Later On

Private insurance must show a profit—and moreover, that profit must increase from year to year or the stock price suffers. Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress:

Today, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) questioned WellPoint CEO Angela Braly about the company’s proposed rate increases in California’s individual health insurance market. The congressmen read from a series of internal company emails which revealed that WellPoint was rising premiums simply to increase its profits:

– “The average increase is 23 percent and is intended to return California to a target profits of 7 percent, versus 5 percent this year.” [WellPoint email, October 7, 2009]

– “We’re asking for premiums that would put us $40 million favorable…if we get the increases on time, we will see an opt gain upside of $30 million downgrades and rate cap.” [WellPoint email, November 2, 2009]

– “[W]e needed to reach agreement on filing strategy quickly — specifically in the area of do we file with a cushion allowed for negotiations.” [WellPoint email, 10/24/2009]

Watch a compilation:

WellPoint acknowledged setting its increases to keep up with medical costs and maintain a 2% profit, but justified the increases by arguing that the company lost money in the individual market in California. “I don’t mind you making a profit but at the end of the year, 2009 a horrible year, you still made 2 point something billion dollars, and that’s not enough,” Stupak remarked, noting that WellPoint’s high profit margin is the reason “many of us believe in a public option.”

The military, deep down, doesn’t care about the troops. It may be a psychological device for distancing those who are likely to die in combat. I don’t know. But I have observed over and over that the military puts the troop in dangers completely unrelated to combat. For example, this article by Barbara Barrett for McClatchy:

The Navy has agreed to pay $1.53 million for a mortality study that could show a linkage between toxic water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and the deaths of Marines and their family members who lived there over a 30-year period.

Some estimates are that during that time, as many as 1 million people were exposed to well water at the base that contained trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride.

The chemicals were dumped into storm drains, leaked from fuel tanks or were buried in pits across the base. They seeped through the groundwater and into wells that fed the base areas of Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace.

The main contaminated well was shut down in November 1984.

Documents that McClatchy revealed Sunday indicate that a fuel storage farm at a central part of the base might have had far greater significance to the contamination than previously was known.

Some 800,000 gallons of fuel were thought to have been spilled over the years from the fuel farm, close to the main well serving Hadnot Point — the location of the base’s enlisted barracks, some officers’ quarters and the hospital.

Benzene is a component of fuel and a known carcinogen.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement this week that the new information changed the science behind the contamination…

Continue reading.

Via Schneier on Security, this interesting, lengthy, and detailed post (if you’re an IT pro, you’ll be particularly fascinated):

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying. Taking a look at the LMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech at LMSD. Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. Of the three network techs employed at LMSD, Mr. Perbix appears to have been the mastermind behind a massive, highly effective digital panopticon.

The primary piece of evidence, already being reported on by a Fox affiliate, is this amazing promotional webcast for a remote monitoring product named LANRev. In it, Mike Perbix identifies himself as a high school network tech, and then speaks at length about using the track-and-monitor features of LanRev to take surreptitious remote pictures through a high school laptop webcam. A note of particular pride is evident in his voice when he talks about finding a way outside of LANRev to enable “curtain mode”, a special remote administration mode that makes remote control of a laptop invisible to the victim. Listen at 35:47, when he says:

“you’re controlling someone’s machine, you don’t want them to know what you’re doing”
-Mike Perbix

It isn’t until 37 minutes into the video till Perbix begins talking about the Theft Tracking feature, which causes the laptop to go into a mode where it beacons its location and silent webcam screenshots out to an Internet server controlled by the school…

Continue reading.

Might be useful. Here’s the review.

Interesting piece by Robert Wright in the NY Times:

Joseph Stack had barely finished flying his airplane into a Texas office building when the battle over his legacy began.

Bloggers on the left asked why people — especially people on the right — weren’t calling him a terrorist. “If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, then right wingers would be “demanding that anyone who refused to label the attack ‘terrorism’ be put up on treason charges.”

Bloggers on the right, such as Conn Carroll, asked why people — especially people on the left — were acting as if Stack was a “conservative Tea Party nut” when the anti-tax animus that led him to point his plane at I.R.S. offices was only one part of an eclectic ideology.

These are arguments worth having, for two reasons.

First, the label “terrorist” shapes our immediate response to attacks and our long-term policies. We’ve invaded countries and altered domestic surveillance laws as part of a “war on terror,” whereas we wouldn’t do such things as part of a “war on a nut who flew his plane into a building and is dead now.”

Second, given the apparent momentum of the Tea Party movement, it would be nice to know if Stack’s kamikaze mission was a not-all-that-shocking emanation from it — whether, as some claim, more than a few Tea Partiers are unhinged.

In common usage, a “terrorist” is someone who attacks in the name of a political cause and aims to spread terror — to foster fear that such attacks will be repeated until grievances are addressed. Thus, Amy Bishop, the vehement Alabama tenure-seeker, wouldn’t qualify as a terrorist; she seems to have no cause larger than herself and, when she gunned down colleagues, presumably wasn’t hoping to strike fear of the untenured into the hearts of tenured faculty everywhere.

Stack, in contrast, saw himself as part of a cause, as one in a long line of fighters against tyranny. The manifesto he left behind reads, “I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. … I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be whitewashed and ignored” — at which point, God willing, “the American zombies wake up and revolt.” This man was, by prevailing semantic conventions, a terrorist…

Continue reading. Of course, Bush’s DHS published a paper on the growing dangers from right-wing extremists, but then the GOP threw one of its notorious hissy fits that of course there was NO threat from right-wing extremists and the very existence of the report was a sign of how corrupt Democrats were (although the report came from the Bush Administration). The Right simply is not serious: they like to create conflict and fight (with Democrats or among themselves, doesn’t seem to make much difference), and they have no interest in (a) reality or (b) governing, the latter because they hate government (and, I presume, want us to live in a state of anarchy).

Interesting:

Source: PR Newswire, February 23, 2010

The House of Representatives today introduced legislation to repeal an exemption to federal anti-trust laws that the insurance industry, including health insurers, has enjoyed since 1945. The McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 gave states the authority to regulate the insurance business without interference from federal regulation, unless federal law expressly provides otherwise. Federal anti-trust laws protect consumers by preventing unfair business practices like price-fixing, bid-rigging, and allocation of markets, and are aimed at helping keep competition honest. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference February 23 to announce the "Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act," and the Center for Media and Democracy’s Senior Fellow on Health Care, Wendell Potter, was invited to speak at the event. Mr. Potter, who worked inside the insurance industry for 20 years, said the exemption for insurers has "contributed to a health care system that has become one of the most dysfunctional and one of the most expensive in the world. And it is time that the health insurance industry begins to abide by the same rules and regulations that every other industry in this country has to abide by." Democrats hope the bill will lower premiums by giving consumers more choices. The White House supports the legislation. The insurance industry’s trade group,America’s Health Insurance Plans, opposes the measure, saying that their industry is already highly regulated and that mergers and other business practices are already subject to federal anti-trust laws. They also say the law would create "legal uncertainty," which would be bad for the industry. Read Mr. Potter’s entire statement in support of the bill here.

At least for a while. Steve Benen:

The case of Najibullah Zazi continues to be under-appreciated victory for the United States. A deadly attack was thwarted; intelligence was collected; and justice was served. No torture, no military commissions, no need to stray from the legal process. The legal system was followed to the letter, and it worked beautifully.

And conservatives really don’t want to talk about it.

The Republicans who most vociferously blasted the Obama Administration for putting the attempted Christmas bombing suspect through the criminal justice system have apparently been silent on another high-profile terrorism case making its way through the civilian system. [...]

Given the GOP outrage over the administration’s decision to charge attempted Christmas bomber Umar Abdulmutallab in criminal court, one might have expected a flurry of Republican press releases and TV appearance this week over the handling of the Zazi case.

But the press releases never came, and the TV appearances were never scheduled.

On the Hill, the usual suspects of hysterical conservatives — Kit Bond, Pete Hoekstra, Pete King — haven’t said a word. And what about their media allies? Even when Zazi’s guilty plea became a major development, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity literally didn’t say a word about the guilty plea of a man who would have killed innocent Americans in a terrorist attack in New York City.

I guess this was an American story that simply proved un-spinnable to the GOP and its cohorts.

Here we had a serious terrorist threat — arguably the most important since 9/11 — and an al Qaeda recruit who was poised to kill a lot of people. The Obama administration thwarted Zazi’s plan, took him into custody, read him his rights, and gave him a lawyer.

And the results couldn’t have been better for the United States. Zazi will spend the rest of the his life behind bars, but only after cooperating with federal officials and becoming a valuable source of intelligence.

I wonder why Republicans would choose to deliberately ignore this. Don’t they want to debate the efficacy of U.S. counter-terrorism policy? Where’d they all go?

12 cans Wild Sardines in Extra Virgin Olive Oil

12 cans Wild Sardines in Oil with Lemon – the oil in this case is soybean oil, which I hadn’t realized. I won’t be buying these again. Good to avoid soybean oil: extremely high ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3.

6 cans Wild Albacore Tuna – No Salt Added (line-caught)

Can’t wait to try them. Free shipping is nice.

This looks like a good recipe. Ingredients:

500 g tub of Greek yogurt, or strain a 900 g tub of plain yogurt (discard the liquid)
1/2 large English cucumber, seeds removed

2 T olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 of a red onion, finely minced
1 t kosher salt
lots of freshly ground pepper
1/4 t cayenne pepper
1/4 t paprika
1 T dried dill
juice & zest of 1 small lemon

500 g is 1.1 lb, and assuming a pint’s a pound the world around, that would be a 1-pint container of Trader Joe’s Greek Yogurt (at least for me). The cucumber is grated. I assume English cucumber is used so that you don’t need to peel it. Full recipe here.

Anne Landman at PRWatch.org:

In April, 2009, former vice president Dick Cheney called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to release classified memos he said demonstrated how well "harsh interrogation methods" — torture — worked to prevent terrorist attacks and save lives. But investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) just released a report saying that the CIA memo Cheney cited as justifying U.S. torture contains "plainly inaccurate information" that undermines its conclusions.

The memo Cheney pointed to as justifying torture is called the "Effectiveness Memo." It is the same memo that Steven G. Bradbury, the Justice Department’s former acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, relied upon to write additional memos in 2005 and 2007 that gave the CIA the legal go-ahead to continue torturing captive terrorism suspects. The"Effectiveness Memo" reviewed the results of the use of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EITs), the government’s euphemism for torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and forced nudity, against two notorious terrorism suspects: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubayda. The memo claims that the CIA’s torture of Zubaydah extracted significant information about Jose Padilla, who "planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington, D.C. area." It further states that "Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003." But this information is wrong. DOJ says "In fact, Padilla was arrested in May, 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs," since the use of such torture techniques was not authorized until August 1, 2002. Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that same month. The Justice Department says Bradbury "relied upon this plainly inaccurate information." Moreover, the information about Padilla was extracted from Zubaydah by using traditional, non-abusive interrogations.

So Cheney relied on incorrect information when he frequently insisted in the media that U.S. torture is justified, even necessary. It remains to be seen whether he will acknowledge his mistake, backtrack on his claims, or apologize for misleading the few remaining Americans who still believed he was credible on the issue of national security. Whether or not he does any of those things, though, maybe this huge error will finally provide Cheney with the impetus he needs to quietly exit the political stage and let America move on from our dark era of sanctioning torture.

I wasn’t aware of this series in the NY Times, but I’m certainly following it from now on.

Here’s a quick way to catch up: a list of the recipes in descending chronological order, along with a topics index. Here are just a few of the recipes:

Greek Yellow Split Pea Purée

Marinated Giant White Beans and Beets

Vegetarian Dishes From a Greek Holiday

Stewed Cauliflower With Red Onions and Tomatoes

Greek Zucchini Fritters

Many more at the link above.

This recipe by Martha Rose Shulman in the NY Times looks quite tasty:

These beans become creamy as they bake slowly in a sweet and sour broth flavored with honey and vinegar. You can make the dish with regular white beans, which will require soaking, or with large lima beans, which will not.

1 pound dried large lima beans or white beans, soaked if necessary for six hours or overnight in 2 quarts of water and drained (limas require no soaking)

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 large onion, preferably a sweet red onion, finely chopped

1 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes

1 bay leaf

3 tablespoons honey, such as clover or acacia

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1/4 cup red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1/2 cup, loosely packed, chopped fresh dill

1. Combine the drained beans and water to cover by 3 inches in a large, oven-proof casserole or Dutch oven, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a medium size, heavy skillet over medium heat, and add the onion. Cook, stirring often, until tender and lightly caramelized, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

3. After 30 minutes, drain the beans and return them to the pot. Add the remaining olive oil, the tomatoes and the liquid in the can, bay leaf, honey, and 2 cups water or enough to just cover the beans. Stir in the onion, and bring the mixture to a simmer. Cover and place in the oven. Bake one hour, stirring often and adding water if necessary. Add the tomato paste, vinegar, salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 30 more minutes, until the beans are tender and the mixture is thick.

4. Stir in the dill, cover and let sit 15 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve with thick slices of country bread.

Yield: Serves six.

I think I’ve found it. At least some of the GOP are terminally stupid—and I know, you’re thinking of James Inhofe. And you’re right: he’s one of six GOP Senators who tried to filibuster a bill that they actually favored: when the filibuster failed, these 6 voted for the bill. Get that? First they try to kill the bill, which turns out to be a bill that they favor. Here are the names.

With leaders like these, is it any wonder that the GOP is in trouble?

UPDATE: Steve Benen notes:

…  This, alas, isn’t especially new. For a year now, Republicans have repeatedly tried to block up-or-down votes on all kinds of bills and nominations, only to vote in support once their obstructionist tactics are defeated. For petty partisans like these GOP clowns to block votes on measures they end up voting for anyway is the height of cynical and pointless obstructionism.

What an embarrassment.

At the end of this post, Drum notes:

… And then there’s this [headline], about Republican Scott Brown’s vote to support a tax cut that would help employers increase hiring:

#5 GOP’s Brown branded turncoat for vote on jobs bill "Literally overnight, the fledgling Republican senator who ended Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority by winning a special election in Massachusetts has gone from being the darling of America’s conservative activists to being their goat….The conservative Drudge Report colored a photo of Brown on its home page in scarlet. Cries of ‘let down,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘sell out,’ and ‘RINO’ — Republican In Name Only — flew around Twitter. By Tuesday afternoon, more than 4,200 people had left comments on Brown’s Facebook page, the majority of which were harshly negative."

Ladies and gentlemen, the modern Republican Party. In the midst of the deepest, sharpest economic slowdown since the Great Depression, only five of 41 GOP senators were willing to vote for a modest jobs bill based entirely on tax cuts. One of those five, a conservative hero a mere four weeks ago, is practically excommunicated from the movement for voting in favor of the bill. A bill, to repeat, based entirely on tax cuts that would spur hiring. What’s left to say?

Fascinating article in The Washington Monthly by Michael Bobelian:

Three days before Christmas 1972, a twenty-two-year-old nurse named Diana Sylvester wrapped up her night shift at the University of San Francisco Medical Center and made her way to her apartment, halfway between the hospital and Golden Gate Park. She arrived around 8:00 a.m. and set her newspaper and purse on the kitchen table. A few minutes later, Sylvester’s landlord, Helen Nigidoff, heard loud thuds and screams emanating from Sylvester’s unit upstairs. With her apron still on, Nigidoff rang the doorbell before opening a door leading up to Sylvester’s apartment, where she came face-to-face with a stranger. "Go away," he growled angrily. "We’re making love." As Nigidoff raced downstairs to call the police, the man ran out of the building holding a denim jacket over his face.

When the officers arrived a half hour later, they found a gruesome scene. Sylvester lay motionless next to the Christmas tree on her living-room floor, her mouth unnaturally agape, blood oozing from her chest like molten lava. An autopsy revealed that Sylvester’s attacker had forced her to perform oral sex and then strangled her, before plunging a knife into her chest two times. One stab pierced her heart. The other tore through her left lung, drowning her in her own blood.

Police immediately scoured Sylvester’s apartment and questioned the landlady, who offered a description of the assailant: white, medium height, and heavy-set, with curly brown hair and a beard. But neither these details nor the bits and pieces of evidence they collected in the months-long investigation that followed were enough to pinpoint the culprit. The few leads investigators turned up fizzled, and the case went cold.

Then in early 2003 the San Francisco Police Department, which had received a grant to use DNA technology to crack unsolved crimes, dug Sylvester’s case file out of storage and discovered a slide with sperm that had been swabbed from Sylvester’s mouth after her death. The sample was badly deteriorated and contained less than half the DNA markers that are normally used to link a suspect to a crime. But investigators ran the profile through California’s DNA database and turned up a match: an ailing seventy-year-old man named John Puckett, who had a history of sexual violence. There was no other physical evidence linking him to the crime. But Puckett was arrested, tried, and eventually convicted based mostly on the DNA match, which was portrayed as proof positive of his guilt—the jury was told that the chance that a random person’s DNA would match that found at the crime scene was one in 1.1 million.

If Puckett’s were an ordinary criminal case, this figure might have been accurate. Indeed, when police use fresh DNA material to link a crime directly to a suspect identified through eyewitness accounts or other evidence, the chances of accidentally hitting on an innocent person are extraordinarily slim. But when suspects are found by combing through large databases, the odds are exponentially higher. In Puckett’s case the actual chance of a false match is a staggering one in three, according to the formula endorsed by the FBI’s DNA advisory board and the National Research Council, a body created by Congress to advise the government and the public on scientific issues. But the jury that decided Puckett’s fate never heard that figure. In fact, his lawyers were explicitly barred from bringing it up.

Over the past quarter century, DNA evidence has …

Continue reading.

Brad Friedman in his blog:

The New York Times’ independent Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, after sending me an email originally standing by the paper’s misreporting of the James O’Keefe ACORN ‘pimp’ story, now describes the rightwing activists misrepresentation of his highly-edited and heavily-overdubbed hit videos as "journalistically unethical".

O’Keefe’s deceptive editing of those infamous tapes implied that he had presented himself in ACORN offices as a 70′s-era blaxploitation "pimp". It was the eye-popping, media-friendly, marquee headline that news outlets, including the Times, latched onto and ate up. Except that it never happened. The tapes were purposely manipulated in order to give the appearance that ACORN workers were so dumb, they didn’t even recognize that skinny little white kid as a phony pimp. And that’s exactly how O’Keefe, and his employer Andrew Breitbart who published the misleading tapes on his websites, wanted them to be perceived.

We’ve spent the last several weeks here reporting and demonstrating how the O’Keefe/Breitbart ACORN video hoax was exactly that — a political, partisan scam that was publicized uncritically by the New York Times, and dozens of otherwise reputable outlets.

Despite the Times’ repeatedly misreporting that O’Keefe was dressed or posed as a "pimp" while meeting with ACORN employees in those videos, and even after being shown in no uncertain terms that he did not, the Times’ Public Editor has declined to recommend the paper retract their reporting on this story. The coverage at the "paper of record" undoubtedly helped lead to Congressional passage of federal legislation attempting to defund the community organization, and helped to bring on a subsequently crippling decline in other funding sources for the non-profit group which serves to provide support for low- and middle-income American families.

At the end of the remarkable email exchange between Hoyt and myself (published in full at the end of this article), he says he recommended only that "Times editors …avoid language that says or suggests that O’Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera".

That, even though…

• former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, whose investigation [PDF] of the edited versions of the videos found no illegal conduct by ACORN staff and observed that "at each and every" ACORN office visited by O’Keefe with his partner Hannah Giles (who was dressed as a "prostitute") he was "dressed like a college student – in slacks and a button down shirt", and;
• ACORN has stated on the record, based on interviews with their employees, that [emphasis in original] "O’Keefe was not wearing that absurd costume when he visited our offices", and;
• Giles herself has now twice admitted on the record (once on video tape), that O’Keefe never wore his 70′s-era blaxploitation pimp costume in those offices, and;
• O’Keefe and Giles’ benefactor, Andrew Breitbart, who published and promoted the videos (and misrepresented them himself in his own Washington Times column) also finally acknowledged the pimp outfit was only used as a marketing gimmick, and;
• while the Times’ Scott Shane first reported on September 15th of last year that O’Keefe "visited Acorn offices…dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play" and, on September 18th, as traveling in "the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of Acorn", and;
• the paper had reported similarly time after time since then (without noting the existence of Harshbarger’s report even once), and;
• even though I directly debunked several pieces of "evidence" that Hoyt originally proffered for his original assessment that he "would not recommend a correction, based on the available evidence", and offered him much more corroborated evidence along with it, and;
• even though he acknowledges his original evidence was, indeed, inaccurate, and;
• even though Congress voted to defund ACORN just days after the New York Times’ first inaccurate report;

…Hoyt nonetheless wrote in his final communication to me: "I still don’t see that a correction is in order, because that would require conclusive evidence that The Times was wrong, which I haven’t seen."

But of course by now, he has seen …

Continue reading.

Simon Owens points out that Breitbart is going on the offensive against bloggers:

Chez Pazienza woke up one morning earlier this month and found an email from Andrew Breitbart — Matt Drudge protégé, founder of Breitbart.com and other right-wing news sites — waiting for him in his inbox. He was immediately suspicious of its authenticity; the email was riddled with typos, devoid of capitalization, and apparently mailed at 3:30 in the morning.

“I went and checked the email address to see if it was him, because my first thought was, ‘why the hell would he bother with me?’” he told me in a recent phone interview.

The email responded to a post Pazienza had written on his blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, referencing a Salon article that had accused James O’Keefe, the ACORN-punking “pimp” that Breitbart has invested serious time and money in promoting, of being a racist. The Deus Ex Malcontent post wasn’t particularly critical of Breitbart or O’Keefe — it simply opined that whether O’Keefe was a racist was irrelevant because both sides of the political divide had already made up their minds — but that didn’t stop Breitbart from treating it as if it was.

“you’re insinuation that james is a racist is equally egregious,” Breitbart wrote. “does it ever dawn on you that we conservatives can’t fathom how lefties can’t see how horrible their social policies have turned out to be for poor and minorities.”

The 3:30 a.m. email bizarrely ended with a reference to the movie Footloose.

“It was weird, it caught me off guard,” Pazienza told me. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Breitbart would want with me.”

But this kind of Breitbart-launched offensive is nothing new or out-of-the-ordinary. While much attention has been given to the conservative’s attacks on traditional media outlets –through his Big Government site, interviews on MSNBC, and speeches at CPAC — he has been actively and aggressively going after bloggers and social media users who criticize him, a trend that has only intensified as more and more controversies surround James O’Keefe III in the wake of his arrest in Louisiana.

“There’s no question that when O’Keefe got busted trying to tamper with a US senator’s phone, it kind of freaked Breitbart out,” Brad Friedman, who owns the progressive Brad Blog, told me. Friedman has been on the forefront of reporting on issues and revelations surrounding O’Keefe, including the recent bombshell that the young conservative never actually dressed as a pimp when he went into ACORN offices, a fact that even Breitbart has been forced to acknowledge. He has also been a frequent recipient of the conservative’s scorn, especially via @ replies on his Twitter account. At one point he even jokingly suggested that Friedman should be subjected to capital punishment…

Continue reading.

Very nice. Via The Wife:

Once again the Republicans defend their title of "the Party of Lies". Ethan Sherwood Strauss in Salon.com:

As the healthcare reform bill waddles toward reconciliation — a maneuver that would let the Senate pass certain budget-related provisions with "only" a majority vote — Republicans are complaining, louder than ever, about being excluded from Democrats’ efforts to craft legislation. And some in the media are buying it.

Newsweek gave voice to GOP grievances in a piece titled "How the GOP Sees It." It begins with this John Boehner lament: "We’ve offered to work with the president all year. We’ve been shut out, shut out, and shut out." Newsweek characterizes the minority party’s point of view this way: "Republicans want to help the president succeed, but he won’t let them."

Almost no one is noting the extraordinary influence Republicans had on the healthcare reform bill crafted by the Senate, as it made its way through the committee process last year. The bill approved by Sen. Christopher Dodd’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, for instance, included 161 amendments authored by Republicans. Only 49 Republican amendments were rejected out of 210 considered.  Yet the bill got zero Republican votes when it passed out of the committee.

You’ll all remember the Senate Finance Committee process, chaired by Montana Sen. Max Baucus. Baucus and President Obama empowered a bipartisan "Gang of Six" from the committee, three Democrats and three Republicans, and they spent the summer locked in negotiations that, again, never produced one Republican vote for the bill in committee. The  Finance Committee ultimately scuttled the public option in its version of the bill, looking for GOP (and conservative Democratic) support.

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Interesting post at The Rag Blog by Harry Targ:

In an effort to teach and reflect more systematically about class rule in the United States, I have used an interesting book by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong, The New Class Society. It describes the transformation of the class system over the last 30 years from one in which there was a small ruling class, a significantly-sized “middle class,” and a lesser population of the poor and working classes.

According to these sociologists the diamond-shaped distribution of wealth, income, and power that existed during the “golden years” of U.S. capitalist hegemony after World War II began to change in the 1970s. Today, in the “new class society” the top one percent of income, wealth, and power holders, in conjunction with the remainder of the top 20 percent of managers, professionals and support staff of the super class, dominate at the expense of the bottom 80 percent of the population.

Using older language, ownership and control of the means of production and the relationships that exist between the owners and those who work constitute the “substructure” of the capitalist system. But what remains a puzzle is “how does the ruling class rule?”

Read the rest of this entry »