Basic Human Decency
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2009Well, now we've reached flat out thuggery. He must be a moderate: he only punched him in the face, he didn't shoot him in the face. From Miami:
A 65-year-old man rallying in favor of healthcare reform was knocked to the ground by a man who disagreed with the call for a government-run health plan outside of a Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce meeting headlined by Sen. Bill Nelson.
Luis Perrero of Coral Gables was standing among about 40 Democratic activists and union workers when a man in a Ford pick-up truck pulled up to the rally at Jungle Island and began arguing with the crowd. The man,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 31, 2009To set the context, in 2007, the Republicans in the Senate were using all sorts of parliamentary maneuvers to prevent a bill from reaching the floor for a vote--the bill raised the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour (TEH SOCIALISMZ!!). It gets really good around 4:00.
Of course, I'm sure there are GOPniks who will claim that "Teddy didn't want" a livable wage...
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2009There are two legitimate reasons for health insurance copayments (that is, you pay for part of a treatment or drug). The first is that copayments provide ownership: by requiring a nominal payment for those who are not indigent, it reinforces that idea that this isn't charity, but a common social obligation, on the part of those who provide and those who receive healthcare. In other words, those who use a lot of services should provide some additional support to the system. The second legitimate reason is that it discourages frivolous use. If you have a toothache, you probably shouldn't…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2009One of the more successful healthcare interventions has been home nurse visits to families that have recently had a child:
"Optional Coverage of Nurse Home Visitation Services" certainly doesn't sound controversial. The initiative, which has existed in various forms at the state and local level for decades, would fund programs that "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains...modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child." Most similar programs have…
mikethemadbiologist | August 10, 2009Over at the Great Orange Satan, I came across a post by a father of a type I diabetic (type I diabetes is an auto-immune disorder wherein a person can not produce insulin, and needs regular injections). To anyone who is familiar with type I diabetes, it's terrifying: maintaining blood glucose 'control' (i.e., keeping blood glucose within the 'normal' range) is an integral part of your daily life. There is the possibility of having too much blood glucose (too little insulin), which, over the long term, is very bad for your health (the effects mimic those typically associated with type II…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2009With apologies to Hannah Arendt. From an interview by Bill Moyers of Wendell Potter, a former healthcare executive:
...that was my problem. I had been in the industry and I'd risen up in the ranks. And I had a great job. And I had a terrific office in a high-rise building in Philadelphia. I was insulated. I didn't really see what was going on. I saw the data. I knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number.
...certainly, I knew people, and I talked to people who were uninsured. But when you're in the executive offices, when you're getting prepared for a…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2009
You see, this is the method of The Enemy, so therefore we don't torture. Or something.
From Glenn Greenwald comes this nauseating account of media spinelessness in the face of the evil that is torturing another human being:
The most noteworthy point was her [NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard] explicit statement (at 17:50) that "the role of a news organization is to lay out the debate"; rarely is the stenographic model of "journalism" -- "we just repeat what each side says and leave it at that" -- so expressly advocated (and see Jon Stewart's perfect mockery of that view). She also said -- when…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2009I don't have much to add to John Aravosis' take on the recent Obama Administration about its recent defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, except to note one thing:
When the basic theory of the case is nearly identical* to those arguments used to defend the outlawing of interracial marriage, you really suck.
Particularly when the president--and the buck does stop with him--is not only a former professor of constitutional law, but is the child of an interracial marriage.
And for extra shitheaditude, guess who wrote the brief for the Obama administration? A Mormon Bush administration holdover…
mikethemadbiologist | May 23, 2009By way of David Sirota, I came across this Wall Street Journal article about the latest corporate sleaze--collecting insurance when your employees die:
Banks are using a little-known tactic to help pay bonuses, deferred pay and pensions they owe executives: They're holding life-insurance policies on hundreds of thousands of their workers, with themselves as the beneficiaries.
The insurance policies essentially are informal pension funds for executives: Companies deposit money into the contracts, which are like big, nondeductible IRAs, and allocate the cash among investments that grow tax-free…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2009One of the disturbing trends over the last decade, give or take, has been how ethical behavior has become synonymous with "a conviction overturned on appeal." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's ethical. With that, I give you Matthew Yglesias (boldface mine; italics original):
They're not actually saying that what they did was right. Rather, they're saying that it was selfish but also legal. ...one is within one's rights, under certain circumstances, to insist on one's ability to inflict suffering on vast numbers of people in order to make more money for your rich self and…
mikethemadbiologist | April 26, 2009
(from here)
And I don't mean that in a good way. Washington Post columnist and Compulsive Centrist Disorder sufferer, regarding prosecutions for torture, scribbles:
The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places -- the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department -- by the proper officials.
One administration later, a different group of individuals occupying the same offices has -- thankfully -- made the opposite decision. Do they now go back and investigate or indict their predecessors?
Let me…
mikethemadbiologist | April 25, 2009http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/23/prosecutions/index.ht…
It's one thing to be a stenographer--and a bad one at that. But, as Glenn Greenwald notes, our celebrity press corps goes beyond that:
...the favorite mantra of media stars and Beltway mavens everywhere -- Look Forward, Not Backwards -- is nothing but a plea that extreme government crimes remain concealed and unexamined.
This remains the single most notable and revealing fact of American political life: that (with some very important exceptions) those most devoted to maintaining and advocating government secrecy is our…
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2009Matt Taibbi says everything I've been thinking regarding Wall Street compensation (but better):
Here's the real problem with people like Jake DeSantis. Throughout this whole period, they never were able to connect the dots -- to grasp the fact that when they skimmed a million here or a million there off the great rivers of capital that flowed through their offices, that that money came from somewhere, from someone. To them, it wasn't someone else's money, it was just money, and why shouldn't they have it?
...For a guy like this, his worth as a human being is wrapped up in buying a bag of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2009It's a trite saying to "follow the money", but, in the case of Senator Evan Bayh's (D-Goldman SachsIndiana) decision to oppose serious mortgage readjustments on foreclosed properties ("cramdowns"), it seems to fit. Here's the background on Bayh's opposition to cramdowns on foreclosures:
Senate debate on legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms for troubled homeowners will be postponed until after the spring recess in April, according to a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev...
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., initially was forced to pull the bill (HR…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2009...and both Helmut and the Mad Biologist told you that would be the case over a year ago. From The Washington Post (italics mine):
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2009While I think Bernie Madoff is a real slimeball (what Jew steals from Elie Wiesel?), putting him in super-maximum security is ridiculous:
Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff is being held in a super-max wing of the Manhattan federal lockup - a unit so tough it drives hardened criminals mad, the Daily News has learned.
It's known as 10 South.
Located on the 10th floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the high-security wing has housed the city's toughest mobsters and most bloodthirsty terrorists.
John A. (Junior) Gotti was there, as well as his archrival, Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo.
On 10…
mikethemadbiologist | March 24, 2009Can we please stop claiming that prices and wages are determined by the invisible hand? This supposed inscrutable force is often quite scrutable and goes by the name power. Consider this hate email liberal activist David Sirota received after a TV appearance (boldface original):
I made a simple point that America is now more economically unequal than it was just before the Great Depression. I subsequently received a wave of very angry hate mail...[one such email]:
I think I am in the majority of Americans who are sick and tired of the unproductive living off of the government. They have…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2009Digby makes a very good point about the real world effects of conservative propaganda:
I'm convinced that one of the mistakes we've made over the years is not telling enough stories of real people who were affected by the conservative movement's deregulation fervor. When they can keep it all abstract and clean it sounds great. It's not so impressive when you see the human results of their "ideology."
With that in mind, consider Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-Wackaloon) claim that Utah doesn't need the stimulus money ("Utah is going to get by fine whether we get that money or not.") in light of what…
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2009Patients without healthcare make bad self-diagnoses. I'm shocked.
The NY Times has a heartbreaking story about people under 30 who can't afford healthcare. It's pretty horrific: juvenile diabetics who have to switch from insulin pumps to injections (which lowers blood sugar control), a woman who went to the emergency room for 46 hours and wound up owing the equivalent of a year of college tuition, and so on (that I can say "and so on", and you can probably come up with your own examples is indictment enough). But this gobsmacked me:
Ms. Polec's roommate, Fara D'Aguiar, 26, treated her…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2009Via Greg Sargent, we learn that Blue Dog Democrat Senator Ben Nelson is still a repulsive person.
Total Reductions: $80 billion
Eliminations:
Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps
*****************************
Reductions:
Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion
Fucking unbelievable. Intelligent Designer knows that Democrats can be pretty screwed up, but,…