to this.
Category: Policy Page 6 of 35
Whatever would we do without them?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg[/youtube]
(There’s a fair chance that this was something of a PR stunt by the publisher. But given the ineptness of DHS, and opportunity to publish the awesomeness above? I’m comfortable with this post.)
This is just boggling:
It has been nearly eight years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the fears and anxieties they gave rise to continue to take a toll on the design of public buildings. Even the words “United States,†it seems — when spelled out in the wrong size and color — can be an unacceptable security risk.
Read the whole thing. My hope is that some enterprising young Representative hungry for a bit of attention can ride this for a bit, hopefully embarrassing the people that brought this about.
Two quotes. From this article. Which you absolutely should read.
Fourteen million dollars.
That is what [Goldman Sachs] paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion – yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.
And:
It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.
But this is it. This is the world we live in now.
You might not be able to change it, but you should know it. And it should inform all of your civic choices and votes. I understand how we ended up here. And step by step? It doesn’t seem so ridiculous. But stepping back? Fundamentally fucked up.
Nice:
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
Your free press hard at work. Meanwhile, Dana Milbank is still whining about the Internets asking questions.
In William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, there’s an online community formed around mysteriously found video (the Footage), which was being released in bits and pieces online. I always wondered if there were real world examples of that – and it turns out, yes:
If there is no known footage of [early 20th century dancer Vaslav Nijinsky], where was this archival footage coming from? From the New Yorker article:
“Because it turns out, these aren’t films. They are computer-generated artifacts, made by Christian Comte, a French artist who has a studio in Cannes.
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You’ve seen this, right? Fox sure does “accidentally” turn a lot of Republicans into Democrats at the most opportune times.
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Best movie review I’ve read in a long time. Ever, perhaps.
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Astana’s Chris Horner won’t be at the Tour de France this year, and he plainly explains why.
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Few quicker ways to piss off a cop (and find yourself in manufactured trouble) than to ask for his badge number. Funny, that.
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I understand why they blurred out “fucktaco”, but “ballsack”? Really? In any event, I must be 12, because I found the whole thing quite amusing.
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Health insurers defrauding their clients? Well I never . . .
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) gets on the Big Brother/REAL ID bandwagon:
I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card — although … there’ll be all kinds of protections — but we’re going to have to do it. It’s the only way.
As Lauren Weinstein puts it:
Isn’t that last sentence what Darth Vader said to Luke when trying to get his son to join him, just after revealing his relationship?
Here we go again. At least in regards to certain topics, when it comes to Congress, it’s:
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!
Sometimes – too often – it is. And this Democrat is tired of it.
This interview with Major Barry D. Wingard, Jr. – defense counsel to a number of Guantanamo detainees – has garnered a lot of attention today, but not nearly as much as it should. Go check it out.
Maybe an enterprising Virginia paper would want to do what the Boston Globe did?
The Boston Globe has been doing some terrific reporting about how small town police departments in Massachusetts have been using the Pentagon’s surplus weapons program to acquire some ridiculously high-powered weaponry. The paper found that 82 police departments across the state have obtained more than 1,000 military-grade weapons over the last 15 years, including…
Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles. At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers.
Police departments need to be sufficiently equipped, yes. They do not need grenade launchers or armored personal carriers. I wonder what we’d find in the garages and warehouses of departments in Virginia.
Robert Reich lays it out:
[Big pharmaceutical and insurance companies] don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, “unfair” is anything that undermines their profits.
So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called “moderate” Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.
Your understanding and participation in this battle really does matter. Do not assume that your representatives and senators are going to do the right thing as the result of a party label. The influence of Big Pharma and insurance companies is far greater than party affiliation. These folks need to know that citizen influence can occasionally be greater than either. Make sure they hear from you. Regularly.