Interesting

Wisconsin State Sen Lena Taylor rips into the "voter ID bill" - and makes a pretty good impression IMO.

What really stuck for me tho' was her mention of Martin Luther King being a card-carrying Repub. It always startles me a little when I'm reminded of how everything seems to flip over once in a while. In the American South during Jim Crow, the Democrats were guys like Lester Maddox and Strom Thurman and George Wallace, and they were all Democrats because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. So it just makes sense that MLK would line up with just about anybody other than those guys. It's good to get these little refreshers once in a while.

Feeling A Little Awkward

David Frum has always struck me as kind of a simpish poser, and it bothers me that I find myself agreeing with him more often the last coupla years.  It could be only that I think it's good when somebody on the Repub side stands up and calls "bullshit" on them once in a while - and he's been doing that a lot lately.  Maybe that's it.

Noah Kristula-Green makes the important point that Stanley Druckenmiller’s weekend WSJ interview has blossomed in a matter of days into something like GOP orthodoxy. We’ve evolved in the space of a decade from “deficits don’t matter” to “defaults don’t matter.”

It seems flabbergasting that a conservative party could arrive at this destination.

Yet the new mood exemplifies the trend we have seen over the past three decades, whereby one after another the “rules of the game” have been discarded as the two parties play politics ever more savagely.

The filibuster evolves from extraordinary procedure to routine super-major requirement.

Secret holds on presidential nominees proliferate.

And now even the debts and obligations of the United States become a tool of politics.

Everybody seems to assume that the rules will be reasserted before the game gets too dangerous. Maybe. Let’s hope. But one year’s outrageous innovation has a bad habit of becoming next year’s new normal. Anything a Republican Congress can do to a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress can do to a Republican president. Americans like analogies to ancient Rome: a republic felled by overcentralized power. They owe it to themselves to study the Polish commonwealth: a republic wrecked by an irresponsible legislature.

Thanks, Dr Caldicott

That was just loads of fun.

Privateering

Classic - this comes as no shock to people, and so there's no general outrage, and so underfunded law enforcement agencies end up looking and acting a lot like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Yo, Democrats

This is the kind of crap that drove me away from the Repubs, and just lends real credence to what used to be the bullshit about "both sides do it". So could ya not do this anymore please?

ER

When you try to force-fit healthcare into the Standard American Business Model, you're probably going to get some pretty ugly results.

NYT:

In 1990, there were 2,446 hospitals with emergency departments in nonrural areas. That number dropped to 1,779 in 2009, even as the total number of emergency room visits nationwide increased by roughly 35 percent.

Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.

The number of ERs went down by 27% while the number of ER Visits went up 35%.  In any other business I can think of, that would indicate an impressive increase in Productivity.  But healthcare is not any other business; and Emergency Medicine is a perfect illustration of that fact.

The logic chain is fairly simple.  More patients going to fewer ERs means there are fewer caregivers per patient, which means less time can be allotted for each patient.  But treating Gun Shot Wounds and Blunt Force Trauma and Ischemic Attacks won't take any less time just because your business plan requires a greater throughput of patients.  Even with the amazing tools available to help staffers do things better, medicine is always more art than science.  It's about people; not gadgets.  The proper care of people requires time.  Take away their time, and people die.  Simple.

Jay Smooth

Gutless

The very concept of taxation has gotten so politically toxic, our esteemed "leaders" have adopted a strategy of using code words and phrases rather than risk being the subject of public wrath if they dare utter any form of the term "tax".

David Frum:

But what this default talk looks like is that the GOP wants a crisis, not a deal. A deal would involve real pain for real voters: Medicare reductions, farm spending reductions, military reductions, and revenue measures. A crisis creates an exciting substitute for such a deal – especially if the GOP can temporarily and delusively convince itself that it can pin the blame for the crisis on President Obama. That will not be true. The whole world will see that the crisis was avoidable, and will see who insisted on forcing it. And however high you imagine the financial and political price – it will be higher.

It's been going on for a while of course, but it seems we've become so accustomed to the nonsense about how burdened we are; and how the gubmint just takes and takes and takes, that we've made it impossible for analysts and politicians even to say the words.

Frum is trying to make a good point about the difference between what his guys are saying they want and what their actions are saying about what they want, but I think he knows that if he so much as mutters "increased taxation" under his breath, the Tea Harpies will swarm down on him and pluck out his eyes, and nobody will hear what he's trying to say over the ruckus.

The same thing popped up in remarks Obama was making a little while back - maybe a coupla weeks ago.  He was talking about budgets, and he mentioned spending several times, but as he listed the spending cuts, he turned a brilliantly perverse phrase that stuck in my brain. He said (approx), "we also need to look at cutting spending from the standpoint of revenue".

Ever the optimist, I'd like to think all this means they're starting to talk about sensible tax increases in the meetings, and they're just trying to wink at us to let us know they're trying to get something done that includes fixing the revenue problems.

And BTW:
4,000,000 miles of streets and roads
75,000 dams
88,000 miles of coast line
12 super carriers
2 1/2 wars
1,431,000 people on active military duty (plus 200,000 in Nat'l Guard units)
800,000 miles of sewer lines
1,000,000 miles of water lines
95,000 Schools & Colleges
650,000 Cops
1,200,000 Fire & Rescue

All of that requires oversight and maintenance, and expansion to keep up with growth. Contrary to the kind of Wal-Mart mentality that passes for critical thinking these days, you don't get Great for Cheap.  

If we spend the money necessary to bring it all back up to acceptable standards, we’d see an economic recovery that’d blow your lip up over your forehead.

At Random

I just picked (everybody's favorite crazy) Uncle Ron here to illustrate a point.  One of the basic features of political rhetoric is the hypothetical If/Then/Else: "If we do (or don't) adopt my (or my opponent's) policy, then this or that terrible (or really great) thing will (or won't) happen".

They all say this shit all the time, and I have yet to hear any of the Press Poodles ask any one of 'em the basic question:
"Can you give me some examples of predictions you've made that actually came true?"
--AND--
"What predictions have you made that turned out not to be true?"

And when they give you the inevitable bunkum about how "the policy didn't fail; those other guys just failed to do it right", then you could possibly point out that that's almost exactly what some guys in the former USSR said about communism.

Are You Kidding?

This guy is making the case that fast food joints comprise the "new face of American manufacturing", and that it's a good thing.  Seriously, are you fucking kidding me?

Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you'll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: "I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day."

So OK, let's make sure we're doing everything we can do to study and improve methods for efficiency and throughput etc, but let's at least acknowledge that we're talking about  assembling a burrito and not a car or a vacuum cleaner or a toaster;  and we need to understand that while there's dignity in all work, it's not cool to consider a job at Taco Bell making chimichangas to be the same as a job at Suzlon building windmills.

Do you not get the feeling that we're being set up for something?