Business Insider — which I take it is not exactly a socialist propaganda sheet — has published 15 charts showing wealth and inequality in America.
The gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else hasn’t been this big since the Roaring Twenties. And we might remember how that ended.
You don’t want to read the comments to this article. In brief — Thank God we’re not like Europe! I’m serious.
See also Kevin Drum and Political Carnival.
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Marc Ambinder says “Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) plans to announce his retirement today.” Just as well. But I do hope that his decision wasn’t based mostly on the death threats he’s been getting. I hate it when bullies win.
Reviving a practice begun by George “Macaca” Allen in 1995, and suspended by Allen’s two Democratic successors, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has April Confederate History Month. Thus, a formerly sleeping pup is now awake and howling.
The continued glorification of the Lost Cause by southern whites is perplexing to damnyankees, so let me explain it. Essentially, it’s all about stoking a cherished sense of righteous and glorious victimhood.
For example, white southerners still call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression” even though South Carolina started it by firing on the federal military garrison at Fort Sumter. Sumter and the sandbar on which is was built were federal territory and not part of the “soil” of South Carolina, even if it was in Charleston Harbor. South Carolina besieged Sumter and dared Abraham Lincoln to re-supply it before the troops in Sumter surrendered or starved to death. The latter possibility was looming when Lincoln sent re-supply ships, and then the South Carolinians called it an invasion and fired.
Then, having started the war, they whined ever since about “northern aggression.” Sounds a lot like our modern-day wingnuts. Nothing is ever their fault.
I’m not sure when they decided the war wasn’t really about slavery, but of course that’s a crock. The Confederacy existed only to protect the institution of slavery. It was THE issue that motivated the secessionists to secede.
After the war it was not long at all before the former plantation class was back in power in the South, brutally oppressing the black population and hoarding most of the region’s wealth, but somehow the South put over a revisionist version of Reconstruction history about how they were all picked on by those awful carpetbaggers.
That said, I’d be all for a “Confederate History Month” if it pushed an honest version of history rather than the highly fictional “moonlight and magnolias” romance that much of the white South still believes.
Margaret Talev writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.
“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com.
I read somewhere that con artists were going door to door, telling people they were being registered for “Obamacare” and asking for a signup fee. I don’t know how successful the con is. But the McClatchy story tells me that lots of people thought the fought-over health care reform bill was supposed to create a taxpayer-funded program to pay for their health care. Sorta like Medicare for all, a.k.a. “single payer.” And, apparently, that’s what many people wanted.
Many people should have said something about what they wanted several months ago.
Of course, it’s entirely possible some of the callers seeking “free Obama Care” were former town hall-storming tea partiers who figured, well, as long as its free, I might as well take advantage. Imagine their surprise to learn that, not only is there no program called “Obama Care,” there is no new federal program providing taxpayer-paid-for health insurance upon which one might hang the name “Obama Care.”
The closest the law comes to providing such a thing are the funds designated for state-administered high-risk pools. This is supposed to be a stopgap measure to help people with pre-existing conditions until 2014, when insurers will lose the ability to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. But some states already had high-risk pools, so that program isn’t entirely new, either. It’s just better subsidized to make it more affordable.
One of the weirder talking points coming from the Right over the past several months is the demand that the President and federal lawmakers who created “Obamacare” be required to enroll in it. But the state insurance exchanges that the HCR bill will eventually establish are more or less modeled after the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, in which most federal employees are enrolled.
Further, nobody will be required to enroll in the insurance exchanges. Indeed, the HCR bill got so hacked down that most people will not be able to enroll in them even if they want to. And the exchanges are not providing taxpayer-subsidized insurance. They are just a means to make more affordable private insurance available to some people who are not insured through employment. The public option would not have been subsidized, either, other than administrative costs.
So to all the “patriots” screaming about “socialized medicine”: you wish.
Via Digby, Dan Froomkin’s description of
Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.
None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.
A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”
Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.
And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”
I watched enough of the video to see for myself what was in it. It is a hard thing to watch. In short, a few men milling around in the sunlight in the middle of a plaza were assumed to be insurgents, and the camera equipment carried by a couple of them were assumed to be weapons, and the passer-by with his children in a van who stopped to help was assumed to be carrying weapons. And the troops in the helicopter — who were in no danger at the time — opened fire.
From the New York Times:
Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.
The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.â€
If you watch the video, you see what a crock that statement is. Clearly, the troops in the Apaches were too far away to tell camera equipment from Ak-47s; exactly to whom were the cameramen supposed to “visibily display their status as press”? What “furtive attempts to photograph coalition ground forces”? It was a small group of men hanging around an open area; what were they doing that made them appear as “hostile combatants”? Nothing that appears in the video. Yes, the video is edited down, but it goes on for a while before the shooting started, and there was nothing shown in the video that warranted shooting.
At least one other man appears to be carrying a rifle, but (a) it could be something else, and (b) maybe he’s carrying a rifle to protect himself form insurgents.
There are various ways to view this. One is knee-jerk, blindfolded apology. But I also agree with Oliver Willis that knee-jerk denigration of the troops isn’t called for, either.
The truth is, we’re all responsible for this. We’re responsible as a nation, because as a nation we put toops into this situation. We’re responsible even if we opposed the war from the beginning and marched against it and wrote out congress critters about it. We did this.
We send soldiers into situations in which they are under horrific stress and become desensitized to killing. And people who are desensitized to killing are very dangerous people. But we made them that way. We did this.
It never ceases to amaze me the way people who lack the critical thinking skills God gave turnips manage to make a living as “experts.”
In Becker’s opinion, the health care bill that passed recently is a disaster for at least two reasons. First, it seems to do little or nothing to deal with the single most important shortcoming of our current system: the fact that people pay very little on the margin for the medical care that they receive. Imagine that you could show up at a car dealership and have any car you wanted, and as many cars as you wanted, for no marginal cost. The market for cars would be in complete chaos, and people would have too many cars, and the ones they had would be too nice.
That is more or less the situation we now have with health care. It isn’t pretty to talk about, but if it costs $200,000 to keep an octogenarian alive for a month, someone has to pay for it. If it were the children of that octogenarian who had to cover part of the bill, and paying for that last month of life was the difference between being able to pay for the octogenarian’s grandchildren to go to college or not, there would be some hard choices to make. With health care expenditures approaching 20% of GDP, there are going to be tough choices. Markets cannot function when the people who receive the benefits of a good or a service are not the ones who are paying for it.
And, you know, it’s all about markets functioning. Now perfectly healthy people are going to storm hospitals and demand MRIs and appendectomies and spinal taps, and it’s going to be chaos. But if we have to choose between Grandma and sending little Sally off to college, then Grandma is off to the Soylent Green factory. That’s how markets (blessed be them) work.
Update: Let me spell this out — The “freakonomics†guys are arguing that a free market system is the superior means for delivering health care, because medical costs will respond to market forces the same way that the price of consumer goods respond to market forces. That’s what I’m saying is stupid.
As far as rationing end-of-life care, I found the example appalling. The decision of how aggressively to treat Grandma’s medical condition should not depend on whether the family can afford to pay for it or not. There are countless variable factors in real-world situations that make these decisions difficult, but ultimately the decision of when to switch to palliative care should be a purely medical one.
I don’t watch Celebrity Apprentice, but I read that former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was fired from the most recent episode.
In the four episodes in which he appeared, Mr. Blagojevich never really found his footing as a competitor, spending more time shaking hands with passers-by than focusing on his tasks, struggling with computer keyboards and committing the unforgivable sin of letting Joan Rivers’s hamburger go cold.
MTV called Blogo’s four episodes a “reign of goofball incompetence”:
This week, the two teams were tasked with creating an interactive display plugging the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the new theme park attraction at Universal Studios that opens in June. Team RockSolid was basically hosed from jump street, as Blago seemed confused during the initial executive meeting, couldn’t clearly express what he wanted and spent most of the time looking wide-eyed and mispronouncing “Harry Potter” terminology.
So Blogo can’t actually do anything. Just like … ? Imagine what fun it would be to have a Celebrity Apprentice team of, say George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and Condi Rice! Tasked with actually having to accomplish something tangible in front of a camera, what would they possibly do?
News you won’t hear from Faux —
Rep. Betsy Markey raised a record $505,000 in the first three months of the year, with the bulk of the money flooding in after she announced March 18 that she’d vote for the Democrats’ health-care reform bill, her campaign said Sunday.
“There have been plenty of big bills come through Congress this year, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen grass-roots support spring up like this,” Markey campaign spokeswoman Anne Caprara said. …
… Kyle Saunders, a political scientist at Colorado State University, called Markey’s first-quarter numbers “amazing.”
Just don’t read the comments to the online article. It attracted teh crazies like a picnic attracts ants.
Update: Evan McMorris-Santoro writes in “The Town Hall Dog That Didn’t Bite“:
On their first recess break since passing historic health care reform legislation, members of Congress have not faced anything like the crowds and anger from anti-reform advocates they faced last summer, when guns, shouts and even fist fights became a part of more than a few town hall meetings. A review of local press coverage from the past week shows that the rage that met members on the weekend the House passed the health care bill has, for the most part, not followed them home. …
… In Colorado, Rep. Betsy Markey, Democrat who switched from a No to a Yes vote on reform’s final passage in the House, held a telephone town hall after receiving threats of violence from people angry at her health care vote. The conference call format certainly didn’t turn constituents away — according to local reports, about 8,000 called in from Markey’s Ft. Collins-area district. Reports from the meeting say that even though there was a lot of talk about the reform bill, little of it was of the “you’re turning us into a communist dictatorship” variety. The Ft. Collins Coloradoan reported that “the bulk of the questions focused on uncertainty about how the reform plan will play out, particularly in the area of cost control.”
Other representatives say their town halls have reverted to being sparsely attended wonk sessions. The exception to this is in New Hampshire, for some reason. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D) and Rep. Paul Hodes (D) were targeted by NH tea party groups, and the tea baggers turned out to scream and harass. But, as I said, New Hampshire appears to be the exception.
Also, the Tea Party Express rolled through the Saint Louis area today, stopping in a park in the suburb of Saint Charles. You can’t always read events from a photograph, but I’ve seen more intensity at a barbeque.
Shocking! President provides detailed answer to question! Press, public scandalized! Does he have no shame? Will he never learn his place?
The morally depraved Steve Benen thinks the President should give even more substantive answers. But how can we ask the American public to process real, factual information about public policy? It’s been so long since they’ve been exposed to such a thing it might cause brain cancer.
Gripe Department: Smitty at Other McCain writes, “If You Can’t Bedazzle With Brains, Baffle With Bacon Sandwich.” I’m looking forward to the bacon sandwich, Smitty, but I’ve never noticed that bacon sandwiches were baffling. Will it do magic tricks, or something? Otherwise me and Miss Lucy will just eat it.