The headline Are YOU Using NSA Spying To Its Full Potential? comes from The Real News Network.  Here is the video.

See, if you just use a little ingenuity, you can turn almost everything to your advantage.

Esquire has the item The Reign Of Morons Is Here.  About the mildest quote I could find to excerpt here is the following:

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

Well, I don’t “believe in the government” either, but I do have an understanding of what we might need to do by banding together, forming a government, and having it perform certain necessary functions.

The point that I keep on insisting on is the following:

The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame.

And to think it all started with Ronald Reagan.

Thanks to RogerS and JoãoG for posting this on their Facebook pages.

In the spirit of this blog being unfair and unbalanced and deviating a little from the motto Extremism is the Enemy of Rationality^™, I bring you the Truth Out article Half the Republicans You Know Are Insane.

When asked if Muslims are working to implement Sharia Law in America – the harshly medieval seventh-century Islamic code best represented by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Wahabists in the ranks of al Qaeda and (shhhh) a significant portion of the rebels in Syria – 44% of Republicans said it was true. If you know five Republicans, once again, two of them believe this, and a third is halfway convinced. Um…how? Where? In what way? Because women can now get free contraception and gay people have the same rights as you do? You think the Taliban is down with that?

The other examples in the article are just as entertaining as the one above.

The Daily Show has the segment Jon Stewart’s Rockin’ Shutdown Eve.

If President Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent mullahs in the world but not with House Republicans, maybe he is not the problem.  (07:20)

I don’t necessarily agree with the disparagement of the mullahs, but I do agree with the assessment of the Republicans.

I also agree with Jon Stewart’s stand on firing all the people in the Congress because one side is being intransigent.

If we refuse to determine which side we think is right and which side we think is wrong, then we are failing to do our job as citizens just as badly as the side we think is wrong is failing to do their job.

I had a situation in my career where I was managing a group where the young technical lead of a project wanted to take the project in one direction and a very senior technical member of the project wanted to go in another direction.

There was no compromise between the two sides and the project would have ground to a halt if no decision was made. I don’t claim to even be a good manager, but I chose the technical lead’s position as the one I thought was right. The other engineer would just not let it go. He would not stop his campaign to make the project go in the direction he wanted. He went up and down the chain of command trying to get the decision changed, all to no avail. He became pretty marginalized in the project even though the very foundations of the project used many key techniques he had developed, just not the one that he was so adamant about.

I would have been shirking my duty and harming the project and the company if I had just decided to fire both of them because they couldn’t agree. We were not going to find out which path was right and which wrong by standing still and arguing over it. We had to move in some direction. If it turned out to be the wrong direction, it would become more obvious as the project proceeded. We could always change direction, although it would have been very painful, had we made the wrong decision.

I don’t claim to any genius for having made the right to decision. It turns out that the technical lead was ahead of the industry by many years. His way has been universally adopted by all the modern day purveyors of that type of software.

In a dynamic industry and in a dynamic world, you just cannot afford to keep arguing. You have to pick a direction, and move forward.

The Chicago Tribune has the story Government shutdown: White House rejects latest Republican offer. What I found particularly interesting was the part that said:

Before the huddle, Republican Representative Peter King, a New York moderate, estimated that more than 100 of the chamber’s 232 Republicans would back Obama’s demand to restore all government funding without conditions. That would be enough to easily pass the House with the support of the chamber’s 200 Democrats.

Asked why the moderates don’t demand a vote, King said: “I guess that they are waiting for the right time.”

This kind of arithmetic is what led to my previous post How The Government Shutdown Ends. If Nancy Pelosi could convey to the moderate Republicans that she and the Democratic caucus would support the efforts of the moderate Republicans, we might be able to get a solution.  Perhaps the moderates are really waiting for some assurance from Nancy Pelosi.

Why doesn’t some enterprising reporter ask Nancy Pelosi how she feels about the idea?

There is another possibility that explains what the moderate Republicans are waiting for.  The damage this shutdown is doing to the Republican party might be considered to be similar to chemo therapy for cancer.  It makes you sick as hell for a while, but it may kill the cancer before it kills you.  In this case the cancer that needs to be killed off is the Tea Party wing of the party.  (Kill off in stopping them from getting re-elected, not in any other sense.)

Talking Points Memo has the article Ted Cruz’s Dad Suggests Obama Is A Muslim (AUDIO).

The father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested Friday that President Barack Obama is a practicing Muslim and slammed “RINOs” for not backing his son’s efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act.

I know that posting this audio is so akin to shooting fish in a barrel that I almost feel bad for posting this.

Apparently this guy never saw the movie “As Good As It Gets“.

The audience cheered when Helen Hunt railed against her HMO for deciding that her child could not get the medical care it needed because of cost/benefit analysis. The HMO was a private company that controlled her health care long before President Obama came upon the political scene.

How can the people against Obamacare be so ignorant of what private health insurance is like?

In discussions with my SO, we came up with an answer to what many might have considered a rhetorical question as posed above.

Since the majority of Americans have private health insurance, they cannot be so ignorant of what it is like to have private health insurance.

However, most people do not get sick enough to experience the worst parts of the private health insurance system.

I have received a good deal of expensive medical care through my private health insurance, and for the most part, I have not experienced the worst effects of the system. I have experienced minor difficulties, but I stood up to the issues and got them resolved.

In order to know about the worst of the worst, most people will have to hear about other people’s experiences. So why are the Republicans so good at making people fear things that never happened, and yet the Democrats cannot engender the same fear over events that actually did happen?

There is another section of the audio that is particularly telling.

He also said that the Affordable Care Act denies and rations coverage for elderly patients while claiming that the law includes “suicide counseling.”

“As a matter of fact, one of the things in Obamacare is that for the elderly, every five years you must have end-of-life counseling,” Cruz said. “Translation: suicide counseling.”

The end-of-life-planning is about what are your options, hospice, in-home hospice, legal issues, as you near the end of life. There is no discussion of suicide which is illegal in most states.

Now it is conceivable that at some time in the future, a government (as well as private) health care plan end-of-life planning could devolve into a discussion of suicide as a means of saving the system money. Under what type of administration is this most likely to occur? Obviously a Republican administration. This Republican just told you what comes to his mind when he thinks about saving money for the system.

The Democrats talk about being more efficient, negotiating prices harder, researching cost containment methods, promoting best practices from health care around the world. Many Republicans think about counseling suicide as a possible method. What does this tell you about the Republican mind?

Also note that if you are elderly and using Medicare, the ACA has nothing to do with your health care. (Except for the elimination of the unfair subsidy the insurance company gets when you use Medicare Advantage. I use Medicare Advantage. Supposedly, the ACA negotiation included the insurance companies’ promise to still do Medicare Advantage without the subsidy.)

McClatchy DC has the story Government starts shutting down.

“You cannot negotiate when you take hostages and extort,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. said. “We’re happy to negotiate. There’s a budget. They can talk about spending for (Obamacare) in the budget. You don’t do it this way.”

Refusing to negotiate with people taking hostages sounds more like a Republican stance.

The article also states the following:

As the clock ticked toward deadline, the House tried a new tactic, voting 228-199 in the early morning hours Tuesday to set up direct negotiations with the Senate by appointing a team of budget negotiators called “conferees” to work with Senate counterparts in the coming days. The Senate flatly rejected that proposal before leaving the Capitol.

“We like to resolve issues,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “But we will not go to conference with a gun to our head.”

Earlier on I had been wondering why they just didn’t go to conference with the two bills and hold the standoff in the conference committee rather than include the entirety of both houses of Congress.

The House vote of 228 to 199 or an earlier vote of 228 to 201 shows how little it would have taken to get an agreement.  With a clean continuing resolution and no changes of position the vote could have been 201 to 228.  If 14 Republicans could have changed position, the whole thing would have been resolved.

I know, you could have made the reverse argument about the vote in the Senate.  Somehow, after losing two Presidential elections over this issue, you might have expected the Republicans to at least give the new idea a shot by at least agreeing to try it out for a while.  They might have given some thought to the possibility that they were wrong.  A tryout period for Obamacare might have provided some more evidence of who was more right and who was more wrong.

During the Bush administration, the Democrats gave in to some wacky Republican ideas which ended up doing more harm to the country than Obamacare ever could.  Maybe the lesson is that the Democrats should have tried harder to thwart Bush.

If the American people cannot come together enough to at least try something to solve our problems, then we may be seeing the end of the American era in history.  Maybe that would be a good thing.  Should we try some good, old-fashioned capitalistic creative destruction on our political system?  After all, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Upworthy has the video and links in the article Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?

In which John discusses the complicated reasons why the United States spends so much more on health care than any other country in the world, and along the way reveals some surprising information, including that Americans spend more of their tax dollars on public health care than people in Canada, the UK, or Australia. Who’s at fault? Insurance companies? Drug companies? Malpractice lawyers? Hospitals? Or is it more complicated than a simple blame game? (Hint: It’s that one.)

Of course you are still free to have your own opinion despite what may be evidence to the contrary.

To save you the effort of tracking down the links mentioned in the video, here is the links section of the explanation of the video from YouTube.

For a much more thorough examination of health care expenses in America, I recommend this series at The Incidental Economist: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wor…
The Commonwealth Fund’s Study of Health Care Prices in the US: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/med…
Some of the stats in this video also come from this New York Times story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/hea…

This is the first part in what will be a periodic series on health care costs and reforms leading up to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in 2014.

In the NBC story Shutdown closer as GOP House clings together, President Obama put the whole matter to rest very succinctly.

In an afternoon interview with NPR News, Obama reiterated that any funding measure that involves major changes to Obamacare is a non-starter.

Asked what he can ‘offer’ towards a compromise – especially once the debate shifts to the debt ceiling — Obama insisted he should not have to negotiate over the issue.

“I shouldn’t have to offer anything,” he told radio host Steve Inskeep. “They’re not doing me a favor by paying for things that they have already approved for the government to do. That’s part of their basic function of government, that’s not doing me a favor.”

When I was working in Oregon, I once joked to a customer in Massachusetts that I would be happy to help him if he flew me and my wife back to Massachusetts so I could help him in person.  Boy, did I catch hell from my boss, and rightly so.  All I could say when asked about it by my boss was the answer I learned to give while I was in the Army. “Gee, it sounded like a good idea at the time.”  Except, nobody was laughing.

Suffice it to say, I worked my ass off to solve the customer’s problem.

I want to be the first to present this scenario so that I can get the credit for predicting it if it occurs.  If it doesn’t occur, nobody will remember this post. (As if they would remember it even if it does occur.)

Let’s say that the shutdown drags on for more than a week (or maybe a month).  The major political donors from Wall Street to the Republican Party would be up in arms threatebning a cutoff of donations if the issue does not get resolved.

Speaker Boner faced with the Hastert rule that he refuses to break cannot bring a bill to the floor of the House unless a majority of Republicans approve.

Nancy Pelosi will organize the Democratic Caucus to join forces with enough reasonable Republicans (stop laughing) to overthrow Speaker Boner, and force a clean budget bill to be brought before the House.

There will be enough votes in this coalition to get the bill passed.  The country will be so happy with what Pelosi accomplished that she will be elected President in 2016.  (I told  you, stop laughing.)

Oh, I forgot.  If you think of this as political humor, feel free to laugh after all.

2013/09/30

Do you think the following scenario is more likely to happen?

If the Speaker brings a clean budget resolution to the floor of the House, Nancy Pelosi promises that enough Democrats will vote for the bill to get it to pass.  In addition, Pelosi promises that enough Democrats will vote to keep the current Speaker when he faces a rebellion from within his own party.

Will the mere threat of such a scenario get the House unstuck?