Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.
There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).
There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.
Facebook keeps dossiers on us all:
The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.Governments have never been able, long term, to distinguish dissidents and subversives from revolutionaries and enemies. Corporations just want to sell us more useless plastic shit.
We can't afford this now, and we never should have afforded it.
Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.As the New York Times discovered, Dauphin Island, Alabama, is a spit of sand with real estate under water in the fine tradition of land speculators and fraud:
Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.
Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas.
[A]t 3 a.m. the next morning, the idea of moving the town woke me up from a sound sleep. I got dressed, went to my office and hammered out a counter-proposal to the Corps: Let us spend the $3.5 million to move the town’s flood prone buildings to higher ground. We’d never ask for federal disaster assistance again.
The Village Board endorsed the idea, but the Corps declined. It was not in the business of moving people; it was in the business of building things and naming them after members of Congress.A calculus like this also pertains to New York City, which will either need vast billions of dollars to create a polder or relocation of low-lying assets or the profligate waste of clean-up and repair funds again and again.
In large organizations, whether governmental and corporate, the lone conscientious person who speaks up often pays a terrible price for telling the truth and especially if he then doesn't acquiesce when power wants to cover it in bullshit. Roger Boisjoly was one such man.
Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.The exact reason it's important to protect whistleblowers is so that those of us who are interested can hope to learn the truth.
The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.
Those worries that government aid gets delivered in a leaky bucket that Mitt Romney heard about in Econ 101? Not so leaky after all.
Coincident to the much televised marriage of another horse-faced Windsor to the lovely commoner Kate Middleton, I've been reading Common Sense. Here's a sweet excerpt:
England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.It's about as sound a basis for a system of government as strange tarts lying in ponds distributing swords.
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.I'm a little-d democrat too. I have no patience for pageantry at the price the British pay for it. These fantastic leeches need an honest job for the first time in generations.
We're only plowing 70% of your street this winter. It's a green program to use less fuel!
We'll give your kids the three Rs, and AP courses or a foreign language are available à la carte so that we can provide you exactly what you want!
No more WIC for you women and your babies! It's a diet plan. Start your baby on the scientifically proven calorie reductions of a lifetime! (Immoral and stupid, the perfect Republican plan...)
That's what business - or a Republican - would do:
“I have never regretted raising prices in the face of significant cost pressures, since we can always course-correct if the outcome is not as we expected,” Heinz’s chairman and chief executive, William R. Johnson, said last month.
[I]t's not up to criminal law to stop every morally reprehensible aspect of behavior. Rather, the law should be for punishing behavior that's particularly socially damaging.This proposal limits government too much for me.
China's no longer so concerned about separating their people from freedom of information:
The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.’’The U.S. security apparatus is working on control, too:
“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: The Web is fundamentally controllable,’’ the person said.
The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, told NZZ am Sonntag that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone [Julian Assange] who is on the run from the law."Then there's Internet neutrality, which is doomed in the current environment in which corporations can buy the government they want.
The Department of Defense and the rest of the government to employees: We prefer you to be ignorant even if it means not reading something potentially embarrassing to your management that everyone else in the world has access to.
"Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority," said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.The strange thing is that doing something stupid like sending this notice is not embarrassing to the White House.
Using a cell phone while driving is clearly risky. I've been put at risk repeatedly by commuters who can't seem to get out of their parking lots without holding a phone to their ears and tuning out every other driver, whom they then threaten to send off to the body shop - or the body farm.
Good, careful studies have shown that merely talking on a cell phone impairs a driver more than being drunk and subjects that driver to greater risk of accident. Talking on the phone is distracting, and distraction is a great enemy of careful driving.
And yet...
Thirty-four thousand people died on the roads last year. (Osama bin Laden, eat your heart out.) Drunk driving was implicated in a third of these deaths - more than 11,000. (h/t Atrios)
Yet, while cell phones have exploded in popularity and common use on the road, there has been no corresponding surge in traffic fatalities. If cell phone use is really as bad as drunk driving, NHTSA should be calling it out as a separate category of distraction, and I'd expect to find another 10,000 dead in the stats. But no.
Now the meta point...
Teabaggers and other wingnuts believe lots of things that the media feeds them. They also disbelieve lots of other things that the media feeds them.
I have no problem in general with skepticism of official sources, which frequently bullshit all of us. I'm not a baby bird, swallowing whatever mom and dad regurgitate into my avid little gullet. No one should be, not teabaggers, no one. I'd just like to separate truth from fiction rationally.
OK, so how to explain the difference between the studied and proven risks of drivers on the phone? Could the problem be a binning defect in our definition of drunk driving? Is it possible that we've reduced the legal standard of drunk driving (0.08% blood alcohol by volume in most states) well beyond the point at which diminishing returns have set in? I thought so until I did a few sample blood alcohol calculations (here). Using my own experiences and perceptions as a guide, there's no doubt that significant impairment begins below the legal standard. (I tested my perceptions, too. One drink per hour for four hours yields almost no blood alcohol at my weight, and that matches my self-assessment of impairment.)
Could there be a huge number of drunks on the road at all times? I don't think that explanation works. The visible rate of cell phone use is significantly higher than the percentage of the population who are problem drinkers. (Yes, both of those stats are proxies for what we'd really try to measure.)
Maybe the problem of alcohol is not the skill impairments at all but, instead, the impairment of judgement. Poor impulse control, found in cell users only at background levels, is rife in drinkers. Interestingly, stoners behind the wheel have impaired skills, too, but they don't pose increased risks because they're blessedly cautious.
Poor impulse control could push drunk drivers beyond the threshold of speed and recklessness that causes more fatal accidents, while cell phone users are so distracted they are at greater risk for non-fatal accidents.
Is this theory true? It's plausible, but I don't know that it's true. In the media, I'd settle for plausible, with the truth to be refined and worked out over time, as it always must be.
Yeah, I'm aware after five decades of life that that's too much to ask for - waaay too much.
Well, your cow's colon...
I don't worry about the gentle wafting odor of cow shit teasing the scent receptors of my nose, but once your cow's shit starts damaging the commonweal, then you've reached the limit of your freedom and slugged in the nose in a way that matter. You have to clean up, even if you're a walking talking anachronism that romantics who once saw "Witness" fantasize about - just as long as they don't have to give up their cell phones.
The point is that you cannot opt out of society as long as you're interacting with it. All the non-Amish conservatives who plead just to be left alone often want to take what's offered (public roads, schools, criminal justice, a clean environment, common defense, an economy that doesn't crash and burn to the ground every ten years) just as long as they don't have to pay any part of anything they don't use directly.
You can fairly argue about where to draw the line for public actions and the taxes to pay for them. But the radical libertarian position of the likes of Rand Paul is anti-social selfishness, and contrary to Ayn Rand and Gordon Gecko, it doesn't work.
Don't raise taxes, just raise the subject of taxes, and total tax-free lunatics crawl out of the talk radio woodwork and explode their know-nothing bile all over everyone. The degree of their ignorance would be stunning but for long experience.
Gov. Deval Patrick is now open to raising the gas tax to fund the Turnpike Authority in servicing the debt incurred in building the Big Dig. Here's some of the reaction:
The right-wing Washington Times (h/t CNN) says that the Republicans are planning to hold operation of the government hostage to force a vote on off-shore drilling. Give the oil companies a windfall that they can bank for decades, or they'll shut down everything else. Waaaah!
It doesn't pay to reward this kind of behavior by caving in to it. Washington Dems, these lock-step extortionists are not your friends, no matter how they smile to your face. Slap them down hard every time they do this shit, and they'll stop doing it.
By the way, change some of the Senate rules that rely on collegial comity come January. Otherwise, the Republicans will try to continue to rule with their 43 seats (random prediction).
Linking to the Moonie Times makes me feel dirty.
