ALREADY LOOKING FOR THE ESCAPE HATCH

Some of the people who have ratched up the kraziness in the health care "debate" are now trying to pre-emptively blame Pres. Obama for any violence that occurs. Lou Dobbs and Mark Levin have both said Pres. Obama will be to blame for the violence each one has had a hand inciting. Lenin would be proud of them.

ANOTHER BAD SIGN

(h/t Atrios)

Eric Boehlert finds another Nazi sign at a teabagger rally:

IS THE "EUTHANASIA" MEME WORKING?

CNN recently reported that there's a age divide in support for Obama's health care reform: those under 50 support it, those over 50 don't. I've been listening to wingnut radio and is does seem that some seniors are buying into this agit-prop. Tonight, for example, on Levin's show (guest host Mark Simone), an 80 year old man called in and took this hysteria to a new level. He said that if the government is allowed to run health care, then the government could easily kill off its political enemies. Simone didn't entirely buy that but he did repeat the lie that the bill would set up a board to ration care. Another caller told Simone he was wrong but Simone wasn't having anything to do with that.

On the other hand, Matt Yglesias does point out that in the general election, there was already an age divide: people over 65 favored McCain, 53% to 45%. The next lower bracket, 45-64, was just about an even split, McCain got 49% and Obama 50%.

KENNETH ARROW LINKS

I noted before that economist Kenneth Arrow wrote a seminal paper on health care economics in 1963 but then I was only able to link to a short summary. Here's a link to the entire paper and a link to a modern-day explication by Prof. Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton. I also found an interview of Arrow in The Atlantic and this is a link to the part that mentions health care.

MORE TALK RADIO LINES

At a health care forum in Tampa¹, one of the loons repeated a by now tiresome, at least for me, line from Hannity and other radio gasbags:

Karen Miracle pushes Barry Osteen, right, who was debating her husband, Garry. “We have the best health care system in the world and I’m completely happy with what we have,” Osteen said.

¹Protesters in Ybor City drown out health care summit on Obama's proposal
By Adam Smith, Times Political Editor
In Print: Friday, August 7, 2009
St. Petersburg Times

YES, THERE WERE NAZI SYMBOLS

Sam Stein at Huffington Post found one at a Ft. Collins, Col. demonstration:



Raw Story also has a pic from Rep. Doggett's town hall:

RACHEL EXPLAINS IT TO US

Rachel Maddow did a segment explaining who's behind the teabaggers and it's very informative. Heather at Crooks & Liars also has the video clip and the transcript.

"THUGS" NOT JUST FOR ACORN ANYMORE

On this teabagger conference call, a guy named Eric Odom calls congress critters "thugs." (Starts just before the 33 minute mark)

YUP, IT'S PURE TALK RADIO AGIT-PROP

(h/t Atrios)

A MediaMatters video captures one of the loons at a town meeting and what he said could've come stright from Hannity, Limbaugh or Levin. The loon begins at about 23 seconds into the clip:

It's a direct assault on our personal liberties, our personal freedom, our personal privacy. You need to open it up to the free markets. You need to get the government the hell out of our way.

PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE: THE REAL NUMBERS

(h/t Paul Krugman)

The wingers claim that the public option will destroy health care in America, so it's natural to ask why hasn't it done so already? 46% of health care funding comes from some level of government, Federal, State or local. Private insurance covers 35%, other private sources like donations (7%) and out of pocket (12%) brings the total from private sources to 54%. SOURCE

YEAH, IT IS THE TALK RADIO CROWD

Sean Hannity routinely lies about Reagan's economic record, falsely claiming that revenues tripled and 21 million new jobs were created. A woman at a town hall echoed one of these claims and when the Rep tried to correct her, he was booed. This reminded of the time I was booted off two AOL message boards because I dared to write that Ronnie wasn't a saint.

THIS WOMAN GETS IT...

At the end of a raucous town hall meeting, where the teabaggers repeated the crap they hear on wingnut talk radio, an elderly woman observed that "the anger, which sounded very much to her like what she hears on Fox News and conservative talk radio, 'If it's not manufactured, they're brainwashed.' " This is close to what a conservative newspaper in Napa Valley noted that "Several callers to the Register on Tuesday reported they were repulsed by the aggressive tactics of some members of the crowd."

You may recall that Fats Limbaugh is very unpopular with Americans and I suspect that these town hall shout down tactics will also be unpopular.

ARTHUR LAFFER, ANOTHER WINGNUT PRINCE OF IRONY

On Jiggles Limbaugh's show, Laffer repeated a favorite meme of the wingers - the colossal impracticality of intellectuals. This is part of the wingers defense of no-nothing populism that Irving Kristol helped create. Laffer embarassed himself at the OMB (1970-72) with faulty projections and in 2006 predicted that there would be no recession and that the housing bubble wouldn't burst in the next year or two. In short, he's no one to make this kind of remark:

LAFFER: Well, I'm not really sure, but if you've ever been to the university with fellow professors, I mean they may be able to manipulate a Feynman diagram or invert a matrix over a Banach space, but they don't know how to pay their lunch bill and they can't tie their shoes. And what you see here are these types of mistakes are classic professorial mistakes, lawyer mistakes. They think that if you change a law, Rush, all of a sudden things are working in that direction. It's not true. And they have no idea of the real world. They've never made a bad trade. They've never suffered the humility of their own ideas being wrong. Because in their classroom their ideas are always right, and that's the trouble with this administration, that they really don't have a clue.

INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

A friend of mine lives in an apartment building for retired persons that was built mostly with Federal money and related something to me that I've heard before: some people want to bite the hand that feeds them. Some of my friend's neighbors routinely whine about the size of the Federal government and excessive taxes without seeming to realize that the very building they live in is due to the Feds and those taxes.

Similarly, Zaid Jilani at Think Progress found this nugget in a WaPo article:

In other pockets of the state, the reaction to Democratic proposals has been strong, too. At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare."

"I had to politely explain that, 'Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,' " Inglis recalled. "But he wasn't having any of it."

ANOTHER FUNDIE BITES THE DUST

The Moron-For-Jeebus minister who opened the Creationist dinosaur park is going to do some serious time for tax evasion. He's also a bit of a secessionist:

Kent Hovind, who founded the park and a ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, is serving 10 years in federal prison for failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $470,000 in employee taxes.

The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

GRANPA MCCAIN FLOPS AGAIN

Just last week he was pandering to the little spirochetes in his brain and declared that he would filibuster any extension of the "Cash for Clunkers" program. This week? Not so much.

DID THE DEMOCRATS JUST WIN THE PENNSYLVANIA SENATE SEAT?

Pat Toomey, the likely Republican challenger, told Chris Matthews on Tuesday that he's in favor of outlawing abortion and even jailing doctors. (What about the women?)

SOME TIME AGO, PAUL KRUGMAN ASKED A QUESTION

Because the competent wingers lie so often, he wondered what the wingnuts regarded as a higher principle than Truth:

I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.

The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?

I think they only believe in furthering their own agit-prop. Whatever stands in the way of promoting their agit-prop threatens not only their self-esteem, it also threatens their income. Dick Morris provides a perfect example when he decided that it was better for the 2 American journalists suffer 12 years of hard labor in North Korea than talk with the Kim Jong-Il.

Carlson: How are we supposed to get the girls home, though, Dick? And I only have 30 seconds. How are we supposed to get them home?

Morris: I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they don't come home. Maybe they go to North Korea and live with the consequences of their decision to go there.

Morris was the worst of the wingers but there were several others who came close.

WINGNUTS DO RECYCLE!

Unfortunately, they recycle agit-prop. You may recall this warning about Iraq:

"All the world has now seen the footage of an Iraqi Mirage aircraft with a fuel tank modified to spray biological agents over wide areas. Iraq has developed spray devices that could be used on unmanned aerial vehicals with ranges far beyond what is permitted by the Security Council. A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland."
Source: President Bush: "World Can Rise to This Moment", White House (2/6/2003).

This morning, Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute was on Slots Bennett's show and warned us about the threat from Iran, which could soon put a nuclear missile on a ship and launching it off our coast.

TEABAGGER SIGNS

At the aborted town hall by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, this video clip shows that at least one tea bagger was present. I took a screen shot...



When I went to the Tucson Tea Party, there were maybe a half-dozen "Don't Tread on Me" flags carried by attendees.

THE ONE AND ONLY "JIGGLES" LIMBAUGH

This is from his CPAC speech.

I WAS DISAPPOINTED IN THE NY TIMES WHEN...

it ran a puff piece on Jiggles Limbaugh in the Sunday Magazine. I am shocked that The New Yorker has done the same thing for hate-monger Michael Savage.

JEFF EMANUEL, RED STATE HYPOCRITE OF THE DAY

Emanuel whines about the request on the White House blog to send along any agit-prop about health care reform. Impervious to irony, he includes this piece of agit-prop in his whine:

The term 'disinformation' is used by the Obama White House as a catchall to describe any opposition to the president's push for single-payer, government-run health care...

As noted below, Pres. Obama is NOT pushing for a single-payer system.

ORLY TAITZ IS A LOONY TUNE

One of her odder claims involves Pres. Obama's social security number. In this interview on MSNBC, she claims that he has "numerous social security numbers" and continues with "one of them is the social security number of a deceased girlfriend."

Maybe she should get a show with Glenn Beck.

WHY DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS?

In part because the Founders saw standing armies as potential threats to liberty and felt that citizen-soldiers in a militia would be an effective counter-balance. From The Right to Bear Arms by Robert J. Spitzer, pp. 27-28:

To judge by the brief debate about and modest wording changes in the amendment's four versions quoted here, the basic sentiment was held throughout - that citizens have a constitutionally protected right to serve in militias when called into service by, and in defense of, state and country. The aim was to ensure the continued existence of state militias as a military and political supplement and counterbalance to the national army and more broadly to national power (Wills, 1999).

In essence, the 2nd Amendment was..

a political compromise between politically popular and state-controlled militias and a politically unpopular but militarily necessary national professional army.

Thomas Jefferson wrote several times about the danger of having a standing army:

"There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army." --Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1789. ME 7:323

"I do not like [in the new Federal Constitution] the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for... protection against standing armies." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. ME 6:387

"Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people's] freedom and subversive of their quiet." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Lord North's Proposition, 1775. Papers 1:231

YES, PRES. OBAMA IS A PRAGMATIST

Bradford Berenson is correct: Pres. Obama is a pragmatic liberal. In this passage from the 3/26/09 town hall, he explicitly recognizes that we can't just rebuild our health care system from scratch:

The problem is, is that we have what's called a legacy, a set of institutions that aren't that easily transformed. Let me just see a show of hands: How many people here have health insurance through your employer? Okay, so the majority of Americans, sort of -- partly for historical accident. I won't go into -- FDR had imposed wage controls during war time in World War II. People were -- companies were trying to figure out how to attract workers. And they said, well, maybe we'll provide health care as a benefit.

And so what evolved in America was an employer-based system. It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch. But that's what everybody is accustomed to. That's what everybody is used to. It works for a lot of Americans. And so I don't think the best way to fix our health care system is to suddenly completely scrap what everybody is accustomed to and the vast majority of people already have. Rather, what I think we should do is to build on the system that we have and fill some of these gaps.

JOSEPH FARAH IS A LYING WHORE...

and the people who believe what they read in World Net Daily are lunatics and fools. This is what Farah wrote today about the latest Birtherism:

No one at WND – not me, not Jerome Corsi, not any columnists, not any reporters – have defended the authenticity of the Kenyan birth certificate. No one here has made a judgment that it is real.

But, somehow, people assumed we were asserting that this was a genuine Kenyan birth document belonging to Barack Obama. That was never the case.

THIS is what WND published yesterday:

WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.

ANOTHER WINGNUT NARRATIVE COLLAPSES

I remember when Sean Hannity made fun of Pres. Obama because he was a community organizer for ACORN, a position that has little power or responsibility. Now, ACORN is the new "Organization of Orcs" for the wingers and community organizers threaten to destroy America.

THE STUPID BURNS

Fats Limbaugh had Arthur Laffer on to peddle the stupid theory that the Free Market Fairy is all we need for health care reform crap and Atrios also found that this fool was also on CNN. There, he said this absurdity:

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.

SUCCESSES

Pres. Obama got our journalists released from N. Korea and pushed back against Matt "The Eggman" Drudge. John Bolton pouts. A good day for America!

WHY CAR SALES INCREASED

Not because of across the board tax cuts which the conservatives are always braying about but because of targeted tax breaks meant to increase spending. It worked here and it worked in China.

China car sales jump 37% on tax breaks
May 11, 2009
Christine Buckley, Industrial Editor
London Times

Car sales in China, which in January overtook the US to become the world’s biggest automotive market, rose 37 per cent last month.

The total sale of vehicles, including trucks and buses, rose 25 per cent to 1.15 million. China has been leading the developing car markets and until last year had reported consistent growth of more than 20 per cent. April’s figures are boosted by government incentives to encourage more sales, with buyers of smaller cars receiving a tax incentive.

PENCE AND THE POOR FARMERS

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IND) was on FAUX and said we needed tax breaks for several groups, among them family farmers. According to the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy database, between 1995-2006, farmers in his district received $1.2 billion in subsidies.

DEMINT VS. MALKIN

Michelle Malkin sez extending unemployment benefits only extends unemployment and lies about her sources. Sen. DeMint shakes off his ideological blinders and on FAUX, supports the extension:

WALLACE: Real quick, in 30 seconds, are you going to support extended unemployment benefits or not, Senator?

DEMINT: We need to take care of those who are unemployed, but we also need to make sure they get jobs. And if we do what Congressman Rangel wants to do, we're going to tax our small businesses that create the jobs, and we're going to have a whole lot more people on unemployment.

WALLACE: But yes or no on extending unemployment?

DEMINT: Yes. Yeah. We'll definitely support that.

WINGNUT IMMIGRANTS

Listening to Randi Rhodes Show right now, she had a caller from the former USSR who said the government cannot run anything, including health care. This seems to be a popular belief among many immigrants from the old Soviet bloc.

IT IS MOSTLY A POLICE JOB

(h/t Raw Story)

The terorists don't have standing armies, navies, air forces or the infrastructure needed to support them. They don't have a supply of fanatics and those can be caught by local police, despite what the GOP and the wingers have claimed.

Australia detains terror suspects in major security operation
Alexandra Topping The Guardian, Tuesday 4 August 2009 01.15 BST

Australian police launched a major security operation last night, arresting four men accused of planning to stage a terrorist attack on a military establishment.

The four Australian men of Somali and Lebanese descent were arrested after a series of pre-dawn raids on properties in the southern city of Melbourne.

The raids involved 400 federal officers and were the result of a seven-month multi-agency operation and extensive physical and electronic surveillance.

THE CIRCLE IS GETTING SMALLER

The number of wingnuts in the media seem to be shrinking, even on FAUX. The same people - Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michelle Malkin, etc. - seem to be turning up with increasing frequency.

RADIO TIDBITS

I listened to Inside Track, a local wingnut show on KVOI, this weekend and I caught a bit from a caller who is convinced that Pres. Obama is still a drug addict. Aside from that delusion, I was struck by how much anger there was in his voice.

I also listened to American Warrior, another local show on KQTH, and a caller claimed that American males have been turned into females during the course of the last 50 years. I think he was using this as an explanation for PTSD but it was hard to tell.

Finally, I listened to Billy Cunningham's Sunday show and he now seems to be back on the birther bandwagon. He has also embraced the "euthanasia" meme.

SOMETHING NEW IN COMMENTS

In the last two weeks, I've noticed a new pattern to right-wing posts on Politico. In addition to parroting the Noise Machine, posters are now just making shit up, "complete" with links that DON'T support their position. This reminds of how Jiggles Limbaugh sometimes provides links that are supposed to support his agit-prop but in fact contradict his claims. Perhaps these posters think like Limbaugh and assume that no one will take the time to follow the link.

This struck me last night when commenter andylit insisted that the World Health Organization omitted private sector expenditures when calculating EU ountries per capita expenditures on health care. His point was that European countries are in fact paying a lot more than WHO states. His citation did not support his claim.

MAYBE I HIT A NERVE

Today on Hannity's radio show, Pat Caddell whined about being called a "FAUX News" Democrat by a blogger last week. I happened to make a post just like that last week and perhaps he heard about it because a Google search only turns up my post.

BIRTHERS AREN'T GOING AWAY

I won't link directly to WND so you'll have to get there through Memeorandum. WND reports that Orly Taitz has come into possession of a 1964 Kenyan document that states Pres. Obama was born there.

I noticed that although this is supposed to be a copy of the original, there are two signatures missing.

MALKIN AND INCENTIVES

On ABC's This Week, Malkin fretted that extending unemployment benefits would only delay the time when people got back to work. She said she wasn't making a moral judgment, just a judgment about incentives. There may be something to that but I don't see Malkin writing any columns about the perverse incentives in the financial industry and her new book doesn't cover them.

FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE "MORANS" SIGN

see more Fail Blog

WHICH PARTY REALLY CHANGED?

(h/t Steve Benen)

The wingers try to convince others that Democrats and liberals have become extremists but that's not the case. In fact, it's the GOP that's moved further to the Right since the 70s, as Harold Meyerson pointed out in the WaPo:

Nationally, the party is dominated by Southern neo-Dixiecrats. In their book "Off Center," political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson compared congressional Republicans of different eras and concluded that a Republican House member in 2003 with a voting record that placed him at the median of his party was 73 percent more conservative than the median GOP member of the early '70s.

THE WAPO DOES GOOD BUT...

(h/t Somerby)

Ceci Connolly points out another right-wing agit-prop campaign:

Talk Radio Campaign Frightening Seniors
Provision for End-of-Life Counseling Is Described by Right as 'Death Care'
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 1, 2009

And even provides the fact that debunks these prophets of deceit:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

WHAT SHE DOESN'T DO IS NAME THE FREAKS BEHIND THIS CRAP.

A FREE PRESS? NOT SO MUCH, REALLY...

Katie Couric let us know that our national press took a dive for the criminal Bush Administration about the Iraq War and thanx to Glenn Greenwald, I learned of another insider who's spoken out about this disgrace. Jessica Yellin worked at MSNBC during this time and had this to say to Anderson Cooper last May:

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

I think, over time...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

I STILL HAVEN'T HEARD FROM DR. AUGUSTINE ROMERO

On Wednesday, July 8th, the superintendent of the school district wrote to me that Dr. Romero was planning to respond to my question. Now I learn that TUSD is expanding its ethnic studies program. I really would like an answer before this is expansion is carried out.

TUSD to expand ethnic studies
By Rhonda Bodfield
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.01.2009

The Tucson Unified School District Governing Board this week agreed to expand the district's ethnic-studies offerings, reduce racial disparities in how discipline is meted out and embark on a new marketing campaign in an effort to persuade a federal judge to lift a 31-year-old order requiring racial balance in TUSD schools.

MORE GOOD HEALTH CARE NEWS

(h/t Taegan Goddard)

A new TIME magazine poll finds that a majority of Americans support major components of the progressives' plan for health care reform.

Sixty-three percent said they would support providing health-care coverage for all Americans, even if the government had to subsidize those who could not afford it. Fifty-six percent said they supported a "public health insurance option" to compete with private plans. Fifty-seven percent support raising taxes on those with annual incomes over $280,000 to pay for the plan. Eighty percent said they would support a bill that required insurance companies to offer coverage to anyone who applies, even those with pre-existing medical conditions.

You can find more results here, such as this finding:

Provides tax breaks to small businesses to make healthcare coverage for the workers more affordable - 90%

THE WACKOS ARE WILLING TO USE COMMUNIST TACTICS

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the RNC has sponsored a radio ad on at least two local wingnut radio stations, KNST and KQTH, that urges people to attend Gabrielle Gifford's (AZ-8) town hall meetings and tell her they don't want health care reform.

I've heard wingnut radio hosts, especially Mark Levin, urge their listeners to attend the town hall meetings of their Congressional representatives and make a fuss. Lee Fang at Think Progress found a memo from a clown who works for the agit-prop organization Freedom Works that spells out the tactics they want to use:

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

"Inflating the numbers" is a standard Communist tactic and has been used by the extreme right since the 50s.

STEPHEN MOORE BLOWS DEAD RATS

In the WSJ, he writes this absolute crap about Granpa McCain:

He continues: “But I just came from driving down Central Avenue in Phoenix and saw closed up storefronts because they’re too small to save, but these giant banks are too big to fail.” This is vintage John McCain, the economic populist fighting for the little guy.

This "populist" has NEVER squeezed in even one earmark for Arizona, not even for this recession.

SOME ADS NEED MORE INFORMATION

Here in Tucson, I occasionally here opinion pieces on the radio by Bruce Ash. The ones I've heard always take the movement conservative view of some issue. What's a bit surprising is that Ash is only identified by name, not political affiliation. He is Arizona's representative to the Republican National Committee and is running to head the RNC's Rules Committee.