ANOTHER REASON CUCCINELLI IS LOSING

He thinks Mark Levin will help him:

Cuccinelli, Levin Rally Sterling Crowd
Posted: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 2:49 pm |
Updated: 6:38 pm, Tue Sep 17, 2013.

Danielle Nadler
LeesburgToday

Levin spoke out against Obamacare, Medicaid and Cuccinelli's opponent Terry McAuliffe.

“He (McAuliffe) talks about Ken Cuccinelli in the bedroom?,” Levin bellowed about McAuliffe. “It’s McAuliffe and the liberals who are in your bedroom (and damaging) our traditional family values (with) some radical, anti-American position.”

A TERRIFIC COUNTY NAME

Don Yelton, the GOP precinct chair who was forced out for his racist remarks on The Daily Show, lives in (wait for it) Buncombe County, North Carolina.  This county has contributed the word "bunkum" to the American political lexicon:

bun•kum or bun•combe (ˈbʌŋ kəm)

n.

1. insincere speechmaking by a politician intended merely to please local constituents.

2. insincere talk; claptrap; humbug.

[after speech in 16th Congress, 1819–21, by French. Walker, who said he was bound to speak for Buncombe (N.C. county in district he represented)]

Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Mr. Yelton doesn't seem to have gotten the message about how poor the GOP is doing among women:

Ashleigh Banfield Chastises Fired GOP Chair For Calling Her ‘Loud-Mouthed Bitch’
by Tommy Christopher | 12:46 pm, October 25th, 2013
Mediaite

CLOWN NEWS UPDATE

Herman Cain says that the charges of sexual harassment against him were "orchestrated by The Devil" and Rick Santorum believes that The Devil has been running Hollywood.  It's a shame that so many people believe these two prophets of deceit.

BANKSTERS RACKED UP OVER $82 BILLION IN FINES & PENALTIES

Too bad not one of them is doing 20-to-Life...

JPMorgan paying $5.1B in Fannie, Freddie deal
By MARCY GORDON | Associated Press – 1 hour 4 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $5.1 billion to resolve claims that it misled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about risky home loans and mortgage securities it sold them before the housing market collapsed.

JPMorgan sold around $33 billion in mortgage securities to Fannie and Freddie between 2005 and 2007, according to the agency. That was the second-most sold to Fannie and Freddie ahead of the crisis, behind only Bank of America Corp.

Previous total here.

THIS MAY BE A TURNING POINT

I've made more than my share of wrongheaded posts about the imminent decline of the conservative wackos over the years but this time there seems to be a serious breach between the wackos and all other conservatives.

Mark Levin: U.S. Chamber of Commerce "Can Go To Hell" For Supporting Stimulus And Immigration Reform
Video ››› October 24, 2013 2:29 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

POPE FRANK IS PISSING OFF THE FUNDIES

His reasonable objections to the Fundie blowhards has upset some of America's worst and reveals the profound hubris at the center of the religious right:

Meanwhile, away from the gaggle of reporters, Tracy Pyland, a born-again Christian and Maryland mother of five who came to the conference with her husband and two youngest children, was less diplomatic when asked about the pope’s recent comments.
“That’s infuriating. That man needs to read his Bible,” she said.

IF HILLARY DOES RUN FOR PRESIDENT...

we'll be hearing an awful lot of this agit-prop:

Hillary Clinton silences a heckler — and presses for civility in D.C.

By Tim Sprinkle 8 hours ago

According to WIBV.com, the man screamed "Benghazi, Benghazi, you let them die" in reference to the terror attack on a U.S. Embassy in Libya in which four Americans were killed.

THIS IS JUST PLAIN FUNNY (AND IT COULD BE TRUE)

(h/t Billmon)

Sometimes I think Sarah Palin's legacy is part of the real "American Exceptionalism"

Sarah Palin Claims Jesus Celebrated Easter
Oct 23, 2013
The Daily Currant

In an interview with Fox and Friends this morning, the former Alaska governor promoted her new book about the left's "war on Christmas" and argued that all Christian holidays should return to the traditional versions practiced by Jesus.

 "When Jesus celebrated Easter with his disciples there were no Easter bunnies or egg hunts. There were no Easter sales at department stores or parades in the street. Easter was a special time of prayer and Christian activism.

A LITTLE MORE ON UNCLE ALAN THE MAESTRO

(h/t Paul Krugman)

On October 12, 2005, Alan Greenspan delivered a speech to National Italian American Foundation and here are some of his remarks that will follow him all the way to Hell:

As the 1980s progressed, the success of that strategy confirmed the earlier views that a loosening of regulatory restraint on business would improve the flexibility of our economy. No specific program encompassed and coordinated initiatives to enhance flexibility, but there was a growing recognition that a market economy could best withstand and recover from shocks when provided maximum flexibility.

Deregulation and the newer information technologies have joined, in the United States and elsewhere, to advance flexibility in the financial sector. Financial stability may turn out to have been the most important contributor to the evident significant gains in economic stability over the past two decades.

... But recent regulatory reform, coupled with innovative technologies, has stimulated the development of financial products, such as asset-backed securities, collateral loan obligations, and credit default swaps, that facilitate the dispersion of risk.

Conceptual advances in pricing options and other complex financial products, along with improvements in computer and telecommunications technologies, have significantly lowered the costs of, and expanded the opportunities for, hedging risks that were not readily deflected in earlier decades. The new instruments of risk dispersal have enabled the largest and most sophisticated banks, in their credit-granting role, to divest themselves of much credit risk by passing it to institutions with far less leverage. Insurance companies, especially those in reinsurance, pension funds, and hedge funds continue to be willing, at a price, to supply credit protection.

These increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than the one that existed just a quarter-century ago.

...But more fundamentally, an environment of greater economic stability has been key to the impressive growth in the standards of living and economic welfare so evident in the United States.

IS THE RIGHT-WING CHANGING IT'S MIND ABOUT HEALTH CARE?

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have both inched a bit closer to endorsing some sort of partially socialized solution to America's health care system with Salam mentioning Singapore.  I was a bit surprised to learn that someone at AEI wrote favorably about Singapore's social welfare system back in 2008:

Medisave, which covers about 85 percent of all Singaporeans, is a component of a mandatory pension program. Employees typically pay 20 percent of their wages into the Central Provident Fund (CPF), while employers pay 13 percent. (Since 1992, the self-employed have also participated.) At the beginning of 2007, CPF had over $1 billion in surpluses.

Medisave accounts can be used to pay directly for hospital expenses incurred by an individual or his immediate family. Limits are in place on the extent of Medisave funds that can be used for daily hospital charges, physicians’ fees, and surgical fees. The idea is to cover fully the bills of most patients in state-subsidized wards of public hospitals. Beyond that, individuals dip into their own pockets or use benefits from insurance plans (see more on this below). Medisave can also be used for expensive outpatient treatments such as chemotherapy, renal dialysis, or HIV drugs.

Medishield, the second part of the program, is a national insurance plan that covers the higher cost of especially serious illness or accident, which in Singapore’s system is described as “catastrophic.” Singaporeans can choose Medishield or several private alternatives, some offered by firms listed on the Singaporean stock exchange. Premiums for the insurance plans, including Medishield, can be paid using Medisave accounts.

Medifund, the third part, was established by the government for the roughly 10 percent of Singaporeans who don’t have the means to pay for their medical needs, despite the government’s subsidy of hospital and outpatient costs. The fund was set up in 1993 with $150 million, with the budget surplus providing additional contributions since then. Only interest income, not capital, may be disbursed.

Finally, there’s Eldershield, an addition to the 3M structure that offers private insurance for disability as a result of old age. It pays a monthly cash allowance to those unable to perform three or more basic activities of daily living.

SEN. MIKE LEE: TOO RADICAL FOR UTAH?

I was surprised by this because I considered Utah to be a bone-deep Red State.

In Utah, tea party favorite Sen. Lee faces GOP backlash over government shutdown
By Philip Rucker, Published: October 22
WASHINGTON POST

Spencer Zwick, a Utah native and national finance chairman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, was more direct, calling Lee a “show horse” who “just wants to be a spectacle.”

“Business leaders that I talk to, many of whom supported him, would never support his reelection and in fact will work against him, myself included,” Zwick said.

A Brigham Young University survey conducted during the shutdown found that 57 percent of Utahans wanted Lee to be more willing to compromise. The senator’s approval rating dropped to 40 percent — down from 50 percent in June — with 51 percent disapproving.

One beneficiary could be Thomas Wright, who stepped down this spring as chairman of the Utah Republican Party. Wright said he is considering running against Lee in 2016 because he has grown “exasperated” with the junior senator’s governing style.

“We can’t keep going on like this,” Wright said. “I want to work with people to get things done. I want to go be a leader and build bridges, not burn them down.”

HOW SOME DOCTORS COST US MONEY

The story of McAllen, TX made some splash and now we have more evidence that doctors will recommend that patients get treated by the machines they own without medical justification.

Costly prostate therapy common when docs own the machine

By Gene Emery

NEW YORK | Wed Oct 23, 2013 5:25pm EDT

(Reuters Health) - A new study of an intensive and expensive form of prostate cancer therapy finds that doctors who stand to profit from the treatment are twice as likely to recommend it, even though there is no definitive evidence that it is better.

The treatment, known as intensity-modulated radiation therapy or IMRT, typically costs more than $31,000 while options costing about half that - or less - are available.

Mitchell analyzed records covering 2005 through 2010.

At the beginning of the period, before IMRT treatment accelerated, it was used in 13.1 percent of cases by urology groups that were destined by the end of the study to buy their own machines. Ultimately, those groups were sending 32.3 percent of their patients for IMRT therapy.

In contrast, among doctors who didn't stand to make money from IMRT, the rate of referral barely grew, rising just 1.3 percentage points from 14.3 percent to 15.6 percent.

FATS LIMBAUGH FINALLY TALKS ABOUT BUSINESS & THE BAGGERS

The fact that businesses are unhappy with House Bagger shenanigans isn't news but Limbaugh finally got around to talking about it, probably because it was reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Dems Make Move on Big Biz
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, our Morning Update today dealt with a Wall Street Journal story, which says that business is frustrated with the Republicans.  Now, Republicans are historically longtime allies, political allies of business.  The Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Meckler said that she interviewed executives of small, medium, and large businesses, and they're all moderate, and they're all dismayed that some Republicans didn't heed their warnings that closing the government and risking default would hurt the economy. 
To this group of moderate businessmen that she found that she claims is now representative of the whole lot, Obama's non-negotiation stance and Harry Reid's ignoring every proposal that the House made had nothing to do with the shutdown.  It was all the Republicans' fault.  "Things are so bad," she said in her story, Ms. Meckler, "that the Chamber of Commerce is thinking of taking sides in the primaries.  They want to throw out Tea Party conservatives and replace them with more business friendly pragmatists, who --" ahem -- and here we go to the crux of the matter "-- would also be friendly to immigration reform," i.e., amnesty, which is the real news of the story.  Okay, so that was the Morning Update today.
Next story.  "Democrats Tell Business: 'We Stood With You' On Shutdown, Debt Ceiling."  So while Journal has this story about how Big Business is really ticked off at Republicans because the Tea Party, the Democrats see that and they're moving in and they're promising a new alliance with big business, and they're moving in on the Chamber of Commerce.  "It was House Democrats who worked with business leaders to reopen the government and meet our obligations, and it was House Republicans who turned their backs on business in favor of the radical demands of the Tea Party." That is a quote from a Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee letter that's gone out.
"While the chamber will support some Democrats in next year's congressional elections, it wants the House to remain under Republican control. 'On behalf of the American business community, given a choice, I would not like to see this administration with the White House, Senate and the House,'" said the Chamber of Commerce head honcho.  The Democrats are making a move on big business, claiming that they are more friendly based on immigration.  I'm just gonna tell you, the reason I'm mentioning to you is because this is going to stoke the Republican Party establishment even more on going after the Tea Party.
"Look what you're doing now, Cruz, Lee, look what you're doing now.  Now you're sending the Chamber to the Democrats, oh, my God, this is the worst thing that coulda happened. We were gonna nail 'em, knock them in with amnesty, and now you've blown it up."  While Obamacare is over here falling apart by the day, exactly what Cheney was talking about, this internecine war he doesn't like.

MORE EVIDENCE

One dead overnight in northside Tucson shooting

2 hours ago • Kimberly Matas Arizona Daily Star


A Tucson man called police just before 1 a.m. Wednesday to report he had just been involved in a northside shooting, a police official said.

The call came in at 12:48 a.m. about the shooting that occurred 400 block of East Navajo Road near the intersection of North Geronimo Avenue and East Fort Lowell Road, said Sgt. Maria Hawke, spokeswoman for the Tucson Police Department. The caller said he’d shot a man.

When officers arrived two minutes later, they found a man with gunshot wounds dead at the scene.

The man who made the 911 call remained at the scene and was cooperating with police, Hawke said.

No further information has been released.

Check back with Starnet for updates.

THIS COULD BECOME A DISASTER

There have been a series of screw-ups in our nuclear forces since 2000 and I'm a little worried that we may eventually have a full-scale nuclear disaster.  Here's the latest:

Four Air Force officers punished for leaving nuclear blast doors open
By Jim Miklaszewski and M. Alex Johnson, NBC News
Oct. 22, 2103

The careers of four Air Force officers who held the keys and codes to launching nuclear missiles are likely over after they were severely reprimanded for leaving blast doors open on their underground launch capsules, Air Force officials told NBC News on Tuesday.

In the newest incidents, the two-man launch crews at Minot and Malmstrom violated regulations that require heavy steel blast doors to be closed and locked when one of the crew members is sleeping.

The AP reported that in both incidents, the concrete and steel doors were deliberately left open while one of two crew members inside slept. One of the officers lied about a violation but later admitted to it, according to The AP.

THIS NEEDS TO BE SPREAD AROUND

The wingnuts are attacking Obamacare by falsely claiming it has reduced the number of full-time jobs and increased the number of part-time jobs. I've noted before that this is a typical conservative lie and here's a little more reality-based evidence:

Obamacare Isn't Ruining the Economy the Way Republicans Had Claimed
Connor Simpson 3,036 Views Oct 22, 2013
The Atlantic Wire

A common Republican criticism of the Obamacare is it's encouraging employers to keep work at part time to avoid health care costs, ruining the economy in the process. But the last jobs report before the health care law's insurance exchanges went online effectively debunks that charge entirely.

See, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the September jobs report on Tuesday, and the economy isn't falling apart. Some new jobs were added but not many. One interesting data point, as Business Insider's Steven Perlberg notes, is part of the survey shows full-time jobs rose and part-time jobs actually fell ahead of Obamacare's debut: 691,000 full-time jobs were added while 594,000 part-time jobs disappeared. "This was the second straight month of part-time jobs falling," Perlberg says.

THIS STORY WON'T MAKE GASBAG RADIO

Sean Hannity used to rail against the Massachusetts liberals who fought against the building of an offshore wind farm but at least one of those liberals turns out to be a Koch brother...

Koch Brother Wages 12-Year Fight Over Wind Farm

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: October 22, 2013
NY Times

OSTERVILLE, Mass. — If the vast wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound is ever built, William I. Koch will have a spectacular view of it.

Of course, that is the last thing he wants. Mr. Koch, a billionaire industrialist who made his fortune in fossil fuels and whose better-known brothers underwrite conservative political causes, has been fighting the wind farm, called Cape Wind, for more than a decade, donating about $5 million and leading an adversarial group against it. He believes that Cape Wind’s 130 industrial turbines would not only create what he calls “visual pollution” but also increase the cost of electricity for everyone. 

Like his brothers David and Charles, who own Koch Industries Inc., Bill Koch is a billionaire, though not on the same order of magnitude. Forbes listed him in September as the 122nd richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $3.8 billion; his brothers are tied for fourth, with a net worth of $36 billion each.

FOR THOSE WHO ARE COUNTING...

JP Morgan's settlement with the Justice Dept. for $13 Billion increases the total amount of fines and penalties for the banksters to $79 Billion from $66 Billion.

GETTING ON THE POORS IS A CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

Gov. LePage of Maine takes a page out of Mitt Romney's book:

“About 47% of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don’t work,” said LePage.
On the recording you can hear a member of the audience ask “what?” LePage repeats himself: “About 47%. It’s really bad.”

I WONDER IF THE CATHOLIC GASBAGS WILL TALK ABOUT THIS

Bill Bennett, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ramesh Ponnuru, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, Kathryn Lopez and Kathleen Parker are all Catholics, so I hope they take this to heart.

Pope Francis describes ‘ideological Christians’ as a ‘serious illness’ within the Church
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, October 21, 2013 9:21 EDT
The Raw Story

Speaking at daily Mass last Thursday, Pope Francis warned Christians against turning their faith into a rigid ideology.

“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology,” he said, according to Radio Vatican. “And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid.

“And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”

“The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people,” Francis added. “But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

WHICH ALAN GREENSPAN ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE?

The Wall Street Journal also has a review of Greenspan's new book and I found 2 statements that seem contradictory:

1)

Mr. Greenspan set out to find his blind spot step by step. First he drew the conclusion that the nonfinancial sector of the economy had been healthy. The problem lay in finance, because of its vulnerability to spells of euphoria and irrational fear. Studying the results of herd behavior provided him with some surprises. "I was actually flabbergasted," he says. "It upended my view of how the world works." 

2)

Mr. Greenspan won't say whether he has agreed with the decisions of current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, but he will comment on the Fed's broader policies, which have become more aggressive since his time. "I'm not in favor of intervention, because markets so effectively function and work unless they are broken," he says.

ANOTHER WINGNUT MEME IS A FAIL

The wingnuts often cry about having China fund our National Debt but in fact, China owns less than 8% of the debt, so we aren't getting deep in hock to China:

Four facts about the national debt you may not know

By David Lauter
October 16, 2013, 2:48 p.m.
Los Angeles Times

2. China holds only a relatively small fraction of U.S. debt.
The U.S. owes money to anyone who owns a savings bond, a Treasury bill or any other form of U.S. government security either directly or by having money invested in a fund that invests in Treasury securities. That amounts to a fairly large percentage of the U.S. population. Slightly under 40% of the total debt is owned by people or institutions, including individual investors, banks, insurance companies and retirement funds in the U.S.
About a quarter of the debt is held by various U.S. government trust funds that are required to invest their money in Treasury securities. That's a form of internal governmental accounting that gets included in calculations of the federal debt limit but doesn’t count as debt held by the public since it amounts to one part of the government lending money to another part.
Just about one-third of the debt is owned by people and institutions  in other countries, of which the largest single holder is China, which has, at last count, about $1.3 trillion in U.S. treasury securities, or about 7.8% of the U.S. outstanding debt.

GREENSPAN'S REGRESSION TOWARD THE MEAN

Despite hints of rational self-awareness in his 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan has reverted to the economic myopia common to libertarians in his newly published book, The Map and the Territory,  which is more free-market fairy agit-prop, not all that much better than the idiotic comments of Glenn Beck, as Paul Krugman notes:

It is, in particular, more than three years since he warned that we were going to become Greece any day now, and declared the failure of inflation and soaring rates to have arrived already “regrettable.”

THIS ARTICLE MADE MEMEO BUT THERE WERE NO LINKS TO OTHER DISCUSSIONS

The Economist has a very good article ("Trouble at the lab") on the failures of statistics usage, peer review and the bias toward publishing positive results in the sciences which should be required reading for anyone at all interested in science. This paragraph is a correct summary of the article but all of it should be read:

Various factors contribute to the problem. Statistical mistakes are widespread. The peer reviewers who evaluate papers before journals commit to publishing them are much worse at spotting mistakes than they or others appreciate. Professional pressure, competition and ambition push scientists to publish more quickly than would be wise. A career structure which lays great stress on publishing copious papers exacerbates all these problems.

In this area, misinformation is a serious problem.

I'M EATING MORE POPCORN THESE DAYS

Cruz says there may be another shutdown but McConnell says NO WAY.  McConnell is supported by former Bagger hero Rubio and opposed by Jim DeMint's Senate Conservative Fund.   This infighting is good for liberals and may turn out to be good for America unless the liberals cave on Social Security.

MOLLY BALL ON THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Her article in The Atlantic "The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas " was interesting but I'm not sure about some of her claims.  For example, she writes that in the early 1980s, Heritage wasn't just another collection of hacks collecting wingnut welfare:

During the 1980 election, an up-and-coming Washington think tank called the Heritage Foundation undertook a massive task: to examine the federal government from top to bottom and produce a detailed, practical conservative policy vision.
The result, called Mandate for Leadership, epitomized the intellectual ambition of the then-rising conservative movement.
..By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, 60 percent of the Mandate’s 2,000 ideas were being implemented, and the Republican Party’s status as a hotbed of intellectual energy was ratified. It was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would declare in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

A few paragraphs later, Ball describes Heritage as an "august policy shop" and that's where I suspect she's wrong. I wasn't as involved with politics in the early 80s as I am now but I can't recall the Reagan Administration, the Republican Party and its supporters ever having an intellectual tone. Ball continues: "Without Heritage, the GOP’s intellectual backbone is severely weakened,.." Since 2001, I've read or re-read some writings of the major conservative thinkers such as Kirk, Buckley, Friedman, Hayek, Strauss, Weaver and Burke and none of them are as compelling as Joseph de Maistre but he's never mentioned by American conservatives.

My claim is that the GOP never had an "intellectual" backbone.