TWO PRETTY GOOD LINES

David Cay Johnston has a very good article on health care in Newsweek and these two points (at least) are worth repeating:

1)

We don't have a free market for health-care services. If we did, we would see a narrow range of prices for the same service.

2) 

Canada, Germany, and France each spend about 11.5 percent of their economy on health care, compared to 17.6 percent in the U.S.
We could have eliminated the income tax in 2010 had we adopted the Canadian, German, or French health-care systems.

LAMBERT HAS 12 GOOD IDEAS

Which are the following:

1. A living wage
2. Medicare for all
3. Tax the rich
4. Post Office bank
5. Jobs guarantee
6. Debt jubilee
7. Net neutrality
8. End the wars
9. Restore the Bill of Rights
10. Many co-ops
11. Few banksters
12. Carbon negative economy

We would also need to re-structure "high finance" so it no longers threatens the rest of us.

THE GARBAGE IS REALLY PILING UP

Last week, Michelle Malkin was on Glenn Beck's radio show and they both agree that Tesla and Westinghouse were good guys and Edison was a bad guy for reasons that were best understood by a paranoid wacko. Also last week, there was some delusional character at a local Safeway who was handing out a pamphlet that basically asserts that the Pope secretly runs almost the entire world. Worse, on one of the Jeebus radio stations in Tucson I heard some really old guy, so old he probably farts dust, brazenly assert that there's nothing in the Bible that is contradicted by science. 

BOB GRANT'S MALIGN INFLUENCE

Mediaite has a little more on the freaks who admired Grant:

Conservative Radio Pioneer Bob Grant Dead at 85
by Matt Wilstein | 6:14 pm, January 2nd, 2014

Sean Hannity, who took over Grant’s WABC time slot in 1995, after Grant was fired for making controversial comments about Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who died in a plane crash, has said, “He’s the reason I’m on the radio.”
Grant moved to WOR, where he became a competitor of Hannity’s, before finally returning to WABC in 2009 to host a weekly show on Sunday afternoons. He has been cited as an influence by not only Hannity, but also Don Imus, Mark Levin and even Howard Stern.

FACEBOOK NEEDS A BETTER "SIMILAR TO" ALGORITHM

This was below a post by Randi Rhodes:

THE BIG NETWORK SWITCH

Cumulus dumped Limbaugh & Hannity and I wonder what their ratings will be by the end of January.  Here's TALKERS Magazine's estimate of the current cume:

THE EARLY MASTER OF HATE RADIO IS DEAD

Bob Grant was the nastiest talk radio host I know of and it's too bad he didn't die 40 years ago.  By their own admission, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and other conservative freaks  admired Grant and that should tell you all you need to know about either of them.  Here are some excerpts from a 1995 FAIR article:

50,000 Watts of Hate
Bigotry Is Broadcast on ABC Radio's Flagship
FAIR
1/1/1995

...conservative politicians like U.S. Sen. Al D'Amato, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York Governor-elect George Pataki have called in to Grant's show to thank him for his support, often saying that it made a crucial difference in their elections.

Grant repeatedly expresses his belief in the scientific form of racism called eugenics, and frequently promotes the "Bob Grant Mandatory Sterilization Program."

Grant says he's been praying for the death of Magic Johnson (10/1/92): "Why is it taking so long for the HIV to go into full-blown AIDS?"

He remarked after a gay pride parade (6/29/94), "Ideally, it would have been nice to have a few phalanxes of policemen with machine guns and mow them down."

IS THIS A SIGN OF DESPERATION?

Clear Channel decided to move Fats Limbaugh and its other gasbags to a lower powered station in LA, the second largest media market in America.  Perhaps to mollify Fats, they also decided to change the name of the new station to KEIB, after Limbaugh's EIB brand name.

KTLK salutes Rush Limbaugh in new name change

By Richard Wagoner, LA Daily News
Posted: 12/31/13, 9:47 AM PST
Updated: 11 hrs ago

In an apparent nod to Rush Limbaugh — or perhaps an olive branch offered to the host in exchange for moving his show from its longtime flamethrower signal at KFI (640 AM) to the much lower-powered KTLK (1150 AM) — Clear Channel is changing the call letters of KTLK to KEIB. EIB, as in “Excellence in Broadcasting,” the longtime slogan of Limbaugh’s show.

Considering the official on-air name of the new conservative station at 1150 will be “The Patriot,” the “EIB” portion will be secondary.

I'm not sure about KFI having significantly more transmission power than KTLK because radio-locator rates KFI and KTLK as having 50,000 watts during the day.

REMEMBER WHEN SONYA SOTOMAYOR WAS REVILED BY CONSERVATIVES?

Beck called her part of Obama's Marxist plot to destroy America, AllahPundit thought she was a racist and there were many other freaks like those two. Well, it seems that Justice Sotomayor can be impartial instead of ideological:

Justice Blocks Contraception Mandate on Insurance in Suit by Nuns
By STEVE KENNY and ROBERT PEAR
Published: December 31, 2013
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Obama administration from forcing some religious-affiliated groups to provide health insurance coverage of birth control or face penalties as part of the Affordable Care Act.

39 YEARS AGO

(h/t Juan Cole)

Right after being graduated from HS, Michele Bachmann spent the summer of 1974 in Israel on a kibbutz! -

“I have been a long time supporter of Israel. The first time I went to Israel was the day I graduated from high school. I spent a summer working on Kibbutz Be’eri near Beer Sheva in 1974.”

I guess she doesn't mind socialism as long as its Israeli:

The kibbutz (Hebrew word for “communal settlement”) is a unique rural community; a society dedicated to mutual aid and social justice; a socioeconomic system based on the principle of joint ownership of property, equality and cooperation of production, consumption and education; the fulfillment of the idea “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”; a home for those who have chosen it. 

REMEMBER TERRI SCHIAVO?

That's the brain dead young woman the entire rightwing shamelessly used for political advantage in 2005. So far, the wingnuts have been quiet about a brand new case of brain death and I'm a little puzzled why they haven't pulled the same shameless exploitation.

REMEMBER, FOR MANY CONSERVATIVES...

Israel is our greatest ever ally and BFF, so I wonder how the social conservatives can stomach this:

Free abortion for all women 20-33, panel recommends
By Lazar Berman December 30, 2013, 6:24 pm
The Times of Israel

The estimated cost per patient was estimated at NIS 2,484 ($714), which covers not only the process, but also the cost of appearing before the government panel. Without government approval, abortion is illegal, but the panel approves 98% of the cases brought before it.

The panel is made up of two physicians and one licensed social worker, and at least one of the three must be a woman.

Unlike in the United States, abortion has never figured in the country’s political campaigns. In fact, Israel does not even have an active anti-abortion movement.

YES, VIRGINIA...

(h/t billmon)

"shit is fucked up and bullshit":

Iraq-Syria
Adam Shatz 29 December 2013
... the American government is fighting Sunni extremists in Iraq, while its allies, notably Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are arming the same Sunni extremists in Syria.

I GUESS NOTHING IS SAFE FROM THE NSA

This story in Spiegel Online about the NSA intercepting laptops in order to put spyware on them made me recall this older story:

Researchers can slip an undetectable trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs
New technique bakes super stealthy hardware trojans into chip silicon.

by Dan Goodin - Sept 18 2013, 7:57am USMST
ars technica

Scientists have developed a technique to sabotage the cryptographic capabilities included in Intel's Ivy Bridge line of microprocessors. The technique works without being detected by built-in tests or physical inspection of the chip.

The attack against the Ivy Bridge processors sabotages random number generator (RNG) instructions Intel engineers added to the processor. The exploit works by severely reducing the amount of entropy the RNG normally uses, from 128 bits to 32 bits. The hack is similar to stacking a deck of cards during a game of Bridge. Keys generated with an altered chip would be so predictable an adversary could guess them with little time or effort required. The severely weakened RNG isn't detected by any of the "Built-In Self-Tests" required for the P800-90 and FIPS 140-2 compliance certifications mandated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

THE WAY THEY WERE...

I was a bit surprised to learn that several prominent GOP politicians were moderates in the 60s and would be denounced as RINOs today.  Newt Gingrich headed the New Orleans Rockefeller for President group when he was a graduate student in history at Tulane. When Donald Rumsfeld was in the House, he was part of the "Young Turks" who supported moderate conservative approaches to governing. After Goldwater's historic defeat, he wanted to remake the GOP into "a reasonable, constructive, and effective force" and helped replace the GOP minority leader Charles Halleck with the more moderate Gerald Ford. After he joined the Nixon Administration, he became Machiavellian. In 1969, Dick Cheney was a graduate student in political science at the University of Wisconsin and "was thoughtful, open-minded and distinctly moderate. He had many liberal friends and even some friends on the radical fringes of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)."

SOURCE: Kabaservice

THE BAGGERS ARE USUALLY SILENT ABOUT PRIVATE SECTOR FAILS

They have plenty to say and write about Obamacare but they didn't have much to say about UPS & Fedex screwing up Xmas deliveries so it was up to others to point out that their beloved Free Market Fairy has another fail.  And for low-hanging fruit, there's always Microsoft.

ALMOST A YEAR AGO...

Fats Limbaugh or Premiere hired a flack to defend Fats from the backlash over his nasty comments about Sandra Fluke and POLITICO published one of the flack's op-eds. It argued that boycotting Fats was a violation of Free Speech yet we all know that there is no free speech on talk radio, as Mike Huckabee inadvertently pointed out:

As a radio talk show host though, “I can say whatever I want to,” Huckabee added.

“I totally control the medium,” he said. “If there’s a caller I don’t like, I either don’t put him up or if he starts saying something I don’t like, I can push one button and he’s gone. How I wish I could have pushed buttons and caused some legislators to disappear. That would have been wonderful.”