JABbering Stooge

Putz, on the “spontaneous” Philly Town Hall Putsch:

CROWD EXPLODES when Arlen Specter says “do it fast.”

This kind of thing just keeps happening. And it’s happening all over.

Gee, I wonder how THAT could be?

I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
— Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power”, April 29, 1938

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Attributed to Benito Mussolini

Even though Mussolini may have meant something quite different by the above quote (assuming it’s truly something he said), I can’t help but think that this move by the Arizona state legislature perfectly fits the meaning the quote has taken on in recent years:

Desperate state may sell Capitol buildings, others
Under GOP plan, government would pay to lease back most of the sites

Call it a sign of desperate times: Legislators are considering selling the House and Senate buildings where they’ve conducted state business for more than 50 years.

Dozens of other state properties also may be sold as the state government faces its worst financial crisis in a generation, if not ever. The plan isn’t to liquidate state assets, though.

Instead, officials hope to sell the properties and then lease them back over several years before assuming ownership again. The complex financial transaction would allow government services to continue without interruption while giving the state a fast infusion of as much as $735 million, according to Capitol projections.

Maybe next time you’ll listen to the Dirty Fucking Hippies before selling out democracy to the highest bidder?

Dr. David Scheiner, who treated the president for over 20 years, says Obama’s plan will fail because it doesn’t go far enough:

The man Barack Obama consulted on medical matters for over two decades said on Tuesday that the president’s vision for health care reform is bound for failure.

Dr. David Scheiner, a 70-year Chicago-based physician who treated Obama for more than 20 years, said he was disheartened by the health care legislation his former patient is championing, calling it piecemeal and ineffectual.

“I look at his program and I can’t see how it’s going to work,” Scheiner told the Huffington Post. “He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The [Congressional Budget Office] said it’s going be incredibly expensive … and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time.”

[…]

“His pragmatism is what is overwhelming him.” Scheiner added: “I think he’s afraid that he can’t get anything through if he doesn’t go through this incredibly compromised program.”

Admitting that he was not a political practitioner, Scheiner said he felt compelled to speak out because of his unique relationship with the president and this critical moment in the health care debate. A champion of a single-payer health care system, Scheiner noted repeatedly that he came to the debate from the perspective of having dealt with the hassles and pitfalls of the current system. His speaking out is part of a larger effort, launched by Physicians for a National Health Program, to push Congress to consider single-payer as an alternative to current reform proposals.

As Scheiner sees it, all alternatives simply fall short. Keeping private insurers in the market, he warns, would simply maintain burdensome administrative costs. He argued further that the pharmaceutical industry is not being asked to make “any kind of significant sacrifices” in the current round of reform negotiations. As for a public health care option, Scheiner insists that the proposal remains vague and inadequate.

The conservative reaction to this revelation is (predictably) going to fall into one of two categories. In the first category are those who will ignore (or stop before reading) the part where Dr. Scheiner advocates a single-payer Medicare-style system in order to claim “Even B. Hussein Osama X The Usurper’s doctor thinks he’s too much of a socialist-commie-fascist for ‘Murka!!!111!1!1!1!!!1!eleventy-one!” These people will be aided and abetted by lazy mooks in the corporate media like Forbes’ David Whelan, whose article on the subject buries the lede — Dr. Scheiner’s support for a single-payer health care system — so far down that you have to have specialized equipment to find it. Whelan further compounds his sins with the article’s deceptive title, “Obama’s Doctor Knocks ObamaCare,” which hits all the talking points the intellectually dishonest cadre of the conservative punditocracy will jump all over like flies on shit. For all its sins, though, Whelan’s article does contain one interesting, if potentially worrisome note:

[Dr. Scheiner] supports the idea of that option for people who don’t like or can’t afford their HMO. But he worries that it will be watered down or not happen at all. “It’s nonsense that the private insurance companies need to be protected,” he says. “Why? Because they’ve done such a good job?”

Indeed.

The second class of conservative reaction to this story will come from those who are intellectually honest enough to admit that Obama’s doctor is disappointed with the truncated scope of Obama’s plan, but will use it to bash Dr. Scheiner as some sort of commie socialist-fascist poopyhead. Considering the decidedly anti-intellectual bent of today’s conservative movement, the proportion of conservative pundits who will likely fall into this category is considerably smaller, but definitely nonzero.

TALK ABOUT PRESCIENT: It appears that Dr. Scheiner’s fear mentioned in the deceptive David Whelan article has come to pass.

Blue Dogs Delay, Water Down House Health Care Bill

What was it that Bartcop said?

How did I get in a party of gutless wankers?

We need to get us some new, better Democrats. Preferably ones with actual, functioning spines.

Ya think?

Has ANY country with a “socialized” health care system gone back to the not-so-tender mercies of the private sector?

Oh, geez. Here we go again! (h/t, John Cole)

Investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital, are inventing schemes to reduce the capital cost of risky assets on banks’ balance sheets, in the latest sign that financial market innovation is far from dead.

The schemes, which Goldman insiders refer to as “insurance” and BarCap calls “smart securitisation”, use different mechanisms to achieve the same goal: cutting capital costs by up to half in some cases, at the same time as regulators are threatening to force banks to increase their capital requirements.

BarCap’s structures involve the pooling of assets from several clients into a secured financial product that can be sold on to other investors and rated by a credit rating agency, potentially reducing the capital allocated against the assets by between 10 per cent and 50 per cent.

These new mechanisms are in some respects similar to the discredited structured products, which were widely blamed for fuelling the financial crisis. But the schemes’ backers argue there are two significant differences. First, they involve the securitisation of banks’ existing assets, rather than of new lending. Second, bankers argue that the new products do not disguise the transfer of risk.

Have these morons NOT learned ONE DAMN THING from the subprime mortgage crisis? Or is it time to consult BartCop’s Second Law?

ANY time a person or entity makes a “mistake” that puts extra money (or power) in their pocket, expect them to make that “mistake” again and again and again.

I just hope the SEC is up to the task of going after these financial pirates…

No seriously. They would rather see the dead litter the streets than force the murder-by-spreadsheet industry to actually uphold their contractual obligations.

(h/t, brendan)

Obama sure has brought out the worst in the wankersphere. We’re not even one year into Obama’s presidency, I’m already starting to run out of ideas for mental health breaks!

According to Max Baucus (DINO), if you’re not his pimps in the health insurance companies, you belong in a psikhushka*:

Fuck you, Sen. Baka. Fuck you to hell.

* Cf.

Shorter Gov. Goodhair:

Rick Perry, After Raising Secession, Calls For Fed Help With Swine Flu

• No, we don’t need no stinkin’ stimulus money — it’ll just go to help those shiftless bums who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths! In fact, we’ll secede before we ac— HOLY CRAP! SAVE US, MR. PRESIDENT! GET OFF YOUR LAZY DUFF AND SAVE US FROM THE UNEXPECTED PANDEMIC THAT ANYBODY WITH HALF A BRAIN COULD’VE SEEN COMING A MILE AWAY!

“Shorter” concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard and given a beneficial mutation by the fine folks at Sadly, No!
I am aware of all Internet tradtions.™