Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Seriously, Charlie, How Do You Really Feel?
Let us be plain. Ralph Reed is a con-man who would sell his gray-haired granny to the Somali pirates for fifty cents worth of consulting fees. He has nothing worth contributing to the national dialogue. This should be plain by now to all but the deliberately dim. The people who put this mess together every morning are not as embarrassing as the allegedly important people who appear on it, and nowhere near as embarrassing as the people who take it seriously, some of whom rule us.
Always a pleasure to read.
Well, This Explains a Lot
Talking Points Memo has discovered that insurance companies are deceiving their customers in an attempt to extract higher premiums out of them:
Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they’d identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she’d be covered.
A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.
But that’s not what she found. Instead, she’d be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.
Otherwise, she’d be automatically rolled over to a new plan — and, as the letter said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.”
If Donna had done nothing, she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more a month for insurance than she will now that she went to the marketplace, picked the best plan for her family and accessed tax credits at the heart of the health care reform law.
“The info that we were sent by LifeWise was totally bogus. Why the heck did they try to screw us?” Donna said. “People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them.”
Donna is not alone.
Why the heck are they trying to screw you?
Because they are Insurance Companies, theat’s why they are trying to screw you.
Like the scorpion said to the turtle, “It’s my Nature.”
A Couple of Important Education Stories from New York State
I would note that the New York Daily News has looked at administrator salaries, and discovered that executives at 16 charter schools in the city are payed more than the New York City school chancellor.
Like I said, looterz want to loot.
More significant is that the Southold School District Superintendent on Long Island has demanded that all student data be removed from Bill Gates’ latest attempt to monetize our children:
After finding out that student data is being shared through the New York State Department of Education Department with a private third-party vendor, Southold School District Superintendent David Gamberg has formally requested to have its students’ data removed from the controversial software system, citing privacy concerns.
Newsday has reported that although student data is currently kept on state computer systems, New York is moving toward contracting with nonprofit Atlanta data company inBloom, Inc. to “store student test scores, disciplinary records, disabilities and other vital subjects.”
Mr. Gamberg fired off a letter to inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger on Monday, requesting to “opt-out” from its data storing system, known as the Shared Learning Infrastructure. He has found a clause in the contract that allows districts to request their records be removed from the system, according to Mr. Gamberg’s letter.
“It is our position that this data contains sensitive and highly personal student information that we prefer not be subjected to the potential for breach, unintentional distribution, access, or abuse without parental consent.,” Mr. Gamberg wrote.
Gee, you think?
I figured out that it was evil when I heard Bill Gates.
We Have Some Election Results
First, as promised, Bridgeport F%$#ing Connecticut, where the people trying to prevent a corporate takeover of public schools won:
The city Board of Education slipped out of the hands of Mayor Bill Finch and Schools Superintendent Paul Vallas on Tuesday despite the surprise win of a Republican school board candidate.
The majority of the nine-member school board tipped in favor of the Connecticut Working Families Party.
The winners include Democrats Howard Gardner, Dave Hennessey and Andre Baker, joined by incumbent Working Families member Sauda Baraka and Republican Joe Larcheveque.
………
The race pitted the Democratic party machine against the combined efforts of the Working Families Party, sympathetic Democrats and strong support from the city teacher’s union. To many, more was at stake than control of one the most troubled school districts in the state. Some had pegged it as the epicenter of a nationwide struggle over the control of public schools, a fight against efforts to cede control to corporate interest groups that seek to privatize educations.
Vallas was brought into the district in late 2011 after the local elected board was replaced by the state, a move later overturned by the state Supreme Court.
During the primary, the Democrats who won made it clear they are not fond of Vallas, and the Working Families Party has actively worked to remove him. In a statement issued early in the day Tuesday, Working Families Party Chair Lindsay Farrell made it clear replacing Vallas would be tops on their agenda.
Menwhile, in Virginia, it looks like the marginally less repugnant candidate, Terry McAuliffe, beat Ken Cooccinelli, who ran his campaign against oral sex (only exaggerating slightly):
Terry McAuliffe, a businessman and former head of the Democratic National Committee, captured the Virginia governor’s seat Tuesday, defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, the state attorney general whose conservative crusades made him an icon of the tea party movement.
With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, McAuliffe led Cuccinelli by more than 30,000 votes, or less than 2 percent.
“I’m very disappointed,” Cuccinelli told supporters assembled in a hotel ballroom in Richmond, adding that he was also “immensely proud of the campaign we ran.”
Despite his defeat, Cuccinelli called the election a referendum on President Obama’s Affordable Health Act, saying that the campaign was close even though McAuliffe had a massive fundraising advantage.
“Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million,” he said,”this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare. That message will go out across America tonight.”
McAuliffe was expected to speak at 11 p.m.
Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, defeated Republican E.W. Jackson, the Chesapeake minister whose history of inflammatory remarks about gays and abortion became a flash-point of the campaign.
Mark Obenshain, the Republican candidate for attorney general, led Mark Herring by less than 1 percent, with 98 percent of the precincts counted.
Don’t fret, Republicans, the new Attorney General, Mark Obenshain is likely just has insane as Cuccinelli.
In New York and New Jersey, the Amazingly Tall Mayor, and Jabba the Governor both won as expected.
The Rest of Europe Begins to Realize that Germany, and Not Greece, is the Problem in the Euro Zone
When Romano Prodi, generally known as “Mr. Euro,” says that, “Germany won’t sell another Mercedes in Europe,” it is clear that Europe’s “Very Serious People” are beginning to understand than Germany’s policy demands are fundamentally inimical to the continuing existence of the Euro Zone, and perhaps the whole EU:
The plot is thickening fast in Italy. Romano Prodi – Mr Euro himself – is calling for a Latin Front to rise up against Germany and force through a reflation policy before the whole experiment of monetary union spins out of control.
“France, Italy, and Spain should together pound their fists on the table, but they are not doing so because they delude themselves that they can go it alone,” he told Quotidiano Nazionale
Should Germany persist in imposing its contractionary ruin on Europe – “should the euro break apart, with one exchange rate in the North and one in the South”, as he puts it – Germany itself will reap as it has sown. “Their exchange rate will double and they will not sell a single Mercedes in Europe. German industrialists know this but all they manage to secure are slight changes, not enough to end the crisis.”
Professor Prodi is the prime minister who prepared Italy for EMU in the 1990s, and then presided over the launch of the euro as European Commission chief.………
I would note that the German belief in their own inherent virtue and it’s destiny to dominate its neighbors has a very bad history.
Heck of a Job, Barry………
What a surprise we do another drone strike, a “success”, and transformed the person that we assassinated from public enemy number one to a martyr and hero:
In life, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was Public Enemy No. 1: a ruthless figure who devoted his career to bloodshed and mayhem, whom Pakistani pundits occasionally accused of being a pawn of Indian, or even American, intelligence.
But after his death, it seems, Pakistani hearts have grown fonder.
Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan’s political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence. The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, denounced the strike as sabotage of incipient government peace talks with the Taliban. Media commentators fulminated about American treachery. And the former cricket star Imran Khan, now a politician, renewed his threats to block NATO military supply lines through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — a province his Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls — with a parliamentary vote scheduled for Monday.
Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.
“It’s another stab in the back,” said Bill Roggio, whose website, the Long War Journal, monitors drone strikes. “Even those of us who watch Pakistan closely don’t know where they stand anymore. It’s such a double game.”
To many Pakistanis, though, it is the United States that is double-dealing, and sentiments like Mr. Roggio’s exemplify typical American arrogance. Shireen Mazari, a senior official in Mr. Khan’s party, has urged the Pakistani military to shoot down drones.
Does anyone really really think that this makes us any safer?
It might temporarily increase the safety of our imperial contingent in Afghanistan, but our incessant drone strikes, and the resultant terror that this engenders in the population creates people who want to kill us.
It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.
Yes, the Texas Voter Suppression Law is Working
It just prevented former Speaker of the House James Wright from voting:
Former House Speaker Jim Wright was denied a voter ID card Saturday at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.
“Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn’t give me an ID,” Wright said.
The legendary Texas political figure says that he has worked things out with DPS and that he will get a state-issued personal identification card in time for him to vote Tuesday in the state and local elections.
But after the difficulty he had this weekend getting a proper ID card, Wright, 90, expressed concern that such problems could deter others from voting and stifle turnout. After spending much of his life fighting to make it easier to vote, the Democratic Party icon said he is troubled by what he’s seeing happen under the state’s new voter ID law.
“I earnestly hope these unduly stringent requirements on voters won’t dramatically reduce the number of people who vote,” Wright told the Star-Telegram. “I think they will reduce the number to some extent.”
Wright and his assistant, Norma Ritchson, went to the DPS office on Woodway Drive to get a State of Texas Election Identification Certificate. Wright said he realized earlier in the week that the photo identifications he had — a Texas driver’s license that expired in 2010 and a TCU faculty ID — do not satisfy requirements of the voter ID law, enacted in 2011 by the Legislature. DPS officials concurred.But Wright and Ritchson will return to the office Monday with a certified copy of Wright’s birth certificate, which the DPS employees assured them would be good enough for the Texas personal identification card, designed specifically for people who do not drive.
“It can be used for anything, not just voting,” Ritchson said.
While Wright will be able to vote, Ritchson worried that others of his age may find the obstacles and inconvenience she and Wright encountered so off-putting that they just don’t vote.
Preventing old people, young people, black people, and brown people from voting is the goal of the Texas ‘Phants.
Mission f%$#ing Accomplished.
Can we please give them back to Mexico?
Tomorrow, I’m Going to Write About ……… School Board Elections?!?!!? In Bridgeport F%$#ing Connecticut?!?!?
Why yes, I will be writing about the returns in Bridgeport, because it is ground zero of attempts by the Education-Industrial complex to turn our school children into profit centers for Wall Street:
Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas – who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago — isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But a school board election in Bridgeport, Conn. – the latest district to tap Vallas to oversee reforms — could effectively spell his fate. Tomorrow’s vote will offer the latest referendum on the bipartisan, billionaire-backed mainstream education reform movement, and on a multi-year effort by local Democrats – aided by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee — to defeat or disempower labor-backed dissenters.
“As I’ve gone around the country, I always point to Bridgeport as one of the signs that the people can beat the power,” former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and high-profile reform critic Diane Ravitch told activists on a conference call last month. Tuesday’s election is the latest round in a long-running war over ed reform, and who should shape it, in the largest city in one of the country’s most unequal states.
For the sake of shielding Vallas and his agenda, activists allege that the city’s Democratic machine has acted indifferent or even hostile to defeating Republicans tomorrow.
“What’s at stake is the future direction of Bridgeport schools,” said Connecticut Working Families Party executive director Lindsay Farrell, citing issues including testing and class size. “And I think, in a broader sense, the direction of public education in this country.”As I’ve reported, Bridgeport’s school board became a battleground in 2009, when two of its Republican members were ousted in an election by candidates from the labor-backed Working Families Party. While Bridgeport is overwhelmingly Democratic, by law no more than two-thirds of its nine school board seats can be held by the same party. While the board’s Democrats and Republicans had often seen eye to eye on education, the WFP didn’t. “They were very effective at questioning the status quo,” Bridgeport Education Association vice president Rob Traber told Salon last year, and when Mayor Bill Finch’s superintendent pushed unpopular cuts in 2011, the Democratic machine and its business allies got “afraid that they might lose control of the board.”
Vallas has been failing down for years, practicing pump and dump, where focuses on standardized tests to the exclusion of real educations, eats his seed corn, and is forced out when it all implodes, when he blames the teachers.
All the while, he sells gives the schools to the hedge fund managers to that they can loot the public school systems.
His tenure in Connecticut it gets even worse, because he did not meet the legal requirements to be CEO, so they set up a no-show phony class for him to check off the necessary boxes.
Interestingly enough, following the WFP victory in the Democratic primaries, the Democratic Party establishment appears to be pulling strings for the Republicans:
The WFP notes a sharp contrast between the Democratic Party’s efforts on behalf of its pro-Vallas candidates in the primary, and its approach to tomorrow’s showdown with the GOP. “The Democratic Party put a lot of resources into the mayor’s slate in the primary, and a lot of money,” said Farrell. “We haven’t really seen them doing anything to help the challengers who won in the primary in the general election.” She told Salon that “education budgets are large chunks of money, and you know, we’ve been really stunned by the lengths to which Mayor Bill Finch, and the Democratic Chair Mario Testa, and Paul Vallas will go to maintain power over those budgets.”
Some Bridgeport progressives take their allegations another step. Retired Judge Carmen Lopez, the local activist who filed the lawsuit against Vallas, told Salon she believes the mayor and his allies were “working to make sure that the Republicans win” because “that’s the only way that Finch could get what he wants, which is for Vallas to stay in power.” Voter Jessica Allen told Salon that City Council president Thomas McCarthy visited her house and, when she asked about education, told her that while “under normal circumstances I would never tell anybody to vote Republican,” in this case “you should be voting for [GOP contender] Larcheveque.” Allen said McCarthy told her the mayor “tried to make these fantastic changes, but everything that we try to do keeps getting blocked …” (Allen, a registered independent, told Salon she thinks “the schools are really screwed up” and “I don’t know what the right answer is.”) But Council member McCarthy told Salon in an email that he was “encouraging my constituents to vote all of Row B, the Democratic line.”
When you consider the proportion of a typical municipal budget that goes to education, it’s clear that there are a whole bunch of politicians in Bridgeport who are siding with the folks dedicated to ripping off the taxpayers.
Yes, I’m also wondering if the Republicans’ attempt to vote Ken Cuccinelli into the Governor’s office, but I really think that Bridgeport is a bigger deal.
Yay!!!! FIOS is Back Up!!
It appears that the power outages in our neighborhood caused a lot of Verizon’s FIOS’ equipment. It took out the Battery Backup Units (BBUs).
It appears that the generation of our now-replaced BBU was susceptible to power spikes.
The Verizon Tech Will be Out Tomorrow
Hopefully, we will get our internet back.
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Light Posting for a While
Verizon FIOS is down at chez Saroff.
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Hardcore Trick our Treating
Did I mention that it is F#@&ing raining?
The joys of children are without number.
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Trick or Treating With the Kids
Natalie is a dryad, and Charlie is an Angler Fish.
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Today is a Day of Mourning Observed Around the World by Heterosexual Women
Because, you see, 19 years (!) ago, I plighted Sharon’s troth, and as such am no longer available to the general populace.
Let the lamentations commence.
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The NSA is the Inmate Running the Asylum
Eugene Robinson says that the, “NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control.”
He’s right, and he is right when he says that their, “This is not just a massive invasion of privacy that the people of France, Spain and other countries understandably resent. It’s also a mistake.”
The problem here is that the NSA, By Design wants it all. It is their organizational imperative.
This is why Obama’s fondness for “bringing in stakeholders” has failed.
They are not a reasonable stakeholder whose needs to be heard, they are akin to the barbarian warriors hired by the Romans toward the end of their empire.
They are a tool that must be kept on a tight leash.
It is also clear that the NSA is pushing back aqainst Obama, because even as they officially deny that Obama was notified, anonymous sources are saying that their wiretapping were authorized:
The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.
Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies.
Think about this: Is there anyone in the NSA who would even talk to a reporter without assuming that the NSA was listening?
This is the NSA sending a not so subtle message, “Don’t f%$# with us,” and if be it’s not NSA director General Keith Alexander, he gave tacit approval to the leak.
Linkage
- Politico Playbook Parody: Civil War Playbook (New Republic) ROFL.
- Tom’s Kitchen: Wine-Braised Beef Short Ribs (Mother Jones)
- These Really Exist: Giant Concrete Arrows That Point Your Way Across America Condé Nast Traveler
And here is about the clearest description of a synchronized (Synchromesh®) manual transmission that I have yet seen.
Economists Finally Get a Clue
I called for this at the start of the financial crisis, and finally many economists have begun to realize that there is such a thing as inflation is too low:
Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough.
Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment.
The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.
The school board in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, is counting on inflation to keep a lid on teachers’ wages. Retailers including Costco and Walmart are hoping for higher inflation to increase profits. The federal government expects inflation to ease the burden of its debts. Yet by one measure, inflation rose at an annual pace of 1.2 percent in August, just above the lowest pace on record.
“Weighed against the political, social and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained burst of moderate inflation is not something to worry about,” Kenneth S. Rogoff, a Harvard economist, wrote recently. “It should be embraced.”
Low inflation favors the rentiers over the producers.
Of course, the economists, are talking about maybe moving the targeting from 2% to 3%, and I think that we should target 6%, but I’m an engineer, not an economist, dammit!*
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
What, You Mean that Gazillionaires Won’t Leave New York City for Orlando, Florida for Lower Taxes
So not surprised.
Studies show that the idle rich do not relocate over their tax levels:
It is not news that New York’s political and media elites worship the extremely rich. You can see this when in a tough economy the New York Times publishes a “Wealth” section fronted by a how-to piece on buying Irish castles. You can see it when you hear the city’s billionaire mayor insisting that critics of wealth inequality should be quiet because they interfere with his dream to “get all the Russian billionaires to move here.” And you can see it when you behold Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., slamming a modest initiative to slightly increase taxes on the Big Apple’s millionaires.
Again, none of this unto itself is all that newsy because it isn’t all that new. New York’s “let them eat cake” culture has been around for a long time in a city where almost half of all residents live below or near the poverty line. However, what is news is the extent to which this wealth-obsessed environment helps strengthen the mythologies that distort economic reality.
Cuomo’s attack, in particular, perfectly illustrates this trend. Fresh off raising millions from wealthy donors for his political front group, the governor slammed Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio’s tax hike proposal, claiming it will drive Cuomo’s beloved millionaires out of the state.
“What they fear is that they’re in a place where the taxes will continually go up and there will be a ceiling and they’ll say, ‘I’m going to Florida,’” Cuomo said of the rich. “I believe that.”
Before you join Cuomo in weeping for the Manhattan fat cats supposedly forced to flee from economic persecution, remember that his story is a fantastical fact-free fable — one that conveniently serves the political interests of the aristocracy, but has nothing to do with reality.
Rich people leaving New Jersey and California actually fell after taxes rose, and the decrease in millionaires in New York happened because their wages fell after the financial crisis.
Holy Sh%$
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is now officially way worse than Chernobyl, because 3 of the reactor cores burned through the bottom of their containments:
There are three major problems at Fukushima: (1) Three reactor cores are missing; (2) Radiated water has been leaking from the plant in mass quantities for 2.5 years; and (3) Eleven thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, perhaps the most dangerous things ever created by humans, are stored at the plant and need to be removed, 1,533 of those are in a very precarious and dangerous position. Each of these three could result in dramatic radiation events, unlike any radiation exposure humans have ever experienced. We’ll discuss them in order, saving the most dangerous for last.
Missing reactor cores: Since the accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, three reactor cores have gone missing. There was an unprecedented three reactor ‘melt-down.’ These melted cores, called corium lavas, are thought to have passed through the basements of reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3, and to be somewhere in the ground underneath.
Harvey Wasserman, who has been working on nuclear energy issues for over 40 years, tells us that during those four decades no one ever talked about the possibility of a multiple meltdown, but that is what occurred at Fukushima.
It is an unprecedented situation to not know where these cores are. TEPCO is pouring water where they think the cores are, but they are not sure. There are occasional steam eruptions coming from the grounds of the reactors, so the cores are thought to still be hot.
The concern is that the corium lavas will enter or may have already entered the aquifer below the plant. That would contaminate a much larger area with radioactive elements. Some suggest that it would require the area surrounding Tokyo, 40 million people, to be evacuated. Another concern is that if the corium lavas enter the aquifer, they could create a “super-heated pressurized steam reaction beneath a layer of caprock causing a major ‘hydrovolcanic’ explosion.”
I knew that there had been multiple meltdowns, but I though that the core damage was contained.
I did not realize that we had the f%$#ing China Syndrome times 3.