They ARE absolutely mutually exclusive.

NOBODY will pay attention to any discussion of any substantive issue if they are distracted by explosive, racially charged, and irrelevant accusations like this one. Nobody.

Demands for candidates to "address" nonsense like this are simply attempts to shut down all conversation on issues of importance.

Raise your hand if you agree.

Posted at January 15, 2008 12:20 PM in response to Playing With Fire: Smearing Obama Among Jews

>Not to mention the chief of police
>(the United States) who has one of the largest
>stockpiles of the product in the world and is
>in the midst of building a new improved
>production facility.

Policeman with gun = religious psycho with gun. Okay, I think we're done here.

Self-appointed "policeman" with gun, i.e. an armed religous psycho vigilante with delusions that he acts under color of law when he kills for Jesus. (You can't have law without religion, as we learned from Mitt last week).

You lose. Thanks for playing.

Posted at December 12, 2007 7:02 PM in response to Thomas Friedman's Flawed Analogy on Iran

I'm going to be leaving a well paying engineering position here, and my wife and I are emigrating to Australia.

She has health problems with chronic daily migraine. I have epilepsy and although I have a medical bracelet saying not to, people call ambulances on me all the time. Insurance refuses to cover half of them because the hospital is out of network, etc. I can't stay here.

Posted at August 9, 2007 12:34 PM in response to Ugly American Conservatism

I wonder if the families of the dead at Virginia Tech would agree with this.

Posted at April 17, 2007 7:50 PM in response to MY REACTION TO THE TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH

The real solution is to give drugs to everyone on the plane.

Posted at April 17, 2007 7:46 PM in response to MY REACTION TO THE TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH

Everyone keeps talking about whether or not this "will happen again". Of course it will. Striving for an incident rate of zero is admirable, but not necessarily realistic. The question should be, how often does it happen?

Specifically, what is the probability that my life would be shortened by something like this? Practically zero. Or by getting shot in general? That's a larger probability, but still, pretty close to zero. This event is not indicative of a larger policy problem requiring "solving" by giving every plane passenger a gun or giving every gun buyer a psychiatric evaluation.

(The real solution, of course, is to fix the doors. Makers of doors should stop making door handles and knobs with closed loops that can be chained shut by crazed gunmen. Technology exists for knobs without loops for chains to go through. How many more must die?)

Guns kill 40 people a day in this country. More people have died from guns today than died at Virginia Tech yesterday. It was a tragedy for all involved, but at the end of the day, still a human interest story. If it happened in Iraq it wouldn't even be that. If we need additional gun legislation, Virginia Tech may provide a nice political impetus to get started- but it should NOT be considered by lawmakers as THE reason for legislation, or we will get a law fixing door handles.

Not that I disagree with gun control in general, but we only have a limited amount of congressperson-hours available and we can save more lives by having politicians work on (say) fixing health care instead of writing legislation having to do with guns. There was a time when we could afford to waste time on such issues but those days are gone.

Posted at April 17, 2007 7:15 PM in response to MY REACTION TO THE TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH

Remember the deadline for registration for those who wanted bankruptcy protection?

And remember the deadline for enrolling in Part D? They threatened seniors that they'd better enroll by May 15 or face stiff premiums for the rest of their lives. It was a shakedown, a dare to all seniors to get involved in the whole disaster or else. Their biggest problem in 2005 and on was that they forgot they had no mandate. They adopted policy positions widely out of line with the expectations of voters, and proceeded to shake down huge sections of the public as if we all love being pickpocketed.

Right after the 2004 election, the attitude of the whole Republican Party changed into one of ha ha, we've got it now, you can't take it from us, we've got you all screwed now. The first thing they did was launch a full scale transparent assault to "save" Social Security. Then they had their widely hated signature achievements, like the bankruptcy bill and Medicare Part D. They just lazily dropped all pretense that they had anything but the most ill of intentions, that they were in this for anything other than enriching themselves and their friends.

One thing that must be noted- there are some issues that have not only succeeded in causing widespread public revulsion, but also, really served to show everybody how divorced the Bush true-believers are from reality. The Republicans, forgetting their lack of a mandate, not only took extreme minority positions on these issues, but also vilified anyone who in fact had a majority opinion.

Iraq: The obvious case, with a competition between the "reality-based" view and the idea that everything is hunky dorey except for insurgents who can be killed and bad PR that can be fixed. Essentially the public was told it couldn't see the nose on its face in the mirror, everything was fine with the painted schools. Once the public noticed the daily car bombings, the deaths of soldiers, and Rumsfeld's general incompetence, they gradually departed from that viewpoint. Many many Republicans failed to follow along, and you can still see them defending the "surge" today- a position with something like 10% support among the public.

Katrina: Remember how this quickly, but only briefly (for most of us), turned into a law enforcement issue? Once those initial reports of looting came out, the wingnuts kept struggling to move the conversation away from Bush's inaction to make it more about the lawlessness in the city. And the public perception of the crisis turned on a dime- until later on when it became clear (to most of us) that the looting was the minor story. (But of course, it must be mentioned that the looting was what it took to finally attract significant attention from Bush.) But for months afterward the Wingnut Brigade's narrative of Katrina was a law-enforcement issue, and political attacks on New Orleans residents continue to this day. The worst are Bush supporters who also got rained on and feel entitled to be racists. If you notice, in almost every case, this minority wingnut opinion views individuals as the cause of all our problems, rather than corporations or the pernicious, corrosive effect of money and corruption in politics.

Schiavo: The most obvious case. This one really was a big F U to the public: we can survive with just our crazy base thank you. Most people were horrified by government intervention in a family's private affairs and failed to view the story in pro-life/pro-choice terms like the Republicans myopically insisted on doing. They even lost libertarians with this one, who are some of their most annoyingly persistent supporters.

Bankruptcy Bill: This got turned into a moral issue too. People who don't pay their bills are bad and should be punished. That was the moral clarity we kept getting. But although nobody likes deadbeats, most people view the Republican bankruptcy legislation as a direct affront to themselves. After all it closes off an option that was previously available to you in the event of a financial emergency. That isn't changed by the fact that some deadbeats out there are already getting their comeuppance.

Posted at December 26, 2006 3:25 PM in response to Event of the (Two) Year (Cycle)?

Interesting. No mention of the fact that seniors and pensioners are having a horrible time getting the medicine they were used to getting.

I made this call back in January when they first unrolled that Part D fiasco.

That was a huge event that mostly went unnoticed by most people. Although it did produce some truly memorable stories, during the few weeks that the media cared to report it:

On the seventh day of the new Medicare drug benefit, Stephen Starnes began hearing voices again, ominous voices, and he started to beg for the medications he had been taking for 10 years. But his pharmacy could not get approval from his Medicare drug plan, so Mr. Starnes was admitted to a hospital here for treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.
-NY Times: Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill

Posted at December 26, 2006 1:35 PM in response to Event of the (Two) Year (Cycle)?

It wasn't just one thing. Too much stuff happened, and Bush's fortunes didn't decline overnight if you recall. His image has undergone a relatively steady deterioration since 2004. If it degraded most quickly at any one time, it was the week of the Foley incident. Lots of stuff came to a head right then; there was a different news bomb every day it seemed. (Not that there aren't stories every day about a president who does evil things daily, but they rarely get traction in the media like the ones that week did.)

I have to specifically take issue with the idea that Cheney's face shooting had anything to do with it. I would classify that as a Kennedy/Chappaquiddick kind of incident. While it's certainly something that your political enemies and the press can run with, a hunting or car accident really says little about your honesty, your trustworthiness, or even your competence. And in Cheney's case, the press didn't even run with it- not as far as they surely could have with such a golden story. It was mostly us talking about it. I wonder if anyone even noticed when the victim apologized to Cheney the next week.

If I were pressed to name specific issues, I would have to say that for pure enormity the one-two punch of Schiavo and Katrina had a huge effect on people. Crazy and incompetent. There are, however, a few issues that people have with Bush, that don't seem to get complained about as much on lefty blogs:

- Bush is perceived as "soft on immigration", especially after the guest worker program he proposed where the govt would match employers up with alien workers "when no Americans could be found"
- He nominated his friend Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court, and this of all things really seems to upset some people
- He seems unaware of the trade deficit, especially with China. Type "why is everything" into Google Suggest (For that matter, try typing "bush is" or "tom delay". Google Suggest is a lot of fun.)

Not that lefty blogs might not share concerns about the trade deficit, but the righty people I've seen switch away from Bush are far more likely to cite immigration or Harriet Myers than we are.

Posted at December 26, 2006 12:24 PM in response to Event of the (Two) Year (Cycle)?

I wrote this letter to Josh about the Plan D fiasco a week ago and like to think that I gave him the idea for this blog. But my wife doesn't buy it.

I wonder what will happen as more and more people start to slide off the cliff during the year as their phony "accrued benefits" exceed the "doughnut hole limit" of $2250. Of course, the insurance company doesn't really pay ten times market price for drugs, they pay something closer to $225. But it counts against you as $2250. And after you reach that $2250 of "benefits", you don't get any more coverage until you finish paying $2850 of non-funny money for what is really $285 worth of drugs. Who would do that? Nobody. Not being stupid, you'll get your prescriptions filled in Mexico instead. But you'll continue to pay the premium for your "coverage". I'm sure people will love that.

WHY are barbiturates and benzodiazepines excluded from coverage? What was the original legislative intent behind their exclusion? Is it just that they present a cheap alternative to expensive new treatments? Or did someone have it out for heavily tranquilized housewives?

WHY are patients locked into a single plan for an entire year, while insurance companies can withdraw coverage for medications with only a month's notice? The drug bill does stipulate that each plan has to cover at least one drug in each category- it seems to have been written with the assumption that all drugs within a category are completely interchangeable except for price. However, drugs within a category usually target different receptors and can't just be swapped for one another with no ill effects. This is why they don't let MBAs write prescriptions.

WHY was the implementation deadline set so early, on Jan. 2006? Did they want the benefit to be in place and working by the November elections? Just remember when you vote this November, that this was all brought to you by Republicans.

As an epileptic who is completely dependent on continued access to prescription drugs, this whole thing has me as mad as a hornet! I can't believe they are doing this to people.

This has become a government that preys on its citizens. 

Posted at January 24, 2006 11:18 PM in response to The A,B,D's of Medicare