I think the idea is pure fantasy. The idea that some future congress will enact the public option when health care is no longer in the spotlight is pretty daft. They’ll just kick the can down the road every year, like they’ve done for hears with the Alternative Minimum Tax and Medicare reimbursement rates.

Besides, isn’t an article like this enough to convince anyone that it’s well past time to pull said trigger?

In August, when Walter Rowen, who owns Susquehanna Glass in Columbia, Pa., sought to renew his company’s coverage for two dozen employees, he said his insurer demanded a 160 percent rate increase. Mr. Rowen said he was told his work force was “getting too old and very expensive.”

Mr. Rowen said his insurance broker found that any other health plan was likely to charge 30 to 50 percent more than he paid last year. He chose a less generous plan from a different carrier for 44 percent more.

160 percent!! But apparently Obama/Snowe think the best idea is to wait until 2013 (when health care reform kicks in) and then wait a few more years to see if it hasn’t held down costs, and then maybe, just maybe, see if we need the public option

Just nuts.

Ahh… democracy.

The long and short of it is that the union tried to make Saturn more like the rest of GM, while management cut off R&D funding.

Philadelphia, that scrappy red-headed stepchild of a town between navel-gazing New York and bureaucratically dull D.C., was beaten down again. But this is nothing new. The nation’s disdain of Philadelphia, and the evolution of “Philly” into a near-epithet adjective along the lines of “ghetto” or “rough,” is a wrong that deserves to be remedied (probably like the word “gay”).

Who is to blame here? Let’s start with the makers of the 1993 film Philadelphia. Their clumsy sort of parallel symbol — the juxtaposition of a struggling post-1970s milieu of urban decay with a man slowly dying of AIDS — demeans the city. Director Jonathan Demme and stars Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington all have a lot of blood on their hands. The main problem, one of several, is that the real-life subject of the film had no connection with Philly — so for Oscar-whoring Hollywood types, Philadelphia’s pre-Rendell city setting served as an appropriate milieu for Tom Hanks to suffer from a terminal illness and eventually die. Low-hanging fruit. Total assholes.

Speaking of artists mining real-life trauma for their namby-pamby “storytelling,” Bruce Springsteen is another slum-porn asshole. His “Streets of Philadelphia” takes the film’s lame symbolic co-optation of Philadelphia even further, using “wasting away on the streets of Philadelphia” as a facile image standing in for “the end of the line.” Go ahead — say it, jackass: Philadelphia is where all the total down-and-out hobos go to die.

Bruce is disgusting, and doesn’t deserve Philadelphia. Should Bruce actually play that horrible song next week at the Spectrum, I hope Philadelphia partisans fight back with a giant vat of Cheez Whiz. My fear, however, is that the well-intentioned locals may believe that Bruce is actually praising their city — which would be unsurprising, seeing how good Bruce is at misleading people — he may be the most imprecise songwriter around, a smoke-and-mirrors charlatan.

If Bruce does play “Philadelphia,” it may set back Philadelphia’s redemption from the Springsteen-Demme Cabal and everyone else who “Phillied” Philly. This redemption, by the way, in my view, came when Brad Lidge struck out Tampa Bay’s Eric Hinske last October and Lidge fell to his knees in religious exultation not to Jesus but rather generation upon generation of beleaguered Philly fans. Don’t let Bruce undo that. Get the vat of Whiz ready.

As for me, I vow from here on out not to “Philly” Philly . . . until I hear about another case of vigilante justice, that is . . .

So it saddens me to have learned what a corrupt money-grab the modern Olympics have become. As one of my favorite sports bloggers notes, the IOC may be even more corrupt than notoriously corrupt FIFA:

The IOC’s politics are way more unpredictable and opaque than FIFA’s. The IOC has all kinds of influences and stakeholders that might not be as obvious to observers as those within FIFA. Here are some examples.

FIFA’s Confederations make for more bloc voting, which both corrupts and simplifies the process. Meaning when Jack Warner or Issa Hayatou promises their confederations’ support, they not only mean it, but can get it done too. Have no doubts that CONCACAF will vote as a block (even Mexico) in favor of the US hosting a World Cup. The IOC and any alliances/blocs within it, tend to be harder to read. It’s well known for example that FIFA chief Sepp Blatter’s powerbase consists of CONCACAF, Asia and the Persian Gulf states especially. If Blatter says he favors “X,” it’s safer to assume that thus CONCACAF, AFC, and the Gulf States will go with him. Also, look and see where FIFA Goal Program funding is going. You can almost guarantee these countries will side with Blatter. This sounds paradoxical, but FIFA is so obviously corrupt it almost makes it more transparent.

Within the IOC, it’s less clear and involves more figures “outside” the formal process.

I think Anne Marie Cox (aka the original “Wonkette”), says it best when she notes that Chicago dodged a bullet:

Critics can try to pinpoint the reason that Barack Obama’s charm offensive failed him in Copenhagen. But as a former Chicago resident and patriotic American, I’m glad the city lost the bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2016. The Olympics, while rooted in grand traditions of fair play and noble amateurism, have become a corrupted and corrupting institution. The bid to be host city is an opportunity for untrammeled graft and favor-trading; the bid for the medals themselves is increasingly a contest of bank accounts, not bodies.

It’s a sad truth. And as a true fan of sports — and of what the Olympic idea might represent — it’s one of the reasons that I frankly don’t care if the Games are in Chicago, or Rio, or Timbuktu. For my part, I’d rather watch Michael Phelps smoke a bowl than go for the gold. At least that’s honest, and not overburdened and corrupted by the greed of big corporations and small men.

And yet while Cheney has come up basically empty-handed, proof-wise, the FBI seems to be racking up the arrests using good, old-fashioned legal methods.

* Trucks, including that paragon of fuel efficiency, the Chevy Silverado (14 mpg city) were 3 of the top 10 selling vehicles.  The Ford F150 (14 or 15 mpg city, depending on the model), was 11th on the list.

* Foreign automakers — the Japanese and Koreans in particular — made a killing on the program, with 5 of the top 10 models and over 60% of the total sales.  This included the single best-selling car, the Toyota Corolla.

* Chrysler, much-publicized recipient of a US-government bailout, managed just 6.6% of total sales under the program, behind Hyundai and well behind the leading sellers.

Despite the Administration’s claims that average fuel economy was improved by 9 mpg for those who participated in the program, it’s time to just abandon the lie.  Cash for Clunkers was a subsidy to US consumers, nothing more, nothing less.  To its credit, the Government, as a major stakeholder in both GM and Chrysler, might’ve slapped a “made in America” provision on the program.  Thankfully, they at least resisted that urge.

S/he’s right. It is useless without context. Fortunately, the BLS can provide! Below is a sampling of the unemployment rate in August of each year, going back to 1999. I picked August because that was the last month available for 2009, and I wanted recent numbers.

Clearly the recession’s hit all chunks of the population, but I think this shows that it’s hit the least-educated very hard. It might have been harder on the college-educated than previous recessions, but in terms of percentage unemployment, those with no high school degree got hit bad. Which makes sense, given the loss of manufacturing and construction jobs.

PS: Keep in mind that when we see an unemployment number in the headlines, what we’re seeing is the “U3″ unemployment measure, which only counts people who are still actively looking for work. That number just hit 9.7%. If you count the underemployed and those who have given up looking (known as “U6), the number is 16.8%.