Flagrancy to Reason

our primary objective in Afghanistan is to capture toughness

buermann — 2009-10-13T09:55:40-06:00

The one clear foreign policy goal Robert Kaplan evinces here would be better served by the POTUS doing some bench presses and showing off his massive pectorals in a glossy spread for Men's Health.

Really.

Obviously US outreach efforts to the Muslim-A...

buermann — 2009-10-13T07:48:16-06:00

Obviously US outreach efforts to the Muslim-Arab audience in the middle east should be spearheaded by Israeli lobbyists from AIPAC, nobody dare question the wisdom of that, but a San Fran librul? That's insane.

how much does a solid super majority in the congress cost?

buermann — 2009-09-28T17:33:11-06:00

start at about $174,545 per participating member of congress.

what is the american enterprise institute planning to do about federal intervention between you and your dog?

buermann — 2009-09-09T00:22:24-06:00

The more I think about it the more weird it is that author Alston Chase is an "adjunct scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute. Back in the day he was writing interesting tracts on ecology, and spent the 90s writing climatologists-can't-predict-the-weather stuff before shutting his trap after '97, when he became pre-occupied with snooping through the CIA's old MKULTRA blowback. But why would the current author of an apparently lovely book about the dogs we love be in the employ of the AEI? Is it the government's fault we love our dogs to a fault? I don't know if I want to know.

please give me back my profits, but don't subject me to risk, kthxbye

buermann — 2009-09-02T10:04:08-06:00

The Mortgage Bankers Association says that their proposal for explicit government backing for a secondary mortgage market would be a "limited role" to "ensure a stable flow of funds for mortgages".

Because it worked so well last time.

math is hard

buermann — 2009-09-01T23:11:19-06:00

"Any moron can figure out how to make money by borrowing from the Fed at almost no cost and then buying government bonds or government insured bonds that pay 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent."

"our strategy in Afghanistan"

buermann — 2009-09-01T21:57:41-06:00

Election fraud is OK if you're not too self-righteous about it? Tell it to Andrew Sullivan.

his predecessors had a track record of 189 years

buermann — 2009-08-31T14:36:29-06:00

You'll just have to overlook the fact that his rounding of 7.25 years to a full 8 erases the memory of 9/11, or something:

DICK CHENEY: I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, 'How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?'

I think I'm beginning to understand what Obama meant by "restoring our leadership in the hemisphere"

buermann — 2009-08-26T09:11:08-06:00

Conn Hallinan observes, among other things:

Fernando Joya, a former member of Battalion 316, a paramilitary death squad. Joya fled the country after being charged with kidnapping and torturing several students in the 1980s, but he has now resurfaced as a "special security advisor" to the [Honduran] coup makers. He recently gave a TV interview that favorably compared the 1973 Chilean coup to the June 28 Honduran coup.

The O'Ministration of Hope, Change, and Ponies has kept up a flat faced anomy towards the military coup in Honduras for over two months now. More so, they're technically still funding it, at this point, under the sickening pretext that they're unclear as to whether the military coup is in fact a military coup. The leaders of notorious US-backed death squads from the 1980s have been put back in charge of internal security, the human rights abuses are so outrageous that even the sloths at Human Rights Watch have finally gotten off their precious asses and condemned them, and it's perfectly clear that this administration is supporting the coup materially while serving up plate after plate of steaming rhetorical waffles.

First they couldn't legally classify the coup as a military coup because math is hard, from there it painfully progressed to a deeper level of nonsense hair-splitting, "The military moved against the president; they removed him from his home and they expelled him from a country, so the military participated in a coup. However, the transfer of leadership was not a military action." With this psychobabble in play they continue to funnel money into the country through the back doors.

So after selling us out to the banks, shopping for the price at which to sell us out to big pharma and the insurance companies, escalating the war in Afghanistan, entrenching Bush's detainee policies, protecting the telecoms and the torturers and generally obstructing justice, and building up an impressive track record of Orthodoxy and Gloom, Black Jesus President is demonstrating "our unshakeable commitment to freedom" in Latin America by backing his first coup there.

Yee haw.

clowning around

buermann — 2009-08-24T15:41:55-06:00

You wouldn't think it was possible, but arguments over administrative cost comparisons between medicare and private insurers can be absurdly funny. For example, it's absurd when the Heritage Foundation adds $7.2 billion of the Justice Department budget onto Medicare's administrative costs, just for the apparent hell of it, nearly doubling the program's administrative costs. The funny part is that the Heritage Foundation has already won.

how much does it cost to sell out to PhRMA?

buermann — 2009-08-24T12:11:31-06:00

The O'ministration and the big drug companies may have actually worked out a way for the drug companies to support Obamacare, namely by forcing more customers onto private insurance rolls so they can buy drugs at the same old artificially inflated prices. Everybody denies it, apparently, but that doesn't matter if drug price negotiations aren't included in the final bill, as whether or not the largest health insurers (medicare,medicaid) in the country can negotiate drug prices is how we can assess whether we're being taken for a ride. Let's do some back of the back-of-the-google estimation:

Prescription drug costs make up "a modest part of total health care spending in the U.S (11%)", which is a modest 242 billion dollars a year. The old proposal Obama was supporting during the campaign was to introduce the classic free market approach of haggling: for example, the Veteran's Administration haggles with the drug companies to bring prices down, while by law Medicare is forced to shop at the patented price. Hence "the lowest price offered by any Medicare prescription drug plan was at least 48.2 percent higher than the lowest price available through the VA". The VA is able to haggle the price down by a bout a third, thanks to the wonders of market forces. Pretty impressive!

The VA is providing coverage for 7.9 million veterans, or 3% of the insured population. Discounting those in the VA that already enjoy the benefit of VA haggling, then, the amount by which everybody else would save on drug costs if they too bickered with their dealers would be roughly $158 billion a year, if I can do basic arithmetic anymore.

This is over 50% more just in savings on prescription drug costs than what it's supposed to cost per year to provide health coverage to 50 million uninsured Americans through a "private" health insurance racket that is even more bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic than the drug companies.

In exchange for $158 billion, the drug companies loudly promised to reduce costs by $80 billion. That's a pretty sweet deal, since they'll be gaining access to 50 million more potential customers.

I'm beginning to think that the only solution to conservative dementia over what constitutes "socialism" is to impose universal conscription. By turning everyone in the country into a veteran we could then provide universal Veterans Administration health insurance at a massive savings. Figuring we could bring our healthcare spending in line with other industrialized countries this way, we'd spend 50% what we do per-capita and save about 1.1 trillion dollars a year. Anybody who opposes this plan is fiscally irresponsible, doesn't support the troops, and hates America. Plus we wouldn't have to listen to harangues about how haggling isn't allowed in a free market.

The GOP's mission to keep government out of h...

buermann — 2009-08-23T11:44:16-06:00

The GOP's mission to keep government out of healthcare apparently means requiring that doctors thrust one of these up women's vaginas. "No exceptions were made for rape and incest victims", but the party of small government has seen fit that a woman still be allowed to "avert her eyes".

everything new is old

buermann — 2009-08-20T23:44:09-06:00

William Oliver, meet Hal Turner.

It's really strange to me that we still let the government utilize agent provocateurs to stir up the crazies, start police riots, and so forth.

dear liberals

buermann — 2009-08-19T11:29:46-06:00

you should be boycotting the insurance companies, not some fruitcake CEO who wrote a retarded column in the wall street journal. He's not the one buying Max Baucus, he just created the healthfood company that could make an insurance boycott remotely considerable for all you hippy weirdos.

KEEP YOUR GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY MEDICARE!!!

buermann — 2009-08-19T00:01:44-06:00

I remember, not 10 years ago, when conservatives praised health insurance co-ops and thought they were the big solution that would harness market forces to reduce costs and expand coverage. Now that solution is just "another name for government takeover of our health care". Insurance co-ops already exist - I believe Big Blue of Illinois is in some legal haberdashery of the word a "co-op" - in their litigious tax dodging ways, and the big ones still won't cover people with pre-existing yeast infections, and they have laws they have to follow, so I guess it is in some sense another name for government takeover of our healthcare. I mean, there's laws and stuff, it's socialism! Or do they mean I'm going to join some co-op that will shop for my insurance from... insurance co-ops? This would be easier to understand if somebody would sock Kent Conrad in that fucking baked potato he has for a chin.

Government has already taken over our health care, and shopped it out for private profit, or maybe private insurers have captured the government and squeezed us for all we're worth. What difference does it make? You are screwed. Please sit back and enjoy the theater.

Jim Henley's blog has always had a green back...

buermann — 2009-06-22T00:58:26-06:00

Jim Henley's blog has always had a green background. I guess that makes him the Andrew Sullivan before Andrew Sullivan was Andrew Sullivan.

This is the predictable outcome of not electi...

buermann — 2009-06-01T18:59:24-06:00

This is the predictable outcome of not electing another pro-life Republican president who will do nothing to lower the abortion rate.

"replication"

buermann — 2009-06-01T17:23:34-06:00

This sentence from the abstract of Jacksonville State University's president William Meehan's doctoral dissertation is very, very funny: "this study replicated ... a study of sabbatical leave patterns that had first been conducted at the University of Alabama in 1996".

via.

The film critic for the NRO suspects that if ...

buermann — 2009-05-19T13:04:59-06:00

The film critic for the NRO suspects that if Dan Brown wrote conspiracy fiction about Islam instead of the Catholic Church that "no publisher would touch him". I suspect the film critic for the NRO is correct: publishers - for instance the publisher of the NRO - have a clear preference for libels and slurs represented as factual criticism, rather than fantasy literature that is sold from the section of the book store clearly labeled "LIES".

speaking of the sacrosanct and inviolable law of fungible senior debt contracts

buermann — 2009-05-19T09:22:12-06:00

If you look at this economic stress index map at the county level you'll notice some dark brown rust spots (representing the greatest economic fallout since 2008) jutting out of the middle of relatively calm seas across the midwest and great plains. Buffalo county, South Dakota. Clearwater county, Minnesota. Doniphan county, Kansas. While Taney County, MO - home to Branson, the broadway of country music and all around tourist trap - is getting nailed pretty bad, for whatever reason the worst hit areas happen to be Indian reservations.

...

buermann — 2009-05-17T18:55:26-06:00

The trains are about 40% slower than they were 60 years ago. Miles of track have dropped from 260,000 in 1930 to under 100,000 today, a level not seen since 1881.

been there, done that

buermann — 2009-05-14T12:30:20-06:00

Pictures of tortured ragheads will undermine battlefield moral by stripping soldiers of their sense of unique accomplishment. The loss of that adventuresome atmosphere and wide-eyed expectation puts the entire mission in jeopardy.

it would be just awful if we were to further inflame anti-American opinion

buermann — 2009-05-14T12:11:20-06:00

Just think of these million refugees the O'ministration has suddenly added to Pakistan's internally displaced population as America's next fanclub.

"The Home Value Misperception Index" is a won...

buermann — 2009-05-14T10:47:25-06:00

"The Home Value Misperception Index" is a wonderful idea. We need more of these.

It's amazing how resilient people's expectations are in the face of ongoing, seemingly bottomless disaster.

the O'ministration of torture

buermann — 2009-05-12T14:10:45-06:00

I'm glad thwarting terrorist acts against us and our allies is still lower on the list of our priorities than the important task of covering up the previous administration's crimes. These mixed signals make me feel much safer.

wake me up when an argument actually occurs

buermann — 2009-05-11T07:35:24-06:00

It's pretty funny that a guy who struck it rich overbilling state and federal healthcare plans is running the GOP's campaign against nationalized healthcare. Who in this government supports a cost cutting, economically efficient single-payer system? Bernie Sanders is about it, no? The GOP has aligned an unstoppable coalition against the otherwise unstoppable juggernaut of Bernie Sanders' socialism, they've even got the rest of the Democratic Party signed on.

I don't remember anymore what Obama's plan was during the campaign. Now it's voluntary cost cutting measures I guess. I still remember when that was George W. Bush's solution for cutting industrial pollution.

glad we waited

buermann — 2009-05-09T18:05:39-06:00

This is really impressive, the initial "stress test" on Citigroup discovered a capital requirement 700% higher than the final price for continued indifference from regulators while we pretend they can grow their way out of their bad debt. The 50% average reduction across the board isn't even evenly applied, without even considering the basis predictions of sunny weather the results contain zero information.

update: oh boy

US banks have been given government assurances they will be allowed to raise less than the $74.6bn in equity mandated by stress tests if earnings over the next six months outstrip regulators' forecasts, bankers said.

clearly i missed some other financial crises

buermann — 2009-05-09T03:02:33-06:00

It's all just 1982 or 1991 again, no need to worry, no option arms a'gonna slap you innadaface.

you've changed

buermann — 2009-05-07T17:44:57-06:00

What the fuck is wrong with conservatives in this country? They mock good mustard but they don't think there's anything at all wrong with cooking precious, precious cow medium well?

It's a sin against even the lowliest ground chuck to go past medium. When I was a boy conservatives could recognize beef abuse. They're not the right wingers I grew up with anymore.

and let's not forget to apportion some of the blame on the advocacy of one of the nation's most highly respected jurists

buermann — 2009-05-07T11:15:19-06:00

Isn't it a little weird for a guy who until a year ago was unable to qualify the success of the deregulatory movement to turn around and put the unqualified blame for a deregulatory disaster on the regulators?

POSNER: let's place the blame where it belongs. Not on the bankers, who are not responsible for assuring economic stability, but on the government officials who had that responsibility and failed to discharge it. ...
And let's not forget to apportion some of the blame to the influential economists who assured us that there could never be another depression.

"Influential economists", among whom we must include "the bankers" on whom none of the blame belongs who were spending gazillions on weakening the regulators on whom the blame belongs because they were weak... OK, I guess the key to understanding the apportionment of blame for economic crises is that while it is dynamic and productive, it is not inherently stable.