Via Dennis Perrin, who remains justifiably skeptical that there’s Hope for Change, a perfectly simple solution:

…the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

Ding! We have a winner!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the hell kind of socialist I am: I’m the kind that thinks health care falls ought to fall into the same category of public service as your local fire department, that’s all. I’d also like to be over and done with the way we do health insurance today, and I can’t understand why anyone is defending such a disgusting, avaricious industry. (You think we don’t already have death panels?)

Via MinusCar, a group of Iowans have started an online petition, seeking to put a measure on the ballot to make bicycling on farm-to-market roads illegal. Because, you know, when you’re driving along on a back country road in your minivan, just trying to send a text message to your husband or pastor, and you accidentally kill a cyclist, it really makes you feel bad. And not just for a little while! Sometimes you feel really, really bad about killing someone with your car for a long time! Plus, just like hitting a deer, it can cost a lot of money to fix the car.

A commenter notes that there is now a counter-petition to have motor vehicles removed from Iowa’s rural roads:

Over the past ten years the number of motorists using these farm-to-market roads has increased dramatically, as have the number of preventable accidents and fatalities.

Traditional rural methods of commerce are significantly impacted when forced to share the farm-to-market roadways with motorists. Because of the growth of today’s commerce and agricultural business, shared roadways are no longer safe or practical in today’s society.

Operators of automobiles routinely disobey speed limits, spook horses and raise clouds of dust. They zip about, and act as though they own the public road itself!

So please if you are a resident of the world join us and help make our roadways safe for both people and livestock. Thanks for your time and your support.

My favorite comment so far:

These 4 wheeled horseless carriges have gone too far, besides creating useless wars for rubber, oil, steel they create a place for youths to experiment with sex and liquor! Time to ban them from all our roads!

Sex and liquor? Really? Hm. Maybe I should drive a car more often.

I know that saying this may result in some gnashed teeth and rent garments, but I’m going to state, unequivocally, that I think this is going too far. I’m reasonably certain that Iowa’s rural roads can accomodate bicycles, tractors, buckboards, and motor vehicles, and that people can share the road safely and responsibly.

Maybe the folks on opposite sides of this debate need to get together, and experiment with sex and liquor (maybe even in a car, so long as they’re not driving on a rural road at the time). I mean, it couldn’t hurt?

In 2002, it’s estimated that cellphone use while driving may have caused a thousand deaths, and maybe as many as 240,000 accidents. Nearly a quarter million accidents. But you never heard about it, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided to withhold data and research about the dangers of cellphone use while driving, because they thought it might anger Congress. God damn it.

In the 7 years since 2002, when that data could have led to stronger legislation protecting us from cellphoning drivers, my anecdotal observations suggest that that the number of folks talking and texting behind the wheel has gone nothing but up. If all those people replaced their phones with fucking martinis, I don’t think they’d be as dangerous. In fact, if we’re not going to risk inconveniencing voters who enjoy talking and texting while driving, or upsetting the cellphone industry, then we ought to take the boot off the neck of the alcohol industry and let people buzz on up before (and during!) the long drive to the mall. I mean, if it’s going to be a Deathrace, then I’m gonna need a drink.

And I’ll say this to you multi-tasking motorists I share our nation’s Capital with: I’m not crazy about your reckless, thoughtless habit of talking on the phone while you should be piloting your car, but if it’s a choice between that and having you attempt to type out a message on a numeric keypad while you blast through my neighborhood at 40 mph, please just call whoever it is you absolutely have to talk to right this very minute.

The president issued an order yesterday to stop the military tribunals at Guantanimo. This stood out for me.

Following Monday’s hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

“Today we were in the presence of true evil,” said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. “Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going.”

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

“My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11,” he said. “When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, ‘Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.’”

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, “No, right here, at Guantánamo,” then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

Report after report concludes that most of the people we held at Guantanamo were never affiliated with Al Qaida, weren’t picked up on any battlefield, and were being held for little or no reason, which means we were destroying lives and families across the globe in response to 9/11. I mean, put aside from the odd Taliban foot soldier who was conscripted, never understood what was happening to him, but finds himself imprisoned a world away from his family with no hope of escaping the Kafkaesque nightmare we’ve created. Perhaps you can’t stir up sympathy for anyone that picked up a gun for the Taliban. Fine. What about the fucking Uyghurs, that everyone, everyone, understood weren’t even peripherally involved? What about the fact that 18 Uyghurs were held in isolation for years and years in Cuba? Why isn’t Donald Arias concerned about that, and how can he be certain that he’s in the presence of “true evil” knowing any of that?

Some of the detainees were undoubtedly involved in planning or executing attacks against the U.S., but since we stepped over every bright line of human rights during their interrogations, bringing them to a fair, legitimate trial will be impossible. Maintaining the moral integrity and legitimacy of our judicial process is a prerequisite to bringing the perpetrators of 9/11, as well as terrorists we may apprehend in the future, to justice. But Joe Holland apparently doesn’t think this is important, or at least, doesn’t think it’s important in cases involving people even remotely suspected of involvement in the attack that killed his son.

And that, folks, is why victims of violent crime should never, ever be able to weigh in on how justice is best served. You can’t blame these people for being in pain, or for the depth and breadth of their grief. If I lost any member of my family to violence, I imagine I would be similarly consumed by heartbreak, rage, and vengeance. I am, after all, human.

By the same token, you can’t expect these folks to think rationally about what’s fair and just. I’m not saying that these families, or victims of violence generally, can’t overcome fear and anger to see clearly, but it shouldn’t be surprising if they can’t, and we certainly shouldn’t be asking their advice on how to proceed. It’s a circus sideshow, and the military folks that brought them down to Cuba to stir them up in front of the press ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves.

The makings of another shit sandwich, left by George W. Bush, for all of us to figure out how to eat. Thanks for that, George, and bon apetit America.

I realize that I’m a wide-eyed idealist, naive to the realities of doing business in this day and age, but I still can’t wrap my head around a paragraph like this:

Proposition 2 would require that starting in 2015, calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be provided space to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely. Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty; opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers by raising domestic prices and exposing consumers to cheaper, ostensibly more dangerous eggs from other countries.

Now, we’re not talking about giving every calf, chicken, and pig be given an acre of grassy meadow to run free, and a string quartet to score the scene. We’re not even talking about letting them see the sun. Nor are we talking about making this happen tomorrow, or a year from now. And this is light years away from mandating that industrial meat operations handle their wastes the way we require cities to do it.

We’re just talking about making their cages, the place they will likely spend their whole lives, big enough for them to be able to extend their limbs and turn around. That’s all. I mean, Christ, if you were going to establish a base-level, lowest common denominator standard for not being completely inhumane, that might be a good place to start.

But there’s so much in this paragraph that’s wrong.

Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty… No, I don’t think it will. It goes a short way towards mitigating intense, widespread suffering, but that’s a ways off from actually preventing cruelty.

…opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers… When you’re managing a massive, highly efficient industrial factory system of growing meat, you’re no longer a “farmer” in any traditional sense of the word, so please discontinue attempts to play on my sympathies by putting a wheat chewing actor in overalls in front of me. Also, peddle that “concern for the consumer” bullshit to someone who’s buying it, this is all about your profit margins.

It’s just stunning to me that this is even a close contest.

Years ago, I used to play poker with friends every so often. This was well before the current Texas Hold’em craze, so we’d play Draw, Stud, Black Mariah, Low-Hole Chicago, Screw Your Neighbor, what have you. Everyone would buy in for $20, chips would ebb from one side of the table, flow the other way, mass in one pile then split into several, as chips are wont to do.

After an hour or two, we’d end up playing either Guts or Ace-Two-Three for the rest of the night. Both games involved playing for the pot, such that one winner takes the pot, one or more losers match it, and it could grow pretty fast. Inevitably, someone would go in (often with a great hand but not always) and lose a pot that would bust ‘em. If they didn’t have the cash to cover, the table had no choice but to let them write an IOU, otherwise the people that had lost real money wouldn’t have a chance to win it back. So, if the busted player didn’t win their IOU back, someone else would own their paper.

Now here’s the thing about IOU’s on our table. If you had to write one out, well, that was that, you were in the hole and we were okay with that. If you held someone’s IOU, you could sell it to someone else at the table for chips, and the bidding depended on whether or not people thought you were good for it. There were some fairly hilarious scenes where someone watched indignantly as their IOU’s were bought and sold for fifty cents or a quarter on the dollar. In some cases, someone might throw down with “I’ve got twenty Woody-bucks for whoever gets me a beer from the fridge.” Woody’s credit rating was less than stellar.

But under no circumstance was it okay to put someone else’s IOU into a pot in lieu of money. The pot would take your IOU if you were busted, but not until your last chip, dollar, and penny was gone, because everyone else was putting real money on the table. The rare attempts to pull such a stunt resulted in shouting and ridicule, with the offender sheepishly replacing the note with chips or cash.

So here we are, with several “too big too fail” companies, bloated with mountains of IOU’s, trying to force we-the-people to buy them with real money that we get from our I-get-up-every-goddam-day-and-go-to-work-for-a-living wages, at what they say is a fair price. For my family of four, they want us to put up somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand dollars to buy these IOU’s at full face value. And we’re going to have to do this because they took these fucking IOU’s from anyone and everyone, over and over again, and were calling them “chips” the whole fucking time.

These Diamond Jim motherfuckers, these blow-thirty-grand-on-coke-and-strippers Wall Street scum, want my real wages in exchange for their shitty IOU’s. The wages I earn by going to work five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of every fifty-two. The wages from which taxes are taken to keep our roads in repair, to fund my children’s education, to give some relief to folks in a jam and a boost to folks who need a hand getting on their feet. The wages that they all said couldn’t support the tax revenue that might give us single-payer health care, subsidize college tuitions, or build up a respectable transit infrastructure.

Well fuck that. Any bill that comes out of Congress seeking to rescue these dishonest, avaricious sociopathic sons of fucking bitches without getting an equity stake, and without giving me my pound of flesh, is unacceptable. Otherwise, I say we let the whole fucking thing collapse.

I like Bernie Sanders take on it. Too big to fail? Too big to exist.

Y’ever get the feeling that all the hubbub about energy independence, even if earnest, is missing the mark?

James Kunstler’s got that feeling:

The reason our energy debate is so hollow and idiotic is because we can’t face this basic reality. The fantasy-du-jour among both political parties is that we can become “energy independent.” By this they mean we can keep on living the way we do by means other than oil. This is just not true. We have to make profound changes in everything we do from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we produce our food. Lately, the only change we’ve shown any interest in is changing what our cars run on. But that is not going to rescue us, not even a little. Our inability to talk about anything else except the cars will drag us down into poverty and turmoil.

I turn to the estimable Lawrence for my response:

Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I guess… I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling like she’s cheating on me.

Lawrence: Yeah, I get that feeling too, man.

A year ago, I was a committed Democrat. Today, though there’s still no question about whether and for whom I’ll vote, I don’t think there’s a partisan argument from either side that I find very persuasive. I thought I was going to be more jubilant at this point, with a truly inspiring, once-a-generation Democratic nominee facing off with the most entertaining implosion of a campaign the GOP’s run in my lifetime. There was supposed to be pitchers of Schadenfreude, filled at a giant, bubbling, multi-tier Schadenfreude fountain and served into chilled Schadendreude steins by a busty blonde St. Schadenfreude waitress. But I’m just not feeling it.

So I thought I’d share some of the thoughts that are getting my attention these days, but I’ll put them beyond the jump for those that would rather not do that to their beautiful minds. Respect.

(more…)