2010 archive

Rewrite, Republican style (emphasis added):

In the end, though, the brain trust – such as it is – of the Republican party wouldn’t be attempting to re-write recent history if their focus groups and polls didn’t show that truthiness pays political dividends. Shortly after Perino’s comments, polls showed voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on issues of national security and that 63% of voters think that “political correctness” – a refusal to disobey laws prohibiting racial profiling – was the root cause of the failure to prevent one soldier’s attack on his colleagues at Fort Hood.

Republicans have apparently decided that they can improve their standings with Americans if they can convince them, despite all evidence to the contrary, that terrorist attacks only happen when Democrats are in power. Republicans seem perfectly and increasingly happy to slough off all responsibility for the things that happened and that they caused during their watch, as long as it brings them back to power. The question for Americans ought to be what they’ll do with that power when they get it back. Last year, they weren’t so keen on keeping Republicans in power. This year, many of them seemingly know nothing about that.

There has been some light-hearted discussion about what to call the first decade of the 2000’s, since someone apparently decreed that each decade must be called something cutesy-poo.

Their have been a number of votes for the “aughts.”

The Guardian went for “the naughties,” as did, I’m sure, others.

But I think TerranceDC has nailed it with “the Uh-Ohs.”

The police always concentrate on the modus operandi. Frank Rich in the Toimes:

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

Mysteries are always easier when you read them back-to-front.

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Steve Bell:

It has nothing to do with security, but it makes persons feel good as they leave the airport.

Afterthought:

For those who miss the point, the dirty little secret of security is that, for all the metal detectors in the world, there is no such thing as “perfectly safe.”

Those who demand it are deluded; those who promise it, charlatans; those who believe the promises, fools.

As long as health care is a profit center, as long as care for the sick is considered “losses,” executives’ country club memberships will be more important than patients’ well-being:

About 27,000 people who buy Personal Choice health insurance directly from Independence Blue Cross rather than through an employer are facing steep increases in their premiums in March to maintain similar coverage – for some, greater than 60 percent – or are finding comparable coverage unavailable.

Despite angry complaints from policyholders, Blue Cross says the changes are necessary because of continuing losses in the Personal Choice plans. And the state Insurance Department says there is little it can do, even after it resisted a proposal last spring to raise rates for the plans by amounts ranging from 10 percent to 58 percent.

One reason: Blue Cross sidestepped the issue by withdrawing its proposed increases. Instead, it told state officials it planned to discontinue the trio of Personal Choice plans in question, which it has offered for the last two decades, and give current policyholders two new choices instead – choices many find unattractive.

Nice end run by BCBS. They took their football, went home, and came back with two new, pricier footballs.