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Marcus Bachmann eats a corn dog
So I don’t normally do one picture posts, but this is the very heterosexual Marcus Bachmann in Iowa circa August 2011 eating a local delicacy:
This is best thing I’ve seen since the Gay Barbarians telling him they need to be “disciplined” and Bachmann’s dance in this youtube video at 1:45.
Oh, here’s Michelle too:
GOP Republican 2011 Iowa Primary Debate Highlights
Image via flickr's DonkeyHotey. Pretend 'June' is 'August'
TPM compiles a video of some highlights of the August 11, 2011 Republican debate. It was more interesting than the first GOP primary debate for sure.
The Daily Beast declares Rick Perry as the winner. They also compiled their 7 favorite moments from the debate.
T-Paw blew it big time in this debate, says Salon’s Steve Kornacki, and didn’t do much except try to tear Bachmann a new one. And they all generally defensive about fiscal policy questioning, according to the NY Times.
BarackObama.com has put together “a helpful guide to a few of the more fascinating positions they’ve taken.” The charts pays close attention to what the candidates said–and what they didnt say. Will they backtrack? Will they double down? Will they hope we forget?
Herman Cain signed off closed off his portion of the debate (where he tried and failed to temper his earlier remarks about Muslims) with: “A poet once said, ‘Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.” Daily Intel identifies the quote as disco singer Donna Summer, from her song The Power of One. She recorded it just over a decade ago as the theme song for Pokémon: The Movie 2000.
Colbert Wants You To Write In Rick Parry. With An A. (via Introspection)
“Knock knock?” “Who’s there?” “Unlimited union and corporate campaign contributions.” “Unlimited union and corporate campaign contributions who?” “That’s the thing, I don’t think I should have to tell you.”
Link below for Colbert’s first SuperPAC video.
(I like WordPress’s recent adoption of the Tumblr reblog function.)
via Introspection
Round-up of columnist opinions on the S&P downgrade
There are 75,500 Google image results for "sad stockbroker."
Round up time:
Paul Krugman, of course, is highly critical of the move. He dedicated a post in his blog to a quote from Atrios:
Apparently we’re supposed to care about what some idiots at some corrupt organization think about anything.
Statistics whiz Nate Silver provides us with a comprehensive post with solid statistical evidence that S&P’s previous ratings are pretty worthless and says their “advice has more often than not led investors toward the losing side of bets.”
My favorite libertarian blogger, Andrew Sullivan, thinks the that downgrade makes sense.
A libertarian I like much less, Professor Richard A. Epstein, claims to have “4 Reasons S&P Got it Right,” but mostly rants about spending.
An anonymous author for the WSJ says, “The Obama Administration’s attempt to discredit S&P only makes the U.S. look worse” and it was the “Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade.”
Economics of Contempts says, “To say that S&P analysts aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer is a massive understatement.”
Karl Smith of Modeled Behavior comments, “I think the value of S&P’s action is that it has given both sides ammo where they need it, which seems like it should strengthen our ability to make a deal. Ironically, perhaps the act of issuing this report will help make the conclusions of the report less true. I hope so anyway.”
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I hope so too.
I can understand S&P wanting to reclaim their integrity after their terrible track record, but is manufacturing a fear-induced international market crisis really worth that right now? I’m leaning towards no, so I’m still not fully understanding S&P’s motivation here. Especially when they own and maintain the S&P 500 index, which unsurprisingly dropped after their parent agency’s own downgrade.
When government shut down over the debt ceiling, 1995 and now
^Debt Ceiling infographic via Third Way
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In the fall of 1995, Congressional Republicans refused to raise the total amount of debt accumulated by the federal government of the United States. It was not raised until the following March. This gap created a 6-month period, when the Secretary of the Treasury announced a debt issuance suspension, which is known as the 95′-96′ debt ceiling crisis. During this period, the US Treasury, under President Clinton, took several extreme measures to raise funds without exceeding the debt ceiling or defaulting, including a temporary use of retirement funds for former government employees.
What makes the debt crisis situation different today?
Unfortunately, the measures taken by the Treasury then, would not be as effective in the current economic climate, analysts at Deutsche Bank found.
In 1995, the economy was in the middle of a strong expansion with the unemployment rate around 5.6%. (Today it’s around 9%.) It was fiscally strong; there was no recovery period necessary from a Great Recession. The deficit was 1995 was 2.2% of GDP. Current deficit is around 9% of GDP and rising each year.
The Deutsche Banking analysts were very clear in their report:
Today, the financing needs of the government are so much higher, that diversion of these funds would not last more than a couple of months, and probably far less.
In terms of the timing of the debt crises relative in terms of election: 1996 is an election year. 2012 is also an election year.
In March 1996, the House controlled under Speaker Newt Gingrich caved in the midst of overwhelming negative public opinion. President Clinton went on to beat Republican contender Bob Dole for reelection by a 9% margin.
Obama certainly has more to lose right now in terms of potential economic disaster. But, at 71% disapproval of the GOP, public opinion polls right now are pretty clear. Americans realize who is at fault here for the impasse.
Fact Checking “ObamaCare Yay Or Nay? The Truth About Canada!”
This is response to the following youtube video with over a half million hits:
The video was hosted by the annoying, stand-up comedian and FoxNews commentator, Steven Crowder, for Tea Party movement pimp PJTV.
In addition to being not funny and having obnoxious amounts of dude-man-bro-awesome Dane Cook frat boy, there’s a lot of the “truth” in the video about health care in Canada that’s just anecdotal stylization about waiting.
00:06 “Socialized Health Care! Isn’t it about time we get on board?” First words of the video, followed by clips of people talking about universal health care. I’m going to make probably the most relevant point of the entire America-Canada health care system debate: Canada does not have a socialized health care system. They have a public INSURANCE system, and private insurance and health care providers also exist.
“Socialized Medicine” has sketchy semantic connotations, but generally refers to a health care program run by the government. In the United Kingdom’s publicly- funded National Health Service, most general practitioners are independent contractors, which means that they are self-employed but also have a contract with the government to provide specific services on certain terms. Even the more left-wing proposed legislation (not ObamaCare) in the US, which seeks to establish universal government-backed insurance, does not reach the government involvement of UK’s NHS levels.
Conservatives have recently been attempting to label any publicly-funded (tax payer-funded) system, including insurance, as “socialized medicine.” But with that definition, the United States already has socialized medicine; it’s called Medicare. Medicare is available to the disabled or retired, and it has higher satisfaction and performance rates as opposed to private insurance.
2:15 Steven and his homeboys go to the Clinique Médicale Urgence St-Hubert on a weekend but it’s closed. From all the French, we can establish they are in Quebec, Canada. Funding for the health insurance is provided by the province, not directly from the federal government, so viewers should note Canadian quality may vary by province.
2:57 “Take a number. The nurse will call with the number.” “Triage… which means we wait and get judged by a nurse.” (3:15) They told the staff at the the hospital that they were not urgent. In my experience, in private hospitals in the US, prioritizing by urgency works the same way.
4:24 Steve is denied a plastic glove to play with. Tragic. No rooster blow up doll for you.
5:05 They get tired of waiting at the hospital and leave. With no accompanying footage, Steve tells anecdotal stories about other people in the waiting room.
7:25 They go back to the clinic the next day and the clinician tells them that they don’t offer cholesterol blood tests. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. There’s no point in getting your cholesterol checked by a walk-in clinic, because you should go to primary doctor for a chronic condition.
8:01 The clinician says that it’s $900 for a private clinic check up. What?! That’s about $937 US dollars. That figure doesn’t make sense. The woman’s English was clearly not fluent. There are private clinics that offer MRIs for only $695.
15:22 “The average wait time to see a specialist in Canada is 17.3 weeks.” He didn’t cite a source for that figure, or how it was calculated, if it included outliers. Here’s a study that says 51% of Quebec patients waiting to see a specialist do so within a month.
16:05 “It’s proven to be terribly inefficient.” Using what standard? Certainly not cost. The per capita health care spending of Canada is nearly half that of the United States.
17:05 “Socialism creates a safety net…” Followed up by footage from a Subway. Canadian sandwich shops are Socialist because they cost more? I think I missed the sandwich-standard definition of Socialism in school.
19:58 “Do you still think Obama is moving us in the right direction here?” Thanks, Steve, for actually talking about ObamaCare anywhere in the video.
Most parts of the video I didn’t address were just a series of medical horror stories from random interviewed Canadians. You can find stories like that anywhere about any health care system.
Recap: Canada is not Socialist. Health care in Canada sucks, but health care in America still sucks more. Everyone wants free, efficient doctors. No one still knows anything about ObamaCare. And Steven Crowder is about as funny as Dane Cook and Michelle Bachman’s lovechild.
How Chris Christie Can Win Back Female Voters
Polling lower than ever, Chris Christie is failing the lady electorate. What issues do women voters care about and what can the NJ Gov. do to change?
Read my article here: http://www.suite101.com/content/how-chris-christie-can-win-back-women-voters-a377638
Also, if you love me enough when you get there, disable your popup blocker and click on all the ads on the page (no malware I swear!). My freelance ass needs ad revenue.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
