Ice Cream Conservatives

Another from Firedoglake. After quoting a conservative unhappy with Ben and Jerry's Hubby Hubby Ice Cream, Thers helpfully lists a number of possible "conservative" ice cream flavors...

Chunky Not Really Descended from Monkey
Death By Chocolate Waterboard
Health Care Crunch Denied Because of Preexisting Condition
Cherry Garcia Ha Ha Your Dead Hippie
Butter Pee in a Can Before You Can Get a Job Junkie
Mint Chocolate LIBERALS WANT TO MIX A FETUS INTO THIS PINT OF ICE CREAM Chip
Rocky Road to HELL
Extra Fudgepacker Brownie Burn in Hellfire

Many, many more suggestions in the comments.

Someone Else Blogging About Vultures

At Firedoglake. At least the vultures I blogged about play a healthy role in the system. These vultures play the system, but root against health.

"Green Czar" Steps Down For Telling the Truth.

Van Jones, who was Obama's "green jobs tsar", has been the subject of a campaign by conservatives ever since they uncovered a video from last year in which he described Republicans as "assholes". The public airing of such a view is awkward for Obama at a time when he is trying to win over Republicans in support of health and energy reforms.

No siree, wouldn't want any awkwardness. No prob when the Pres and VP candidates refer to a reporter as a "major league asshole" (and never apologize, but did regret that people were offended), but when an environmentalist, civil-rights activist, and (gasp) brown person has correctly referred to republicans as assholes at some point in his past... well! We mustn't have that. I gather Beck has been having conniptions over this for several days.

Assholes...

Surplus Population

"If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Two articles in the NYT caught my eye this morning. The second was on the budgetary problems arising in districts with large numbers of homeless kids. An unfunded 2001 federal law requires districts to provide a number of services for such kids.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.

I'm sure the republicans feel that home-schooling would be the best solution for homeless kids.

And the first was on the emerging new thang on Wall Street: buying life insurance policies from the elderly and ill at a reduced rate, bundling them and selling them as securities to pay off when the original policy holders die.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person.

(...)

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

This strikes me as beyond disgusting, but then everyone knows I'm a prude. Still, there are some moments of levity...

Critics of life settlements believe “this defeats the idea of what life insurance is supposed to be,” said Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. “It’s not an investment product, a gambling product.”

Well, ummm... insurance of any kind is a gambling product. I guess what he's really saying is "Hey we're supposed to make the profit on this, not someone else."

Dickens

I'm looking for a particular Dickens quote for a piece I'm think about tossing together... if I had a dead tree version of the NYT this morning, I would have wadded it up and thrown it across the room. I haven't found the quote I'm looking for, but I did find this one, which seems perfect for the rage I've been feeling this summer:

“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth”

I like.

Vulture Day

At first I thought this was sort of a gag, but it looks like it's serious: today is "blog about a vulture day."As far as I can tell, no one has picked Turkey Vultures yet. I sure don't know why...Well, yeah, there is that. But the fact is, you can make anybody look kinda bad if you're trying to. Check out this one. Tell me that's not one stylin' dude.
And seriously, if you've never noticed them in flight, you're missing a treat. Few birds have the incredible grace of vultures; fewer still have the ability to stay aloft for hours at a time with only occasional adjustments of their wings, and still fewer flaps.
Turkey Vultures seem to be pretty much everywhere in the US. Look up!

Saturd80's

We Belong- Pat Benetar, who showed us children of the Seventies that women could be tough and feminine at the same time they rocked you to pieces. This is gentler and sweeter than much of her music, but it's one of my favorites.

Original (unembeddable) MTV video here.

Smoking Gun- Robert Cray, who hailed from Portland. My Portlandian roommate from 81-85 was several years older than me, and unlike me, was very fond of the bar scene and live music. As soon as Cray's first album came out, he had it.

Save It For Later- English Beat didn't produce a whole lot of music, but I was very fond of what they did create. I think a couple of them formed the group that had the giant hit, "She Drives Me Crazy." But that's for another Saturday

So today we have Saturd80s, Caturday, and Vladurday. Are we done with gratuitous puns for the time being? Yes, my oh-so-patient friends, yes, we are.

Caturday

My kitty has become a little chubby over the summer. A creature of changing habits and preferences, we have concluded one thing: her favorite food is Meow Mix.

We have also concluded that she is very fond of belly and chest scratches. Her favorite, though, is hanging off the side of my chair, with no feet on the ground, while I scratch her spine.

She's a silly animule, but she has me trained well.

What He Said

My Facebook comment on this issue was that I thought Obama should tell kids whose parents objected to just drop out and give up. It's very likely that the mental impairment arising from having such parents would prevent them from ever succeeding academically.

Vladurday

I thought the title of this Pundit Kitchen Post was pretty witty too. So I swiped it.
see more Political Pictures

Turtle?

LORI TOBIAS/The Oregonian
Scientists think a fossilized tortoise found along the beach in Lincoln County may be 20 million years old. The domed back of the stone, which measures roughly 30 inches long by 24 inches wide, suggests it was a land turtle.

If I had seen the above, I would have simply dismissed it as a very large concretion. Even looking at the full size image (click to double the size), I'm not seeing any features that jump out and say "fossil." But I'm not a paleo guy, even less of a vertebrate paleo guy, and know absolutely nothing about chelonian paleo. So I'm willing to assume that Hanschumaker and Orr know what they're talking about.

Very Cool!

Poor Adolph

Heeeeeee's baaa-aack!

Feakin' brilliant!

An Interesting Problem

with, very likely, no happy solution.Under nearly any circumstances, my response would be "close it down." Even under the circumstances we face, that's likely to be my final position, unless there's some practical way to remove mercury from the emissions.

But here's the problem: Oregon is an overwhelmingly volcanic state; we have very little in the way of outcropping limestone. There's a small amount in the Klamath-Siskyou province in the SW, and a larger amount in the Blue Mountain province in the NE. Many are in tectonically-shattered small pods that wouldn't really be economic to develop, and many have too high a proportion of clastic material (sand and clay, for example) to be useful for cement making. I was on a field trip in, I think, spring of 1988, and we stopped to look at the outcrop near the Durkee plant. At the time, and as best as I can tell from a quick web search, to this day, it's the only cement manufacturer in Oregon.

I have commented before that construction materials such as sand, gravel tend to have local sources, since the cost of transporting them in the quantities in which they're used is high. The same holds true for cement. It would not make economic sense to bring in all our concrete (or limestone) from neighboring states; on the other hand, it does not make sense to keep emitting these shocking amounts of mercury into the air. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out; the factors at work here are powerful.

Perhaps Idaho, directly downwind, and presumably the prime recipient of Oregon's Hg emissions, could help subsidize some of the transportation costs? Perhaps the Durkee plant situation will inspire someone to develop more effective Hg capture technology? I dunno, but it should be pretty clear that the levels being emitted are untenable.

Followup: A few articles later, I found an op-ed on the same issue.

The biggest mercury polluter in the entire United States is a cement factory in eastern Oregon. This fact has not escaped notice of the state's environmental watchdog, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

The very day the federal government released its disturbing report on mercury's widespread threat, DEQ officials announced that the agency would work hard to make sure that the cement company could continue to release mercury at a level 60 times greater than new federal emissions limits.

Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Border Man...

Medium Large

There's a blogger I've read from time to time who deals with the shear hell transgendered people have to go through dealing with today's identity requirements. Not pretty. Peppermint Patty would be pretty much restricted to the US and grounded. And if she managed to travel to another country, there's a good chance she'd spend months or years trying to gain re-admittance to the US.

Mad as Hell Doctors!

Aren't going to take it any more!

There's no nice way to say it. The financial cost of health care is killing our citizens, hobbling our economy, crushing small business, and threatening the solvency of our government. In the meantime, the Health Care Industry is spending almost two million dollars a day lobbying Congress and manipulating public opinion to accept “reform” legislation that leaves a vicious, for-profit system intact. The "public option" is a trap. We need real reform that finds immediate savings, controls costs, and accomplishes the moral imperative of true Universal Access. A Single Payer plan is the only real path to a Health Care System that is socially, ethically and fiscally responsible. And yet, our elected officials refuse to even discuss the possibility of a Single Payer plan!

If that doesn't make you mad, we recommend checking your pulse.

I think this is a Quixotic effort, but I'd donate if I could. The doctors and patients are the ones who should be at the forefront of media coverage, not the frontal lobotomies of pundits and right-wing legislators.

Elijah pointed this out to me. I sort of promised myself earlier, no more health rants today. Yeah, I lie to myself, just like everyone else.

I Hate It When That Happens

It drives me crazy when my browsing interferes with loading and running animated gif advertisements on dating services, travel services and how to fit into a bikini by Christmas, among the countless other purchasing opportunities available to me. Sometimes I'm just so goddamn thoughtless...

Oregon is Pretty Milquetoast

in terms of the seven deadly sins...The above is the map for the intensity of "pride," the "Aggregate of the other six offenses—because pride is the root of all sin." Amusing, and interesting to see somewhat meaningful statistical definitions of the sins. From Wired Magazine, the other six are at the link. (I found that clicking the pics to make them bigger didn't work; right-click and choose "view image" for full size.)

How Corporations Game Our Perceptions

Here's the lede:

LOS ANGELES — Dismayed by the number of poor children about to be dropped from a publicly subsidized health insurance program, California lawmakers voted Thursday to levy a tax on insurance companies to help maintain the program, which had been slashed into near nonexistence as part of the state’s budget.

OMG! The dysfunctional State of California has managed to pass a tax! The apocalypse is nigh!

Not so much. Buried down in the story is this:

Under the new law, which Mr. Schwarzenegger has pledged to sign, health insurance companies that participate in the state’s Medicaid program will face a 2.35 percent tax on gross revenues, replacing the 5.5 percent existing tax that will end in October.

A better opening to the story would be "In the face of 700,000 uninsured children, California legislators and governor agree to cut taxes funding their coverage by nearly 60%."

On a totally unrelated note, the spell checker tells me "lede" is misspelled. I appreciate having a spell checker that subtly highlights words it doesn't recognize, I just wish it had a broader vocabulary.

Trying to Get My Head Around This

One of my liberal activist mailings earlier this morning misrepresented "the trigger" reportedly being discussed between Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and the White House. The mailing described it thusly: "Incredibly, Barack Obama may advocate for passing a bill with a "trigger" - meaning he'll wait for our health care crisis to get even worse before implementing a public health insurance option."

Now look, I expect lies and scare tactics from the right- such maneuvers seem to be all they have these days. It irritates and angers me, but I expect it. I do not expect, and will not tolerate, such nonsense from my side, especially when it's in the context, first and foremost, of a fund-raising campaign. As soon as I finish this up, I'm going to go back and unsubscribe from that mailing.

There's no doubt that it's been difficult to get factual and objective information about the substance of proposed health care reform(s), but that's not an excuse for making things up. I had to read the article I've excerpted below twice to get the general gist, but I don't think it looks all that bad. Obviously, all the details aren't in place, and I'll need to think about this development in terms of the larger picture. I may decide I don't like the idea after all. Or not. The point is, what's described is a very long shot from "he'll wait for our health care crisis to get even worse." And I won't tolerate propaganda from anyone, even if I agree with their overall goals.

Under Ms. Snowe’s proposal, a new government corporation would offer health insurance in any states where affordable coverage was not readily and widely available from private insurers. The corporation would not be part of the Department of Health and Human Services, although federal officials would serve on its board.

The public insurance plan would be offered in any state where fewer than 95 percent of the residents had access to affordable coverage.

Congress would define “affordable” with a sliding scale based on income. Under a proposal being considered by the Finance Committee, Medicaid would be extended to anyone with income less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,327 for a family of four).

For people with incomes just above that level, insurance would be considered affordable if they could find a policy with premiums equal to no more than, say, 3 percent or 4 percent of their income. For people with incomes exceeding three times the poverty level ($66,150 for a family of four), insurance might be deemed unaffordable if the premiums were more than, say, 12.5 percent to 15 percent of their income.

Given that roughly 20% of US households fall below the $29,327 figure noted above, I think it's a fair assumption that the trigger would be pulled immediately. And suppose you have a family of four with a household income of $50K: you would meet the trigger clause if you couldn't find family coverage for less than $2000 per year. I don't think you could find family coverage for much less than five or six times that figure.

If the trigger option placates the righties (who are unable to run through this kind of higher math), and allows a public option to be set in place, I'm OK with it.

The Public Option

Well, we silly libs have been pwned again: we already have a "public option" in health care. All you have to do is scream "fire."

Among the hidden costs of the health care crisis is the burden that fire departments across the country are facing as firefighters, much like emergency room doctors, are increasingly serving as primary care providers.

About 80 percent of the calls handled by Engine Company 10 [in Washington, DC] are medical emergencies because the firehouse serves one of the city’s poorest areas, where few residents have health insurance, doctors’ checkups are rare, and medical problems are left to fester until someone dials 911.

Debate over, man, debate over. I guess the good news is that while health emergency calls have tripled over the last 30 years, fire calls have dropped over 40%. Probably because most people are deeply suspicious of government-run fire-fighting. Leads to fasciconiptionism, you know.