Did you know you are overinsured?

I'm lucky in that I have a very good medical plan where I work. Yes, we have to deal with the usual in-network/out-of-network BS, but it's a good plan. I pay about $3600/year in premiums, and the total premium is about $10,000 including what my employer pays.

George W. Bush thinks I'm overinsured. And if you have any health insurance at all, he thinks you are too.

Josh Marshall explains:

...the core premise of the policies the president is about to lay out is that Americans are over-insured when it comes to health insurance. Over-insured. Got too much insurance.

These aren't my words. These are the words used by the conservative policy-wonks who came up with the president's proposals. Just hop over to Google and start googling the phrase 'over insured' along with 'health' and 'conservative'. This what they think; and what the president thinks. It's why he's behind these ideas.

So the president thinks the problem is that people have too much health insurance. People are over-insured.

I don't think that's how most Americans see the problem, do you? I'm confident that they don't. Really confident.

But let's let them decide.

The president wants to make health care his political issue this year. No Democrat should open their mouth this year on this topic without first saying this: The president thinks the problem is that Americans have too much health insurance; we don't.

Bush of course thinks that the answer is health savings accounts and high-deductible insurance policies. Perhaps for people in HIS circle,, and arguably even in mine, using health savings accounts to pay outine medical expenses instead of $14 co-pays would make people think twice about using medical services. But is asking people to pay for preventive care out-of-pocket really cost-effective? Or will such a policy give people like me yet another excuse to put off having a colonoscopy as long as possible?

When a routine blood draw and lipids profile, or a mammogram, or an annual physical, or a pap test, is paid for by insurance, it's an incentive to obtain such preventive care. When it's an out-of-pocket expense, the "I Feel Fine" defense kicks in and people tend to defer such screenings, which means even MORE expense later on, after the heart attack, the stroke, the hysterectomy, the mastectomy, or the colostomy.

Another problem is that Bush's plan would put more people into the hunt for private insurance, and as we all know, anyone with a pre-existing condition -- which may be defined as anything from diabetes to high blood pressure to carrying 10 extra pounds -- is going to have a hard time finding insurance at an affordable price. For families trapped in the downward wage spiral of the global economy and tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, there just isn't money for health insurance, let alone health savings accounts. The result? More uninsured people, fewer people obtaining preventive care, more emergency room visits, more costs for preventable catastrophic illness.

Whether the Republicans want to believe it or not, free market solutions don't apply to health care. If you need it, you need it. Period. I'm all for getting employers out from under the burden of providing health care benefits, but the answer is to allow the economies of scale that a national health insurance program can provide -- not nationalized health care, but nationalized health insurance -- one which spreads the risk across the young and old; the sick and the well; the poor and the rich -- so that NO ONE has to decide whether to buy shoes for her children or get a pap test.

Green Mango Salad

Nothing says summer like a green mango salad. With its hot, sour, salty sweet explosion of flavours, this salad is the perfect antidote for those sticky, sweltering days of humidity.I made this twice in two days: the second version was a much tastier success, as I made sure to dress the mango shreds at the last possible moment, minimising any sog factor.I brought the leftovers into work the next

Green Mango Salad

Nothing says summer like a green mango salad. With its hot, sour, salty sweet explosion of flavours, this salad is the perfect antidote for those sticky, sweltering days of humidity.I made this twice in two days: the second version was a much tastier success, as I made sure to dress the mango shreds at the last possible moment, minimising any sog factor.I brought the leftovers into work the next

The straight poop on the "Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats too" meme

It's bullshit. We always knew it was bullshit, but now it's documented. Of course this won't matter wo the whores like Katie Couric, Timmeh, and Chris Matthews, but let's get the truth out there.

A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.

The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.

In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”

Although Abramoff hasn’t personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”

But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.

The analysis includes a detailed look at seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients, and a comparison of their giving with that of approximately 170 other tribes. (Abramoff is often said to have had nine tribal clients. But Morris omitted two of the tribes – the Pueblo of Santa Clara, whose donations were virtually nonexistent, and the Tigua Indian Reservation, because it isn’t listed in Federal lobbying files as having a lobbyist and Abramoff worked on contingency. At any rate Santa Clara’s post-Abramoff donations to the GOP were overwhelmingly higher than to Dems, so including them would have added even more to the GOP side of the ledger.)

The analysis shows:


in total, the donations of Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him, while their donations to Republicans more than doubled, increasing by 135 percent after they signed him up;

five out of seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients vastly favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones;

four of the seven began giving substantially more to Republicans than Democrats after he took them on;

Abramoff’s clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP -- exactly the reverse pattern.
“It’s very hard to see the donations of Abramoff’s clients as a bipartisan greasing of the wheels,” Morris, the firm’s founder and a former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, told The Prospect.

Bloomberg News published a similar, more limited analysis last month, which relied on a small amount of data also from Morris’ firm.” But that analysis didn't look at all of Abramoff's tribal clients, and didn't provide a detailed year-by-year analysis of their donations or a detailed comparison to other tribal giving. Since then, some observers, such as blogger Kevin Drum, have argued that a comprehensive look at the donations of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients would help shed light on the scandal.

The Prospect asked Morris to do two things: First, compare the contributions of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients before they’d signed on with Abramoff versus after they’d become his client. And second, compare the contributions of all Abramoff tribal clients with the contributions of all non-Abramoff tribes.

Go here to see the rundown of said donations.

As the above numbers show, four out of seven tribes -- Saginaw, Chitimacha, Coushatta and Mississippi – saw their contributions to Republicans increase significantly, even vastly, after they became Abramoff’s clients.

At the same time, two of those four tribes -- Saginaw and Chitimacha -- saw their giving to Democrats drop or remain static. The other two -- tribes Coushatta and Mississippi -- did see their giving to Dems rise under Abramoff, but by amounts that were dwarfed by the increases in giving to the GOP.

These patterns strongly suggest that Abramoff’s representation of the tribes manifested itself largely in a dramatic rise in contributions to the GOP. And it also suggests it’s likely that Abramoff had little impact on giving to Democrats.

Nor does it appear likely that Abramoff steered contributions to Dems from the remaining three tribes who didn’t see their giving to the GOP climb. Of those three tribes, one tribe -- Pueblo of Sandia -- saw a negligible shift in donations to both parties. The second -- Agua Caliente -- slashed its contributions to both parties, but even so, the percentage of that tribe’s giving that went to Republicans still rose dramatically. The third -- Cherokee Nation -- simply stopped giving altogether.

The big picture is also compelling. Taken together, Abramoff’s tribal clients gave $868,890 to Dems before hiring him; afterwards, they gave $794,483 -- a decrease of nine percent. By contrast, the tribes’ donations to Republicans went from $786,560 pre-Abramoff to $1,845,975 after he became their lobbyist -- an increase of 135 percent. In other words, when Abramoff entered the picture, contributions to Dems dropped, while donations to Republicans more than doubled.

Adding to the case, the Morris firm also did a year-by-year analysis, from 1991 to the present, of the giving of scores of tribes -- Abramoff’s clients included. The firm’s look at the year-by-year giving of his clients is eye-opening. It shows even more clearly that in some cases clients’ giving to the GOP jumped dramatically just after Abramoff signed them.

Let me repeat what is the main source of the use of this meme -- the notion that because tribes that were clients of Jack Abramoff gave LEGAL campaign contributions to Democrats, it is exactly the same as if Abramoff had given the money himself. Another part of this claim is that Abramoff directed the donations to Democrats and the tribes did his bidding. Both of those assumptions are demonstrably false.

God knows there have been plenty of financial scandals involving Democrats, and the issue isn't that Democrats are pure as the driven snow. But the Abramoff scandal involves corruption at the highest levels of government to an extent we rarely see. This scandal is breathtaking in both its breadth and its utter shamelessness. The broacast whores of the mainstream media have been given their marching orders to repeat the false meme in perpetuity. But here in consensus reality, we still call a lie for what it is: a lie. It's not "another viewpoint" or even the Colbertian "truthiness." It's a falsehood, plain and simple.

Bushie, you're doing a heck of a job

George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Sidious, have taken to warning Americans once again that they are not safe, that the terrorists are yet still coming, and that they are the only thing that stands between Americans and certain annihilation by Evil Brown-Skinned Islamic Hordes.

If their response to the Gulf Coast is any indication of the kind of performance we can expect from this bunch of miscreants, we're all fucked.

Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows.

While the administration can claim some clear progress, Bush's ringing call from New Orleans's Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes" to make the city rise from the waters has not been matched by action, critics at multiple levels of government say, resulting in a record that is largely incomplete as Bush heads into next week's State of the Union address.

The problems include the slow federal cleanup of debris in Mississippi and Louisiana; a lack of authority for Bush's handpicked recovery coordinator, Donald E. Powell; the shortage and poor quality of housing for evacuees; and federal restrictions on reconstruction money and where coastal communities can rebuild.

With the onset of the hurricane season just four months away, there is no agreement on how to rebuild New Orleans, how to pay for that effort or even who is leading the cross-governmental partnership, according to elected leaders. While there is money to restore the city's flood defenses to protect against another Category 3 hurricane, it remains unclear whether merely reinforcing the levees will be enough to draw residents back.

Then of course there's the issue of WHICH residents the Administration wants to lure back. I can't imagine that Karl Rove, ever-concerned with Republican electoral fortunes, is going to allow Bush to go along with any plan that returns the largely black, largely Democratic voters of New Orleans' Ninth Ward to return -- not when turning New Orleans into a Republican property developer stronghold is an opportunity right there for the asking.

Here's a status report on the Bush response to the disaster:

Below are some of the major promises Bush made in his Jackson Square speech, and how the government has fared:


· Housing. Bush promised to empty shelters quickly, meet the immediate needs of the displaced, register victims, and provide housing aid in the form of rental assistance and trailers.

In Mississippi, 33,378 occupied trailers are meeting 89 percent of the estimated housing needs. But there have been 34,000 repair requests and maintenance complaints, according to Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.).

In Louisiana, trailers have been provided for about 37 percent of the estimated 90,000 displaced families in need of housing. Officials acknowledge production bottlenecks and in-state battles over sites. Trailer costs have swelled from $19,000 to $75,000 apiece.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration are struggling to meet unprecedented demands. FEMA is providing rental assistance to 700,000 families, but about 75,000 people are still in hotels. In some places, there is a shortage of rental housing available for evacuees.

As of Jan. 16, 18,943 applications for rental help had yet to be processed. As of this week, the SBA said that 190,000 of 363,000 applications for disaster loans to homeowners and businesses are still pending.

Cleanup. The president vowed "to get the work done quickly . . . honestly and wisely," but a key first step -- cleanup -- has not gone smoothly.

Thirty million cubic yards of debris remain uncollected -- enough to build a five-sided column more than 50 stories tall over the Pentagon -- provoking environmental concerns, fears of runaway spending abuses and a spirit-sapping despair. Layers of subcontractors have caused debris removal costs to quadruple from $8 per cubic yard to $32 per cubic yard, said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who visited the region on Jan. 17 as part of a Senate delegation.

Rebuilding. On the broader question of rebuilding, Bush promised "a close partnership" with state and local leaders, with the federal government playing a secondary role. But the U.S. government is the key player because it provides money, determines access to flood insurance, and takes primary responsibility for infrastructure and cleanup.

Reimbursement. Bush said the government would reimburse states for the costs of taking in evacuees and cities for emergency costs. But Mississippi and Louisiana officials say their needs are greater and will continue for years.

There's more...

When you think about the ways the Bush Administration has played on Americans' fears to its own political advantage -- fear of terrorists; fear of waves of immigrants; fear of avian flu -- and relied on Americans' primal desire to have a Big Daddy figure to make the boogeyman go away, one need only look at the Gulf Coast to see what we're all in for, should any of these threats actually materialize. Because it's clear that the only thing the Republicans want to keep safe is their own political power. The rest of us can all go to hell.

Someone had to say it

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration meme has been "9/11 changed everything", and it has beaten that particular drum to justify all of its efforts to bankrupt the country, oil-grab in the Middle East, and eliminate the rights that Americans have enjoyed as codified in the Bill of Rights for over 200 years.

Did 9/11 change everything? Or have Americans responded to a horrific attack that just happened to play out on national television in a way that is out of proportion to its importance when played out against the larger framework of history?

Joseph Ellis, a Mount Holyoke College professor, thinks it's the latter:

Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.

My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.

What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Ellis is 100% right. We are living in a country in which people who are at most risk of being hit in another terrorist attack -- those living in large cities -- are going about their business, cognizant, but not obsessed, with the threat which may loom. And these people are not voting for the totalitarian policies of George W. Bush and his fascist minions on the right. They are governed by Democrats or by moderate Republicans like George Pataki and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mike Bloomberg, and they elect people like Barack Obama to Congress. Like the Israelis, who really DO live every day with the possibility that they may be blown to bits while going to work, they don't obsess about the risk because if they did, they'd never get out of bed in the morning.

It's in the reddest of red states, and the "red areas" within the states -- the farms and suburbs of the heartland -- where the "9/11 changed everything" meme has taken hold -- in places that are more likely to be destroyed by an asteroid than by a terrorist attack.

Bush policies that do surveillance of antiwar groups and vegans, who brand as credible threats 15 people standing outside a military recruiting station with a banner reading "Bush Lied" and about as many handing out peanut butter sandwiches outside of Halliburton headquarters; that justify pre-emptive wars and warrantless searches; and that generally serve only to make us less free and keep people frightened while Bush cronies pick their pockets, are NOT justified by the events of 9/11.

If 9/11 changed everything, it's only because we allowed it to; because we were too frightened to question what our own government is doing to us.

So I guess they'll shut us all down before taking us off to the camps

From the BBC, via Hoffmania:

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The document says information is "critical to military success"

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

Psyops? You mean like "new tapes by Osama Bin Laden"?

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.

You knew they wouldn't allow blogs to stay online forever...not once the power of bloggers became known.

This country is being led by some pretty crazy-ass motherfuckers.