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. . . . .It's not been that long ago now that Facebook was launched. It's founder, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had gone from 150 million active users, to over 300 million, in 9 months, a speed record that would equal Usain Bolt's. Bear in mind that it took him 5 years to get to 15o million. It also is cash-flow positive, well ahead of schedule, and proof positive that the marketplace, if run in a truly free enterprise fashion works. For those of you who are users, but don't know how advertising works on it, it's a bid system, but based on placement it also does a good job, and excellent job of letting suppliers find out right away if there is a demand for their service, product, website, movie, book, etc. It's been a while since I touched on anything in this column remotely like technology as sociology/anthropology, but this is fascinating. I wrote earlier this year about Zuckerberg's plans for Facebook, and what his 5 year plan was, (which he absolutely obliterated in terms of pace). He is following the plan, as he laid it out in the article in Wired I read, to the "T". His next move? He's going after Google, and he wants Microsoft and Apple coming to him first before launching software. 24 years old, a billionaire, a damn smart businessman, and most importantly, a born intuitive for knowing what people want and how to package it. That's what fascinates me, Facebook, and yes, I am a very active user, as most of you know, is beyond a phenomenon. It's size now makes it equal to the population size of the U.S. For those of you who are active users, you'll understand it when I say that Facebook is it's own egalitarian democracy, and is an example of self-rule done right. Friends, ideas, links, news; it all rises and falls on it's own merits, dependent entirely on the population viewing it and clicking "share" or "like". It has become it's own society, and is actually pretty well far more reflective of the "real" world than any of the infotainment channels; Fox (Faux) News, CNN or MSNBC.
. . . . I started out this morning talking about Max Baucus's Senate Finance Committee draft form of his "Gang of 6" Health Care Reform Bill. . . .Bob Cesca -
. . . . .The full PDF version of the draft can be found here. Yes, I've downloaded and will read it tonight, start to finish. If I were you, I'd do the same, otherwise, any discussion that you want to have with me about it will be pretty one-sided and short.Anyway, the Baucus Plan has arrived and, as predicted, it's terrible. So terrible in fact that he's basically lost all Republican support and possibly up to half of the Democrats on the Finance Committee.
Actually, you could say that the plan is bipartisan -- insofar as members of both parties hate it.
. . . .Your new hero should be Wendell Potter, as a former Communications VP for CIGNA (boo, hiss, one of the bad guys) he served as a flack for one of the country's largest health insurance companies, but in an Ebenezer Scrooge moment, decided to change his life, get a little good karma going and make up for his past sins:
. . . .More Wendell Potter, from Politico:Speaking before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee Tuesday, former health insurance industry executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter warned that if Congress "fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act."
Potter also struck back against one of the key arguments made against the public option: that it would have an unfair competitive advantage over private insurers.
'Contrary to the misinformation being disseminated by the health insurance industry and its allies, the public insurance option would not have a competitive advantage over private plans," Potter told the committee. "It would have to meet the same benefit requirements and comply with the same insurance market reforms as private plans. "
Potter, who was previously a vice president of communication at Cigna, also sharply criticized Democratic Senator Max Baucus' health care reform bill in a conversation with reporters Monday, calling the plan an "absolute gift to the industry."
Potter said the proposal would not provide affordable coverage. It gives the industry too much latitude to charge higher premiums based on age and geographic location, fails to mandate employer coverage, and pushes consumers into plans with limited benefits, Potter said.. . . .More from the transcript of his remarks:
Other legislative proposals, including the "Baucus Framework" being considered by the Senate Finance Committee's "Bipartisan Six," would benefit health insurance companies far more than average Americans.. . . . .Still like the system the way it is? Want the "government" to keep it's hands off health care reform? Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:The practices of the insurance industry over the past several years have contributed directly to the growing number of Americans who are uninsured and the even more rapidly growing number of people who are underinsured.
Other proposals, by providing financial incentives for employers to offer barebones plans with lousy benefits and high deductibles, would actually encourage them.
Unlike H.R. 3200, those proposals would not require employers to provide good benefits or even to meet minimum benefit standards. They also would permit employers to saddle their workers with the entire amount of the premiums in addition to the high out-of-pocket expenses, escalating the already rapid shift of the financial burden of health care from insurers and employers to working men and women.
The Baucus plan also would allow insurers to charge older people and families up to 7.5 times as much and younger people, impose big fines on families that don't buy their lousy insurance, and would weaken state regulation of insurers.
As a consequence, these proposals would do little to increase affordable coverage for those currently insured, or stop the rise in medical bankruptcy. They would, however, ensure that a huge new stream of revenue--much of it from taxpayers who would finance the needed subsidies for people too poor to buy coverage on their own--would flow--"gush" might be a more appropriate word--to insurance companies. And much of that new revenue would ultimately go right into the pockets of the Wall Street investors who own them.
Over the past several weeks, I have repeatedly told audiences around the country that the public option should not just be an "option" to be bargained away at the behest of insurance companies who are pouring money into Congress to defeat substantial and essential reforms. A public option must be created to provide true choice to consumers or reform will fail to truly fix the root of the severe problems that have been caused in large part by the greedy demands of Wall Street.
By creating a strong public option and restricting the insurance industry's ability to enrich executives and investors at the expense of taxpayers and consumers, H.R. 3200 will truly benefit average Americans.
The Baucus plan, on the other hand, would create a government-subsidized monopoly for the purchase of bare-bones, high-deductible policies that would truly benefit Big Insurance. In other words, insurers would win; your constituents would lose.
It's hard to imagine how insurance companies could write legislation that would benefit them more.
The Kaiser Family Foundation's latest Employer Benefits Survey is out, and they've got some numbers worth remembering.
The average cost of a family health insurance policy in 2009 was $13,375.
Over the past ten years, premiums have increased by 131 percent, while wages have grown 38 percent and inflation has grown 28 percent.
If health-care costs grow as fast as they have over the past five years, the average premium for a family policy in 2019 will be $24,180. If they grow as fast as they have over the past 10 years, premiums in 2019 will average $30,803.
No one quite knows when, or how, the system will crumble. But make no mistake. At this rate of increase, it will, eventually, crumble. Want more numbers? They're here
- Completely batshit crazy Left wing wingnut conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an open letter to completely batshit crazy Right wing wingnut conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.History is what matters and being on the right side of history is what’s important when it comes to the legacy we leave on this planet. You don’t want people to look back on you as a Benedict Arnold, as a traitor to America. You don’t want people to look back on you as a media whore, as playing the role of being loyal opposition to sucker legitimate and growing grass roots opposition to the new world order.
Your agenda is to put out a dual message – to discredit and polarize the conservative movement to the benefit of the establishment left and the elite. Your bizarre and clownish antics of fake crying, which you proved were staged when you replicated them on demand for a GQ photo shoot, are doing nothing but reinforcing the stereotype that the conservative right is insane.
Your entire 9/12 project has nothing to do with uniting America and everything to do with reinforcing neo-conservative rhetoric about how we should relinquish our rights and accept the police state because terrorists want to attack us and Saddam Hussein has WMD’s and yellowcake.
. . . .For those of you who know who both of the lunatics in question up above are, I'll give you a moment to quit laughing and spitting coffee all over the computer screen.. . . .OK, time's up.
. . . .Now, I think it's important to point out a couple of things. Beck claims that he's a recovering alcoholic/addict, I don't know. As someone who is, it's not my place to claim or decide for him if he is or isn't. My point, if you're not in the recovering community, please don't judge us by two very notable exceptions. that being Beck and Limbaugh, who also claims to be in recovery. Now, as for Beck's theology, his spiritual worldview, he does have one, and it's basis is about as far out as you can get. From Andrew Sullivan:
. . . .All of which leads me to very bottom of the bottom feeders, Limbaugh and Drudge. Now, before we launch off into a discussion of race and racism, I'm going to put some of my bona fides out there. I am white, Irish, as a matter of fact. My great-grandfather on my father's side was a Canadian Dakota who had come across the Detroit river, and left my great-grandmother pregnant (yes, people did have sex in those days). However, my former brother-in-law is black, as are two other former brother's-in-law, on my former's wife's side. On that side, most of my nieces and nephews are mixed-race. The best man at my wedding, still a friend, is black and gay. For 25 years, I lived in SE Mich, in Ypsilanti, which along with Belleville and Romulus, form one of the most racially mixed areas around. A couple that were one of my former wife's good friends was a mixed race couple. A good number of the kids, who are still friends of my sons, and walked in and out of my house through the years were black. I worked in an automotive plant, with a workforce that ran about 50/50. I spend a good deal of my time out on the Rosebud Reservation, and can count a good number of First Nation and Natives as my friends, good friends. What that leads up to is simple. I'm not black, so I can't know what it's like to be black, or to have that experience. I do know what it's like to walk onto the reservation and immediately be a minority. I say all that to point out that race was not something I was conscious of, or ever drew a distinction about.This I should have known, but didn't. And it does reveal some of the contours of the latest rebellion against modernity and embrace of fundamentalist religion at the heart of the American right:
"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment ... The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
Fascinating. The author, Willard Cleon Skousen, has a long history in the annals of conspiracist far-right. I figured it would get worse on the right before it got better. But this trend - a combination of theoconservatism, American exceptionalism and populism - is truly disturbing. Mormonism is its natural religious base: the supremely American religion.
. . . .I have zero tolerance for racism. Racism, to me, is nothing more than small-mindedness, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance and obstructionism; all willful characteristics that are a very conscious choice.
. . . .I say all that, to be sure that you know where I'm coming from when I take this next topic on, because I've said it, without providing basis, and I'm sure that I've raised some eyebrows, but Limbaugh and Drudge the last two days have now put it out on the table for absolutely everyone to see and hear.
. . . .It's easy to be subtle about racism, and to provide covert information. As in. . .I don't want to call Joe Wilson a racist, and say that's why he yelled "You lie" and wouldn't have done that if a white President was standing there, but I will say that it was Strom Thurmond, a well-known racist, segregationist and friend of the Klu Klux Klan who mentored him and schooled him. . . .See how easy it is to box that in?
. . . .I'm not going to go there about Wilson anymore. I believe that the rebuke and admonishment that the House gave him today was petty and did nothing more than add fuel to the fire and continue to make him a wingnut folk hero. I believe that the two public military reprimands that were handed to him last week and were published in this column were rebuke enough in and of themselves, I believe that knowing that he broke the Rules of Decorum that he swore to follow when he was elected a Representative and seated will turn around and bite him.
. . . .Jimmy Carter and Maureen Dowd disagree with me, that's their perogative.
. . .Drudge and Limbaugh are another matter, altogether. Both are despicable human beings, who are doing the best they can right now to ignite a race war in American and split the country in two. Will Bunch -
Except that ever since President Obama's largely successful speech to Congress last week, the message from Drudge and from the conservative echo-chorus that is conducted daily by Rush Limbaugh has become increasingly less subliminal and more shrill, and their toxic tone is one that should alarm all Americans. It can be summed up: "Black people are running amok in Obama's America - emboldened by an African-American in the White House, they are now here to beat up white folks, cheat them out of their hard-earned money, and impose 'black nationalism'! White people need to be very afraid.". . . .What has me so worked up about Limbaugh?
I don't believe that allegations of racism should be tossed out lightly, and I've cautiously watched this narrative unwind over the past couple of weeks. Today, there can be no doubt. The lead story on the Drudge Report for the entire day until about 2:30 p.m. - on a day in which two tabloid evergreen stories, the murder of a beautiful young Ivy League college student and a round-up of terrorists in New York City just after the 9/11 anniversary, were in the news - is about a fight on a school bus. A non-fatal (thankfully) fight on a bus, that happened to involve black kids beating up a white kid, and was captured of course on video.
Drudge's typically sedate headline: "White Student Beaten On School Bus: Crowd Cheers."
Now, I noted that the story was removed as a lead item right around 2:30 - coincidentally, the story also changed from an original version in which the police declared that the fight was racially motivated. It's still a fluid situation, but right now, the world of America's newsrooms has been "ruled" (in the famous words of ex-ABC/Time's Mark Halperin) for most of today by a kids' fight on a school bus. The article also gets into racial history of Belleville, Ill., which is probably not the part of the story that Drudge was interested in hyping:Belleville has had a long history of racial turmoil, with a past that includes police harassment of black motorists, cross burnings and discrimination in city hiring.
The divide began a century ago, in 1903, when a black man was lynched by a mob of 5,000 people in the town square, set on fire and dismembered.
No matter -- let's not let history interfere with Drudge's "Blacks Gone Wild" narrative for the day, his layout of stories and photos that might seem willy-nilly but in fact usually has all the deliberate care of a $10,000 wedding planner. Thus, right below the screen shot of punching black students, we see the headline "POLITICO: So far, Obama's failing miserably," which is in fact an opinion piece, which it would have to be since the actual news of the day (not linked on Drudge) is that the president's approval rating is climbing again. But as you ponder Obama's alleged failure, it is the photo of rampaging young blacks that you see.
On the left. we have a medley that includes a campus rape (the suspects are black), mixed in with a story about a principal in trouble for not showing Obama's speech, leading up to a photo of a black man, Kanye West, disrespecting a white woman, Taylor Swift, brought full circle by Obama again calling West "a jackass" (which he, in fact, was).
Drift back to the center for a series of increasingly hysterical headlines about the ACORN scandal, which involves a few rotten employees of a community organizing group (Obama was a community organizer, remember?) caught giving tax-cheating scam advice -- did I mention the ACORN workers were predominantly black? Do you remember all the fuss in the right-wing media about million-dollar, white collar tax-cheating advice-givers at banks like UBS? Me neither.) Clearly, today's Drudge Report is a narrative, and that narrative is all about race, and a social fabric that Drudge and his readers are convinced (based, of course, on a series of scare headlines) is coming apart.
Think I'm a little paranoid? I still probably wouldn't be reading about this if I hadn't spent a little time in the car this afternoon, enough time for Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the Republican Party who has worked tirelessly to infuse race into discussions about Obama, playing tag team with Drudge, as he so often does. As I started the engine, the radio host and his caller were prattling on about the all-important school bus assault, and Limbaugh said the story is a perfect illustration of what he called "Obama's America."
That alone would be beyond outrageous, the allegation that the mere presence of a black president -- who just last week spoke to students urging them to study and act responsibly -- is encouraging kids to fight on a school bus. But that was just a small part of Limbaugh's show today, which was all about race. He harped on a Newsweek article that he claims shows that racism is pre-determined (just as liberals always argue that homosexuality is pre-determined, don't you see...so...I guess racism is OK, after all -- all-righty, then), and of course the massive left-wing conspiracy that is ACORN, the corn-rowed people who are the real ones trying to rob the middle class, and not the Wall Street types who so rarely get even a mild rebuke from Limbaugh, except when they vote for Obama. I thought he was done -- but then Limbaugh said "remember how I asked earlier today if Obama's brother is still in the hut" (not making this up) and read all of a lengthy article about Obama's relatives in Kenya.
Look, there's a lot to talk about with a new president such as Obama, who has a lot of policy proposals on complicated issues like health care or climate change, and so there's a lot there for a thoughtful, conservative critique. But that's not where the conversation is going right now -- it's all about the shiny black object.
Fox News and its out-of-control Howard Beale, the seriously un-anchored Glenn Beck, have spent most of the last several weeks focused on two issues: ACORN, and mid-level Obama officials like now-departed so-called "green jobs czar" Van Jones. Jones -- did I mention that he is black? -- and ACORN have both shared a common mission: bringing a dose of political power to poor, mostly urban people who have not had power. And make no mistake, what really scares Beck, Fox News and the vast right-wing media is not the petty fraud of some ACORN employees or a few nutty things that Jones said in his more radical past, but the fact that they will succeed in their legitimate mission of empowering American citizens.
There's something else that the right wing finds alarming, and that is Obama's relative success in speaking to the American public in a calm and persuasive manner, as he did last week. I think it is this frustration, the worry that while it's mostly a vast work in progress that the president may not be "failing miserably" as Drudge and some Politico op-ed writer allege but showing signs of success, that have led to the new more overtly racial tone, dragging the current discourse to a low level that didn't seem possible. And so -- like Maureen Dowd concluded, also reluctantly -- I can't help but feel there was a racial edge to ex-Strom Thurmond acolyte Joe Wilson and his exasperated "You Lie" at the president. It plays right into the toxic narrative that is building on Drudge and talk radio and Fox like a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama's post-racial America? Good grief, were we really that naive, and so recently? I can honestly say that America right now, on the ides of September 2009, feels more racial, at least to me, today than it has any time in a generation, now since I was living in New York City in the era of Do the Right Thing. And the "Racial America" of Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and far too many of their millions of "dittoheads" is going to keep getting even more racial -- if we don't call them out.
"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on... I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.". . . .Andrew Sullivan's response:
I'm sorry but this is outrageous. The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks ... based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape?. . . .And what does Michelle Malkin, Limbaugh's submissive little geisha (see how ugly it is and how easy it is to do with the right words?) respond to an incident that wasn't racially motivated, and was quickly dismissed by the police as nothing more than a "couple of bullies"?These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in Saint Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right.
Do they understand how irresonsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm? Or is that what they need and thrive on?
the black-on-white student beating was completely unprovoked and racially motivated. Watch as many students cheer the attack — and the bus driver is nowhere to be seen:. . . .Her correction later in the day? After the police had investigated? Piffle, she merely implies that it was still racially motivated, and that the police had bowed to political correctness, when in fact it was one police captain, who'd done a thorough investigation and found it to be a case of two bullies beating a kid up that they'd been threatening to beat up. Oh yeah, by the way, the other "cheering" students, can't be heard on the videotape.
. . . .Race is the 800-lb. gorilla in the room, and if idiots that are attempting to start a race war in America like Limbaugh, Drudge and Beck don't stop, there will be one, now wouldn't that be a legacy the party of Lincoln will just be damn proud of.
. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.
. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.
. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.
. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.
. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.
. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.
. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.
. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.
. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night
. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.
The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell
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