Projection?

Shorter Kevin D. Williamson, "Unnecessary Lies", National Review Online, May 6 2014:

OK, so we couldn't come up with any coherent reason why the Obama administration would have been conspiring to tell lies about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in September 2012. But that totally doesn't mean they weren't doing it! Like, maybe they were just keeping in practice.

Cheap shot: Inventing Benghazi

At the "Groundswell" meeting of May 8 2013, where neo-Crusader Christian goblins Jerry Boykin and Frank Gaffney were helping to plot the creation of a "scandal" around the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Boykin reported, per Karoli:

And I think it's okay to share with you, wouldn't you say so Frank, that the Speaker was, I thought he was very coherent last night when we talked about this. And that he believes that the process needs to play out before we get a special committee...

Yes, when they caught Boehner being (apparently) coherent, they knew they must be onto something special.

Image from the People Of  Earth: Attention interview with John Boehner (July 2011), a work of transcendent genius.

Also check out Driftglass for the designation of the scandal as Whitewater 2.0, which pretty much says it all.

If you keep it can you like it?

Edward Lloyd's coffee house. Image via Rombouts.

Breaking from Wall Street Journal:

The White House on Thursday will announce a plan for allowing insurance companies to continue offering existing individual insurance policies even if they fall short of the coverage standards set by the 2010 health-care law, a Democratic official briefed on the plan said....

The plan, which the official said could be implemented without passing legislation, would allow insurance companies to extend "substandard'' plans in 2014 only if they are already in existence. Unlike the House bill, the administration plan wouldn't allow insurance companies to offer such plans to new customers.

The theory is first that this will stop the congressional Democrats from signing onto anything rash; it can be done without any legislation, and that sounds like a good thing. Of course I don't see how this will "work" in the sense of actually getting those misbegotten complainers their imaginary coverage back. The insurers don't want to offer the plans that they've canceled, at least unless they get a chance to make them worse, by adding new restrictions or increasing the deductible. But maybe they'll be permitted to do that. Or maybe they'll be sort of forced to offer plans that were grandfathered under the original legislation.

Meanwhile I have a proposal: the Multistate Plan Program should be enabled to create a plan for anybody whose policy has been canceled that would match the premiums.

The way it would work would be like this: You'd start out by calculating the effective premium on the basis of the customer's income and its position on the poverty scale. If then are at 400% of poverty their effective premium is the same as the premium they've been paying, if they earn less then their effective premium is whatever the actual premium would buy after the government subsidies under the Obamacare program proper. Then the coverage package would be the Ten Essential Benefits plus whatever disposition of coinsurance/deductible/out-of-pocket maximum makes sense—some wealthier customers might well end up paying 80% or 90% coinsurance, because those premiums they've been paying are just too low, but it would still be a better deal than what they got from the canceled plans. Those "if I like it I can keep it" folks would have to accept, because the freedom they're insisting on is the freedom to pay an excessively low premium and eat the associated risks.

Best of all, it would get the Multistate into business in a bigger way, hastening the day when it becomes our National Health. What do you think?
 

Breaking badder

Finally! RT @foxnation: Study finds IRS suppression of Tea Party swung 2012 election http://t.co/Ng2pVrRS2x
— digby (@digby56) November 12, 2013

Stop the presses! Fox News has just learned that the Washington Examiner published five weeks ago a report according to which American Enterprise Institute hack Stan Veuger published on June 20th a hypothesis that the IRS swung the 2012 elections Barack Obama's way in what remains the all-time Greatest Obama Scandal of Forever by their relentless two-year persecution of 501(C)(4) organizations with the words "Tea" and "Party" in their names:

Tea party, from the flickr of Alberto.Gar.

Boehner's list of Obamacare tragedies

John Boehner's long J'Accuse list of the President's Obamacare crimes cites a total of eleven bullet points: a bunch of harrumphing about IF YOU LIKE IT YOU CAN KEEP IT!!! and three specific cases : a woman who's pissed off at how little the exchange does for her when the rules are specifically designed to keep her from using the exchange, which she does not need; a woman who's pissed off at having to be covered for maternity benefits when she's already got four kids, who has not even bothered to find out how much she'll be paying; and a large metropolitan area that isn't pissed off at all, though for some reason Boehner is.

• WATCH: “A woman in North Carolina has seen her insurance plan canceled and her premium’s increasing by over 50% due to Obamacare’s regulations, WRAL-NC reports.” (Free Beacon)

The woman in North Carolina is Ruth Ann Grimes, music director at a United Methodist Church in a Raleigh suburb, who wrote to the News Observer August 29:

Leave 'em laughing

The Blogger program in which these ruminations are compiled sometimes decides for no discernible reason that cut-and-paste passages from the New York Times (and only the Times, I'm not kidding, it does not do this with any other source) should be set in 1.5-em type. Normally I just change them, but this bit from Scott Shane's latest article on the NSA data collection seemed to convey so perfectly a fact about the NSA that nobody seems capable of understanding that I just thought I'd leave it big:

The point was not so much to catch the Iranian leader’s words, but to gather the data for blanket eavesdropping on Iran in the event of a crisis.

Dope springs eternal

Updated 10/16

They really can't help themselves. The zombie story of the martyrdom of the padres ministering to our Catholic troops who might imaginably have been arrested, though it took a pretty creative mind to imagine it (I gave it quite a bit of space here and here), continues to not die. Although it is quite clearly not true.

Thought you said Hagel fixed this. http://t.co/ZYAOAjI39C Hagel specifically blocked refunding contracted Catholic priests. @Yastreblyansky
— Doug Rink (@TalkSouthRadio) October 15, 2013

What appears to have happened is that a Father Ray Leonard (known around the parish house, I hope, as "Father Sugar Ray")  was due to start civilian chaplaining at the [jump]

Wolf pack. From Howling for Justice.

In breaking news, President Obama did not play 18 holes...

Heritage idiots:

Government Shutdown: Memorials Closed, Golf Course…Open?

Many government employees are on furlough. Veterans have been barred from their memorials. Yet despite the temporary slowdown in government, there’s one thing still open: Obama’s golf course.

Last week, the President paid a visit to one of his favorite courses at Andrews Air Force Base. Obama deemed that all military installations remain operational during the shutdown, and therefore, the golf course, too.

From American Stinker, uncredited, August 26, with an article by Thomas Lifson, the magazine's publisher. 

Actually, not one veteran was ultimately barred from the World War II Memorial, and it is now open for "First Amendment Activities". I never thought I'd be citing the Daily Caller for facts, but [jump]

News aggravators

Priests' hole, from Historic UK.

I can't believe RedAlert Politics hasn't done the latest SCANDAL about the Muslim Obama adminstration being determined to make all the Christians generally stomp on the Cross and spit on the sacred image of Reverend Gantry I mean Senator Sanctorum I mean.... But credit where credit is due, congratulations to them for resisting it. As for the rest of the rightwing noise machine...

Exchange

From BooMan Tribune, explaining maybe better than I could do with a normal post how I feel about the NSA horror show. I expect the brilliant and exceedingly well-informed Tarheel Dem (I don't often have courage to disagree with him, and much more often don't disagree at all) will be replying to my last over there, where you can keep following it if you're interested.

Big Data. From the GoodData blog.

Re: Serious Questions (4.00 / 2) Techies were always there on issues of privacy and of course drugs. They vote Republican because of taxes. They're only being political about privacy now because it's suddenly a Republican issue, and because the Snowden revelations reveal that rich white boys can be spied on. (Though in fact it's no likelier than it ever was.) by yastreblyansky on Sat Aug 17th, 2013 at 01:45:35 PM EST [ Parent | Reply to This ]

Re: Serious Questions (none / 0) You're saying there's a "rich white boy" block on NSA searches? 50 states, 210 media markets, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts by TarheelDem on Sat Aug 17th, 2013 at 01:47:25 PM EST [ Parent | Reply to This |   none 0-Mega Troll 1-Troll 2-Warning! 3-Good 4-Excellent  ] [jump]

Sixteen Scandals: Defiance

Story by Katrina Trinko in The Corner, in its entirety:

Steve King called for charities struggling to get 501 (c)(3) status to “defy the IRS.”

Both tea-party and pro-life groups have faced struggles in getting the IRS to give them tax-exempt status.

“If you’re a 501 (c)(3) and you’re afraid of the IRS, just go ahead and defy the IRS on that!” King declared during a speech at The Family Leader summit.

“I’ll stand there with you,” the Iowa congressman added. 

Leaving aside the question of whether "struggle" is the appropriate word for having to fill out kind of a lot of forms and lie about how you're really a social welfare organization and not involved in politics, and leaving aside the fact that many groups not affiliated with Tea Party or anti-choice movements have had to "struggle" in the same way, I want to know exactly what form this defiance, with Steve standing there, is going to take. Will they insist on paying the taxes they've been exempted from?

Sixteen Scandals: Missouri

Who knew? "College Republicans Deemed Security Threat at Obama Speech" http://t.co/y8McGEkcvl
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) July 26, 2013

If you Google something like "Central Missouri College Republicans Obama" you will get a lovely kind of picture of the right wing outrage wind machine getting into gear: [jump]

Scandalmongering

Updated 7/14/2013

Remember, the snark is only a sideshow. This is what it's really about. Whether there's to be a privately enforceable death penalty for walking while black.

Unbelievable and misuse of public funds. MT @WashTimes DOJ helped facilitate anti-Zimmerman protests in Florida http://t.co/OMI71fU1AH
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) July 10, 2013

This is an amazing pseudoscandal that has been blowing like the scirocco all day, beginning I guess with a report from Judicial Watch, a wingnut welfare dispensary (to be fair, they have targeted a number of genuinely corrupt Republicans) funded by Richard Mellon [jump]

Snowdeniana

Hong Kong. Photo by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty, via The Guardian.

Odd little detail, on the demonstrations yesterday in Hong Kong in support of Edward Snowden and his stand in favor of Hong Kong's famous tradition of unsurveilled* free speech: It should be obvious to anybody with any experience of the situation that the Beijing government is quietly backing the demonstrations—some protests in Hong Kong are in brave and magnificent opposition, but this is not one of them—and yet from the US press coverage it's just about impossible to tell; looking at the Times, CNN, and Reuters (via Raw Story), only the last even hints at it: [jump]

I polished up the handle so carefullee...

Updated

Incidentally, does anybody want to know why it is that the NSA can be collecting metadata on everybody's phone calls for the last seven years but when the Department of Justice wants the same information on 20 AP reporters over a two-month period they have to go to the AP with a warrant and ask for it?

H.M.S. Pinafore. Image from Leo Weekly, Louisville.

I imagine it's because they have a much better chance of getting what they want in a format they can use. Maybe the DOJ isn't even allowed to talk to NSA, but at least they probably just don't know how to, like FBI and CIA. And would rather not try, because they hate each other. Also, the NSA's information will turn out to be fantastically flawed.

Listen, every time you open up the GoogleBooks database you find an idiotic metadata mistake: like listing vol. 1567 of the US Congressional Edition, 1870, as being published in the year 1567, and the 1968 Handbook of Labor Statistics in 1600 (it's actually Bulletin no. 1600), so that if you do an n-gram search for the frequency of the word "expenditure" it shows these astonishing little leaps in the late 16th century, based entirely on bad coding. That's not the NSA, that's Google. Do you seriously think 10,000 government servants working in conditions of absolute secrecy can't do a worse job than Google, in all its glory?

Because if you give a government agency a worthwhile task to do in the open, they can do great things—really!—but if it is stupid, wasteful, and done in secret, they're going to make it worse. This is an ineluctable rule of fat government, and it's why the war departments are always the worst-run institutions in a given country, because they are where the mission managers congregate to suck up after one another and plan their promotions, from polishing up that handle (on the Big Front Door) to "writing" a revised manual of counterinsurgency strategy.

Putting it coarsely: If our national security establishment ever manages to build itself a dick of what it regards as the requisite size, will it be able to avoid stepping on it? I think not.

Image via HLN TV.

Update September 29:

The NSA is indeed not allowed to share data with FBI, CIA, or the National Counterterrorism Center. The proof is that they did it, apparently by mistake, allowing 250 analysts access to it between 2006 and 2009 when "the problem had been fixed". From a story of September 11 (!) at International Business Times.

Housekeeping

A few weeks ago I had another surgical intervention—just a fishing expedition among the detritus of what was once my glottis to see if any of those little things were malignant little things, which I'm glad to say they weren't. But an outcome seemed to be that I was a lot more tired than usual, or than easily explained by the usual combination of spleen, envy, and testosterone loss anxiety. Also couldn't exert myself without running out of breath owing to swelling around the airhole, and was losing ridiculous amounts of weight owing to eating taking a tremendous amount of time when you can't breathe. To make a long story shorter, yesterday we bit the bullet and punched the stoma hole back in my throat and put me on steroids, and I'm going to try gaining 15 pounds in the next two weeks (I guess that's why those scampi spoke to me so strongly yesterday, as the oxygen began to flow once more—I was hungry!).

Fruity dessert tacos, with a little jalapeño, from Taste of Home. Dollop of yogurt on mine, please.

Anyway that's also part of why I haven't been posting much lately. The Scandals had something to do with it too, but mainly because I couldn't think hard enough about them without falling to sleep. Anyway, hi everybody! Don't all get up or anything.

When servants go uncivil

Edward Lear, Uncle Arly.

Brooks's column, "When Governments Go Bad", begins with a quote:

Government, Clinton Rossiter once wrote, is something like fire: “Under control, it is the most useful of servants; out of control, it is a ravaging tyrant.”

This is however an awfully carefully pruned version of what that humblest of American New Conservatives actually said in his Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (1955): [jump]

Sixteen Scandals (continued)

David Brooks can tell a perfectly lucid story, you know, when he feels like it, especially when it's more or less true—truthfulness being a good writer's most elegant technique for achieving verisimilitude, though little appreciated.

Mosaic from Leptis Magna, Libya, via Mosaik.

Not that he's off the hook for today—in fact he turns out to be more than usually slimy—but truthful lucidity is one of the things he does with his column on Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman at the center of the BENGHAZI! scandal, as some have called it:

Sixteen scandals

Do not talk to this man unless a State Department lawyer is present. Jason Chaffetz, AP photo.

Thanks to Peggy Noonan, with her expert knowledge of how things work in a conspiratorial White House, I am starting at last to get a fix on what might have happened during the Benghazi incident in the alternate universe where Republicans are right about things.

I

President's private office, White House, 11 September 2012, 4:00 PM.

HENCHMAN: Mr. President? Bad news from Libya, I'm afraid.

OBAMA: Curses! Ex Africa semper aliquid novi! What is it this time?