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.

When thou criest let thy companies

Via.

You know how President Obama has been trying to get the CIA under presidential control for the first time in the agency's history and get it to act as an intelligence service instead of an Organisation de l'Armée Secrète? You don't? Well, it's not my fault.*

Anyway the keystone of the job, after installing the president's own personal creature to head the CIA (first Petraeus, whose specialty is to kiss up and smack down, and to implement an idea fanatically as if to prove that it was his own; and then after that flameout the [jump]

Election Day

Dear New Jersey,

Saw you this morning on your way to work, across the river, as I was getting into the bus myself, but too rushed to say "Hi." Don't forget to vote! I know it's unlikely, but as Slate's David Weigel told Barbara Buono this morning,

DW: I do remember when McGreevey almost beat Whitman, so that's always in my mind; the last poll was 20 points.

BB: Was it really?

DW: Polling wasn't as frequent or good back then. But the last poll was a Reuters poll, that had it at around 20, and it ended up being —

Sunday Obamacare martyr

Art by Jimmy Ernst, from WikiPaintings.

See, See Rider, 1946.

Today's Obamacare victim is Betsy Tadder, 52, of Rockton, Illinois, an over-the-border suburb of Janesville, Wisconsin who told Fox News that her current health insurance plan is being canceled as of December 13:

Right now, she pays $454 a month for health insurance, and the cheapest plan being offered as a replacement costs $871, she said. Tadder explained that the new plan includes benefits she doesn't need, like pediatric dentistry and maternity coverage.

Essentially, the government is telling her that her current plan is not good enough. [jump]

Greta van Susteren fails her Turing test!

You know those CAPTCHA devices?

A CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. The most common type of CAPTCHA was first invented by Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder. This form of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, a CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test. (Wikipedia)

Turns out that's the trouble with the healthcare.gov website, according to Fox's Greta van Susteren: she couldn't get past it.

Yes, folks, Obamacare doesn't allow robots to get insurance on the Marketplace exchange, and apparently Greta is—well—apparently Greta is a robot.*

*Or just hasn't ever seen a CAPTCHA before—at Fox they have servants to take care of that stuff.

Old Mr. Buckley does the Texas Tommy in the family vault!

Texas Tommy image via California State University at Long Beach.

Whatever has happened to the National Review since the grand old days when the True Conservatives were at least literate is not getting better. Eliana Johnson at NRO comes up with a marvelous new verb:

California senator Dianne Feinstein reveleated on Sunday that she told the White House, in the wake of the botched rollout of the health care exchanges, that the administration should pull down Healthcare.gov until it was functioning properly but that her advice was rejected. “They believe that they need to keep it running and that they can sort out the difficulties,” she said. 

Does it mean she sort of reveled in the revelation, or that she was bleating as she revealed it? Then, on the subject of the If-you-like-it–Gate Scandal,

Though she indicated that she is murky on the details of the law, she told CBS’ Bob Schieffer that “I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear” and, with regard to an individual’s ability to keep the insurance he is, “It is really very unclear, right now, exactly what the situation is.” 

Yes, I'm sure Obama repeatedly or perhaps repeleatedly said, "If you are it, you can keep it." 

Marathon Sunday

Run!!! pic.twitter.com/BDrNFFIJD5

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) November 3, 2013

The occasion is great and everything (good luck to my neigbor Mat Gerowetz!), no particular remarks from me, just blown away by the beauty of the Staten Island light as caught in this photo.

Leftist is as leftist does

AFL-CIO Now did a very nice piece, I thought, on effective ways of "kicking ass for the middle class" as exemplified by a bunch of labor and state legislature actions taking place around the country, and I felt compelled to reply to an unnecessarily unappreciative comment from a FireDogLake contributor called Bill Perdue. His ripostes to that got stuck in moderation purgatory, probably with reason in the first case, because he told me I was lying, which is pretty bad manners; but his second version isn't so bad, and I thought I'd run it here, with a lengthier response of my own, and an invitation to him to carry on the discussion if he wants.

Via plattsburgh.edu.

Bill_Perdue 

• 2 hours ago

It's the working class and you won't be doing any good until you abandon the Democrats and Republicans and reorganize the Labor Party and unleash to run against Democrats and Republicans and use it to help organize unions and educate the working class. [jump]

Sometimes the Tsar really doesn't!

Sargasso Sea, via WAITT Foundation.

Exactly 50 years ago:

Nov. 2, 1963: President Kennedy is stunned by a coup in South Vietnam. Details in WWR's @JFKElmStreet http://t.co/b77Qdd0d53
— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) November 2, 2013

Kennedy immediately blames the CIA [for the murders of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, which was not part of the coup plans]. "I've got to do something about those bastards," he later fumes. "They should be stripped of their exorbitant power." But the President also engages in a bit of spin control, saying "We have to make it clear this is not an American coup."

Of course we didn't know that Kennedy was blaming the CIA, did we? We only knew about the part where he was lying, denying the US had anything to do with the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem. And a lot of people were quite certain he was lying, quite rightly, but it hardly occurred to anyone that the coup was against his express will as president. But we now know that that was the case. And don't even talk about Hoover's FBI, which is known to have spied on the president himself.

Now we're all expressing astonishment over claims that Barack Obama may not have known that the NSA was gathering communications data of some kind on various European and Latin American heads of government and heads of state. [jump]

If you like it you can keep it

Lost in the furor over President Obama's deliberate, pervasive, and apparently gleeful FALSEHOOD!!! (four Pinocchiosin today's Washington Post) is the question of whom he was lying to, an answer to which is succinctly suggested by Sarah Kliff (sort of by chance, since the passage is meant for a somewhat different job), also in the Post, as it happens:

Image by Hyokka at DeviantArt.

While the federal exchange has gotten much attention in recent weeks, only a small fraction of Americans are expected to use the new marketplace to buy health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, by 2023, 24 million people will buy insurance through the state and federal exchanges; that’s about 7 percent of [jump]

Cheap shots: Engulfed in disorientation

Image from Uncyclopedia.

Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN, founding member with Congressman Diane Black of the Tennessee Transgender Caucus) got pretty literary in the hearings originally intended to expose the bad planning of the healthcare.gov website until it turned out that it was kind of working already and Secretary Sebelius had issued a preemptive apology, and then [jump]

More insurance fraud

As you know, I'm collecting examples of people claiming they liked it and couldn't keep it and giving those claims a bit of a closer look. Today's (Happy Halloween!) Obamacare victim is Sue Klinkhamer, a 60-year-old former Democratic congressional staffer from St. Charles, Illinois:

When Klinkhamer lost her congressional job, she had to buy an individual policy on the open market.

Three years ago, it was $225 a month with a $2,500 deductible. Each year it went up a little to, as of Sept. 1, $291 with a $3,500 deductible. Then, a few weeks ago, she got a letter. [jump]

Comment

Image from Exophrine.

Posted in comments at Emptywheel,10/28/13, on the Greenwald-Keller debate, though directed only to a point Marcy makes about the representation of white privileged perspectives; I've laid out parts of this argument elsewhere but I think I've put it together particularly well here:

I’m not the voice of color either, nor certainly the voice of Bill Keller either, thank God, but I’ve been paying enough attention to the former to have a feeling that the issue cuts a couple of different ways. First, right or wrong, many people [jump]

Monday morning cheap shot

Shit Gets Real >> Dick Cheney: It's 'Not True' Mike Enzi And I Are Fishing Buddies http://t.co/IezrqTyGNH
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 28, 2013

Just hooked him in the cheek that one time. Bad cast.

Dressed for defensive bass fishing with Dick "Largemouth" Cheney. Note the symbolic representation of emergent Liz. Via.

Why does Obama want you to have low testosterone?

And other conspiracies.

From an "opinion piece" by "Bill Tatro" in Townhall on our anti-colonial president. What's interesting to paranoia aficionados is the "1 weird trick" ad, which turns out to come in special right-wing editions. Who knew? And who knew Obama was to blame for your rundown feeling and lack of sex drive? I guess you knew, Mr. RWNJ, didn't you?

Mr. Tatro is possibly the only right-wing writer I've seen openly opposed to the American Revolution:

Star chamber

Ceiling of the Star Chamber, Palace of Westminster. The decoration is said to be the reason for the room's name.

Human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack is a hero, but she is an attorney, and she's using some loaded attorney language here:

US notifies defendant it'll use secret evidence. This is like the Star Chamber. Hope #SCOTUS rules unconstitutional. http://t.co/zrzPItjeJH
— Jesselyn Radack (@JesselynRadack) October 26, 2013

What exactly do you mean by "this", Counsel? I would say it is more precisely like the end of the Star Chamber. Because when Charles I was using the Court of Star Chamber in the 1630s to punish Puritan subversives he was definitely using techniques familiar to victims of [jump]

Sir Winston, you are drunk!

"Joe" the "Plumber" and his awesomely vile tweet as captured in Talking Points Memo:

To his remark about the history of the Democratic Party I would like to offer the Winston Churchill comeback: Yes, Joe, and Republicans have a history of favoring the gold standard. But we Democrats got over our problem 60 years ago, when we lost Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.

Cheap shots and googledipities

From Infidel753.

Found poem

From a Salon headline, with just a couple of tweaks:

Liberal Pundit Fail

Rush to attack Obamacare site
Can only aid unhingèd right.

Angela Merkel, Rahm Emanuel, Michael Hayden, and much, much more below:

Not so Quiet on the Rose-Garden Front

Via.

Mr. President, I think that war on journalists may not be going so well...

Or maybe "war" isn't quite the right term. Oval-Office Contingency Operations?

And they're shooting down people applying from their mobiles at Danziger Bridge

Because how comfy can you get inside an insurance policy? Image from Pertinent Perils.

"The one difference was Katrina was a storm, the health care law was Obama’s creation." -- @RonFournier
— gn (@GN192) October 23, 2013

Yes, virtually identical. As we mourn the 1,833 people who have died from the ravages of Obamacare over the past three weeks, the 200,000 homes destroyed, the 800,000 rendered homeless, the $150 billion in economic damage, we have to ask ourself once again: Doesn't God do enough harm? Why should our president get in the act as well?

Oh, one other difference: This time President Bush wasn't forced to interrupt his vacation. Also it is rumored that some people may be getting some affordable health insurance. Which is strange when you come to think about it: wouldn't you think they'd prefer some nice FEMA trailers?

Image from FoodMusicJustice.

h/t @gn192 for the inspiration.