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The NRA’s enemies list

Monday, February 4, 2013

If you can judge an organization by those it considers its enemies, and I think you can, then ones judgment of the NRA must be rather harsh. Check out the distinguished list here. Far more thorough than Nixon’s. I wish I could get on it. 

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Incompetent Canadians, or just poorly equipped?

Saturday, February 2, 2013

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Police say a man ran through the hallways of a Vancouver apartment building, slashing seven people in what they believe was a completely random attack,

Sgt. Randy Fincham said Friday seven people were injured in the high rise building on the city’s west end during the attack Thursday night. Six people were taken to hospital and one woman remains in critical condition. Another bystander was treated at the scene and released.

(via Huffington Post)

All I can say is that here in America no self respecting crazy person would ever have botched the job this badly. All that work and maybe he managed to kill one person. Now, being a democrat, with both a small and large “d”, I believe in the equality of all, so I can’t buy into the argument, which certainly suggests itself from the facts, that Americans are simply inherently superior to Canadians, and that when we set out to do a job, we do it right.

No, I firmly believe that if this guy only had the right tools, he could have done the job right. With just one Bushmaster he could have climbed into the pantheon of mass murderers, right up there with Adam Lanza and all the rest of the American heroes that have been exercising their Second Amendment rights. I mean, in the time it took him to ineffectually slash away at seven people, he could easily have blown away thirty. I think the fault lies with the Canadian government, which has put roadblocks in the way of aspiring serial killers at every turn. Well, if that’s the way the Canadians want it, fine. They may beat us at hockey now and then, but when it comes to mass murder, we’ll stay number one.

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Book review review

Saturday, February 2, 2013

I subscribe to the digital edition of the Literary Review, a British magazine somewhat like the New York Review of Books, except unlike the New York Review, it really is solely dedicated to reviewing books.

I downloaded the February issue a few minutes ago, and seeing the word “Assholes” on the cover, without further elaboration, I just had to seek out the content inside to which this teaser applied.

Well, I wasn’t disappointed. The book under review is called Assholes, a Theory, by Aaron James. I’m very much hoping the book is as funny as the review, since after reading the review, I felt I just had to get the book. Certain it is that assholes seem to be proliferating faster than most varieties of humans. This perception, which I’m sure is widely shared, may not be true, however. It  may be that assholes may just have thrust themselves into positions of both power and visibility in greater numbers now than previously. Of course this is a chicken and egg sort of situation. Is it, for instance, harder for a non-asshole to get elected to office than for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle because being an asshole is a necessary pre-condition to being a successful politician, or is it because the assholes, once they got a foothold, changed the rules of the game so that only an asshole would want to play? I favor the latter theory. Being a political observer for many years, I would hardly deny that there have always been assholes in the political profession, but never, until recently, has it been the case that one of the two major parties was populated entirely by assholes, while the other was merely dominated by the breed.

As I said, the review is funny, but also perceptive. Certainly you can’t argue with the reviewer’s (Michael Bywater) choices for perfect exemplars of the type:

Identifying them is easy. James fingers, among others, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Simon Cowell and Mel Gibson. He claims, plausibly, that George W Bush wasn’t an asshole, but was in thrall to a lot of them, most notably the asshole’s asshole, Donald ‘Asshole’ Rumsfeld. The argument is readily extended. The current coalition government is mostly composed, not of assholes (with the surprising exception of Iain Duncan Smith), but of twats, amateurs and posh fuckwits. It may be a flaw in James’s thesis that he lacks the experience of the Etonian asshole; but, equally, he lacks the counter-argument of royalty, the great advantage of which is that it guarantees that our nominal head of state may, as occasionally happens, be a tyrant, a shmuck or an idiot, but never an asshole because his or her supreme entitlement is constitutionally enshrined so need not ever be exerted.

(via Literary Review – Michael Bywater on Aaron James)

Of course there’s plenty to quibble with there. Mr. Bywater is British, and can be forgiven for his credulous acceptance of James’s assertion that George W. Bush is not an asshole. We Americans know better, but we had far more exposure to the man. So, just as we can be forgiven for not recognizing the “Etonian asshole”, Bywater can be forgiven for not recognizing the American equivalent.

As a man, I was heartened to learn that, while my sex contributes the vast majority of assholes to the planet, women can qualify, as Bywater convincingly demonstrates:

Perhaps controversially, James also questions the belief that assholes are always men. Received opinion has it that a female who betrays asshole qualities is, by simple linguistic convention, referred to as a ‘bitch’. Not so – he cites as an example the rabid right-wing ‘commentator’, the spittle-flecked horror Ann Coulter. The difference? ‘The bitch betrays you behind your back. The asshole fails to recognize [your justifiable complaints] to your face.’

A thoroughly convincing argument. I highly recommend this book review, which is why I’m reviewing it here. It was timely reading for me. I had a trial scheduled for this coming week in which the plaintiff (I’m representing the defendants) is, without doubt, the biggest asshole it has ever been my misfortune to meet, which is saying a lot, because that means he tops any asshole lawyer I’ve ever run into, and though I have nothing but respect for most members of my profession, the assholes among us are of the first water. So, click on the link and read the entire review. Unless you’re an asshole.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, February 1, 2013

It’s a shame that the Beatles stopped live performances at some point in their career, so that for a fairly large percentage of their time together, there are only videos like this of some of their better songs. This is topical and, since the right tends to not get irony, might very well become the theme song for the NRA.

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Sarah bows out

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Sarah Palin has been in the news lately for no longer being in the news. Providing, of course that you call Fox news. Mostly Sarah is now the butt of jokes, like here. Yes, Sarah is done. She made a lot of money, and may make more in the future, but her days of high profile grifting are over, and I just want to say I told you so, even though I told you so while wrongly predicting she’d run in 2012:

For a number of Republicans, running for President has nothing to do with actually wanting to be President-it’s a money making move. Sarah has found, in recent months, that even the idiot media can in fact get enough of her if she’s not in the game. Her shelf life has nearly expired and the only way to reinvigorate it is for her to get back in the mix. She can keep her brand in the black for years after the next election, because after she loses she can play the victim of the media, the Democrats, and the Republican establishment, which she can blame for denying her the nomination she doesn’t really want. She could potentially grift for at least four more years nursing that grievance, and go out with an avalanche of cash in 2012 by going the distance as a third party candidate. If she doesn’t get back in the game she’ll just be another Christine O’Donnell, reduced to walking off of a TV set just to generate some short term buzz.

(via CT Blue › A prediction)

Poor Sarah, she didn’t even get to do that walk off. She was kicked off instead.

Addendum: I put this post in the “Sarah Palin” category. This is probably the last time I use that category, making it one of many orphans in the strip running down the right hand side of the page. Perhaps none of those orphans acquired that status faster than the “Mitt Romney” category. Remember him? He ran for president once. 

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Awesome

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Paul Simon sang that we live in an age of miracles and wonders. And we do. But we also live in an age of awe inspiring insanity. The Age of Reason, which spawned this great land, has given way to the Age of Unreason. The latest example, which breaks new ground in legal unreasoning, is contained in a brief filed in the Supreme Court, opposing gay marriage:

The traditional marriage laws “reflect a unique social difficulty with opposite-sex couples that is not present with same-sex couples — namely, the undeniable and distinct tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended pregnancies,” wrote Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush. “Unintended children produced by opposite-sex relationships and raised out-of-wedlock would pose a burden on society.”

“It is plainly reasonable for California to maintain a unique institution [referring to marriage] to address the unique challenges posed by the unique procreative potential of sexual relationships between men and women,” argued Washington attorney Charles J. Cooper, representing the defenders of Proposition 8. Same-sex couples need not be included in the definition of marriage, he said, because they “don’t present a threat of irresponsible procreation.”

(via Daily Kos)

Now, the writer at Daily Kos goes on to patiently explain why this is balls out crazy, but that’s the wrong tack to take. Anyone who needs such an explanation is too far gone. No, just put it up there and stand in awe. This is America in the Age of UnReason. Prepare for more awe when the Supreme Court that ruled that James Madison intended for every American to have the right to an assault weapon tops itself by restricting marriage to heterosexual couples because only they have the biological equipment necessary to have unplanned babies.

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Call me a cynic

Monday, January 28, 2013

Crotchety old man time.

Today I received an email from my local bar association about a gun buy back program. I don’t question the motivation of these programs, but is there an iota of evidence that they do any good?

I don’t have a gun. I do have an Ipad, which is getting old. If someone offered me an Ipad “buy-back” program, I might very well use it, pocket the cash, and get myself a brand spanking new and improved Ipad. I suspect these programs may in fact just be a way of subsidizing the purchase of newer and more powerful guns. How many NRA members are laughing their way to the gun show?

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Bipartisan fail

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Looks like the cave on the filibuster is almost complete. It’s unclear if Reid was did it because he wanted to, or because he didn’t have the votes, but it’s definitely yet another bipartisan “solution” that will merely exacerbate the problem it purportedly addresses. I’m no parliamentarian, but even I can see that this only means that the Republicans will gum up the works at a slightly different point in the process.

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Another meme debunked

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

I came upon this via Dean Baker. It’s worth reading, as it explodes another of the memes that gets endlessly repeated until it becomes something everyone knows, when there’s precious little truth in it. In this case, it’s the fable that jobs are going begging in this country because our school systems are simply not producing quality people. A far more persuasive case can be made that American corporations are incompetent when it comes to hiring people. The article in question is a review of Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It a book by Peter Capelli, a prof at the Wharton Business School. The thrust of the book is that American corporations put needless impediments in the way of potential employees:

Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management, is a connoisseur of job-hunting stories gone wrong. One of his favorites was related to him by someone in a company whose staffing department failed to identify a qualified candidate for a “standard engineering position”—out of 25,000 applicants. Another comes from a software developer who was turned down for a job that involved operating a particular brand-name software-testing tool—despite the fact that he had actually built just such a tool himself. Adding insult to inanity, another time he was deemed unqualified because “I didn’t have two years of experience using an extremely simple database report formatting tool, the sort of thing that would require just a couple hours for any half-decent database wrangler to master.”

(via Penn Gazette | Home Depot Syndrom, the Purple Squirrel, and America’s Job Hunt Rabbit Hole)

It’s a lengthy review, and an isolated quote doesn’t do it justice. It’s hard to argue with the proposition that it makes no sense to automatically exclude an otherwise qualified job applicant from consideration because he or she had a low GPA in high school, as many of the computers that have take over the hiring process have been programmed to do. The prevailing philosophy appears to be that if a person isn’t 100% ready to perform every aspect of a job, no learning curve allowed, then he or she will not be considered. Just another way in which the younger generation of Americans is being royally screwed. As the article points out, important sectors of our economy were created by people who lacked the credentials to get jobs in their field today:

In a 2011 op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal, Cappelli remarked on a telling statistic from the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s: only 10 percent of the people in IT jobs had IT-related degrees. But a lot of the same people would probably have a hard time landing similar jobs today, because employers have increasingly adopted what Cappelli calls “a Home Depot view of the hiring process, in which filling a job vacancy is seen as akin to replacing a part in a washing machine.

The “skills gap” is a meme embraced to a greater or lesser extent by politicians in both parties, including Obama and Romney. This is yet another illustration of what I hereby christen CtBlue’s law: there is an inverse relationship between the validity of any given proposition and the extent to which that proposition is accepted by a bi-partisan consensus. Beware of bi-partisanship, and most especially, fear unanimity.

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Shameless muckraking at the Times

Sunday, January 20, 2013

According to the New York Times, the recent “fiscal cliff” deal was a good deal for drug maker Amgen:

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the “fiscal cliff” bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.

The language buried in Section 632 of the law delays a set of Medicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysis patients.

The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The news was so welcome that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts. But it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period.

(via NYTimes.com)

Amgen spread its money around in a bi-partisan fashion, particularly to Mitch McConnell and Max Baucus, whose former chiefs of staff now lobby for Amgen. McConnell has a former Amgen employee on his payroll, and both he and Baucus have benefitted from Amgen’s financial largesse, and there seems no doubt that the provision in question was inserted, in noble bi-partisan fashion, by the two Senators, with the White House, also a sometime beneficiary, looking the other way.

My wife, with whom I usually agree, asked how anyone could fail to see this as straight out corruption.

As I say, I usually agree with her, but she’s flat out wrong on this occasion. McConnell and Baucus had only the interests of the patients at heart. The fact that these drugs are currently being overprescribed to the patient’s detriment must, after all, be weighed against the drawbacks of overhasty action:

Supporters of the delay, primarily leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who have long benefited from Amgen’s political largess, said it was necessary to allow regulators to prepare properly for the pricing change.

…

Aides to Mr. Hatch and Mr. Baucus, and a spokeswoman for Amgen, said the delay would give the Medicare system and medical providers the time they needed to accommodate other complicated changes in how federal reimbursements for kidney care were determined.

“Sometimes when you try to do too much and too quickly, you screw up,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch. The goal, an Amgen spokeswoman said in a written statement, is “to ensure that quality of care is not compromised for dialysis patients.”

So true. The evidence is compelling, or at least I’m sure it would be if either McConnell or Baucus had produced any.

Some might say that the two year delay the company got in 2008 (over and above the delay for other drugs), which would have expired in 2014 should have been sufficient, given that the government would have had six years to accommodate the other complicated changes and that a total of eight years to accomplish this task seems unnecessary. They might argue, for instance, that it will take the government more than twice as long to perform this complicated task than it took to win World War II, including developing the atomic bomb, and almost as long as the period of time between our first rocket launch and the day the first man walked on the moon. But that just shows how little such critics know about the relative complexities of the problems involved. Building the a-bomb was a piece of cake compared with figuring out if Sensipar should be treated the same way as every other dialysis drug.

Besides, it’s not like we’re really losing money on Amgen. Sure, this delay will cost us taxpayers $500 million dollars. You read that right, million with an “m”; we’re not even talking billions here. It’s hardly worth thinking about. But consider: Amgen just agreed to pay a $762 million dollar criminal penalty, so that puts us $262 million dollars to the good. Moreover, there’s every reason to believe Amgen will continue to break the law, so it’s overwhelmingly likely the government will hit the jackpot again. Why, we’d be crazy not to give Amgen as much rope as we can.

So I can’t figure out why the Times bothered to waste space on this article. This is the sort of thing that gives the news media a deservedly bad image. We don’t need no education on stuff like this. It’s just not right to imply that hard working public servants like Baucus and McConnell would compromise the public interest for filthy lucre with such overwhelming evidence that they have only our interests at heart.

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