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German Tax Dollars at Work

Thursday, October 24, 2013

The saintly new pope has seen fit to put a German bishop on leave. Seems he forgot that vow of poverty they take. At least I was always told they took one:

The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the “bishop of bling” by the media over his alleged lavish spending.

Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is accused of spending more than 31m euros (£26m; $42m) on renovating his official residence.

The Vatican said it deemed “appropriate… a period of leave from the diocese” for the bishop.

The suspension comes two days after he met the Pope to discuss the matter.

The BBC's Stephen Evans: “Outside the cathedral, people expressed some satisfaction that the bishop had been suspended”
“A situation has been created in which the bishop can no longer exercise his episcopal duties”, a Vatican statement said.

It said a Church commission would rule on the matter, but did not say where Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 53, would go or what he would do while the inquiry was held.

The head of Germany's main lay Catholic group, the Central Committee of German Catholics, Alois Glueck, welcomed the Vatican's decision.

via BBC News

It's really hard to see what the Pope's problem is, since the German taxpayers are footing the bill:

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst – and his spending habits – had become infamous in Germany, where many people pay Church tax to the state. The tax raised 5.2bn euros for Catholics and 4.6bn euros for Protestants in 2012.

And, anyway, the good bishop needed the money to do good works:

He was criticised for a first-class flight to India to visit the poor.

I mean, what did they expect him to do? Walk to India barefoot? Plus, give the guy credit, it takes a special person to even figure out a way to spend $42 million on a single residence. That kind of money makes Mitt Romney's house with the car elevator a shack by comparison.

What was it that Jesus said?

25 [I]t is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Perhaps the good bishop figures he's found a loophole; after all, strictly speaking, the money he's spending doesn't belong to him in the first place, so technically, he's not rich, he just gets to live like a rich man.

ALMOST COMPLETELY UNRELATED ADDENDUM: By way of treating my readers to a bit of scholarship, I'll pass on something I learned in second grade about the above quote from our lord and savior. We had a priest teaching us religion that year, so you know this is true. It is not as hard for a camel to go through a needle's eye as you might think. The very narrow gates leading into walled cities were, in that day and age (according to our priest and some of the folks here) referred to as “needle's eyes”. It was not at all impossible to maneuver a fully loaded camel through this aperture, but it was, indeed, quite difficult, so there's more hope for the rich than appears at first blush. So there you go, in addition to some good old fashioned mockery, you've learned something new.

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Sometimes simple makes sense

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

An interesting post at Hullabaloo. Digby links to a commentary arguing that the unfortunate number of glitches affecting the Obamacare website are proof of, rather than proof against, the superiority of classic twentieth century liberalism over the weird mix of federal government, state governments, and rent-seekers that it has become trendy to think deliver services more efficiently, and upon which Obamacare relies.

Mike Konczal has written a provocative post that is getting quite a bit of play today and is well worth reading. He posits that the rough Obamacare rollout is a direct consequence of misplaced faith in neo-liberal solutions, which he defines in this instance as a reliance on means testing, privatization, devolution to the states, all in the pursuit of “choice” and “competition” as the best ways to provide services at an affordable choice. He contrasts that with the New Deal style programs which are universal, federal government run programs:

Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of a governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism. This point is floating out there, and it turns out to be a major problem for conservatives as well, so let's make it clear and explicit here.

She points out that there is a certain breed of “liberal”, Joe Klein being her Exhibit A, that feel that the New Deal approach of coming up with a simple and direct solution to a problem is really just too passé, because, …you know, computers and all.

She delivers up a particularly juicy quote from Klein, and observes:

He just asserts that people must need more choices about where their retirement money is held and where they get their health care because the world is now like a computer. I don't know why. And considering what we're currently going through with the Obamacare web-site rollout, that statement is more hilariously absurd than ever.

This is quite a common phenomenon among the punditminati. Positing causation when there is no relationship between the asserted cause and the alleged effect. Arguing from analogies that do not bear inspection. Employing metaphors that make no sense. Claiming that since some things have changed, all things, no matter how unrelated, must change. All, oddly enough, in service to the underlying proposition that we really must, for our own self evident good, redistribute from the masses to the upper classes.

The article to which she refers is well worth reading. I think it demonstrates rather compellingly that while Roosevelt didn't have a computer, he had the right idea about how to efficiently deliver essential services.

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Someone watches over us

Friday, October 18, 2013

Apparently someone once said, though no one know who, that “God takes care of fools, drunks, and the United States of America”. Given recent events, even we non-believers must pause and wonder sometimes.

Consider this. The present day Democratic Party must be the most incompetent political party that has ever maintained its existence on the face of the earth. There is only one exception, and that appears to be the present day Republican Party. Given the media environment in this country, given their huge advantage in money, and given their success in destroying the economy, while a Democrat has been president, in a way that has mostly been under the radar, the Republicans should be shoo-ins to sweep in 2014 and crush the Democrats in 2016. Yet, right now it looks like this is not to be, and that once again the Republicans will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

We can perhaps forgive them for not believing that Obama would stand firm in the recent debt limit/government shutdown fight. After all, despite the advice of eminent bloggers such as myself, he's caved before. But, having suffered a crushing defeat due to the fact that they acted in an utterly insane manner, they are now convincing themselves that they weren't crazy enough.

For a certain block of House conservatives, the ones who drove Speaker John Boehner toward a government shutdown and near-default against his will, the lesson of the last few weeks isn't that they overreached. Not that they made unachievable demands, put their leadership in an impossible position, damaged their party's position with the public and left a deep uncertainty about whether the GOP conference can recover and legislate.

No, what they're taking away from the 2013 crisis is: They didn't go far enough.

They aren't angry with Speaker John Boehner for ultimately capitulating to Democratic demands. They're frustrated with their more mainstream colleagues who put him in that position.

“I'm more upset with my Republican conference, to be honest with you. It's been Republicans here who apparently always want to fight, but they want to fight the next fight, that have given Speaker Boehner the inability to be successful in this fight,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) told reporters Wednesday. “So if anybody should be kicked out, it's probably those Republicans… who are unwilling to keep the promises they made to the American people. Those are the people who should be looking behind their back.”

via Talking Points Memo

There is a certain weird symmetry (or is it asymmetry? ) in American politics. When Republicans lose, they blame it on the fact that they weren't right wing enough, despite the fact that when they are actually honest about their positions, voters desert them in droves. When Democrats lose, they also blame it on the fact that they weren't right wing enough, despite ample evidence that there is widespread support for what are now considered far left positions, such as maintaining Social Security at its current levels, or taxing the rich at, say, the same rate or even higher than the rest of us pay. If a day ever came when Democrats advocated for what people actually want as forcefully as Republicans advocate for the smokescreens they use to hide their real policies, we might see some progress in this country. In the meantime, the believers among us can only thank God for protecting the USA from a fate worse than what we are actually getting, and the non-believers among us can only shake our heads and wonder.

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Friday Night Music Returns

Friday, October 18, 2013

At least I think it will, assuming I can tie some disparate strands together.

Now that Obama has won his victory over the contumacious tea partiers, we can safely go back to criticizing him for his many failings, chief among which is his coddling of Wall Street. Pam Martens, the normally sensible blogger at Wall Street on Parade does just that today, but I'm sorry to say that she's totally off the mark. She takes offense at the Administration's implicit claim that it effectively pursues Wall Street criminals by nailing a few lower downs and fining the banks. Some might say this is a little like jailing Mafia thugs and letting the Godfather off with a fine, which he, by the way, doesn't pay personally, but extracts from the folks who have to pay protection, or, in the case of the banks, people we call “shareholders” or “depositors”. She writes:

Jeffrey St. Clair, Editor at CounterPunch, sums up the situation perfectly in his column on the web site today:

“Obama is the executive manager of what the British punk band the Mekons called the ‘Empire of the Senseless.’ By this, I don’t mean an empire that is inchoate, but a government that doesn’t sense, that doesn’t feel, that is immune to the conditions and desires of the governed.”

As the market now anticipates JPMorgan moving from a $1 billion settlement to an $11 billion settlement, the Obama administration seems incapable of understanding that these escalating sums simply means that crime is out of control; that money does not equal justice.

via Wall Street on Parade

As I said, she's normally sensible, but she's got this all wrong. In this country, in this time, money, not man, is the measure of all things. It is only right and just, that our modern day crime bosses can cleanse themselves of sin by payment of money. It's sort of like buying an indulgence, and we all know how fair that was. Besides, Martens must have a skewed idea of the concept of justice. Those of us who have read Plato's Republic carefully are well aware that poor Socrates tried manfully, but never really did rebut Thrasymachus's claim that justice was “the will of the stronger”. Rather than complain, we should be thankful that the banks deign to throw some money our way to atone for their sins.

And that brings us to the music, which illustrates the point. There's only one thing that matters, and it's not justice:

By the way, in addition to the inestimable Randy, this video features Mark Knopfler and David Sanborn. Great musicians and great big dollops of truth, all in one place!

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New London makes news

Thursday, October 17, 2013

New London, the fair metropolis just to the west of my adopted town of Groton, has proven yet again that, despite appearances, it is not just a jerkwater town dominated by a giant highway entrance that destroyed most of the historic center of town so that people could be spirited to Groton to build instruments of death. the town is far more than that; it is a place where cutting edge research is done. No, not at the Pfizer campus, built and then abandoned by a soulless corporation. I'm talking about venerable Connecticut College, where researchers have proven what many might feel is fairly obvious, but must nonetheless be rigorously proven: that Oreos are more addictive than cocaine. At least rats find Oreos more compelling, and I see no reason to believe the results don't hold true for us humans. After all, at least when it comes to Oreos, rats seem to be spookily like us humans:

What was surprising – and I’m not kidding – the rats preferred to open the Oreos and eat the middle first, then eat the cookie outside. Seriously.

via Americablog

I can well and truly believe that Oreos are addictive, though I myself have gone cold turkey in the Oreo department for many years. For, lets face it, in the world of sugar addiction, Oreos are the marijuana to the many forms of sugary heroin out there. I myself prefer my drug of choice to be delivered in fairly pure form, in the darkest of chocolates. Why adulterate it with flour, regardless of how little there may be in the Oreo sugar delivery module? I'm sure if given a choice, the rats would agree with me.

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Hypocrisy, Texas style

Thursday, October 17, 2013

No additional comment needed:

After years of trying to undermine the Affordable Care Act, Texas lawmakers are suddenly embracing President Obama’s signature domestic policy accomplishment. On Thursday, the Texas Tribune reported that the state is shuttering a state-based health care program and encouraging Texans to sign-up for coverage in the federally-run health care exchange.

Texas’ high risk pool program, which opened in 1998, provides coverage to individuals and families with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t find insurance in the individual health care market. But since the ACA’s exchanges began enrolling beneficiaries, the state deemed the program obsolete, arguing that Texans could find a better deal in the federally-run exchange:

The state has deemed the high-risk pool obsolete, as the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance companies participating in the federal marketplace, which launched on Oct. 1, from denying coverage to Texans with pre-existing conditions. Gov. Rick Perry signed Senate Bill 1367 in June, scheduling the pool’s abolishment.

The pool will close Jan. 1, and the 23,000 people currently participating in the pool must sign up for coverage on the insurance exchange by Dec. 15 or find coverage elsewhere to avoid a lapse in care.

via Think Progress

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Humpty Dumpty, ur-Republican

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

One of my favorite exchanges in literature appears in Alice in Wonderland. Humpty Dumpty tells Alice:

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

To which Alice-remember Alice?-, replies:

“The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Bu the far wiser Mr. Dumpty sets her straight:

“The question is, which is to be master—that's all.”

The Republicans may just have had their heads handed to them but that doesn't stop them from proving their mastery over the poor, helpless words that they torture regularly. Turns out, for instance, that only a lying journalist could claim that the Republicans were ever trying to use extortion to repeal Obamacare. And it's not the word “extortion” that they choose to master, it's the word “repeal”.

According to Congresscritter Raúl Labrador (R-ID), Rep. Labrador says “it's 'absolutely false' that GOP sought Obamacare repeal. 'We have never asked for a full repeal of Obamacare…'

You might have thought otherwise, but that was undoubtedly before Labrador and his friends proved their mastery over the word "repeal”. The poor guy was helpless before them. A mere six letters and two forlorn syllables could never withstand the combined attack of the Republican Masters of Words. In this case, as Jed Lewison at Daily Kos explains, there is a crucial distinction that those of us who think like Alice could never have seen or manufactured:

So if you said Labrador and his fellow Republicans were demanding Obamacare repeal in this government shutdown, you're totally lying, because they weren't demanding Obamacare repeal, they were merely demanding the Obamacare be defunded until 2015 because they were united in support of “getting rid of Obamacare.”

And, as everybody knows, there's an enormous difference between “repealing Obamacare” and “getting rid of Obamacare.” So if you're one of the lying liars who is accusing Republicans of trying to use the government shutdown and threat of default as leverage to repeal Obamacare, you need to start telling the truth: They were simply trying to get rid of it.

Of course, the Republicans have an easier job than did Humpty. Back in his day there were lots of people who thought just like Alice. But in these modern times our media, at least, are far more flexible. After all, what appears to a neutral observer as a “cut” to a program can be perceived by our press as merely a “change”. It couldn't be that hard for them to go along with seeing a crucial distinction between getting rid of a law and repealing it.

One might ask why the Republicans need to make work for the staff of the OED. It’s really quite simple. If they weren’t trying to repeal Obamacare, then they didn’t just get their clocks cleaned. And, at the risk of summoning the shade of Lewis Carroll again, if they say it three times it is true.

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Words fail me

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

It's been a while since I've posted; primarily, it's true, because I've been away, but at least secondarily because-I admit it, I'm incapable of performing my job as a blogger. I could cheat, of course, and use a Thesaurus, but absent that expedient, I'm simply not up to the task. I can't come up with yet another adjectival equivalent to insane, stupid, or outrageous to apply to the Republican party and the allegedly sentient beings that it chooses to send to Congress. Even Shakespeare would have run dry by now.

So, I shall take this opportunity to retreat to the world of baseball. Go Sox! Also, here's a short video of a moocow from my recent trip to Vermont. Apropos of nothing, but she was a very nice cow, who, for a cow, showed surprising interest in us when we stopped to take her picture. Still, just a cow. Smarter and more judicious than your average Republican, but nowhere near as smart as a dog.

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More Good News

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Our local paper, The New London Day is really not a bad rag, but the editors there seem to be obsessed with placating a small but vocal number of local right wingers, who continually accuse it of bias, no matter how much it bends over backward to appease them. This recently led me to pen the following Letter to the Editor, about a global warming denying editorial cartoon it elected to publish.

A recent poll found that the typical conservative political candidate overestimated his or her district's conservatism by 20 points, while the typical liberal candidate overestimated the conservatism by around 5 percentage points. The effect on public policy that results has been pernicious, to say the least.

But politicians, of both the left and the right, are completely in tune with their constituents compared to the New London Day, which has historically tried to appease those that accuse it of a liberalism the rest of us can not perceive. Give it up, Editors. Nothing you do will stop the accusations.

Case in point: I was aghast to see the Day hand off editorial page space to a cartoonist who is a climate denier, which cartoon contained a factual assertion (that the icecaps are not melting) that is demonstrably untrue. Global warming is a fact. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that warming is attributable to man's actions. Denying this reality is, at this point, as absurd as claiming the earth is flat.

The Day was recklessly irresponsible in running this cartoon. It cannot be justified by the trope that “both sides” of an issue deserve to be presented to the public. Sometimes, there is only one side, and then there are the liars and propagandists. The fact that the Koch Brothers want us to believe that global warming is a myth does not make their arguments any more credible. Rather than helping to spread their lies, the Day should consider educating its readers about the right wing money machine that is seeking, now with the Day's help, to delude the American people into ignoring the most important issue of our times.

Well, the letter never got published, as it exceeded their word limit. Rather than sacrifice a single syllable of my deathless prose, I elected not to butcher it. And no, the fact that the citizens of New London County were spared this letter is not the good news. I haven't reached that yet.

The good news is that the LA Times has elected to go where the Day fears to tread:

The Los Angeles Times hit back at climate deniers on Tuesday while defending its decision to not publish op-ed letters that deny global warming.

The newspaper reiterated its position on the letters after Newsbusters, a conservative media watchdog, criticized its policy over the weekend. A Times editorial about Obamacare had noted that “ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” do not get printed.

Times' letters editor Paul Thornton addressed the criticism in another op-ed.

“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” he explained. “Saying 'there's no sign humans have caused climate change' is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

via The Huffington Post

This truly is good news- a deviation from the typical media claim that it's not their job to differentiate between honest factual disputes and lies or delusions. Who knows, this may spread. There are signs on another front that the media is beginning to understand what we left wing bloggers have known for years: that both sides are not equally at fault for our dysfunctional government. It only took a government shutdown, the threat of default, and craziness so intense that even the corporations that thought they owned the Republican Party are now acknowledging that the inmates have taken over, but hey, it's still progress.

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Okay then, that makes sense

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

We all remember the meme about the tea party person who demanded that the government keep its hands off his or her Medicare. I spent a fair amount of time one day googling around to document that it was fact based, and while I'm not prepared to say it wasn't, I found no evidence that it was. As Stephen Colbert might say, it was very truthy, but as some might also say, it might not have been true.

Well, the truthy is now more than true:

“I don’t think that the government should be involved in health care or health insurance,” says Greg Collett, a 41-year-old software developer in Caldwell, Idaho, who would rather pay the fine for now – $95 the first year – than signup….

Collett counts himself among the 29 percent of people who said in an NBCNews/Kaiser poll they are angry about the health reform law. “The issue for me is that it is not the proper role of government,” he said.

Collett, who is married and has 10 children, says the kids are covered by Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance plan for people with low income and children who are not covered.

via Buzzflash

Awesome.

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