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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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Friday Night Music

Friday, January 18, 2013

Last week I wondered who did put the ram in the ram a lang a ding dong, and I got in answer in the comments. Turns out it was Cynthia Weil Barry Mann, this information coming via a commenter, who included a list of some of the great songs the co-wrote. Being as I’m beginning to get desperate in this feature, I was glad to get the list, because I figured there’d be something on it that would give me an idea for this week. I settled on the Drifters, who I don’t believe I’ve ever used before. Amazingly, I found this video, which is a pretty good version, and yes, for you youngsters, performers really did dress like that in the 70s. The song, however, is from the early 60s, but there’s at least a better than even chance that these are the original Drifters (well, at least some of them), though I’m sure my last week’s commenter would know better than I.

Okay, speaking of the Drifters, I couldn’t resist adding this one. I first starting paying attention to popular music when I got my first transistor radio. Back then, the number of transistors was considered to make a difference. My radio had a respectable six, though within a couple of years, I graduated to eight. This song was big when I got my first little Channel Master, and it’s certainly stood the test of time. Again, the performance is from the 70s, but the song came out in 1960, the dawning of the Golden Age of rock.

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Wow

Thursday, January 17, 2013

As David Atkins, at Hullabaloo says, the Onion couldn’t top this, which actually appears in the Wall Street Journal:

Poor, sad rich people. My heart aches for them. 
Really, no additional comment needed, but speaking of the Onion, I read recently, can’t remember year, that this will be a year in which it will often be necessary to preface statements with phrases like, “This is not from the Onion”. Yes, indeed. 
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Connecticut Truther

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

This woman almost became Connecticut’s Attorney General:

Go to Martha Dean’s Facebook page. That will be the only time you read that sentence on Daily Ructions. Dean, the 2010 Republican nominee for Attorney General has since Monday appeared to use her Facebook page to boost the vile conspiracy vultures gathering over Newtown’s Sandy Hook elementary school. A few minutes watching the video that Dean links with a “NEWTOWN SETUP?” lead in will give you a feel for the toxic content.

(via Daily Ructions)

And yes, I just linked to Kevin Rennie’s blog, but even a stopped clock…

If memory serves, Dean’s was the only down ticket race that was close in 2010. I guess that’s one bullet Connecticut managed to dodge.

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