Author Archives: cassandra_m

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"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

Sen. Tom Carper Talks About State-Run Public Options

This video from the Nightly Business Report is not embeddable, but click here and the player should come up for you. There is a transcript, too.

Sen. Carper’s interview with NBR focuses largely on his proposal for states to create their own Public Options until the reporter asks him about the plan to create a federal Public Option and let states opt out. He pretty quickly acknowledges that new suggestion and moves the conversation to a discussion of the CBO scoring. If you are looking at the video, this starts around minute 2:00.

One of our commenters here remarked that we’d have to watch Carper as he works to protect the interests of his insurance company funders and tries to water this down. I think that this interview is the “tell” that Carper may not be nearly as interested in the opt out initiative as in the states create their own plan.

Always worth watching — since you can usually win with a bet that Carper will vote with his funders than for his constituents.

Friday Afternoon Bacon Blogging — DIY Bacon Vodka

Bacon-flavored vodka seems to be all the rage right now, with a couple of expensive and hard-to-find versions out on the market. But making your own seems like a perfect fall weekend project. Plus you can make enough to give as hostess gifts or other gifts for the upcoming holidays. This recipe is courtesy of the blog Brownie Points:bacon_vodka

Bacon Vodka

makes up one pint

Fry up three strips of bacon.
Add cooked bacon to a clean pint sized mason jar. Trim the ends of the bacon if they are too tall to fit in the jar. Or you could go hog wild and just pile in a bunch of fried up bacon scraps. Optional: add crushed black peppercorns.
Fill the jar up with vodka. Cap and place in a dark cupboard for at least three weeks. That’s right- I didn’t refrigerate it.
At the end of the three week resting period, place the bacon vodka in the freezer to solidify the fats. Strain out the fats through a coffee filter to yield a clear filtered pale yellow bacon vodka.

Decant into decorative bottles and enjoy.

Be sure to go to the link and read the comments on this post — there are lots of interesting variations on this recipe and even a recipe for bacon-flavored bourbon.

Calling ‘Em Out

Time Magazine reports that the White House is getting more aggressive in taking on the disinformation that gets into the press:

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to “fact-check” Obama’s many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new “sex clinics” in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to “call ’em out.”

It’s about time. The ‘death panels’ lie persisted in the media for several days (if not more) before you even began to hear the journalistic hedge of some say there are no death panels in the bill. Chuck Grassley went back to Iowa and dutifully scared people, lying about the government shouldn’t be able to pull the plug on grandma. There’s Michele Bachmann who pretty is making up a ton of stories about whatever comes into here head (there’s something about her that reminds me of watching my college buds after they dropped a tab of acid). You can run down the litany of lies daily and you can count on one hand how many times the media will actually note that.

I’m obviously not a J School grad, but I am always gobsmacked when some media type reminds us that much fact-checking material is fed to them from some opposition. Damned odd. Especially since bills and other real info are up for review from desktops everywhere. Then people remind me that fact-checking costs money. And then I ask them how it is that simply writing down what someone says with no context gets to be journalism.

Wingnuts everywhere will get their pout-rage on over this. But as far as I’m concerned, if the media treats the swiftboaters, the teabaggers, the bullies and the liars as newsmakers there is something self-protective about doing the one thing that the media should be doing. Calling them out on the lies. And pushing the media to do better.

Late Night Video — Autotuning Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking

There is something oddly fitting about this autotuned tribute to Dr. Sagan. You wonder what the point of it is, but here is an exuberant remix of the words of one man whose exuberant sense of wonder and delight in the world and the stars just charmed you right into sharing that wonder and delight. I loved the Cosmos series and loved to hear Dr. Sagan speak on long form programs like Charlie Rose or the Tomorrow show. And today I discovered that Cosmos can be watched again via Hulu.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc[/youtube]

Late Night Video — Call GOP Senator David Vitter with Your Prostitution Questions!

Senator David Vitter has been up in arms about the whole ACORN business — where a scam prostitution crew tries to get a mortgage — that it seems more than fair to get the Senator to talk about his expertise with prostitution:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCesaJ479Vw[/youtube]

Make sure you call!

CBO Score on Baucus Bill Completed

The CBO score (this is a pdf) was delivered on the Finance Committee bill this afternoon and the news is at first blush — good. Good in that it will keep the process rolling to its next step which is a vote out of Committee so the work at merging the HELP and Finance bills can proceed. Key highlights:

  • Costs of this bill are $829 billion over the next decade,
  • would reduce the deficit by$81 billion, and
  • cover 94% of Americans.

According to CBO and JCT’s assessment, enacting the Chairman’s mark, as amended, would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010-2019 period. The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $829 billion in credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $201 billion in revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and $110 billion in net savings from other sources. The net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of other spending changes that CBO estimates would save $404 billion over the 10 years and other provisions that JCT and CBO estimate would increase federal revenues by $196 billion over the same period. In subsequent years, the collective effect of those provisions would probably be continued reductions in federal budget deficits. Those estimates are all subject to substantial uncertainty.

By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 29 million, leaving about 25 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). Under the proposal, the share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage would rise from about 83 percent currently to about 94 percent. Roughly 23 million people would purchase their own coverage through the new insurance exchanges, and there would be roughly 14 million more enrollees in Medicaid and CHIP than is projected under current law. Relative to currently projected levels, the number of people either purchasing individual coverage outside the exchanges or obtaining coverage through employers would decline by several million.

There are still real problems with this bill, but this is an uncontroversial score which should get this thing out of Baucus’ hands soonest.

More Like This Please! Shep Smith Dismisses the Talking Points

You have to see it really, but there is a transcript here. Shep Smith had on repub Representative John Barrasso from Wyoming for a discussion of the Public Option for health insurance reform, which definitely did not go as the Representative likely expected. Not only is it remarkable that Smith understood the Public Option and how it fits into any reform effort really well, but the jaw-dropping thing about this interview is how utterly intolerant Smith is for the routine talking points. Barasso wanted to talk about “government-run health care” and Smith sets him straight. Barasso wanted to talk about Medicare cost and budget issues and Smith re-orients the conversation to noting how health care costs have gone up while insurance profits and lobbying costs have gone up. There’s definitely more at the video:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT61GNLBclk[/youtube]

And a note to reporters everywhere — this is how you deal with the talking points.

NCCO Takes a Step Towards Openness

From the article that DD linked to highlighting the Delaware Way this week, there was a small piece at the end noting a piece of good news:

There is now a Web page where users can read the text of legislation that has been introduced and tabled or referred to a board and not yet adopted.

You can see that here. Click on the links and you get a pdf with the text of the action, and I can’t tell how long this data stays posted. It’s pretty ugly, but it does the job and for that we congratulate the County for catching up to the General Assembly. Getting an RSS feed for proposed actions would be a nice touch, as would be a search function.

Next up — posting the recordings of Council meetings online. Or better, online streaming of the Council Meetings. But definitely posting up the legislative actions is a step in the right direction.

Late Night Video — Everything is OK

Delightful bit of business monkey-wrenching some of the public space rules of speech, recording and interaction with “security” staff — tweaking the Fear is Good mindset. This is about 8 minutes long, then get back to work so you can move on to your shopping experience.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAQrsA3m8Bg[/youtube]

Banned Books Week

banned booksThis past week has been Banned Books Week, the week the ALA and American booklovers shine a light on the effort to censor or remove books from public libraries or classrooms and to celebrate the freedom to read.

The ALA has provided an interesting map of the books banned and removed from public facilities.

A resource from last year, but a still good one, is the National Coalition Against Censorship Voices Against Book Censorship Project — where may authors lent their voices to speaking out against book censorship. There are excellent entries here, but my favorites:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHMPtYvZ8tM[/youtube]

and this is very powerful:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRla77tFOY[/youtube]

It never ceases to amaze me how much effort that people will spend in controlling what you know or the ideas that you encounter. And I can’t begin to imagine the life of someone who has so utterly cut him or herself off from the acquisition of new ideas or knowledge. But they are out there and they are trying to control what you and your kids read. Those of us committed to knowledge and a life of ideas have not many choices other than to fight back and to make sure that the only people for whom information can be controlled are just the ones in their own homes.

These are the Top 100 Banned and/or Challenged Classics. What are your Top 5 favorite banned books?