Author Archives: cassandra_m

About cassandra_m

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

Friday Afternoon Bacon Blogging — International Bacon Day Edition

International Bacon Day? Who Knew?

September 5 is International Bacon Day and Metromix Baltimore has done the world proud with its Sixteen Degrees of Craving Bacon photo essay.

My favorites:

Finding out St. Anthony is the Patron Saint of Bacon
Bacon Tuxedo! I think we found the DL uniform for the Boys here.
Wake n’ Bacon alarm clock — to go with the coffee maker and bread machine that deliver automatic goodness in the AM.

More Michael Steele FAIL

So what if you began a “Freedom Tour” and nobody came? (NOTE: Scott P over at the Palmer Lyceum has an excellent post up on this too. h/t nemski)

This is another tale of FAIL from Michael Steele and the GOP efforts to reach out to minorities. He begins this tour at Howard University — the tour lands at Historically Black Colleges and here you go:

The visit didn’t exactly seem to stir the campus; in the student union building, the line to get into the cafeteria two floors below Steele’s speech was much longer than the line to get into the talk, and the first two rows were filled in, just before the program began, by about two dozen mostly white College Republicans from other D.C. universities. Questions for what was billed as a town hall meeting had to be submitted days in advance to the Howard chapter of the college GOP.

Got that? You go to a Historically Black College in the nation’s capital and you need to fill in seats with white kids from other colleges and submit your questions days earlier for screening. Then we get to the obligatory you-can-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps portion of our program:

For the first 40 minutes or so of his hour-long talk, Steele’s message boiled down to vague platitudes about black professional role models, the need for young people to pay attention to politics and the sheer unlikelihood of his journey from D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood — just a few miles up Georgia Avenue from Howard’s campus — to the top of the RNC.

That’s a message, I’m sure Howard parents are furiously calling the President and Dean to demand that never again shall a political figure provide an non-pre-approved encouraging message to their kids.

And Steele thinks that he is somehow on the same operating level as the President of the United States:

For most of the night, no matter how he tried, Steele couldn’t quite get the audience on his side. And he certainly did try. He constantly brought up Obama, asking the students if they would have ever thought “you would have two African Americans sitting atop the political class of this country.” In Steele’s mind, it seemed, being chairman of the RNC was more or less the same thing as being president. “It’s not just a political game,” he said of Washington’s policy battles. “It’s not just Barack Obama and Michael Steele going back and forth.”

Never let it be said that Steele isn’t a role model for delusional behavior. There’s more at the link — including an account of Steele badly handling a young woman who wanted to talk about health care or insurance. But it is pretty clear that few cared about what he had to say, and that run on African-American party registration switches to the GOP is still just a pipe dream.

Just As You Thought the Palin Trainwreck Might Be Over…

…Levi Johnston shows up to talk to Vanity Fair. This, of course, is just a teaser and Levi has been out and about not doing the Quitta from Wasilla any favors.

The article includes Andrew Sullivan red meat in the form of a tale on Palin trying to convince Levi to let her adopt Bristol’s baby as well as further confirmation that Palin isn’t cut out for hard work or living up to her political commitments. After the campaign was over, Levi notes:

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

Not interested in the work, but interested in the money. No wonder the neocon crowd love her.

Progressive Dems of Delaware Meeting Tonite

This reminder is from the erstwhile Rebecca Young:

Hey DLer’s!

Before all the special election stuff in Sussex broke lose PDD had scheduled Speaker Gilligan to visit this Wednesday night. That visit has been postponed until December. So, if anybody was planning to come speak to the Speaker on Wednesday he won’t be there.

However, Progressive Dems for Delaware will be meeting on Wednesday, Sept 2, at 7:00 PM at DelDems Headquarters to work on our health care reform action plan. Anybody who believes that health care reform is a moral imperative facing our nation with welcome to join us!

This is a great place to help out with the campaign for health insurance reform.

Five Myths About Health Care Round The World

While conservatives are busily abandoning the moral imperative of the 8th Commandment (and doing so in a pretty ugly way), T.R. Reid provides a useful corrective in countering the most prevalent of the fear and loathing being manufactured based upon the health care systems in other countries.

It is very good and a very good reminder of just what is NOT on offer in our own effort to reform the system:

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people’s medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

Read the whole thing.

Mike Castle Goes Out of Town to Get His Inner Wingnut On

On Monday, Castle went to Philly to be part of a panel of legislators to discuss Health Insurance reform for some radio show.

What is interesting about this is that Castle abandoned his so-called “moderation” for some pandering to the wingnut base:

Castle challenged the idea that the government must take significant action to reduce the ranks of everyone who lacks health insurance after hearing the oft-bandied-about figure that 46 million people in the United States are uninsured.

“Maybe 14 million [of those uninsured] qualified for Medicaid or S-CHIP and another 8 million are not citizens of the USA and we don’t have a responsibility to provide health insurance to them,” he said.

Another argument from made up numbers — you never see any sourced breakdown of this talking point, but all it is supposed to do is to make the gullible think that the problem is smaller than it is and to make it look like undocumented people are meant to be eligible. In other words — the usual lying from the usual suspects. And the audience in attendance dutifully went through their the manufactured rage provided to them via Dick Armey and the teabaggers.

The Philly Inquirer has an article with more detail of what all of the panelists discussed. Interesting that the Dems appealing to reality were shouted down.

So other than the despicable talking points that Castle apparently needs to go out of town to deliver — what do you think about this performance? Out of town tryouts to see how much wingnuttery he can really deliver?

Another Lesson on Why Just Reprinting Press Releases from the ICs Office is NOT A Good Idea

From the NJ Editorial on Sunday:

With new regulations and contract consultants

What new regulations? Seriously — there was a major revision to the statutes in 2005, additional revisions in 2007, and the last seems to be in 2008. Now these links are from the Delaware Captive Insurance Association, which is an industry group, so I imagine they are keeping up on the regs here.

Interestingly, this same Association provides more data on the number and growth of Delaware Captives since the 2005 statute revision:

The State of Delaware licensed 22 Captives in 2008, bringing its total number of active
licenses to 40. This represents 122% growth during the calendar year and marks a
significant increase over the 5 captives that were licensed prior to the revision of the
Delaware statute in 2005.

So there were 5 captives here before 2005 and 40 by the close of 2008. Meaning that Delaware added 35 captives since 2005 and 22 of those licensed in 2008. So there already was an effort to add these companies to the revenue rolls, there was no new legislation and the NJ is buying lock, stock and barrel the ICs narrative that there is something new about this. When the only thing that is really new about this is the hiring of campaign crony(s) — and paying them more money — to take over an effort that has been ongoing and functional since 2005 or 2006.

There was an opportunity for real reporting or even for weighing in on how state agencies decide to spend revenues for the possibility of increasing those revenues or even how to get these agencies to be more accountable for these spending initiatives.

More Like This Please!

A Republican Iowan tells Sen Grassley that Grassley’s constituents want a Public Option. This is very good on many levels and this ad will be running in multiple Iowa markets and DC.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ezBSvJFsE[/youtube]

I’d like to know the answer to this:

I voted for Senator Grassley in the past. But when Grassley takes over $2 million from the big health and insurance industries that oppose reform and then says he won’t give Iowans the choice of a public option, I have to ask: Senator, whose side are you on?

The Impact HR 3200 Would Have for Delaware

h/t Booman Tribune

Congressman Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee has complied a district by district assessment of the impact of HR 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. For Delaware (pdf):

up to 23,100 small businesses could receive tax credits to provide coverage to their employees; 11,000 seniors would avoid the donut hole in Medicare Part D; 1,100 families could escape bankruptcy each year due to unaffordable health care costs; health care providers would receive payment for $85 million in uncompensated care each year; and 63,000 uninsured individuals would gain access to high-quality, affordable health insurance.

There’s more at the one pager, but it provides a way to think about what reformed health insurance might mean for us right here.

This is what passing this bill could mean to Delaware’s neighbors and communities. Not the Tom Coburn call your neighbors to help you manage your cancer — but real health care that does not put your family at risk.