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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

by w0ujpysd Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like a lot of people, Ed Kilgore is distressed at the outpouring of support on the right for Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy:

Call it “individualism” or “libertarianism” or whatever you want, but those who declare themselves a Republic of One and raise their own flags are in a very literal sense being unpatriotic.

That’s why I’m alarmed by the support in many conservative precincts for the Nevada scofflaws who have been exploiting public lands for private purposes and refuse to pay for the privilege because they choose not to “recognize” the authority of the United States. Totally aside from the double standards involved in expecting kid-glove treatment of one set of lawbreakers as opposed to poorer and perhaps darker criminal suspects, fans of the Bundys are encouraging those who claim a right to wage armed revolutionary war towards their obligations as Americans. It makes me really crazy when such people are described as “superpatriots.” Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.

The details of the Bundy case have gotten a lot of attention at conservative sites, but the details really don’t matter. Bundy has a baroque claim that the United States has no legal right to grazing land in Nevada; for over a decade, every court has summarily disagreed. It’s federal land whether Bundy likes it or not, and Bundy has refused for years to pay standard grazing fees—so a couple of weeks ago the feds finally decided to enforce the latest court order allowing them to confiscate Bundy’s cattle if he didn’t leave. The rest is just fluff, a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorizing that led to last week’s armed standoff between federal agents and the vigilante army created by movement conservatives.

The fact that so many on the right are valorizing Bundy—or, at minimum, tiptoeing around his obvious nutbaggery—is a testament to the enduring power of Waco and Ruby Ridge among conservatives. The rest of us may barely remember them, but they’re totemic events on the right, fueling Glenn-Beckian fantasies of black helicopters and jackbooted federal thugs for more than two decades now. Mainstream conservatives have pandered to this stuff for years because it was convenient, and that’s brought them to where they are today: too scared to stand up to the vigilantes they created and speak the simple truth. They complain endlessly about President Obama’s “lawlessness,” but this is lawlessness. It’s appalling that so many of them aren’t merely afraid to plainly say so, but actively seem to be egging it on.

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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

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Blood Moon!

by BryonWrench Posted on April 15, 2014

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It turns out that timing is everything with the blood moon. We had a thin little haze of clouds passing across the sky here in Irvine, so I couldn’t get a very sharp image, but at 11:24 pm, the moon was still disappointingly moon-colored. By 12:03 am, however, it was satisfyingly florid. Enjoy.

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Blood Moon!

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Big Government Run Amok Decides to Back Down

by Lovie9666thwo Posted on April 14, 2014

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The Washington Post gets results!

The Social Security Administration announced Monday that it will immediately cease efforts to collect on taxpayers’ debts to the government that are more than 10 years old.

….“I have directed an immediate halt to further referrals under the Treasury Offset Program to recover debts owed to the agency that are 10 years old and older pending a thorough review of our responsibility and discretion under the current law,” Social Security’s acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said in a statement.

So there you have it. If your mother—maybe, possibly—got overpaid 40 years ago when you were a five-year-old child, the Social Security Administration will no longer seize your tax refund check in order to recover her alleged debt. Progress!

Anyway, Eric Posner says the government’s legal position here was untenable all along. That’s good to know.

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Big Government Run Amok Decides to Back Down

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How to Lose Money and Come Out OK Anyway

by ClaritaPBNK Posted on April 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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TIAA-CREF is buying Nuveen Investments for $6.25 billion from Madison Dearborn, a private equity shop that bought Nuveen in 2007. Nuveen has performed poorly since then, but insiders say that the TIAA-CREF deal ensures that the Madison Dearborn will at least break even on its investment. Felix Salmon is gobsmacked after running through the numbers:

So here’s my back-of-the-envelope math: you buy a company for $2.7 billion in cash, plus debt which you refinance a few times. While you’re running the company, it loses a total of $2.4 billion. And then you sell the company for $1.75 billion in cash. Total going out the door: $5.1 billion. Total coming in, at exit: $1.75 billion. Net loss: some $3.35 billion, give or take.

All of which raises some big questions about the WSJ’s claim that Madison Dearborn “will have at least broken even on its Nuveen investment”. If that claim is even close to being true, then at the very least we can’t take Nuveen’s public filings at face value at all….This is worth remembering, when private-equity types (think Mitt Romney) claim that their interests are aligned with the interests of the companies they buy. That certainly doesn’t seem to have been the case here. Nuveen is being sold with about $1.5 billion more debt than it started with, and with cumulative losses under Madison Dearborn’s ownership of some $2.4 billion. That’s not a great legacy for TIAA-CREF to inherit. If Madison Dearborn really is breaking even on this deal, that only goes to show the enormous disconnect between the economics of private equity companies — the wealthy rentiers of society — versus the economics of the real-world companies they buy and sell.

Of course, one possibility is that Madison Dearborn is just putting a brave face on things and reporters are taking it at face value. More likely, though, there are tax games of some kind that allowed Madison Dearborn to strip a ton of value out of Nuveen over the past seven years. I suppose they’re also benefiting from low interest rates, which means that Nuveen’s refinanced debt is less onerous now than it was in 2007.

In any case Salmon’s point is well taken. If you can break even after running a company as disastrously as Madison Dearborn has, there’s something pretty badly rotten about the entire world of high finance. But then, you knew that already, didn’t you?

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How to Lose Money and Come Out OK Anyway

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Here’s a Second Look at Obamacare and the Uninsured

by MarkoGurner Posted on April 4, 2014

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Here’s a quick follow-up on my guess earlier this week that Obamacare will reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about 10 million when we finally close out 2014. The Urban Institute has released its latest survey results and concludes that Obamacare insured about 5.4 million people through early March. This is a comparison with Fall 2013, so it doesn’t include the sub-26ers who have been covered by their parents’ policies since 2010. It also doesn’t include the March signup surge. If you add those in, we’re probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million right now, which I think is consistent with a guess of 10 million by the end of the year.

There’s still a lot of guesswork in these numbers, but this is about the best we have right now. It’s less than the 13 million the CBO projected, but it’s a pretty healthy number nonetheless.

UPDATE: It turns out that the CBO uses pro-rated years. If you sign up for coverage on April 1, you count as three-quarters of a year. If you sign up on July 1, you count as half a year. I didn’t know that, and it changes my guess. By normal human terms, I think about 10 million of the previously uninsured will have Obamacare coverage by the end of 2014. By CBO terms, that might come to 9 million or so.

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Here’s a Second Look at Obamacare and the Uninsured

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S&P 500 Sets Yet Another Fake Record This Year

by HarrietAMRO Posted on April 1, 2014

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From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. stocks kicked off the second quarter with broad gains Tuesday, propelling the S&P 500 index to a seventh record close of the year.

I’ll cop to being sort of pedantic here, but no, the S&P 500 didn’t set a record today, let alone its seventh of the year. Time series like this only make sense if you adjust for inflation, and if you do that the S&P closed 10 percent below its August 2000 peak. Granted, the S&P 500 has more than doubled since 2008, an immensely more impressive performance than, say, median income or the unemployment rate, but it’s still not in record territory.

If you’re curious to see what the real S&P 500 looks like, it’s in the chart below.

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S&P 500 Sets Yet Another Fake Record This Year

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Senate Report: Torture Didn’t Work and the CIA Lied About It

by MichaelPud Posted on April 1, 2014

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The Washington Post has gotten hold of the Senate investigation into CIA interrogation practices and—

No, wait. They haven’t. They’ve only learned what the report says “according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.” It’s impossible to say if these sources are characterizing the report accurately, and their summary descriptions of the report make it very hard to judge how fair the report’s conclusions are.

But with those caveats and cautions out of the way, what does the report say? This:

Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.

Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

….“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.

Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.

However, for those of us who think that detainee abuse is, in fact, as important as the lies that were told about it, there’s this:

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

The report describes previously undisclosed cases of abuse, including the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a detention site in Afghanistan — a method that bore similarities to waterboarding but never appeared on any Justice Department-approved list of techniques.

So the torture was even worse than we thought; it produced very little in the way of actionable intelligence; and the CIA lied about this in order to preserve their ability to torture prisoners.

Anybody who isn’t sickened by this needs to take very long, very deep look into their souls. For myself, I think I’ll go take a shower now.

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Senate Report: Torture Didn’t Work and the CIA Lied About It

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LA Times: 9.5 Million Newly Insured By Obamacare

by EstellaMassie Posted on March 31, 2014

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So how many people are newly insured thanks to Obamacare? Noam Levey of the LA Times provides the current best estimate, based on the latest enrollment and survey data:

As the law’s initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states.

The tally draws from a review of state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide.

….Republican critics of the law have suggested that the cancellations last fall have led to a net reduction in coverage. That is not supported by survey data or insurance companies, many of which report they have retained the vast majority of their 2013 customers by renewing old policies, which is permitted in about half the states, or by moving customers to new plans.

Rand’s latest survey data suggests that the share of uninsured adults has declined from 20.9 percent last fall to 16.6 percent as of March 22. Gallup has also shown a decline in the uninsured, and its March poll will show a further decline, according to Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport. More details at the link.

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LA Times: 9.5 Million Newly Insured By Obamacare

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Apple Has Patented Clicking on Phone Number to Dial a Phone? Seriously?

by silvermega-1959 Posted on March 31, 2014

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The New York Times tells us today that Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is really just a proxy for its war against Google’s Android operating system. That’s not news. But this just makes me want to pound my head against a wall:

In the case set to open this week, Apple’s legal complaint aims at some of the features that Google, not Samsung, put in Android, like the ability to tap on a phone number inside a text message to dial the number. And although Google is not a defendant in this case, some of its executives are expected to testify as witnesses.

I know we all mock some of the things that seem to be patentable these days. I sure do. And who knows? Maybe those things really aren’t quite as obvious as we all think they are. But tapping a phone number on a phone in order to dial it? There is no plausible universe in which several thousand designers wouldn’t think of doing that. Somebody needs to put a leash on Apple before the venomous ghost of Steve Jobs drags them into a rabbit hole of techno-legal vengeance from which they never recover. Enough.

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Apple Has Patented Clicking on Phone Number to Dial a Phone? Seriously?

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Raw Data: By 2017, Obamacare Will Be Covering 36 Million People

by BufordLindley Posted on March 28, 2014

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Megan McArdle asks, “Is Obamacare now beyond repeal?” Good question! McArdle goes through the various estimates of enrollment figures, concluding that something in the neighborhood of 5.5-6.5 million people are likely to sign up this year, depending on how much enrollment accelerates in the last few days of March and how many people drop out because they fail to pay their premiums. That sounds reasonable to me. Then this:

Does that mean that Obamacare will basically be beyond repeal, as its supporters hope? It certainly makes things harder. But we still don’t know how many of these people are newly insured, or how many of the previously insured like these policies better than their old policies — nor how much pressure it is going to end up putting on the budget. Those are things we won’t know for quite a while. But if it were impossible to ever cut off an expensive entitlement that goes to the middle class, TennCare would never have been cut.

But there’s something missing here. It’s something that nearly everyone has neglected in the frenzy to figure out what’s happening right now. Here it is: the world doesn’t stop in 2014. Enrollment of around 6 million makes Obamacare hard to repeal, but for now that’s not really what’s holding it in place. What’s holding it in place is the fact that Democrats control the Senate and Barack Obama occupies the White House. And even if the Senate switches parties next year, I think we can all agree that Obamacare is going nowhere as long as Obama stays president. So 2017 is the earliest it could even plausibly be repealed.

But what do things look like in 2017? The chart on the right shows the latest CBO estimates. By 2017, a total of 36 million Americans will be covered by Obamacare. Of that, 24 million will have private coverage via the exchanges and 12 million will be covered by Medicaid. Those are very big numbers. Even if Republicans improbably manage to get complete control of the government in the 2016 election and eliminate the filibuster so Democrats can’t object, they’ll still have to contend with this.

Does this make Obamacare invulnerable? Of course not. Nothing makes it invulnerable. It’s always possible, though it seems vanishingly unlikely at this point, that it will fail so badly that even Democrats sour on it in a couple of years. It’s also possible that Republican hostility will remain so furious that they just flatly don’t care about 36 million constituents. And maybe they won’t care that the health care industry is fully invested in Obamacare and will fight efforts to get rid of it.

Anything is possible. But when you talk about the chances of repealing Obamacare, you should be talking about 2017. And if you’re talking about 2017, then the number that matters isn’t 6 million, it’s 36 million. That’s a mighty big nut to crack.

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Raw Data: By 2017, Obamacare Will Be Covering 36 Million People

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