The Breakfast Club 7-22-2014

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.

Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

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This Day in History

Breakfast News

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Don’t Know Much About History

I recently happened to be in the audience for a discussion on the legacy of World War I, held at the Thompson/Reuters headquarters in New York City, when Henry Kissinger made an amazing observation: of the five major wars that the United States has fought since World War II, all were entered on behalf of “idealistic principles.” No less surprising to me was the fact that nobody else in the crowded room of media and policy bigwigs appeared to find anything odd about that statement. Given what we now know about the lies, deception and corruption that preceded the most catastrophic of these wars-Vietnam and the second Iraq War-to call them “idealistic” is to purposely evade history at best, or (more accurately) to rewrite it purely on the basis of ideology rather than evidence.

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Journalistic Malpractice: The Media Enables the Right-Wing Politicization of Science

We’re at a particularly hyper-partisan moment in our country. As such, one would think the existence of a scientific consensus on a policy issue would offer the mainstream media a welcome oasis from the mirage of social media myths and the desert of dueling soundbites that all too often crowd out informed comment. Using such a consensus as a no bullshit baseline, an objective journalist could more honestly explore opposing arguments, measure them against evidence, and judge their veracity. This is no small thing, because if modern journalism is to continue to live up to its Constitutional promise, it can’t merely be about telling the who, what,whenand where of the world anymore, it must go beyond that to explain the how and why.

But time and again, the establishment media fails at reaching this higher bar. Instead of contextualizing policy debates by weaving in extant scientific knowledge or academic research, the national press all too readily churns out formulaic stories filled with superficial horserace reporting. A press corps so consistently unmoored from facts becomes very vulnerable, however, when one of our nation’s two political parties undertakes a proverbial war on science. With very little effort, policy debates can get hijacked and devolve from discussing relevant facts to lobbing ad hominem insults. This simple-minded journalistic approach renders the underlying science of any issue moot. But it’s a safer career move, since it just wouldn’t do well for an “objective” journalist to always be pointing out that, on issue after issue, one party has become fully detached from scientific reality. In a “both sides do it” media culture, no party or ideology can ever lose legitimacy, no matter how crackpot its ideas about how the world works.

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Here’s How The U.S. Sparked A Refugee Crisis On The Border, In 8 Simple Steps

The 57,000 children from Central America who have streamed across the U.S.-Mexico border this year were driven in large part by the United States itself. While Democrats and Republicans have been pointing fingers at each other, in reality the current wave of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has its roots in six decades of U.S. policies carried out by members of both parties.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has sown violence and instability in Central America. Decades of Cold War gamesmanship, together with the relentless global war on drugs, have left a legacy of chaos and brutality in these countries. In many parts of the region, civil society has given way to lawlessness. It’s these conditions the children are escaping.

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Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is failure

Predicting the future course of American politics is a lively and flourishing vocation. Guessing how future generations will commemorate present-day political events, however, is not nearly as remunerative. In the interest of restoring some balance to this tragic situation, allow me to kick off the speculation about the Obama legacy. How will we assess it? How will the Barack Obama Presidential Library, a much-anticipated museum of the future, cast the great events of our time?

In approaching this subject, let us first address the historical situation of the Obama administration. The task of museums, like that of history generally, is to document periods of great change. The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite: how to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t. Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over-when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in-and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.

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Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet

The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

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Must Read Blog Posts

Thoughts on Turning 70, America’s Decline, and About a Dozen Shocking Developments I Never Saw Coming

by Tom Engelhardt

Hellraisers Journal: Military Shuts Down Portland Mine and Arrests Men Loyal to Western Federation

by JayRaye

You Know Your Country Sucks When You Look Wistfully Back at Stalin

by Ted Rall

Sunday Train: What Future for America’s Deadly Cul-de-Sacs?

by BruceMcF

Some words about “Star Wars”

by Cassiodorus

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The Daily Wiki

Jester

A jester was a historical entertainer either employed to entertain a ruler or other nobility in medieval or Tudor times or was an itinerant performer who entertained common folk at fairs and markets. Jesters in medieval times are often thought to have worn brightly coloured clothes and eccentric hats in a motley pattern and their modern counterparts usually mimic this costume. In medieval times jesters entertained with a wide variety of skills which could include songs, music, storytelling, acrobatics, juggling, and magic. Much of the entertainment was performed in a comic style and many jesters made contemporary jokes in word or song about people or events well known to their audiences.

(snip)

In similar vein, buffoon is a term for someone who provides amusement through inappropriate appearance and/or behavior.[18]

Originally the term was used to describe a ridiculous but amusing person. The term is now frequently used in a derogatory sense to describe someone considered foolish, or someone displaying inappropriately vulgar, bumbling or ridiculous behavior that is a source of general amusement.

The term originates from the old Italian “buffare”, meaning to puff out one’s cheeks[19] that also applies to bouffon.

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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

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Breakfast Tunes

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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee

Convictions They Should Not Go as the Wind Blows

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1 comments

  1. The day started too early with not enough sleep. I was already in a board meeting at 9 AM that required listening to lawyers droning on about the medical legal ramifications of any decision that is made. I’ve already had my month’s ration of caffeine and after a nearly nearly hour drive home, I am now faced with 5 mail boxes that are brimming with equally boring content that I need to read. I just want to go to the beach but it’s near 90 here in the apple with humidity to match.

    This is so not my day.

    It looks like it wasn’t a good day for the Affordable Care Act either. From The New York Times

    Two federal appeals court panels issued conflicting rulings Tuesday on whether the government could subsidize health insurance premiums for people in three dozen states that use the federal insurance exchange. The decisions are the latest in a series of legal challenges to central components of President Obama’s health care law.

    The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, upheld the subsidies, saying that a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service was “a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion.”

    The ruling came within hours of a 2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said that the government could not subsidize insurance for people in states that use the federal exchange.

    That decision could cut potentially off financial assistance for more than 4.5 million people who were found eligible for subsidized insurance in the federal exchange, or marketplace.

    The weirdness is the DC Circuit court decision is based solely on a typo in the bill.

    The two Republicans’ decision rests on a glorified typo in the Affordable Care Act itself. Obamacare gives states a choice. They can either run their own health insurance exchange where their residents may buy health insurance, and receive subsidies to help them pay for that insurance if they qualify, or they can allow the federal government to run that exchange for them. Yet the plaintiffs’ in this case uncovered a drafting error in the statute where it appears to limit the subsidies to individuals who obtain insurance through “an Exchange established by the State.” Randolph and Griffith’s opinion concludes that this drafting error is the only thing that matters. In their words, “a federal Exchange is not an ‘Exchange established by the State,'” and that’s it. The upshot of this opinion is that 6.5 million Americans will lose their ability to afford health insurance, according to one estimate.

    The Supreme Court of the United States, however, has long recognized that a law’s clear purpose should not be defeated due to an error in proofreading. As the Court explained in 2007, “a reviewing court should not confine itself to examining a particular statutory provision in isolation” as the “meaning-or ambiguity-of certain words or phrases may only become evident when placed in context.” It is indeed true that a single phrase of the Affordable Care Act, if read in isolation, suggests that Congress intended only state-run exchanges – as opposed to federal exchanges – to offer subsidies, but this provision is contradicted by numerous other provisions of the law.

    I am not a big supporter of this bill since it basically was by the health insurance companies and big pharma but if the DC ruling stands it may well kill people who will no longer be able to afford what pitiable coverage the subsidies provided that helped them get some medical care. Already high premiums, coupled with high deductibles before co-pays kick in, will cause healthy people to drop their insurance further pushing premiums higher for those who need it most. If sick people can’t get care they die.

    There were a lot of folks in the comments at the NYT that were jut a pissed at Democrats who wrote and passed this very flawed bill:

    Kevin Rothstein

    Someday, our nation will adopt single payer. The Democrats in name only in Congress sold the people down-the-river by failing to adopt a public option.

    The blame lies with Sen. Max Baucus and the former Senator from Aetna, Joe Lieberman, among others.

    We also have a president who was not willing to argue forcefully enough for the public option, as Obama is also a centrist Democrat elected to maintain the status quo while pretending to offer hope and change, just as another centrist Democrat, from a town called hope, allowed Wall Street to hijack his better angels.

    I agee with riverdaughter at The Confluence:

    I think I am being too hopeful about it being the end of the beginning and that maybe the country will get serious about a national healthcare policy that includes true universal responsibilities and cost controls.  [..]

    But the Republicans might have done us a favor for being the obstinate, selfish, mean-spirited, take-no-prisoners, uncompromising assholes that they are.  At some point, the sheer weight of all of this pigheadedness, coupled with insurance insecurity, may actually provoke a backlash against them and we could end up with Democratic congresspersons motivated to actually fix the gigantic flaws in this byzantine, unworkable and deeply unsatisfying act.

    Well, we can dream.

    Time to start looking at congressional candidates and asking hard questions about where they stand on Medicare expansion and single payer.

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