As far as I understand the Blunt Amendment, it would allow any employer to deny coverage for any medical treatment that he/she frowned upon, and evidently without any requirement that the employer must show a genuinely held religious objection (compare to conscientious objectors).

So, seemingly, the Christian Science Church, or any individual Christian Scientist who owns a business, could cut out all medical care and drug coverage on the ground that the CS church doesn’t like it, and recommends prayer for all illnesses.

Similarly, a Jehovah’s Witness could prevent his/her employees from having coverage for blood transfusions.

And so it goes. This is what happens when you have a crappy law, like Obamacare, that continues the no-longer rational approach of having medical insurance, and thus medical care, dependent upon employment and the employer’s wishes about what gets covered and what doesn’t.

Back to the company town and company store we’re going.

I think Lieberman and McCain will have four weeks’ worth of erections once war begins, and they won’t need Viagra to do it. For them, war is the strongest aphrodisiac.

Jon meant to say “capitulation to Republicans.” That kind of writing construction occurs when you eschew using prepositional phrases. Jon does this a lot. So does David.

Now, to the substance: There are many of us who don’t believe that Obama is actually capitulating to the Republicans. We believe, at least as to some issues, that the “capitulation” is really phony. That Obama was with them all along.

Key case in point: The health insurance cartel bailout that comes right out of the Republican playbook of c. 1994. Obama lied and lied and lied about trying to preserve a public option, which Rahm dealt away to the cartel at the get-go, and about fighting to avoid imposing an individual mandate on consumers, which is the cornerstone of this bailout that guarantees the cartel a captive market forever.

The phony national debt crisis is another.

(I could comment all day on this stuff, but I need to get back to work.)

Also, Reichstag fire.

Also, Hank Paulson prowling the halls of Congress with a three-page draft bill that would authorize billions if not trillions to be given to the Wall Street banksters yesterday, to keep GS and AIG from the fate of Lehman Brothers. (Oh, how I wish Golden Sacks had gone down the tubes.)

Also, pretty much everything that Naomi Klein describes in Shock Doctrine.

The common thread? Right wing and anti-democratic forces at work.

Isn’t anyone bothered by the fact that the story of Mr. Ting’s probe was not made public until after the Foreclosure Fraud Blanket Pardon was announced as a “done deal”? Methinks that if the results of Mr. Ting’s probe had been announced before the pardon was announced, the pardon would have been more difficult to justify to the public.

And, of course, this all begs the question that 49 state AGs (that’s the last number I heard), plus Holder, have all done this deal with absolutely minimal, if any, investigation or discovery in litigation. An attorney in private practice would be open to malpractice claims for agreeing to such a deal with this pitiful level of investigation.

So, bottom line, the timing of Mr. Ting’s report is very disturbing to me.

Theoretically, this decision cannot be appealed. The New York “Court of Appeals” is really NY’s highest state court. Misnomers abound in the NY judicial system: there are a zillion NY “Supreme Courts,” which are their low level trial courts.

So, now that NY’s highest court has interpreted NY’s own Martin law to allow a private right of action (civil only, to be sure), that should be the end of the issue. Federal courts are supposed to defer to the interpretation of a State law by the State’s highest court.

But don’t be surprised or appalled if/when the banksters take this matter up in the Federal courts, arguing that the Martin Act impinges on some Federal securities law or other Federal statute, that the Federal statute “occupies the field,” and therefore the Martin Act is pre-empted by Federal law. And you can bet your last dollar that at least 5 of the Supremes will agree once the case gets there.

It seems that no one condemns Tebow for these mass male genital mutilations beyond a statement of “WTF?” How about recognizing this for what it is: (1) sexual perversion and (2) a human rights violation. This is, IMHO, every bit as bad as what Sandusky was (allegedly) doing. And Tebow not only admits it, but is proud of it. Shame on the US – and the Philippines!

Nobody has mentioned this fact so far, so I will. AG Masto is a Republican! The search by Diogenes for one honest Republican seems to have succeeded. But just one so far.

Anyone out there have more info on Masto and her politics and ambitions? Can we trust her to stay true to this case? Maybe she will be the one to nail the invertebrate Reid next time around?

And, of course, this is precisely what the insurers do. So, when a government agency does it, it’s murder, but when the insurance cartel does it, it’s good business judgment, or something? The Rethugs’ hypocrisy just never, ever ends.

DDay, you should not be buying into the US propaganda that the Palestinians are “Stateless” or the equally vile propaganda that current US law “binds” Obama to cut off funds to UNESCO.

Per Wikipedia article on State of Palestine: “As of September 2011, 127 (65.8%) of the 193 member states of the United Nations have recognised the State of Palestine.” Palestine is recognized as a state under international law.

This point segues into my second: In a comment on a thread a couple of days ago, texan99 helpfully cited the two US public laws that are being used by Obama to justify cutting off funds from UNESCO. (I don’t have time right now to pull the citations.) They are from 1990 and 1994, I think.

One statute says that the US must cut off funds it gives to any UN entity that recognizes the PLO. Well, the Palestinian state is not the PLO. It is the “Palestinian Authority” (a term, BTW, that is in its own way as obnoxious as the Arab term “Zionist Entity”). Palestine has PLO people in government on the West Bank, but the Palestinian enclave known as Gaza is run by other folks, Hamas to be exact. Not PLO.

So, that statute is not a legal bar to Obama and his State Dept lawyers, who had no trouble justifying military action in Libya w/o complying with the War Powers Act and in offing al-Awlaki w/o even identifying a bill of particulars.

The 1994 statute bars the US from paying dues to a UN entity that allows full membership to an entity that lacks the indicia of being a state as recognized under international law. As noted above, 127 out of 193 UN members recognize Palestine as being such a state. The US does not get to define international law unilaterally. So, that statute does not “bind” the US.

Problem is, of course, that no federal court would even issue a declaratory ruling, much less an injunction, to prevent Obama from cutting off US funds to UNESCO – foreign relations power of the government, “non-justiciable” question would be the excuses. Beyond that, if a federal court ever did that, AIPAC would make sure that Congress passed a new bill by overwhelming majorities in both Houses and that Obama signed it into law that would eliminate the “flaws” in the current laws.

But the basic point is that we should not be buying into the AIPAC propaganda.

The guillotine was invented by people who had people like Bobo in mind.

Not necessarily. We don’t want the med industry complex to win. But attorneys who represent plaintiffs in malpractice cases need to be compensated. The typical victim of malpractice is usually unable to represent him/herself because of many barriers: financial, informational, emotional, physical.

So, an attorney or other advocate is needed. The current system accepts that the attorney usually finances the malpractice case, which is often quite expensive because of the need for complex investigations, expert witnesses, etc. The current system accepts that the attorney for the successful claimant gets a share of the claimant’s award, typically one third or forty percent, depending on complexity and other factors. And under the current system, the attorney for the unsuccessful claimant gets no compensation and has no financial claim against the client.

One appropriate modification to this system would be for the attorney’s fee to be paid by the defendant or the defendant’s insurer. It gets complicated, however, if the case is settled, rather than taken to a verdict and judgment. In a settlement, the numbers will get pushed around and, potentially, if the attorney is to be given a fee above and beyond the settlement amount for the claimant, the settlement amount may well be reduced (at least in the negotiating tactics of the insurer/defendant) so that, de facto, the claimant’s share really does come from the amount that the claimant would otherwise get in the settlement.

Bottom line: Victims of malpractice need lawyers, and the lawyers need compensation. The compensation should come from the defendants/insurers, not from the clients.

You say: “Where the defendents really get hit is the multiple reasonable awards. Leave a sponge in somebody, it’s $30K minimum to take it out. Screw up any surgery, it’s the same.

If there was, oh, say, a single payer system, this problem would go away.”

Depending on what precisely you meant by “this problem,” it does not go away with the magic wand of single payer (which I support).

Single payer does not eliminate malpractice itself, if that’s what you meant by “this problem.” Nor does single payer, in itself, adequately compensate a malpractice victim. Damages in a malpractice action should start with, not end with, payment for remedial surgery. There are also, ordinarily, plenty of damages that should be available for pain and suffering for the second surgery, losses of income, and other consequential damages in the example you cite. Single payer shouldn’t be paying these damages. The malpracticing surgeon should be paying.

And to Lawrence Lessig @22. Why, oh why, should the public pay huge sums of money to politicians to fund their campaigns, when so much of it goes right into expensive TV and radio ads on the public airwaves? Just another subsidy to a huge empire, just like Obamacare, which is a total bailout of the insurance cartel.

As I argued @116, it’s long past time to make the media leeches pay something for their essentially free use of the public’s airwaves, and requiring them to provide free or at least reduced-rate ad time on their stations is a much better solution than the Rube Goldberg construct of taking huge sums of money from the public to give to the politicians who in turn will give it to the TV and radio stations.

I don’t have time to read the thread, but I wanted to make just two points. I apologize if anyone has already stated them or if Lessig has them in his book.

First: Many people have advocated trying to amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United. That’s a tremendously naive and stupid strategy that is doomed to failure. It also unnecessarily and improperly concedes the point that the decision was dead wrong on constitutional principles substantively, with Thomas’s involvement also constituting a taint, and with it being procedurally a total overreach and beyond the scope of the review that SCOTUS had initially granted. And, even if you succeeded in amending the Constitution in this regard, all you do is preserve the same insane money treadmill that we already have, albeit on a somewhat less skewed playing field.

Second: One truly critical way in which money politics COULD at least theoretically be tamed is by amending the telecommunications act to require commercial TV and radio stations, as a condition of their licenses, to give gobs of free and reduced rate advertising to political candidates. The airwaves belong to the public, not the media empires. I think the current telecomms act (of 1996, another Clinton monstrosity) is up for renewal in a couple of years. Not doable? Way more doable than a constitutional amendment or any other BS proposed remedy that I’ve seen bandied about. And it puts the focus where it really needs to be: on the media empires. And it gets to the root of the problem. As in “radical.”

It is certainly true that FDR created the WPA and CCC by executive order. But, you cannot assume that the same legal structures are still in place, some 75 years later. So, you cannot assume that Obama can simply wave a pen and create new versions of the WPA and CCC. As if he actually would want to, anyway. And if he could, what funds would he use to pay for them? Talk about a ground for the Baggers to demand impeachment!

I did a quick google search and couldn’t readily find any info on this issue. So, I caution us all not to blithely throw around the idea that, in 2011, the president can create New Deal agencies – and fund them – at the stroke of a pen. I’d invite anyone to follow up on this legal issue if you want, but given Obama’s strong disinclination to go in this direction, I think it’s just a moot point and a waste of time to do more research.

I have to disagree. SS and Medicare are indeed “entitlements” – we paid for them and we are entitled to collect the benefits. The Right Wing has so poisoned the “dialogue” and so undermined the language that far too many people are accepting the notion that up is down, if that’s what the MSM and the Rethugs say it is.

For example: They call themselves “conservatives,” although they are anything but conservative – they don’t want to conserve anything. They want to tear down everything of value. They call SS and M “entitlements,” which they are, but they have turned the term into a pejorative. Read the addendum that Orwell wrote at the end of 1984 about the use of the English language.

We must not let them do this. And every time one of “us” denies that SS and M are “entitlements,” we have fallen into the trap.