The one that grates on my ears every time: when someone says “between” more than two things when they really should say “among”, i.e. “between England, France and Germany” when they should say “among England, France and Germany”. Between can only mean 2.

Please. “Whore lawyers”? The lawyers the money was directed at – to help with foreclosures, with actual people in the jaws of this thing – are hardly whores. They’re the ones who are sweating their own mortgages.

The whores, unfortunately, aren’t even the ones who wrote the settlement – they’re the guys in DC who forced the AG’s to sign.

It’s a political question. Federal courts have no jurisdiction. Pretty easy motion.

If Walker is knocked out, every penny the DNC spends will benefit it in every state in the general. It will be a lift to the party. If they let it go down thinking they’ll concentrate on the general…unfortunately, we are going to get what they richly deserve.

I am so tired of these people “keeping their powder dry”.

Long as they have this discussion about their Grand Bargain before the election happens. This should be the only thing they are talking about. If you want to cut Social Security, if you want to cut Medicare (if???) do it now, in the daylight, before people vote.

Of course these spineless excuses for leaders will jabber about everything else until the election is over, at which point they will discover that they have a mandate to destroy what’s left of the New Deal.

Not that it makes a difference, I suppose. Both sides want it to happen. It’s just the 300 million of the rest of us who don’t.

My q

Excellent points all.

Just one point to add: really hot chicks already have their own helmets, and their own bikes. It’s equally true that the hotness bar is completely reset when a guy sees a woman on a motorcycle.

Congress responds by amending the ACA to impose a special health care tax on every citizen, in an appropriate amount. If you have insurance meeting certain standards, you are exempt from the tax. I don’t see any constitutional issue with that, and as I understand it, neither would the lawyers for the plaintiffs and for the intervenor National Federation of Independent Businesses.

Constitutional, I guess, but manifestly cruel. The result would be the same. People would be forced to buy something they can’t afford and even when they stretch to buy it can’t afford to use it. Sure, there are subsidies, but there are only two ways to go on subsidies. If they are at a level that doesn’t take into account what it really takes to live in this country, with our $4 gas and our food prices that are inexplicably and invisibly inflating, then they are useless to most of us. If they are set to be used by families who are not yet going under, then we are paying income taxes to the government to have them paid directly to the health insurance companies to subsidize our premiums. If that is not a straight up wealth transfer from my pocket to Aetna’s, I’ve never seen one. And I could still be stuck with a plan that only pays 60-70% of my costs.

The problem with subsidies, also, is that somebody has to come up with a formula to figure out who gets them. The government is not very good at assessing the real cost of living. Ever owed money to the IRS? And subsidies are expenditures. They can always be trimmed under the guise of budgetary restraint.

The Court gave up its credibility when Scalia picked the winner of the 2000 election. Or, as Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent, “[a]lthough we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

I probably should have said this before, but I have absolutely no problem with mandatory helmet laws. I rode without my helmet once in Delaware, the closest non-helmet state to where I live, for ten miles, just to see what that was like. I was so happy to get to the border of Maryland, where I had to stop and put it back on.

After all, lots of states have motorcycle helmet laws, to the dismay of many riders.

Yes, they do. And if you don’t want to ride with a helmet, don’t ride. If helmet laws were really analogous to the ACA, they’d require my next door neighbor, who doesn’t ride, to wear one. It really IS that simple, even if you can get all kinds of lawyers who’ll talk about it for three days.

Although I never thought I’d say this, Justice Kennedy hit the nail on the head: can Congress create commerce in order to regulate it? Can Congress require everybody to buy health insurance because of the impact on interstate commerce once everybody has to buy it?

This isn’t the Civil Rights Act of 1965; Congress didn’t segregate the lunch counter, and then declare that segregated lunch counters interfered with interstate commerce.

And we aren’t talking here about Social Security and Medicare. They are financed by straight up taxes. Everybody seems to agree that Congress could simply impose a tax that would fund single payer. They wouldn’t be forcing people into the private market.

We can’t lose sight of the problem here. Set aside the parade of horribles that are trotted out by smirking pricks like Scalia. I am not at all worried that Congress is going to make me buy broccoli. The problem with this bill is that every single American is now a hostage to the private insurance industry. We know this argument isn’t really about covering everybody, because there are still going to be millions and millions of uncovered people by anybody’s estimation. We know it’s not really about funding health care, because health insurance companies have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to do anything and everything they can to get out of covering illnesses. We know it’s not about getting people health care, because the bronze plan allows a family deductible of $11,900 on *top* of the premiums. Even my crappy HSA eligible plan only has a $5,000 family deductible on top of my $5,600 in premiums. Instead of getting a cold this winter, I ended up with walking pneumonia, because even when I knew it was turning into bronchitis I did not have the $125 to shell out to see the doctor, and another $45 for the antibiotics.

The bill is indefensible. This may be the one time in my life I ever agree with Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. Other than our opinions of this law, the only other thing we have in common is that we are all oxygen-breathing bipeds.

OK, about the Springsteen clip:

1. I can’t understand a word Mike Ness is saying other than “Bad bad luck”; and the bigger question:

2. Where the hell is Patti????

Carve outs or not, MERS skirted registration statutes in all 50 states. Nobody knows who owns anything anymore. The banks can’t foreclose without crap documents. I no longer have any idea who has the right to enforce my mortgage. I know it’s not the servicer I send money to every month or the mortgage company shown on my documents.

There aren’t just clouds on title. There are hurricanes all over the country.

Today’s trash Gannett outet ran an indignant front page story on millitary pensions. The story acknowledged that in 2007 the law was changed to allow the brass to collect more in pension than they did in exchange for staying in beyond the usua; 26 years. They were particularly steamed about someone collecting $272,000. Almost casually they mentioned that oh, this was a four star “officers” (i.e. admirals or generals) with 43 years of service. They talked about the average pensions for 3 and 4 star officers and seemed to say that the military was sucking down money on behalf of these 190 officers.

As opposed to Halliburton doing the laundry.

The 1% of military retirees earn what investment bankers do 2 years out of school, and nobody has ever shot at the latter, so I really don’t think they’re the problem.

The question here isn’t whether some of the people getting Social Security disability benefits are really disabled or not. It’s why the others are mired in years and years of appeals and hearings and denials.

I have worked on hundreds of Social Security disability applications over the past 14 years. I have never, and I mean NEVER, seen someone on benefits who didn’t deserve them. The process is so sharply targeted at denying people that it’s a miracle for someone to get through. In the process of weeding the “undeserving” millions of people who are totally disabled don’t get what they should. Forget about it if you have an injury and your primary complaint is that you are in too much pain to move. Pain? PAIN??? You’re a deadbeat. You’re a whiner. You’re a drug addict. Psychiatric disability? A slacker.

Then there are the judges.

I had a hearing once at which an ALJ told an appellant that he wouldn’t be disabled if he just ate better and controlled his Type 1 diabetes, which kept landing him in the ER with diabetic comas. The guy couldn’t even practice law, much less medicine. And presumably he’d been to law school, though sometimes I wasn’t entirely sure he’d gotten the point of it.

And yes, “my cousin knows this guy…” is no way to run public policy. But it keeps the people from complaining. Until the TV glazed folk out that they’ve been taught it is better to throw one innocent guy in jail than to let a criminal go free, rather than keeping the former out at all costs, we aren’t getting anywhere.

…and they trust these republicans why?????