Rose occasionally invites people he doesn’t like onto his show just to show how broadminded he is, but since he’s actually not, he patronizes and belittles them. It was the same with David Graeber and, to a lesser extent because of their creds, Richard Wolff and David Harvey.

The best thing California could do is reject Obamacare in favor of single-payer but its size works against the likelihood of that happening. Here’s Counterpunch/Naked Capitalism’s Lambert on Medicaid:

“a) OBRA 1993 requires all states that receive Medicaid funding to seek recovery from the estates of deceased individuals who used Medicaid benefits at age 55 or older. It allows recovery for any items or services under the state Medicaid plan going beyond nursing homes and other long-term care institutions. In fact, The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) site says that states have the option of recovering payments for all Medicaid services provided. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) site says at state option, recovery can be pursued for any items covered by the Medicaid state plan. …

Your estate is what you own when you die – your home and what’s in it, other real estate you may own, your bank account, annuities and so on. And even if you have a will, your heirs are chopped liver. Low-income people often have only one major asset – the home in which they live and, in some cases, this has been the family home through several generations.

So what this boils down to is: If you are put into Medicaid – congratulations – you just got a mandated collateral loan if you use Medicaid benefits at age 55 or older! States keep a running tally.”

So, Medicaid: Pain City (if not for you, then for your kids). Not Medicaid: Happyville! Your kids get the house! (Even accepting ObamaCare’s eligibility framework, which I do not, you would think that citizens would be given the choice between opting for Medicaid, and sacrificing their children, and opting for a really crappy plan that wouldn’t sacrifice their children. But n-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!!! They’re forced into Medicaid; that’s the issue here.)

Oslo Bysykkel (“Oslo City Bike”) is the name of a public-private partnership project of Oslo, Norway and one of the outdoor advertising units of Clear Channel Communications.

!!!

Coombs said Manning was “naïve to think that the information he selected could actually make a difference but he had good intentions.

As others have indicated, it’s too bad that Coombs thinks he has to diminish Manning’s achievements. Would this particular court really be more sympathetic to a well-intentioned doofus than a principled dissenter? This is the suck-it-up military, after all. Coombs is concerned with getting the minimum sentence possible and what do I know about military courts, but it’s nonetheless painful to read.

Yes, you have to be very careful with Blue America. I let them do my thinking for me once and deeply regret it.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Resume transfers, beginning with the 86 men cleared for release. The majority of the 166 men who remain at Guantánamo, including CCR clients Djamel Ameziane of Algeria, and Khaled Othman and Mohammed Al-Hamiri of Yemen, have been cleared for transfer by the Obama Administration for years. As Senator Carl Levin recently pointed out in a letter to President Obama, the national security waiver contained in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides a “clear route” for transfers to occur.

Lift the Administration’s self-imposed blanket ban on repatriations to Yemen. Of the 166 men who remain, 89 are from Yemen. More than half of those men – 56 – have been approved for transfer by the Obama Administration. The moratorium is collective punishment, a violation of the fundamental principle of non-discrimination. President Obama can and must unilaterally lift his self-imposed ban.

What’s this got to do with Republicans in Congress?

it failed to get a handle on the story of that company and how it fit into the rotting state of U.S. capitalism

Gibney would have lost a lot of his audience if he’d made Enron into a critique of capitalism back then. He did a great job of getting across the sociopathic nature of the company and the calamitous results of removing state control from energy generation. If the film was personality-driven, I daresay it was partly to keep it entertaining enough to reach a wide audience and partly because the puerile nature of the personalities driving our economy was an important part of the story.

But that was then. Public perceptions have changed and Wikileaks has never been about personalities, but about philosophies of governance. I suppose I’ll see the film if I get the chance but I suspect Gibney was the wrong guy to make it.

That confused me too.

I’m not a New Yorker, or even an East Coaster. Can the city do better? They seem to like flamboyant types and at least he’s not a plutocrat or Chuck Schumer.

Huh. Well, you obviously know more about it than I do. I was a resident, though not a voter, 1997 to 2000 and came into contact with both Morella and Van Hollen through the Million Mom March. It was pretty clear even then that Van Hollen was as you describe him.

Montgomery Co. MD might as well have stuck with liberal Republican Connie Morella. She was well-liked (and I think had more character than Van Hollen) but gerrymandering and the rise of an insane Republican faction gave Van Hollen the edge.

Not sure what you mean, but the U.S. Hindu community (Sunil is a Hindu name) is not known for radicalism so I was dumbfounded when initial reports came out.

Won’t matter as long as they’re from Muslimlandia.

So Chechen. Less inexplicable than Indian-American.

Wouldn’t have been too hard to give “naked guy” a towel.