That's how bad it is.

Via Tulsa World:

This tiny town near the Oklahoma-Kansas state line north of Enid may soon own the country's only all-Christian prison, with Christian administrators, employees, counselors and programs.

"If Chicken Little doesn't come to town, we'll be open in 16 months," said Bill Robinson, the founder of Corrections Concepts Inc., a Dallas nonprofit prison ministry that is spearheading the project. ....

Robinson, himself an ex-con and prison minister, said he had been working for years on the idea of an all-Christian prison, and he had invested $1.3 million so far on construction plans and other expenses.

Words cannot express the relief I feel at not having to read yet another access blogger's "progressive" screed on Senate process. Now, about the sausage?

First, phantom reform does give you choice, but it is the choice between many HMOs and other private, for-profit insurance plans. Real reform would give patients the choice they actually want, which is to choose their doctors and hospitals. Americans don’t want a choice of insurance company bureaucrats; they want a choice of health care providers.

No one could ever have predicted! From the NYT :

Drug Makers Raising Prices Before Reform

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

And I sure will have a lot of trouble paying for those drugs on my credit card that--thanks to the convenient lag in implementing credit "reform"--now has 29 % interest!

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

How would you complete the following sentence:

For nearly two years the US economy has been battered by a recession brought on by _________________.

I would guess most semi-informed people would mention the housing bubble and mortgage backed securities (unless you are so completely incompetent as to not know about the $8 trillion dollar housing bubble!). Somewhere in the discussion one would hope to hear about the sub-prime lending spree that hugely profited unscrupulous mortgage brokers and victimized many borrowers. Right?

CNN:

More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan's government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday.

The U.S. military failed to "maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons -- or about 36 percent -- of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008," a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

[...]The military also failed to properly account for an additional 135,000 weapons it obtained for the Afghan forces from 21 other countries.

Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

[...]Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill.

ubetchaiam

For those who argued we should just pass SOMETHING, even if it was a bad bill, because they said we could fix it later, this is what you
get from a strategy of perpetual compromise, a bill that is utterly
beyond redemption. It’s time to throw HR 3962 in the medical waste
bin, and do what should have been done in the first place, build a
new national health care system on what actually DOES work, by
extending the existing economical and efficient Medicare plan to all
ages.

Kip Sullivan at Firedoglake:

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Barney Frank has become something of a darling on the left because of his feistiness, which heaven knows is in short supply among Democratic politicians. That quality seems to work best for someone who will go down with the ship on principle, all other considerations be damned; someone like Dennis Kucinich, who voted against the House health care bill under just that circumstance. (Phoenix Woman brilliantly articulated the hazards of this outlook.*) It does not work so well with someone who appears to be at least half in the pocket of the interests he ostensibly oversees.

His interview with Ed Schultz earlier this week gave a clear illustration of why. Schultz pushed on a couple of key points: Last year's bailout came with no strings attached, and as a result the major players have gone back to the same reckless behavior. Frank turned prickly, which is what feisty looks like when you don't like it, and almost immediately said "don't condescend to me" when Schultz was obviously doing no such thing. He proceeded to condescend to Schultz throughout the interview; "the point I made to you several times" and "What's the matter with you?" stand out. There was also this:

SCHULTZ: Congressman, why can't you just admit that this was a serious misstep on the part of the Congress? You forked out billions of dollars to save the economy, I get all that, to get the structure back going again. But you didn't ask them questions about how this...

FRANK: No, Ed. You're wrong.

SCHULTZ: Oh, tell me I'm wrong.

FRANK: You're wrong. And I'd like to be able to explain it.

McClatchy's Sacramento Bee:

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District sued Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and 45 other financial firms Thursday in Sacramento federal court for allegedly rigging bids in bond-derivatives markets and defrauding the utility.

SMUD joined at least six city and county governments in California that already have filed similar lawsuits arising from a federal investigation made public in 2006. Many other public entities around the country have joined in lawsuits seeking class-action status.

Via Avedon Carol, this little item from Caltics:

Now it looks like they're moving to up the Hooverite ante, and two of California's powerful federal politicians are at the center of the debate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is joining 6 other Senators to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approve a commission to recommend cuts to Medicare and Social Security - or else they'll refuse to vote to increase the US government's debt ceiling: ...

audio by title hoosiers for a commonsense health plan single payer now

Senator Bernie Sanders:

In my view, the real solution to the problem of how to reform health care in this country is a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. We are going to try to at least give states the option to go forward and move toward a single-payer system. Whether it’s Vermont or somewhere else, if one state pulls it off it will spread around the country.

Via Naked Capitalism:

Look, I'm totally sure that paying to bail out the insurance companies by cutting Medicare won't have any real effects on old people who are going to die soon anyhow. Especially given this great news:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn't come along with it.

Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” [shock doctrine!] said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

Yay!

The only reason the Howler repeats himself is that our famously free press does. As for example:

This morning, the gods rocked with laughter: On Olympus, that is. Reason? On the front page of the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg penned a report about the way current health reform bills would deal with American health care spending. On Olympus, her opening paragraph produced some muffled laughter:

STOLBERG (11/10/09): As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama's promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

Note that definition again: We’ll accept a rise in health care spending—it just can’t be a runaway rise! As Stolberg continued, the muffled laughter became full-throated—almost a roar:

STOLBERG (continuing directly): Mr. Obama has made cost containment a centerpiece of his health reform agenda, and in May he stood up at the White House with industry groups who pledged voluntary efforts to trim the growth of health care spending by 1.5 percent, or $2 trillion, over the next decade.

Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now openly laughing? In the face of a “runaway rise in health care spending,” Stolberg almost seemed to suggest that a “trim” in growth, of 1.5 percent, somehow connected to the idea that “cost containment” was “a centerpiece” of Obama’s agenda! And then too, the gods, and their guests, had all seen the OECD figures—the figures which show the baseline of American health care spending. Can you see why the gods, and their guests, were now laughing hard at us mortals?

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007
United States: $7290
France: $3601
Germany: $3588
United Kingdom: $2992
Italy: $2686
Spain: $2671
Japan: $2581 (2006)

There’s the baseline for any future rise. In 2007, the U.S. spent 102 percent more than the French! In Stolberg’s account, it seems that we’re planning to “trim” 1.5 of those 102 points! But then, cost containment is a centerpiece of our health care agenda!

On Olympus, the sides of the gods are starting to split in the face of our culture’s year-long clowning—clowning which is mainly conducted at the very top of our “press corps.” Our advice: Surrender the prejudice of your youth! In a hundred different ways, you were told that “man” is “the rational animal!” As your society flounders and drowns, you—like the gods—can learn to see something quite different.

By contrast, here's how they do it in France:

Who knew? But it's nice to see it all put together:

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Because it’s not the best we can do. It mandates people purchase private insurance. It is a $70 billion giveaway to private insurance companies and locks in this system that’s the problem, not the solution.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

Monday meant that there were only 45 shopping days before Christmas, and NPR was in full consumerism mode.

If you were casually listening to Morning Edition, you might have thought NPR was reporting on its own newsreader stars - Montagne, Inskeep, Siegel, Norris, and Block -

"[They]...have names like Mr. Squiggles, Chunk, Pipsqueak....[and] are embedded with a computer chip so they can squeak, chirp and respond"

- and not the $10 MUST HAVE TOY of the season - computerized hamsters:

Times:

A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government’s picture of the country’s economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation.

The shortcomings of the data-gathering system came through loud and clear here Friday and Saturday at a first-of-its-kind gathering of economists from academia and government determined to come up with a more accurate statistical picture.

John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich are correct, it isn't HR 676 and it's not as good as HR 676. It is however a very good compromise, and for all the incrementalists and political realists out there in TVland, it provides a good foundation to build on.

What it is is HR 676 with a chunk of HR 3200 added on at the end, some revenue provisions added, illegal aliens excluded, covered benefits slightly less generous, and the part about turning the hospitals and other institutions into non-profits removed.

Glenn Greenwald:

As a testiment to Delaware's secrecy, I barely knew it existed.

Reuters:

Move over Switzerland. The tiny state of Delaware beats the Alpine country in a contest for the most secretive financial jurisdiction, a tax justice rights group said on Saturday.

The United States, led by the eastern seaboard state, took in $2.6 trillion in deposits from non-resident corporations and individuals in 2007, according to a survey of financial jurisdictions analyzed by the Tax Justice Network.

Masthead

The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:

Aeryl,
BDBlue and
danps.

Please contact any of us with submission ideas or feedback.

Krugman asks, and answers "politics" (that is, right wing bromides like "government is the problem"). Of course:

This is a copy of the long reply that Maggie Mahar made to my post "Why Is Maggie Mahar Lying About Health Reform?" at TPMCafe. I've now gone through in turn and posted responses to her statements. I will not have time to do another round of replies, but hopefully this will be enough. I suggest that people show up to the Firedoglake book salon on November 9 and ask her to stop saying that the public "option" is anything at all like "Medicare E (for everyone)."

I am, of course, not lying about Health Care reform.

Samuel Metz in the Oregonian:

Smoking kills. So does the health insurance industry.

In the 20th century our tobacco industry, threatened by associations between its product and a lung cancer epidemic, diverted public discussion to a multitude of highly charged and largely irrelevant issues. It succeeded so well that even now, 50 years later, it still freely markets its dangerous products with only minor packaging concessions.