I think Taibbi is overthinking this, and letting his paranoia meter get the best of him.

He’s not accounting for the obvious: The whistleblower’s account syncs up very closely with Trump’s own summary of the call in question, which he made public, plus the text messages that have been released, plus Trump’s own public entreaty for China to help him out recently, plus calls to the UK, Australia, Italy . . . plus trips by Barr and Giuliani on the same mission. None of this has been refuted even by the players in question.

This isn’t rocket science, or “deep state” voodoo, or a James Bond novel. It’s simply a very stupid man-child, who has no business being president, who frequently causes the people surrounding him to be stunned, and many times a day insults them and anyone with the nerve to be critical. It makes perfect sense that given his odious nature, he’d provoke this. And I couldn’t care less that the whistleblower is from the CIA. The second one, and those likely to speak out later, will probably be from different departments or just the West Wing.

Taibbi and others are letting that one (possible) fact get in the way of their judgment. They’re letting the idea of a “spook” them, and burdening this one person with the entire history of said agency. That goes waaay beyond mere bias. That’s flat out nonsensical.

Lastly . . . the reason why this is different from past instances of whistleblowing, as far as the way he or she is being treated . . . is that person hasn’t been publicly outed yet, though the political right and Trump’s cultists are trying desperately to do just that. Taibbi also seems to have forgotten that Trump called him/her a traitor and suggested execution was in order. Again, this is prior to any “outing.” Taibbi and company should at least wait until that happens before making comparisons with the Snowdens, et al.

I like Taibbi, but I don’t think he’s thought this out.

wv wrote:

Well i havent seen you post a single solitary article by the LA Times that was in favor of Sanders-Health-Care. I’d be pleased to see one of those articles by the LA Times.

As far as the effects of Ownership on reporters and coverage. I recommend the mountain of research on that subject.

At any rate, I usually stay out of the nuances and algebra of the Health Care debate. Its not my thing as I’ve said before. Cause it doesnt matter to me what the algebra sez. What matters is do we want to be a country where everyone gets adequate health care or not. Should the rich get great health care and the poor get none or inadequate health care? Should their be ‘classes’ of health care the same as when we fly on planes — first class, second class, third class, etc. Should we have a health care system equivalent to the airline bizness? Or shold health care be… different. In a class all its own. Special. Beyond profit and capitalism.

For me that answers to those questions dont require a complicated algebra.

You know, usually ‘you’ are the one saying ‘dont over-intellectualize things.’

w
v

I think, in general, Americans have a tough time seeing class as a thing, and an even harder time thinking of class divisions and their effects. At least in the present tense. I’d imagine it’s a lot easier to do so in the past tense. With how things “used to be.” They’d probably recognize the inherent ugliness and unfairness of, say, the divisions on the Titanic that enabled the rich to escape and doomed the poor, stuck below deck. They might even thrill to a scene that showed a rich guy getting his comeuppance, sliding down the upturned ship to his death.

But it’s really tough to think in those terms about now, today, here and now, when it comes to education, health care, environmental dangers, disaster relief, etc. It’s much tougher to think in terms of a caste system, which we actually have, that largely determines what people get to be and do with their lives, simply due to the accident of their birth and their built-in networks, support systems, or lack thereof. And all around us, we’re bombarded by the message that it’s all up to us, if we just work hard and be-leeve, we can do any-thing!!

America is the only “developed” nation in the world that has an epidemic of medical bankruptcies. In the rest of the developed world, it’s virtually unheard of. There’s only one reason for that: our formalized, segregated, balkanized, normalized caste system . . . which most of the OECD, at least when it comes to health care, has largely jettisoned.

Again, this isn’t rocket science.

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Now, if you were to suggest that Nittany will “graggoksnorfle” the day, then I think he really would get antsy a bit and stop posting on behalf of Monsanto. But “rue”? It just sounds too nice a word to me.

Well, “Rue” is the name of a morgue where some murders took place in a short story written by Edgar Allen Poe.

What, exactly, is there about murders, morgues, and Edgar Allen Poe that you consider “nice”?

I may be a shill for Monsanto, but at least I’m not twisted enough to have warm feelings about a word so closely associated with the macabre.

Well, Rue is French for street. And I have a lot of warm feelings about certain streets in France. Certain street walkers, too.

As for Poe, he’s my budd. I bet you didn’t know that he hangs out at UVA in his old quarters still, and he and I have had some great chats there, especially after I’ve had a few whiskeys. A coupla years ago he admitted to me something I have long suspected. His poems? He knows they’re not that good, and that Baudelaire’s translations are most responsible for his legacy as a poet. He’s very proud and rightfully so about his short stories, mind you. But he knows that Baudelaire is the real genius when it comes to his poems. Those translations into French are really what links Poe to the Symbolist Movement, Arthur Symons, Yeats, Pound and Eliot.

Ask ZN. He’ll back me up on that, though I’m not sure he’s had the pleasure of direct contact with Poe like I have.

Anyway, Poe is always a gracious host, and he makes sure the Ravens stay in Baltimore while I’m there. Oh, and another thing: Penn State cheats at football!!

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

. The private, for-profit sector will never, ever, not ever be able to compete with a truly non-profit, public health care system on costs, value, access, coverage or outcomes.

Though to clarify, this is about universal public insurance.

A fully public health care system would include de-privatizing the world of health care providers.

Universal insurance, in itself, does not do that.

Correct. It’s a right-wing scare-tactic to talk in terms of “socializing health care” overall. No Dem is calling for that. Their plans involve only the funding (insurance) side, not the delivery side.

But I’m not a Dem, so I get to call for the entire shebang to be public, non-profit.

;>)

Which I do. I’d be thrilled with the funding side going all public, non-profit. But I think the delivery side has to follow suit. If left to their own devices, for-profit delivery costs will keep rising, and they’re already the highest in the OECD. Doctors, big pharma, medical machinery — they’re all paid far more than in any other country . . . and that’s simply not sustainable for any kind of insurance system.

A for-profit one increases the costs to patients, as already mentioned. But a non-profit one has to deal with those rising (delivery side) costs too. To me, it makes far more sense to attack both problems at the same time.

And we used to have municipal arrangements in America as the norm. Doctors were paid by towns, housed by the town, etc. etc. Patients paid what they could, usually in the form of food or home production stuff. We could update that for the 21st century and merge it with public, non-profit insurance. Everyone would get a card. They’d present it at municipal clinics and hospitals and local offices for GPs, etc. We could also expand the VA system to cover all citizens. And lest people argue that the VA is a mess, that mess is easily fixed via hiring enough staff.

Most recent audit places its deficit at 23,000 people. That’s where the long waits come in.

wv wrote:

“….Of course, this requires action. But it’s so much easier to blame others — Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Circus, or whomever — than to make responsible lifestyle choices. Maybe that explains the media coverage.”
=========================

Well, fwiw, they lose ‘me’ when they put this kind of thing in the article. That causes all kinds of alarm bells to go off in my head. I mean, why add that last sentence? Where does ‘that’ come from?

Those big-ass corpse are subverting what little democracy there is, polluting the planet, and destroying the biosphere. Thats ‘worse’ than causing cancer.

w
v

Yeah, and who makes, mass markets, sells, lies about tobacco? Who pushed for war after war to open up new markets? Corporations. It’s addictive. They knew it was addictive long ago. And they still pushed it. To kids, too. And when North America and parts of Europe started reducing consumption a bit, they blitzed the “third world” with mass marketing and got billions hooked there.

“Take personal responsibility for your actions!!” never seems to apply to the owners of these corporations.

And food? Where does obesity come from? The mass marketing and production of crap, laced with unnecessary sugar and fat and dyes, et al. It’s not in corporate America’s best interest for people to eat less, or eat what’s healthy for us. That would kill profits. That would mean a radical shift away from corporate to local food sources. From factory to very small farms, etc.

“Take personal responsibility!!” needs to include the pushers of garbage too.

wv wrote:

The National Media sometimes criticizes Donald for ‘free lancing’. I wonder if that move is considered ‘free lancing’ ?

w
v

I’m probably the billionth person who’s said this . . . but AD is so crazy good, so relentless, so driven, and so freakishly athletic, he can take himself out of a play and put himself right back into it before it ends — and make the stop. I’ve actually never seen another player do that . . . unless the play is abnormally extended.

Also, whenever I see him standing next to other very large humans, I’m amazed at how small he seems, relatively speaking. He shouldn’t be able to do the things he does on the field. He looks like a linebacker, not a DT.

My view: We need to ask ourselves, as a society, do we want a system that everyone can afford, that provides the best chance for healthy outcomes, puts patients first, puts the common good first? Or do we want to put profit-takers first, and the individual chance to make one’s fortune off the pain and misery of others . . . and hope for the best when it comes to patients and outcomes?

Because you can’t do both. It’s impossible. We have to choose. Want all Americans to have access to those healthy outcomes? You can’t leave it up to profit-takers. Why? Because their goals, interests and incentives are in direct opposition to those of patients. Obviously. That’s just math. The desire to make fortunes runs counter to the ability of citizens to afford health care. No way around it.

A sane society wouldn’t even hesitate on this. It would treat the health of its citizenry as “sacred,” in a secular sense. At the very least, it would have a non-profit system akin to its public schools, where the focus is on the students, not on insuring the personal accrual of large fortunes by the few.

Again, you can’t do both. You can’t make “wealth creation” a factor while you seek to give access to all citizens. It’s mathematically impossible. You will always and forever leave tens of millions of people out, and short cuts will need to be made for everyone else but the richest of the rich. Patient health will always be at best of secondary concern.

Gotta choose: health for all or wealth for a few.

Side note: Jack posted it earlier, but when I saw the article at the NYT, I was livid. Trump was told that it was illegal to just shoot migrants, which he called for. He wanted to do that. So he kept trying to figure out ways to end this manufactured border “crisis” that were legal, and was told, repeatedly, “No, Mr. President,” you can’t do that.” He changed to shooting them in the legs, electrifying the fence, putting flesh-ripping spikes on the top of the wall, adding moats with snakes and alligators in them.

The man is a sadist and a monster.

At this point, going back to the topic above, the main reason why he keeps his base gives support for some recent studies on levels of stubbornness in humans. Those right of center, ideologically, the studies showed, tend to dig in even more when they’re confronted with facts. As in, they cling even harder to their stances, if criticized. Left of center people tend to reassess and give up on older positions, if the facts warrant this.

Obviously, these studies were about aggregate behavior, not individual. Exceptions galore exist and are assumed.

In my view, people are attributing far too much to Trump himself, as far as his “base” is concerned. He inherited the vast majority of it, simply by being the GOP standard bearer. The same people who voted for Romney, McCain, Dubya, Bush Sr, etc. etc. voted for Trump. If they’re old enough, the same people who voted for Reagan, Nixon, Goldwater and so on.

There’s no doubt in my mind that if Trump had run as an independent, he would have been crushed by the GOP nominee. If Kasich or Rubio, for instance, had won, they would have had at least as large a group of diehards behind them, if not larger.

Trump, on his own, brings very few new people into the GOP, and he loses more than most would to the Dems.

This is why I think the Dems make a huge mistake if they think the answer is to chase after Trump voters. They’re not going to vote Dem anyway. Smarter way to win in 2020? Go after the people who staid home who lean left. They’re virtually the only ones available in the “undecided” column.

Quick follow up. Please know that none of this is about you. I kinda feel I have to say that again, cuz I know I sometimes react harshly to posts like this. It’s a bad habit.

;>(

In no way, shape or form am I trying to get you to stop posting the stuff you think is important here. The more the better. I love reading your take on things. Always have. That’s not gonna change.

Hope all is well in the Mountain State.

Not sure if you remember this, WV. But old Wallace Stevens is among my favorite poets, evah. I think he was, in fact, the greatest American poet of the 20th century, and in the running for greatest English language poet of that century.

I have his collected poems and prose, in a fine edition from The Library of America, plus this or that paperback. And recently purchased and read a really great bio by Paul Mariani.

I recommend it highly:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Whole-Harmonium/Paul-Mariani/9781451624380

Theoretical, and controversial, but some studies say meditation is kind of similar in its effects. Helps bring the conscious mind in sync with the subconscious. Again, that’s the theory. Religious ecstasy does this as well, which also can be “practiced.” Buddhists do this daily. Born again Christians say it happens the moment they accept Jesus as their savior. But if they’re not mystic adepts, it never happens to them again.

(Have always been fascinated by mysticism. Included much about it in a coupla of my unpublished novels. Well, all of my novels are unpublished!)

Psychedelics would be another route to the same thing, though far more intense and direct. A short cut of sorts? Merging the conscious and unconscious minds is likely pretty damn healthy, but it also likely needs guidance . . . Too bad Carlos Castaneda is no longer alive. At least not on this astral plane.

One of my favorite poets and writers in general is Henri Michaux, the Belgian genius. He experimented with mescaline and other drugs and wrote about that. Painted under the influence too.

I went to a sports bar to watch most of the game. Wish I hadn’t. Though there were a couple points in the game that brought me some joy. The joy quickly ebbed away, though, after this or that interception, missed tackle, missed block, etc. etc.

I may end up trying to get the Sunday Ticket earlier than I had planned — hoping to save money suspending the service a bit longer, etc.

In a nutshell, the Rams embarrassed themselves. That might have been their worst defensive performance in ten years. Can’t remember the last time they tackled so poorly. Just atrocious. And Goff was like a rookie again, flailing away, though his line gave him little help. Poor performance on the line is going to lead most QBs into major errors. But I think a lot of that still falls on Goff. And the coaches. And the staff. etc.

Trap game? Were they looking past the Bucs to Seattle? I have no idea. But they better get a handle on this and soon, or they’re not even going to reach the playoffs. Yes, they have great talent . . . perhaps top three in the league overall. But sloppy play can negate that against most teams, and the Bucs were hungrier this Sunday.

Anyone else think the guy who speared Peters in the endzone should have been flagged, fined and thrown out of the game for that?

Players Only meetings are warranted, regardless.