Tekeli Li!!!

The horror.....

H/t Del Palmer

Obama 2013 vs. Biden 2006

Biden debunks every single one of Obama's talking points:

It's a Week for Good Court Rulings

This one is a ruling that an unpaid internship must be an educational experience for the benefit of the intern, not an unpaid job:

Yesterday, a federal judge issued the first major ruling on the illegality of unpaid internships in recent years, challenging a rise in corporate reliance on uncompensated workers.

Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated U.S. and New York minimum wage laws by not paying two production interns for work done on the set of the movie “Black Swan.”

Pauley ruled that the interns had essentially completed the work of paid employees – organizing filing cabinets, making photocopies, taking lunch orders, answering phones – and derived little educational benefit from the program, one of the criteria for unpaid internships under federal law. Pauley also ruled that the plaintiffs were employees and thus protected by minimum wage laws.

“I hope this sends a shockwave through employers who think, ‘If I call someone an intern, I don’t have to pay them,’” Eric Glatt, one of the plaintiffs, told ProPublica. “Secondarily, it should send a signal to colleges and universities who are rubber-stamping this flow of free labor into the marketplace.”

It should also be noted that unpaid internships serve to keep poor people out numerous professions, because they cannot afford to work for free.

Quote of the Day

From the always informative Charlie Savage:

You think any of these guys looked at what happened in 2008 and thought, "Boy, those guys really were crooks and bought the country a helluva catastrophe. We should learn from them and not do that ourselves." Nope, I guarantee you the first thoughts among the people who thought up this scam for the insurance companies was, "Holy crap, look at the dough those guys made!" And I guarantee you those same people all got raises. The upper levels of American capitalism is so rotten with amorality, so utterly devoid of any conventional sense of ethics, let alone social responsibility, that it hardly seems worth pointing it out any more. Congratulations to America's graduate schools of business. You have bred three generations of vampires to feed on the rest of us. It's as though every medical school in the country adopted the basic approach to thoracic surgery of Sweeney Todd and married it to the economic philosophy of Bialystock And Bloom.

He is talking about the insurance industry, which has recently been discovered to have been using complex accounting tricks to boost their apparent assets and revenue.

If the Banksters had been sent to a "federal pound me in the ass prison," these insurance executives would have thought twice before engaging in accounting fraud.

Won the Election and Should Have Been President

Al Gore:

The National Security Agency's blanket collection of US citizens' phone records was "not really the American way", Al Gore said on Friday, declaring that he believed the practice to be unlawful.

In his most expansive comments to date on the NSA revelations, the former vice-president was unsparing in his criticism of the surveillance apparatus, telling the Guardian security considerations should never overwhelm the basic rights of American citizens.

He also urged Barack Obama and Congress to review and amend the laws under which the NSA operated.

"I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way," Gore said in a telephone interview. "Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that those who would give up essential liberty to try to gain some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

There are some people who leave politics, and just cash in as a lobbyist (Evan Bayh comes to mind), and there are those who find freedom and grow.

Al Gore is one of the latter.

Let me offer a hearty f%$# you to the corrupt Supreme Court justices who mad the Bush administration happen.

Would You Cut Someone's Throat for Money

The hed is instructive, "Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000."

When people talk about how the private sector solves everything, just remember this story:

A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital cut a hole in Earl Nattee’s throat on Jan. 3, the day before he died. It’s not clear why.

The medical file contained no explanation of the need for the procedure, called a tracheotomy, according to a state and federal inspection report that quotes Sacred Heart’s chief nursing officer as saying it happened “out of the blue.” Tracheotomies are typically used to open an air passage directly to the windpipe for patients who can’t breathe otherwise.

Now, amid a federal investigation into allegations of unneeded tracheotomies at the hospital, Nattee’s daughter, Antoinette Hayes, wonders whether her father was a pawn in what an FBI agent called a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid.

“My daddy said, ‘They’re killing me,’” Hayes recalled, in reference to the care he received at the hospital.

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them -- enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

They have witnesses who wore wires, and a number of doctors, as well as the CEO of the for profit (notwithstanding the Catholic hospital sounding name) hospital.

There is a reason why governments need to aggressively regulate, or operate, critical services, because incentives to produce good behavior are either ineffective, or more expensive than explicit regulation.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Word for This is Desperation………

Yes, the NSA is now saying that it will provide information about how it's rapacious thirst for our personal data stopped some terrorists at some point:

The National Security Agency (NSA) plans to release details of terrorist attacks thwarted by its controversial bulk surveillance of Americans’ communications data, a senior US senator said on Thursday.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, would provide “the cases where this [surveillance] has stopped a terrorist attack, both here and in other places” as early as Monday.

Here is the important quote:

But the FBI director, Robert Mueller, forcefully defended the programs on Thursday to the House judiciary committee by saying the broad surveillance could have foiled the 9/11 attacks and averted “another Boston”.

But this program has been going on for years, and Boston happened.  Why didn't it do it then?

They are trying to blow smoke up our ass.