We knew it was going to be rough, but wow.

The health and human services portion of the proposal would cut Medicaid provider rates — what doctors and hospitals and others are paid — by 10 percent. And it doesn’t include funding for population growth or for increased costs or utilization rates. There’s also a $4.3 billion cut included to account for the federal stimulus money used in the current budget that’s not available for the next budget. The proposal would cut a total of $16.1 billion in health and human services spending. That’s a 24.6 percent cut.

Jon Stewart gets pissed.

Man what a terrible name. Last night you did some pretty neat stuff politically. You apparently won with a write in candidate in Alaska. You took back the house. You used a mess of legal voodoo to allow non-profits to match the fund-raising levels of your rivals (something that’s going to bite all us NGO’s in the ass, I think). You made me drink a lot of red wine and throw things at the Television (this is not really all that hard). Most improbably, you made an electorate believe that you were the party to change the course of government, even though over the past 18 months you’ve been unwilling to compromise on a single goddamn thing that would be good for the country.

But that’s neither here nor there. Your stonewalling policy worked, and applaud you for it in the same fashion I applaud when disaster movies smash up our cities and national monuments. Now though, you have a serious challenge: governing. Not campaigning, not raising money, not sound-biting, governing.

Lets see how you do. You’ll pardon my skepticism though if I have my doubts as to how applicable your current resumes (‘once filibustered 27 bills’) are to problems like the economy, immigration, election reform, etc.

Best of luck.

Well,  Jon Stewart may yet save the country…

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith. Or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.”

“Not being able to be able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.”

“The press is our immune system,” Mr. Stewart says. “If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker. And perhaps eczema. And yet, with that being said, I feel good. Strangely, calmly good.”

Damn straight. And damn brilliant.

Pardon my language, but this is fucking insane.

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The article goes on to describe the process, whereby legislators from across the country meet each year at conferences and draft sample legislation, ostensibly a kind of state-house happy hour networking event, although private companies (like representatives form the private prison industry) spend tens of thousands to attend and get in on the action, going as far as to suggestion what legislation to draft.

The draft language proposed in Arizona matched, to the letter, a draft bill proposed at one of these conferences.

My kind of rally…

We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.

Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we’d like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 — a date of no significance whatsoever — at the Daily Show’s “Rally to Restore Sanity.” Ours is a rally for the people who’ve been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence… we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.

Also counter-balanced by Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive

…with our livelihoods.

This is where the trickery comes in. To explain it, let’s go back to the sausage analogy.

Say I’m a sausage grinder. My sausage is selling great.  Until one day, my customers say they don’t want the ends, the ones with those nasty knots. Pretty soon, I’ve got all these end bits piling up on my counter. I’m worried it’s going to turn off customers. So I shove the end bits back in the grinder and make new sausages.  Brilliant. Of course, customers don’t want those end bits either.  So, I throw them back in the grinder. This works for a while.  But eventually, I’m making sausages that are made up entirely of nasty end bits.

“So, this is exactly what happens with subprime CDOs (collateralized  debt obligations) ,” Bernstein says. “The investment banks take the worst parts of the CDO and they put it into new CDOs, recycling it again and again, until pretty soon, the CDOs that you’re left with are made up of the worst parts of the stuff.”

With Wall Street, when they recycle a CDO and shove a nasty bit back in the blender, they mark it as a sale. As if they found a real customer.

“In fact, a lot of the business is an illusion,” Eisinger says. “The CDO guys are orchestrating the demand.”

From a fine collaboration with NPR and ProPublica, with AutoTune the news thrown in for good measure.

When Greg Abbott actually sues a company in Texas, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.

In Texas City, an estimated 538,000 pounds of pollutants like benzene, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide leaked into the air during that period, though Carman believes the release may be “more than 10 times higher” than the number that BP reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That’s because, he says, BP assumes that its flare met the 2 percent standard but has no record proving that it does. “BP has no real monitoring technology up on the flare,” he says. “They have no way to measure the actual emissions that did not get burned over the 40 days.”  (more…)

While we ponder more stringent immigration controls in the state, hows about we deport BP?