politics/$

Politics & Money

Occupy Wall Street’s raises $5 Million to purchase & forgive debt

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Members of Occupy Wall Street last week announced the formation of “Rolling Jubilee,” a fundraising campaign that would be used to purchase outstanding debt and then abolish it. And as of Friday, the campaign has already raised enough to eliminate more than $5.7 million in personal debt, according to its web site.

source: Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Rolling Jubilee’ Raises Enough To Abolish $5 Million In Debt | ThinkProgress.

This is a great idea.

“Can you feel it? Nothin’ can save ya!”

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“Can you feel it? Nothin’ can save ya!

For this is the season of catchin’ the Vapors”

Poor Lindsey Graham. In less than eighteen months he’ll be defeated in South Carolina’s 2014 GOP primary. He is the number one target of the Club for Growth. He is talking tough about the UN Ambassador and yelling “Benghaz!” over and over again as if it is a magic word that will save him from doom. It won’t help.

source: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Nothing he does can save him.

CEO’s will paint the fiscal cliff as doomsday

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Here is Aetna’s mission statement.

Why we exist: The Aetna mission

Aetna is dedicated to helping people achieve health and financial security by providing easy access to safe, cost-effective, high-quality health care and protecting their finances against health-related risks.

Building on our 158-year heritage, Aetna will be a leader cooperating with doctors and hospitals, employers, patients, public officials and others to build a stronger, more effective health care system.

Our values

Everything we do at Aetna starts with our values — a clear, strongly held set of core beliefs that reflect who we are and what you can expect from us. We created our core values together, as one company with more than 30,000 individual voices, and with guidance from our customers. Our values carry through our thoughts and actions every day, inspire innovation in our products and services, and drive our commitment to excellence in all we do.

– Chairman, CEO and President Mark Bertolini

source: Aetna Mission and Values — Aetna.

Sounds great? What he says about the fiscal cliff: (from MarketWatch):

WASHINGTON–Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini, who is among a dozen chief executives meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama later this week, on Monday warned that companies are preparing backup plans that include layoffs if the White House and congressional leaders are unable to reach a deal to avoid the combination of tax increases and spending cuts known as the “fiscal cliff.”

“The American people are going to suffer because we’ll lay them off–because we know how to respond to these kinds of situations,” Mr. Bertolini warned at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council event.

How to respond is massive layoffs. Not cost cuts. Salary negotiations with workers. Price changes for products. Layoffs. I wonder if these are values 30000 individual voices hold too.

They are pressuring congressman to deal because they are confident a deal now will result in a better tax deal for them.

A whiney 1% fast food marketing stunt

Know your Meme: Papa John's Boycott
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Know your Meme: Papa John's Boycott

Elections are great focus groups. Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter knows that he’s got a bunch of people who instead of knocking doors for Mitt Romney will order his products just to show “support” for him in his crusade to sell crap pizza and not give his workers health care:

More than 17,000 Facebook users plan to eat at the pizza chain on Friday to support the company’s founder and CEO, John Schnatter, who has said President Barack Obama’s health care reform law will cause prices to jump by 11 to 14 cents per pizza, and has said employee hours may be scaled back.

So, when you actually look at the real cost, it’s less than that:

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Papa John’s sells exactly half medium/half large specialty pizzas. Averaging the ranges for both sizes, then averaging that product yields a .86% price increase — well outside the range of what Schnatter says Obamacare will cost him.

So how much would prices go up, under these 50/50 conditions, if they were to fairly reflect the increased cost of doing business onset by Obamacare? Roughly 3.4 to 4.6 cents a pie.

In September, the company announced that it would be giving away 2 million free pizzas. That was, of course, a promotion designed to increase brand awareness and to invite consumers to try the brand — with the ultimate goal of selling more pizzas. Those giveaways can’t really be cataloged alongside sales that would have been made otherwise. But just in case you’re curious, that would be the equivalent of $24 million to $32 million in pizza revenue.

source: Breaking Down Centi-Millionaire ‘Papa’ John Schnatter’s Obamacare Math – Forbes.

In the short term, It’s a win win for Schnatter. He can play the aggrieved millionaire businessman who has been set upon by HHS thuggery and get these events thrown for him by tea baggers who want to protect him from the wrath of adding health care benefits for his full time workers. On the flip side, most of his customers don’t really give a damn about this and it won’t impact Papa John’s sales as if you eat Papa John’s you probably don’t give a f*ck if your pizza taste good or not. He makes a grand principled stand without standing to lose much.

Campaign Back Office: Tech team and human candidate beat Tech consultants and robot candidate

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Ars Technica has overview of Obama team’s superior back office platform:

One of the biggest problems in the last campaign was that you had all these people who are out in the field who are volunteering who start building their own versions of these rogue tools to do the same thing over and over again,” said Clint Ecker, senior engineer for Obama for America (and an Ars Technica alum). Every field office assembled its own patchwork of tools using spreadsheets or a hacked Web application to track operations. They communicated over Google groups or simple e-mail lists. “It made it hard to keep everyone on the same page,” he added

[…]

“We definitely bumped up against some limitations with RDS but they were largely self-inflicted,” Ecker said. “We were able to work around those and stretch how far we were able to take RDS. If the campaign had been longer, we would have definitely had to migrate to big EC2 boxes with MySQL on them instead.” Not having to switch off RDS meant that the Obama campaign saved “a shitload of money” on hiring additional database administrators, Ecker added.

Ecker says the team also tested Amazon’s DynamoDB “NoSQL” database when it was introduced. While it didn’t replace the SQL-based RDS service as Narwhal’s data store, it was pressed into service for some of the other parts of the campaign’s infrastructure. In particular, it was used in conjunction with the campaign’s social networking “get-out-the-vote” efforts.

The integration element of Narwhal was built largely using programs that run off Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS). It pulled in streams of data from NGP VAN’s and Blue State Digital’s applications, polling data providers, and many more, and handed them off to worker applications—which in turn stuffed the data into SQS queues for processing and conversion from the vendors’ APIs. Another element of Narwhal that used SQS was its e-mail infrastructure for applications, using worker applications to process e-mails, storing them in S3 to pass them in bulk from one stage of handling to another.

source: Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech | Ars Technica.

McKayla Maroney impressed?

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President Obama talks with members of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics teams in the Oval Office, Nov. 15.

President Obama talks with members of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics teams in the Oval Office, Nov. 15. Pictured, from left, are: Steven Gluckstein, Savannah Vinsant, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, Steve Penny, USA Gymnastics President, McKayla Maroney, Kyla Ross, and Jordyn Wieber (Pete Souza)

props to The Obama Diary.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s presser: Luke Russert’s white male privelege on parade

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Luke Russert is the youngest Capitol Hill House of Representatives correspondent and he got his job, covering the most powerful legislature in the world, right out of college with an intern’s experience. Many suspect it’s because his departed father was dean of NBC News and I am part of that many. His colleagues at MSNBC won’t say this, but in reality, no one of his experience gets hired for that job. No one. His offensive, wasteful and meandering question today was a wasted opportunity to get better insight from Speaker Pelosi on Democratic strategy toward budget talks or foreign policy or infrastructure (Sandy and beyond). We did get a better understanding of how ill suited Russert currently is for that job:

Luke Russert: “Some of your colleagues privately say that your staying on will prohibit the party from having younger leadership and will be..hurts the party in the long term…what’s your response?”*

Nancy Pelosi:“Some of my male colleagues came when they were 30…You have to take off of that 14 years for me because I was home raising a family”

I just highlighted two parts of the Minority Leader’s answer. Watch the whole exchange:

The best is Russert declines to accept that he just said some offensive garbage and to Pelosi’s answer and continues to filibuster her and insist on an answer to his question. Then he gets taken school.

Not even really actualized in Luke’s silver spoon fed brain before he opened his mouth and asked that question is that Nancy Pelosi is really good at her job. Really good. We know Tip O’Neill, we should also know Nancy Pelosi as someone who is literally changing the face of politics.

That job (Minority leader of the House of Representatives) includes: representing her district, negotiating compromises with the Republicans in the House of representatives, raise money for House Democrats and Democratic candidates, organizing the Democrats to oppose or support the platform through legislation, getting Democrats elected in districts around the country that represent the party platform and cultivating Democratic leadership (committee ranking members, house caucus chairs, leading legislative strategy among Democrats, official leadership positions and campaign committee leadership) from the House of Representatives to further those goals. All of that takes years of experience, knowledge of the legislative environment, a fine strategic mind, patience, allies and know how. In addition,leadership of your caucus is usually someone who is in a safe seat: one that won’t be gerrymandered away from them (because they have clout built from years of alliance building and deal making) and their delegation isn’t hostile to them. So from the deepest blue districts (preferably in blue states or in Clyburn’s case a blue area e.g. African American, non Cuban latino, Asian) with Democratic house legislators, that is where you’ll get candidates who make sense as leadership. All of Obama’s legislative successes have gone through Pelosi as majority leader or minority leader. Along with Harry Reid, that historic first term of legislative successes was made possible by their legislative prowess. She has been a winner. No reason she should step aside. McConnell and Boehner have steadily made their party older, whiter and more male. The Democratic party has continued to find young, diverse candidates. The record breaking 20 women in the US Senate, a lot of that started with Pelosi getting some of those women elected to the US House of Representatives. Let alone the additional women, black, latino and asian members of the House of Representatives.

Think Progress Infographic: A Congress of Firsts

Think Progress Infographic: A Congress of Firsts

To be short, this is the most diverse and probably youngest congress you’ve ever seen. Ever. But to Luke Russert it’s legitimate to ask Minority Leader Pelosi if should be asked to step aside so someone like Heath Shuler (who took his ball and went home) (or whoever confided with Russert) should be given a turn.*

Some new guidelines for Russert’s next presser:

  • Women running for the House of Representatives don’t get the same opportunity as you baby Luke! So whereas you’ll have 30 years of experience reporting national news at 50, a female US rep may be 10 to 15 years in to her role. Pelosi first won her House seat at 47 years old in 1987.
  • Anyone that whispers sweet politic nothings in your ear probably wants to launder their bullshit opinions through your stupid questions at a presser so they don’t have to take responsibility for being sexist, ageist or white male & priveleged. If you start any press conference question with “someone somewhere, privately told me”, start over and ask a different question

Note: Love the imagery of Nancy Pelosi’s boss a$$ platoon comprised of the House Democratic Women’s Working Group. It’s a small tight stage, but it’s the feeling that there isn’t enough room for them and they are going to make more.

*I would bet money that the Democratic colleague(s) Russert cites who privately say to him that Pelosi is too old and needs to step aside would be a male Blue Dog Democrat whose idea of compromise is capitulation to the Tea Party controlled Republican caucus on tax cuts and entitlement cuts so they can be re-elected in 2013.

Learned Nothing: Republican Establishment wants nice presentation of same policies, Tea Party wants to move farther right

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Who is Rep. Paul Ryan backing for Republican leadership in the house? Tea Bagger: Tom Price

Mr. Price, an outspoken conservative who helped lead Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s health care law, is running against Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers for Republican Conference chairman.

source: p m carpenters commentary: Ryans learning curve.

Ryan is also refusing to back any additional tax revenue to deal with the debt. Here is Rep. Tom Price (also a medical doctor) on Obamacare:

Boehner wants McMorris Rodgers because she was a good solider who brazenly denied that the Republican Party, a party that is against The Lily Ledbetter Act, supporting candidates defining Legitimate Rape, would deny included contraceptive coverage for insured women and issued a platform that would outlaw reproductive rights is not fighting a “War on Women” during the 2012 campaign*:

They are going to knee cap Majority Leader Boehner at every turn until he capitulates. In effect, he will be leader of no caucus. Representatives have to deliver. They are much more closely coupled with constituent needs than are Senators or the President. If the Tea Party continues to knee cap Boehner he will either have to join their blockade as he foolishly did last time or legislate with (gasp) Democrats so that things get done. It was true last term, it’s true this term: Boehner has no control over his caucus and as a result he has no caucus.

*Note: John King is awful.