Blood test
I have to get a blood test today for my thyroid meds or they won’t refill my prescription (I don’t know why, I’m doing fine), so I went over to the local ambulatory center (which was a hospital until right after I moved here). I sit and wait my turn for about a half-hour. One of the patients is watching a movie trailer on his phone; it’s really loud, and he’s chortling loudly as he watches. “DAY-UMN!!!” he says to the woman he’s with. “He shot him right in the stomach, yo!”
I finally get in to get my blood drawn and I’m bitching to the technician how much easier it was when doctors took blood right in the office. “I know, I remember it, too,” she says. “I don’t know why they stopped.” I tell her it’s because doctors were making so much money, ordering extra tests.
“Don’t kid yourself,” she says. “They’re still doing it.”
Baby, you’re a rich man
When I read this piece yesterday, I thought, wow, here’s a guy who’s flying around in kazillionaires’ private jets, sitting in private boxes at high-profile sporting events and making ten times the median income in New Jersey (one of the wealthiest states) — and he’s poor mouthing? Seriously, dude? This is not going to endear him to the voters! Maybe if he listens to the video, it will start to sink in. Via the Daily Beast:
“I don’t consider myself a wealthy man,” Chris Christie said Friday in New Hampshire. That would be the same Chris Christie who, according to his tax returns, made $698,838 in 2013—$160,054 of which he earned as governor of New Jersey, and $475,854 of which came from his wife, Mary Pat Christie, who works at a New York investment bank.Christie isn’t rich if you’re comparing him to his friends and donors, and he certainly may not feel rich in New Jersey, where his own policies have made living more expensive. But it turns out that feeling just makes Christie exactly like many other technically rich people: not very self-aware.
Mind you, this is just reported income. Nudge nudge, wink wink!
Christie’s income is nearly 10 times New Jersey’s median, which in 2013 was $71,692; and well over $539,000, the amount necessary to qualify as one of the top 1% of earners there.So why does Christie feel so poor?
He offered his own explanation on Friday: “Listen, wealth is defined in a whole bunch of different ways, and in the end, Mary Pat and I have worked really hard, we’ve done well over the course of our lives—um, but, you know, we have four children to raise and a lot of things to do, so, no, I don’t, I don’t consider myself and I don’t think most people think of me that way.”
Perhaps Christie doesn’t feel rich because compared to his friends and the lifestyle he enjoys in their company, he’s not.The economic class with the greatest income inequality is the upper class, because it encompasses everyone earning $250,000 or more. Were Christie to look around, he might feel very poor indeed. He has flown on private planes provided by Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and Republican donor, and Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And he has been the guest of King Abdullah of Jordan—“a friend,” an aide told The New York Times—who put him and his family up for a weekend in a hotel with rooms costing $30,000 a night.
Chris Christie is someone who only really enjoys OPM (Other People’s Money). When he was in office, he was, in fact, the spendingest U.S. Attorney around. When he traveled, he ordered a lot of room service, and he was frequently accompanied by the colleague everyone assumed was his girlfriend (who has since shuffled through a series of well-paid, government-related jobs). And he only stayed in five-star hotels! No government per-diem rates for him, no sir. (The way he accomplished this was to put off making reservations until the very last minute and claim the top-ranked hotels were the only ones available. Oh yeah, this is the guy we want in the White House.)
And when he was a lobbyist for Bernie Madoff’s Wall Street trade association, why, you just betcha he had an American Express gold card. Imagine the fine dining OPM paid for!
Not to mention, he (someone without a lick of prosecutorial experience) managed to bundle together a large enough contribution to the Bush campaign that Karl Rove slid him into the U.S. attorney’s slot.
Everyone is a “friend,” because that’s his way around the strict (but obviously not strict enough) New Jersey ethics laws. All those nice hotel rooms, all that room service, all that living high on someone else’s hog. What a life.
The day we’ll know Chris Christie truly is a rich man is the day he finally starts paying his own way.
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Watching Scotty blow
Charlie Pierce goes to see Scott Walker in New Hampshire:
I was especially interested in the evening show provided by Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. I had to wait for John Sununu, Sr. to go through an introduction that lasted longer than the Good Friday ritual. (Sununu may still be talking. CSPAN cut away to listen to Walker.) But Walker was worth the wait. We heard about how he’s going to ride his Harley to Bike Week in Laconia this year. We heard the bit about buying the shirt at Kohl’s. We heard “go big and go bold.” We heard about the death threats. And we heard a lot of stunning misdirection about how rosy things are with the Wisconsin economy. (I was especially taken with how he boasted that he had turned his state into a right-to-work paradise, Walker having denied up and down throughout the last campaign that he had any such plans.) And there is no question. Scott Walker is the best Governor of Wisconsin that New Hampshire ever has had.
What we didn’t hear, of course, was that, back in America’s Dairyland, they may never get out of the death spiral into which Walker has shown the actual state he allegedly actually governs. His new budget is so draconian that even some of the Republicans in his pet legislature are starting to get nervous. And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a newspaper of wild ambivalence regarding Walker and his prospective candidacy, dropped a dungbomb on him that demonstrated that, while Scott Walker may have bought a shirt at Kohl’s, he isn’t qualified to run a cash register there.
Last August, a Wisconsin state agency told two family-planning organizations that they owed a total of $3.5 million because they had overbilled Medicaid programs for prescription drugs and certain services. Last week, the agency — the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health Services — lowered the amount by more than $3.2 million. The two family-planning organizations — NEWCAP Community Health Services and Family Planning Health Services — were told of the change in letters from Alan White, the inspector general. Yet the letters raise more questions than they answer, not the least being how the state could have been off by 93% — and maybe more, given that at least one of the organizations plans to challenge the remaining claims. The Department of Health Services would not make White or anyone else in the department available for interviews this week, and White did not return phone calls. The department would only answer questions via email.
My suspicions that family-planning clinics were deliberately targeted in order to placate those parts of The Base that Walker needs to appease are completely unfounded, I’m sure. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.
(He will get around to uttering some barefaced non-facts about this situation sooner or later. He’s had practice at that.)
This coincided with Walker’s Rubio-esque attempt to thread the marriage equality needle; apparently, he won’t go to the clerk’s office, but he’ll go to the reception. (Is he only in it for the open bar and the bratwurst? Stay tuned.) And it also coincided with some new polling numbers from alma mammy that fit Walker for the bell also worn by “Bobby” Jindal and Chris Christie back in their home states. The folks in Wisconsin seem to be tumbling to the fact that their state, in addition to being a lab rat for corporate conservatism, has been rendered quite deliberately little more than a vehicle in which Scott Walker can run for president. Good luck with that.
Kids with ADD learn better when they can fidget
Bad moms
Who leave their kids in the car! I did this all the time with my kids. I’d come home from work and drive to the 7-Eleven to get milk or whatever. I was supposed to pull my kids out of the car and drag them in for me for five minutes — especially when I could see them?
Crazy. Just crazy.
News you can use
One of the weird ADD symptoms I have is constant tightness in my upper back, always. It’s always been that way. I can get a therapeutic massage and on the way home, it’s right back to the status quo. The only time that stopped it was when I used to be on Ritalin (which I can’t take because it was starting to cause Tourette’s symptoms).
But my friend Maya, God bless her, turned me onto passion flower tea. (They call it “the herbal Prozac.”) When she made me try it, I did not believe it would work. But it did. So I don’t care what they call it, this shit works. When I drink it, my neck gets all loose-y goose-y and I feel like I just took a Xanax — which, under the right circumstances, is not such a bad thing.
So if you have a high-stress job, bad relationship, poverty, anger with your elected officials, etc. and want to feel like you took a Xanax, you should try it. Here’s the kind I use.
Sheriff Joe and his PR machine
Oh, come on. If he’s serving vegetarian food, it’s because it’s cheaper and the more profit there is for Joe’s pals! The bigoted blowhard sure does know how to distract people from his legal problems:
Only a marketing magician like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio could transform an all-vegetarian meal into a bunch of baloney.
But that’s what he did last week, staging one last publicity stunt before he is scheduled to appear Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow in a contempt hearing.
Arpaio tried to divert attention from his troubles with a made-for-the-media event featuring former “Bay Watch” actress Pamela Anderson, who serves as a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The idea was to provide a photo opportunity for Arpaio as well as a chance for him to speak about the cheap, meatless meals he’s serving to those detained in the county’s jail system.
Media outlets in town could not resist covering the event – although we should have.It was harmless enough, I suppose, except perhaps to the sensibilities of those who believe they’d been targeted and discriminated against by Arpaio’s department and wonder why the media still falls for his self-serving antics.
Continue reading “Sheriff Joe and his PR machine”
It’s good when Republicans are fighting over Social Security
Via Digby, some interesting news:
So what to make of Mike Huckabee coming out swinging on this issue on Friday and taking Christie and the others to task in no uncertain terms?
“I don’t know why Republicans want to insult Americans by pretending they don’t understand what their Social Security program and Medicare program is,” Huckabee said in response to a question about Christie’s proposal to gradually raise the retirement age and implement a means test.
Huckabee said his response to such proposals is “not just no, it’s you-know-what no.”
“I’m not being just specifically critical of Christie but that’s not a reform,” he said. “That’s not some kind of proposal that Republicans need to embrace because what we are really embracing at that point is we are embracing a government that lied to its people–that took money from its people under one pretense and then took it away at the time when they started wanting to actually get what they have paid for all these years.”
He added that he had no intention of endorsing Paul Ryan’s plan either. This is very unusual for a Republican. They may not want to take that vote for cutting the program, especially since their base is very much among those who benefit from it, but they are never this unequivocal about it. It’s extremely rare for them not to issue any disclaimer about The Deficit and The Government Spending Too Much, etc, etc. To come right out and take the retirement age and means testing off the table — that actually is the “bold” and “authentic” breaking-with-conventional-wisdom for which the beltway media had already Christie all the credit.
Have the progressives finally made some headway on this issue? Lindsey Graham came out against cutting SS too. It’s hard to imagine, but if there’s actually some open discord on this issue among the right wingers, we may finally turned the tide. They’ll never quit, of course. And Wall Street wants that money. But what this does is put a lot more pressure on Democrats to keep their grubby hands off the program. And that’s a big relief.