Imagine My Shock

FDL Action » Goldman Sachs: Insurance Stocks Would Drop 36% By 2019 With House Public Option

Pretty interesting. Goldman Sachs evaluates the impact of the Finance Committee health care bill, the House bill and no bill on the value of insurance stocks over the next 10 years. They focused on the impact of Wall Street’s biggest insurance stocks: Aetna, UnitedHealth, WellPoint, CIGNA and Humana.

The best scenario for the insurance companies is doing nothing:

Justice

The Seminal » Does Wolf Blitzer Think It’s Time To Call Out the Lynch Mob?

What happened at Fort Hood was terrifying, it was horrible, it is dislocating, and it is beyond disturbing. But it is not grounds for setting aside the Constitution. Unless everyone has constitutional rights, none of us is guaranteed that our own rights will be protected. When we say that Nazis have a right to free speech, that suspected terrorists have a right to be free from torture, that accused murderers have a right to a fair trial, it doesn’t mean we are endorsing Nazis, terrorists, or murderers (or murderers who are also terrorists). It means that we recognize what the Constitution requires–as it says on the Supreme Court building, "equal justice under law."

Having a Constitution isn’t easy, but it’s something many of us think is worth the effort. As Congress said in 1963 "No persons should be more entitled to protection of their constitutional rights then the servicemen engaged in protecting the sovereignty of the United States." It’s easy to repeat those words when we’re thinking of brave, wrongly accused soldiers caught up in a Kafkaesque misunderstanding. The test of whether the Constitution means what it says is whether we can apply the principle of equal justice to those who appear repellent. I’m glad to answer "yes"–the Constitution must apply to everyone, without exception. That’s the only way we can be sure that we, ourselves, will be protected.

A speedy trial followed by an execution. That is precisely what too many people seem to want here.

A Canadian View On The Vampire Squid

CBC News - World - Shamelessness on Wall Street, who knew?

Put more precisely, this was a brilliant exercise in privatizing profit and socializing risk.

Which is the American way, no matter what conservatives here want to believe about the risk-taking, enterprising, can-do spirit of rugged individualism that supposedly separates American businesses from their spoiled counterparts in the socialist nanny states of Europe and Canada.

To their credit, a great many Americans have seen this for what it is, are angry about it and have called their politicians.

Some of those politicians have had the courage to call people like Blankfein on their nonsense about doing God's work.

Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell has a better term: "casino capitalism."

"Wall Street is not providing access to capital for companies that make things," she says. "Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up."

Why I no longer consider myself cynical

The Seminal » EMILY’s List Notices, Fundraises Off Of, Stupak-Pitts Amendment

Ellen Malcolm’s cynical email amounts to political malpractice: writing to EMILY’s List large list, asking for money and petition-signing to Harry Reid, when everyone who understands Capitol Hill knows the time to start fighting Stupak-Pitts was when it was announced in July, not now after it has passed the House and can only be stopped in the Senate. "We’ll fix it in conference" is a fools errand for progressives.

And Ellen Malcolm, as head of a long-time Washington institution, should know this.

But three-alarm fundraising and list-building can only be accomplished when women’s rights have actually been put on the chopping block. It wouldn’t suit EMILY’s list, or any other women’s rights Veal Pen denizens, to try to actually stop Stupak back when it mattered and could be headed off completely — much better for any organization’s visibility to let the issue come to a full boil.

Sarah Should Know better

Palin's Enemies List: Lashes Out At The Media, Bloggers, And SNL Writers

"I looked at the script," she writes of the preparation for her appearance on the show. "It wasn't all that funny. SNL writers had taken the campaign's 'Drill, baby, drill' mantra and turned it into a risqué double entendre about Todd and me. I thought, Nah. C'mon, New York talent, we can do better than that."

The last people that you take on are comedians. They will fuck you up!

Shocking News

Women Now Hold Half of U.S. Jobs - For Less Money Than Men | Crooks and Liars

When these stories come out, I have to laugh. Because women on the working-class end of the economic spectrum have had to work for a very long time. Pay raises haven't get pace with the cost of living, to the point where paychecks aren't worth what they were in the 70s. Women stepped in to pick up the slack.

No, what the Wall St. Journal means is that the sort of women who are married to the men who read the Journal have to work now. (It's a class thing!) But some things remain the same: Women still get paid less.

What Digby Said

Hullabaloo

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don't think there's even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

All over the blogosphere people link to Digby and simply say "what she said". This is one such post.