The Commentariat -- Nov. 6, 2013
** George Packer of the New Yorker: "Our democracy's unnecessary stupidities."
Todd Gillman of the Dallas Morning News: "President Obama will use his time in Dallas on Wednesday to ramp up pressure on Gov. Rick Perry to expand Medicaid, aides said -- a step that could lop 1.4 million Texans off the rolls of the uninsured. The president will call on Perry to join 'reasonable Republican governors in states like Ohio and Michigan and Arizona' who already have agreed to such an expansion...." CW: Yup. Jan Brewer (Az.) is reasonable. ...
... MEANWHILE. Robert Garrett of the Dallas Morning News: Texas "Attorney General Greg Abbott hinted strongly Tuesday that Texas may impose additional training and background checks on 'navigators' hired under federal grants to help people sign up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act." CW: Sabotage by any other name still stinks. ...
... Robert Pear of the New York Times: Inexplicably, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rules that the ACA is not subject to a "law that ban rebates, kickbacks, bribes and certain other financial arrangements in federal health programs, stripping law enforcement of a powerful tool used to fight fraud in other health care programs, like Medicare." Let the circus begin!
** Juan Williams of Fox "News": "Taking crocodile tears to a new level, ObamaCare opponents are now rushing to their defense and calling the president a liar. These critics include Republican politicians who did not vote for ObamaCare; these are Republican governors who refuse to set up exchanges to reach their own citizens; these are people oppose expanding Medicaid to help poor people getting better health care; these are people who have never put any proposal on the table as an alternative fix for the nation's costly health care system that leaves tens of millions with inadequate medical coverage and tens of millions more totally uninsured.... If you are one of the estimated 2 million Americans whose health insurance plans may have been cancelled this month, you should not be blaming President Obama or the Affordable Care Act. You should be blaming your insurance company because they have not been providing you with coverage that meets the minimum basic standards for health care." CW: Read the whole post. This is an amazing piece coming from a conservative commentator on Fox "News." A-Mazing! ...
... Dana Milbank: "No, the Obamacare pratfall is not Obama's Iraq: The magnitude is entirely different, and the problems -- Web site malfunctions and a wave of policy cancellations -- are fixable. But the decision-making is disturbingly similar: In both cases, insular administrations, staffed by loyalists and obsessed with secrecy, participated in group-think and let the president hear only what they thought he wanted to hear." ...
... Brian Beutler of Salon on the arc of health insurance "rate shock" stories: "... it's really striking how long it's taking reporters to realize that these stories are incomplete, and probably inaccurate, unless and until they and their subjects have a handle on all of the relevant information.... The truth is the Affordable Care Act isn't blameless -- not, as its critics suggest, because it imposes too much regulation on the individual insurance market, but because it doesn't impose enough." ...
... CW: Beutler faults the insurers for much of the brouhaha: "The transition period between the old individual market and the new, better one, provides them one last chance to use the power of inertia and fear of the unknown to feed their consumers into expensive plans and shunt the blame for the price hike onto Obamacare." This brings to mind a comment in yesterday's thread: citizen625 noted that the president of UnitedHealth Group received nearly $49 million in compensation last year according to Forbes. "Next time some someone says whats wrong with the healthcare system and blames Barry O and the Democrats, trot that number out as a representative drain on non-medical costs of healthcare," citzen625 writes. ...
... Worth Noting: United HealthCare had to rebate premiums to many policyholders because the company failed to meet "the ACA's 80/20 rule that requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent of their premium dollars on medical care or quality improvements and no more than 20 percent on administrative costs and overhead." (Sen. Al Franken put the rule in the bill.) In North Carolina, for instance, this UHC "accounts for ... nearly two-thirds, of all rebates" due that state's policyholders." United HealthGroup companies also accounted for the most rebates in Florida. In 2012, insurers had to pay out about $1.1 billion for failing to meet the ACA requirement. In 2013, that figure was down to about $500 million. More importantly, the Obama administration estimated that "the 80/20 standard contributed to $3.4 billion in lower premiums for 77.8 million consumers because health insurance companies charged less up front." Obviously, United HealthGroup was one of the companies that missed that boat. Surely overcompensating their CEO contributed to their being one of the minority of health insurers who couldn't meet the 80/20 standard. (There's an 85/15 standard for group insurance.)
... It isn't just the insurers. From-the-Heartland adds: the highest paid U.S. CEO on the Forbes list "is John Hammergren of McKesson at $131,190,000.00 for the year (McKesson delivers medicines, pharmaceutical supplies, information and care management products and services) and #6 is George Paz of Express Scripts at $51,520,000.00 for one year (Express Scripts is a pharmacy benefit management company). These are all obscene salaries that we are paying for through our insurance premiums or cost of care if uninsured." F-t-H recommends single-payer insurance, which would largely cut private health insurers out of the picture. Beutler agrees. Jonathan Chait, below, explains why single-payer didn't happen. ...
... ** Jonathan Chait: "The point is that [the ACA] represents the least-disruptive, least-painful way to clear the minimal threshold of any humane reform. The preferred alternatives of both right and left would impose an order of magnitude more dislocation -- creating not a few million 'victims,' but tens of millions. What's on display at the moment is a way of looking at the world that sanctifies defenders of the horrendous status quo and places all the burden upon those trying to change it."
Donna Cassata of the AP: "Invoking the Declaration of Independence, proponents of a bill that would outlaw discrimination against gays in the workplace argued on Tuesday that the measure is rooted in fundamental fairness for all Americans. Republican opponents of the measure were largely silent, neither addressing the issue on the second day of Senate debate nor commenting unless asked. Written statements from some rendered their judgment that the bill would result in costly, frivolous lawsuits and mandate federal law based on sexuality.... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said a final vote in the Senate is possible by week's end."
Ed Kilgore: "Unions and progressive activists are uniting around Tom Harkin's bill to boost benefits by $70 a month for all Social Security recipients (and more for those heavily dependent on benefits for retirement security), increase (rather than decrease, as the 'chained CPI' tentatively accepted by the White House...) the cost-of-living adjustment formula, and pay for it all by eliminating the regressive payroll tax cap for the program.... The ... 'expand Social Security' message may be less about ... changing the playing field than the simple fact that voters, and particularly the older voters on which the Republican Party so heavily relies, are likely to support higher benefits however they feel about 'entitlements' as an abstraction.... The broader subject of rapidly eroding retirement security is long-overdue for serious public debate."
Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday he plans to have two more test votes on nominations to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals by the end of the week. The move is intended to determine whether Republicans will follow through on their threat to filibuster judicial picks Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins. If they do, as seems likely, the Nevada Democrat has said he may revive his own threat to end the minority's ability to filibuster nominations through the so-called nuclear option."
John Boehner -- Democrats' Secret Weapon. Steve Benen: "The Democratic coalition is stable, but not unbreakable. By refusing to govern, Boehner and House Republicans are strengthening that coalition, boosting Democratic fundraising, helping Democratic recruiting efforts, and motivating the Democratic base."
But you know, I think that the president should take ownership not just of what he's said and what he's promised the American people on Obamacare. But I think he should take ownership over this divisive culture that he has created, this KKK analogy you saw Trey (sic) Grayson roll out. And no Democrat is out there in any sort of organized fashion denouncing this. Now you got Harry Belafonte making the same allegation. -- Reince Priebus, RNC Chair
Priebus's high dudgeon is awfully precious considering his party is littered with folks who have done nothing but coarsen this nation's political discourse with nary a peep of condemnation from him or anyone of any stature in the GOP.... There are sitting Republican members of Congress who have openly talked about impeaching the president because they continue to believe he was not born in the United States.... And there were winks and nods on this issue from Speaker John Boehner and other so-called leaders of the party. No wonder a protester felt comfortable unfurling a Confederate flag in front of the White House last month. If anyone 'should take ownership over this divisive culture' it's Priebus. -- Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post
Charles Pierce: With respect to Chris Christie, Democrats are following "the same ghastly strategy that aided and abetted the rise of C-Plus Augustus in Texas."
The Plagiarist, Ctd. Jim Rutenberg & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "While maintaining the defiance he has shown since the claims of plagiarism were first made last week, [Sen. Rand] Paul ... said he was putting in place a more diligent system within his office to footnote and attribute material, part of what he called a restructuring on his staff. He said there would be no firings. But, in an interview at his Senate office complex, Mr. Paul said he resented implications from those he termed 'haters' that he had sought to dishonestly take other people's work as his own." ...
What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we're going to do them like college papers. We're going to try to put out footnotes.... We have made mistakes..., but [they have] never been intentional. This is coming from haters to begin with, because they want the implication to be out there that you're dishonest. -- Rand Paul ...
... Hunter of Daily Kos: "While Sen. Rand Paul is off challenging people to fisticuffs or worse, one of his senior advisers has finally admitted the obvious: Yes, there's been a bucketload of copying going on in the Paul camp.... Now the word has come down; it's the fault of unnamed staffers, and it's more the fault of you, the reader, for not being able to magically discern when Rand Paul and his staff are speaking their own words and when they're lifting entire pages of content from somewhere else...." ...
... How Not to Regard Having Your Work Stolen. Dan Stewart of the Week, who was one of the writers Paul plagiarized, doesn't care: "In fact, I'm rather flattered." CW: Nice, libertarian notions here about the "anachronism" of "the concept of intellectual property." But I don't think Stewart would be so nonchalant if his employer decided not to pay him but published his stuff anyway because his right to be paid for an "intellectual product" was an "anachronistic concept." ...
... Right-Wing Paper Fires the Plagiarist. Jim McElhatton of the Washington Times: "The Washington Times said Tuesday that it had independently reviewed Mr. Paul's columns and op-eds and published a correction to his Sept. 20 column in which the senator had failed to attribute a passage that first appeared in Forbes. The newspaper and the senator mutually agreed to end his weekly column, which has appeared each Friday since the summer." ...
... The Nut Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree: Crazy Coot & Cooch. James Hohmann of Politico: "Headlining the final rally of Ken Cuccinelli's underdog campaign for Virginia governor, Ron Paul suggested the 'nullification' of Obamacare on Monday night." If that wasn't enough of a reprisal of the Civil War, Paul flirted with talk of open rebellion: 'The Second Amendment was not there so you could shoot rabbits,' he said. 'Right now today, we have a great threat to our liberties internally.'" CW: Not sure if Ron Paul -- unlike his son -- writes his own stuff or if he copies it from John C. Calhoun & Jefferson Davis speeches. ...
... Ed Kilgore: "... can you imagine a statewide Democratic candidate anywhere, much less in a 'purple state,' associating himself or herself so conspicuously with such ravings? No, you can't. If you want a fresh example of what 'asymmetric polarization' is all about, just consider that this is how the Republican Party of Virginia chose to conclude a statewide campaign."
Cruzing YouTube, Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch finds another anti-gay, anti-choice rant by Ted Cruz's father & political surrogate Rafael Cruz.
Apartheid, U.S.A. Thomas Edsall of the New York Times: "The Republicans who now control the legislatures and governorships in the deep South are using the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 to create a system of political apartheid. No state demonstrates this better than Alabama.... Once Alabama Republicans gained control of the levers of power, they wasted no time using the results of the 2010 Census to reinforce their position of dominance. Newly drawn lines further corralled black voters into legislative districts with large African-American majorities, a tactic political professionals call 'packing and stacking.' ... In that famously vicious political blood sport, redistricting, they will exploit their ability to deploy the cloak of civil rights to maintain and strengthen a politically advantageous segregation of the races."
Spy Rules Kaput? Steve Holland & Mark Hosenball of Reuters: "The United States is working to improve intelligence cooperation with Germany but a sweeping 'no-spy' agreement between the two countries is unlikely, a senior Obama administration official said on Tuesday."
Patricia Zengerle of Reuters: "Senior U.S. senators revived a push on Tuesday to ratify a treaty to protect people with disabilities from discrimination, almost a year after Republican lawmakers blocked approval of the international pact. Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called a hearing to address concerns about the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, during which some Republican lawmakers made strong appeals for more support from members of their party.... A Senate attempt to approve ratification in December 2012 failed by a vote of 61-38, five votes short of the 66 needed for ratification."
Digby: It appears that "anal rape by instrumentality" is now part of "our basic moral fabric."
Local News
Monique Garcia & Ray Long of the Chicago Tribune: "The [Illinois] General Assembly today narrowly approved a gay marriage bill, clearing the way for Illinois to become the 15th state to legalize same-sex unions. The bill got 61 votes in the House, one more than the bare minimum needed to send the measure back to the Senate, which quickly signed off. Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has said he would sign the bill into law should it reach his desk."
Presidential Election 2016
Isaac Chotiner of the New Republic: "If [New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie can somehow be considered the front-runner for the 2016 nomination, however, it is only because of a dearth of strong Republican candidates. His political shortcomings are much more acute than people realize.... The big problem for Christie is that ... two ostensibly separate concerns -- his temperament and his problems with the base -- are likely to merge in unpleasant ways."
News Ledes
New York Times: "On the eve of a new round of talks between world powers and Iran, a senior Obama administration official said Wednesday that the United States was prepared to offer Iran limited relief from economic sanctions if Tehran agreed to halt its nuclear program temporarily and reversed part of it."
AFP: "Secretary of State John Kerry reaffirmed US opposition to Israeli settlements on Wednesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Palestinians of creating 'artificial crises' over the issue. Kerry spent all day shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians and after a late dinner with Netanyahu the two dismissed their teams and again huddled alone for private talks."
New York Times: "On Wednesday, Twitter set the price of its initial public offering at $26 a share, valuing the company at $18.1 billion. Twitter shares are set to begin trading on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange."
AP: "City councilors called on Toronto's deputy mayor to 'orchestrate a dignified' departure for Mayor Rob Ford, who was greeted by angry protesters on his first day of work after acknowledging he smoked crack. Deepening the crisis, Ford's long-time policy adviser Brooks Barnett resigned, continuing an exodus from his office that started in May when news reports emerged of a video showing the mayor smoking what appears to be crack. Police announced last week they had a copy of the video, which has not been released publicly." CW: Maybe somebody should explain to Ford what "dignified" means.
AP: "A court in Egypt upheld Wednesday an earlier ruling that banned the Muslim Brotherhood and ordered its assets confiscated, the state news agency reported. The decision moves forward the complicated process of the government taking control of the Islamist group's far-reaching social network and its finances."
AP: "Swiss scientists have found evidence suggesting Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned with a radioactive substance, a TV station reported Wednesday, prompting new allegations by his widow that the Palestinian leader was the victim of a 'shocking' crime. Palestinian officials have long accused Israel of poisoning Arafat, a claim Israel has denied. Arafat died under mysterious circumstances at a French military hospital in 2004, a month after falling ill at his Israeli-besieged West Bank compound."
Reuters: "A former U.S. militant who hijacked a plane to Cuba almost 30 years ago flew home to the United States to face air piracy charges on Wednesday and was taken into FBI custody in Miami, an FBI spokesman said. William Potts was scheduled to appear before a U.S. judge in Miami on Thursday, FBI Special Agent Michael Leverock said."
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Reader Comments (15)
Except, Dana, (Milbank), while both Presidents wanted their Presidency's primary initiative to succeed, one was designed to save people's lives and the other was designed to end them.
And oh, yeah, one of the Presidents realizes (a bit tardily) that while his initiative began with a whimper, hardly a bang and certainly not shock and awe, he has a reasonable expectation it will end well; the other still doesn't know that after the initial shock and awe, it was and remains all downhill.
@Ken Winkes: Milbank is talking about the process, not the product. And he's very clear about not equating the products. Moreover, he's comparing a specific phase of the process -- the follow-up after the main event; i.e., 9/11-passage of ACA.
Marie
At first I thought McKesson was just a booze company paying their CEO $131M per year. After all, there's money to be made peddling the stuff (a la Joseph Kennedy.)
Googling McKesson turned up this new tidbit according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newspaper yesterday:
"McKesson Corp., one of the country's largest pharmaceutical distributors, has agreed to pay $13.9 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges the company fraudulently reported inflated drug prices to increase payments to pharmacies from the state's Medicaid program, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced Tuesday."
http://www.jsonline.com/business/mckesson-to-pay-state-139-million-to-settle-medicaid-fraud-charges-b99135525z1-230678221.html
1 down, 49 to go?
CW: I sit (properly) corrected. Thanks.
And on the other side of the world: Robert Scheer of Truthdig says: "What John Kerry did this week in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is nothing short of despicable." See if you agree. Some of us have written about the mess we left in Iran when we ourselves organized a coup. This seems to be one of the thorns that are still sticking to those that don't forget or forgive.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pay_no_attention_to_that_imperialist_behind_the_curtain_20131104</
PD Pepe: Hate fence-sitters, but I'm one of them on this issue. I ask myself what I would do if I were in charge of American Middle East policy. Would I opt for a pure and often chaotic democracy in all cases or hedge my bets by supporting selected strong-man leadership? Admit I just don't know. Good for me, I guess, because it reminds me again (that's the second time today), I don't know everything.
Yes, our foreign policy legacy (too much of it thinly disguised corporate warfare) continues to bite us in the tush.
What would you do?
What I do know is that Washington State's election results were mixed, and that some of those results are disturbing. The Republican won the only open state senate seat, which will reinforce the our senate's tilt to the right, so we can expect another relatively unproductive legislative session this coming year as the house and senate stand-off continues. And the initiative to label GMO foods, imperfect but I thought worthy of support, appears to have lost big.
Oh, Ken, I've been a fence sitter on quite a few issues covering decades, but there are some things I'm dead sure about and those issues make me the liberal that I am. The case that Scheer makes is a valid argument I think but like you when I try and put myself in the shoes of Kerry/ Obama I find myself still sitting on that fence. What the right thing to do, the honest thing according to Scheer, may not be the wisest. Would be good to get other more savvy minds to weigh in on this. To date haven't come across anything else about this except just to report on the trip itself.
@P.D.Pepe: I linked to a NYT editorial yesterday which said, "Mr. Kerry seemed to go further than necessary or prudent to make common cause with the authoritarian generals who led the coup and are now running the country." So essentially the editors agree with Scheer, if not in such a signature-Scheer garment-rending way. My response to the NYT editorial was "The U.S. has a long, inglorious history of bolstering Middle East tyrants. Let's call Kerry a traditionalist!" I tend to defer to the Times editors or topics about which I know little, so my inclination is to ask, "What wuz you thinking, John?"
However, Juan Cole, who isn't one to mince words, is surprisingly muted in his criticism of Kerry, noting that Kerry is "between a rock & a hard place" on Egypt. So Cole more-or-less backs your unequivocal alignment with the proverbial fence.
Marie
The Pauls, père et fils, seem to have similar difficulty with the written word. Big Ron, you may recall, denied ever having written stuff about how blacks and gays were destroying the country and how the government was intentionally spreading AIDS. But Daddy Paul denies ever having had a hand in the regular transmission of racism and all purpose hatred that littered the RON PAUL Political Report, the RON PAUL Survival Report, and RON PAUL'S Freedom Report (I may be forgetting the Ron Paul Stick it Up Your Ass Report). Not only didn't he have a hand in any of those publications bearing his name, he never even read them. Really!
Ah...yeah. Okay.
But he has been suitably outraged by claims that he did know, or at the very least should have known the kind of horrific stuff coming out under his name for over 20 years. Show of hands, class. How many believe that Daddy Ron really knew nothing about the Hate-a-Rama his newsletters promoted? For decades.
Yeah. What I thought.
Okay, up next, Ron spawn, Li'l Randy.
The Little One also has a problem with words. But not his own. It doesn't appear that he has many of those, so he has to borrow some from other people. I mean, who has time for all that original thinking and writing crap? Not Senator Bagger, that's for sure. But then he was caught (I'd say "bagged" but he's already that). And lo and behold: Outrage. Again. From a Paul, over something published under his name.
So after days of stonewalling and threatening to kill people, the Littlest Plagiarist has come clean. And just like daddy, it wasn't his fault. Someone else did it.
I may be misinformed, but I thought taking responsibility for your own actions was at the core of libertarianism. Guess I was wrong. Must be something else at the core.
Something rotten.
@Akhilleus: You are indeed confused about the meaning of "taking responsibility." Libertarianism is implicitly a two-level hierarchical system in which there is one set of rules for the Galt "producers" (Ryan's "makers") -- with whom the Ryans & the Pauls identify -- & another set for the "takers." Remember in Atlas Shrugged, Galt organizes a "strike" against the collectivist society, where he & other "producers" go off to create their own individualistic enclave, free of the collectivist riffraff. (Bet Galt's Gulch would be perfect! -- a bunch of individualists trying to live together.)
For the producers, the rallying cry -- best expressed by Li'l Randy yesterday -- is "leave me the hell alone."
For the rest of us -- to the extent the producers will tolerate us -- "taking responsibility" means accepting the world of the "producers'" vision -- the low wages & terrible living conditions we've earned, no public services, no regulation of the producer's excellent products, etc. But, hey, no taxes!
That isn't really cruel because we get what we deserve. The Galts see us as worthless cyphers: "... whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills...." It is also fair because without the producers, we would have nothing at all. Any scrap of uninspected food, any rented trailer-house, any untested pill or experimental medical procedure (Li'l Randy poking us in the eye), no matter how costly, would not exist except through the inventiveness, expertise & initiative of the producers.
So, really, Akhilleus, try to be more grateful. The Pauls have deigned to serve us wretched little takers -- which is itself an inexplicable paradox. But this gift of their time is conditional. As young Mr. Paul told the Times, if people don't appreciate this particular certified plagiarist, he is happy to go back to being a self-certified opthamologist -- his version of Galt's Gulch, I guess -- his retreat from the collectivist dystopia.
Marie
I just read Pierce's piece on M. Dowd's latest column. I just knew she couldn't help herself from rolling around naked on the pages of "Double Down". After all, it was written for her demographic; 12 year old girls who have barely made it past the I-love-horses stage, read all the celebrity teen mags and are searching for the perfect commanding yet doting daddy.
Marie,
Darn it all, I'll try to be a good little taker from here on out. But I sure would love to see what Galt's Gulch looks like.
Let's see, no public schools (natch). All roads would be private, maybe toll booths at unguarded points of entry that might allow the odd taker or two to enter Libertarian Heaven. No services that aren't private and for-profit. Every Galt for themselves. Each domicile would require water filtration, a self-contained sanitation system, an energy source, defense capabilities, and enough land to grow food (although takers might be allowed in to do the dirty work), (as well as a well stocked private libray in each fortress from which others' ideas may be purloined sans attribution).
Regarding the Little Petulant One's request to be "left the hell alone", I'd be happy to if only he would agree to take his screwball ideas and "get the hell out of congress". Until then Aqua Buddha is fair game.
After all, we pay his salary. And as one of his employers, I'm demanding that he shut the hell up, grow up, and knock off the plagiarism.
But from now on I promise to be more respectful to shitbrained little weasels. Cross my heart.
Stephen Colbert's remark about FOX wanting women to pay more for healthcare is one I simply cannot stop from laughing.
"Did you catch that? Under Obamacare, men will pay the same amount as women, and yet we still don't get to pass a cantaloupe with toenails through our genitals."
Scheel seems to have quit watching Egypt shortly after the Moslem Brotherhood came to power and tuned back in only after their removal and thus missed the entire slide of a grossly incompetent administration toward theocracy. Before condemning the military out of hand I would recommend reading Yasmine El Rashidi's article in the Sept 26th issue of the NYRB. In her article she states "Faced with the choice between armed militants (of the Brotherhood) and armed men in uniform, Egyptians, by a large margin, are choosing the latter." I just hope Kerry told the generals that US aid is contingent upon the promised free spring elections being held and power returned to civilian control.
@Marie: Thanks for the info––I missed that NYT editorial. Smiled at your " a signature-Scheer garment-rending way"; he does indeed cut a forceful fabric rhetoric akin to his buddy Hedges whose meagre pleasures seem to be taken sadly at best. The sky is always falling for this guy and yes, he's right to raise his fist, but anger like his takes too strong a hold and deters from his messages.