Silvio Berlusconi Might Be In Trouble This Time, Again
Is this the end of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? “Today saw the results of four referendum votes in Italy to repeal Berlusconi-era legislation on nuclear power, water privatisation and trial immunity for government ministers. The last of these has been fundamental in allowing the semi-despotic prime minister to continue his rule free of the tiresome hassle of legal action on charges of corruption and sexual harassment. This referendum has finally given Italian voters the opportunity to bring the charade to an end, with a resounding 95 per cent of voters coming down against the government’s policies.” Berlusconi has been written off plenty of times before, and is still telling jokes as if he doesn’t have a care in the world, but with a sour electorate and close friends referring to him as “ill,” maybe it is last call. Maybe.
Things That Are Like Self-Cleaning Ovens
“The web is like a self-cleaning oven in that it will correct itself over time.”
— That is so funny (and also, in the middle of a very interesting conversation between Times reporter David Carr and Aaron Sorkin), because I’ve never heard anything else compared to a self-cleaning oven.
A Modest Proposal for Preventing Medicare from Being a Burden on Taxpayers
by Paul Ryan

From time to time, we offer free space to citizens with something to say. Today, Congressman (and former Oscar Meyer Wienermobile driver) Paul Ryan has a new crazy proposal that explains how Medicare can be saved — delivered in his own, inimitable language.
It makes the youth of the nation and the working class melancholy when they hear senior citizens importuning our elected officials on both sides to preserve Medicare in its current form. These seniors, instead of being able to make themselves useful, are forced to employ all their time writing letters-to-the-editor and calling their legislators.
Probably all Americans agree that the overflowing Medicare needs of seniors, is, in the present budgetary crisis state, a very great additional hardship; and, therefore, whoever could find a fair, cheap and easy method of ensuring the medical needs of these elderly, would deserve the admiration of both of the nation’s political parties.
But my intention is far from limited to providing only for the health care of seniors; it is of a much greater extent, and it aims to address all Americans little able to insure themselves, and who thus demand access to expensive, but necessary, entitlement programs.
For many years I’ve focused on this important subject, and weighed several of the mainstream proposals. They’ve all been grossly mistaken in their accounting.
The number of Americans on Medicare is estimated at 45 million. Of these, it’s calculated about 27 million are of comparatively sound health; from that number, subtract 5 million who will be conscientiously unwilling to submit to the new program, leaving a core of 22 million healthy Medicare enrollees. Of the remaining 18 million of the original total, 10 million have health so poor as to require conventional care beyond this proposal.
Those larger picture figures in mind, I believe my party has architected a solution to the unsustainable financial burden the Medicare entitlement system has placed on the American taxpayer.
I have been assured by the most expert American health professionals and health policy researchers that a younger, healthy Medicare enrollee, well trained, is perfectly suited to provide for the basic healthcare needs of other, older Medicare enrollees.
Our plan is that of the 22 million enrolled seniors willing to participate in the plan, 15 million at any one time would serve as Associate Medicare Team Members. While it would be impossible to train these seniors to the level of a registered nurse (RN), experts nearly unanimously agree that a senior between the ages of 65 and 72 easily has the mental acuity to reach the training level of a Certified Geriatric Care Manager or similar.
Not only will this put the health care services within closer reach of the seniors who need it most, but it will also deliver that care from a trusted peer. and not from some hurried unknown person in a lab coat in a foreign, unfamiliar environment sterilized of not only germs, but also compassion.
Clearly, Associate Medicare Team Members will be limited in the care provided. An exploratory committee of medical experts has recommended that procedures such as medication administration, demanding bowel evacuation, catheter insertion and removal, CT scanner operation and basic wound stitching are all well within the abilities of a trained senior.
Naturally, more complex surgical operations will be limited to MDs, who, thanks to this program, will have more time for procedures. As such, we project the added benefit of a decline in malpractice cases.
Initial calculations by the Congressional Budget Office prove that our proposal would save taxpayers $435 billion after just five years.
The first ten years would require an investment of $20 billion in training, infrastructure and professional development to set up the program, putting it in line to begin serving those who are now 55. Those 55 and above will see no changes to Medicare whatsoever.
An added outcome of bending this cost curve is that, in the years after the program is fully operational, existing Team Members would be able to handle the larger part of the duties of training incoming Associate Team Members, creating a self-sustaining and fiscally sustainable Medicare system.
Congresswoman Bachmann, whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased to discuss this matter and offered a refinement. She said that many states, having of late found themselves in billion-dollar budget shortfalls, might be willing to see their own low-income Medicaid systems participate, wherein uninsured families and those in economic need would also receive free basic health care treatment from Associate Medicare Team Members.
A variation of this program is already practiced in some African nations, where it has proven unanimously popular, boasting participation rates well over 95 percent.
The numerous advantages of this proposal are obvious and beyond debate.
Not only would this proposal cut down on health care spending, but it would also allow Medicare to exist and continue in its current form, something recent poll and election results have proven is what people, especially seniors, want.
As always, we are not automatically set to reject any offer proposed by our fellow members on the other side of the aisle. But before Democrats act in contradiction to this plan, we call that they address two points.
First, as things now stand, how does the nation propose tens of millions of Medicare enrollees continue to receive care when the system is fundamentally unsustainable, without further breaking the backs of taxpayers, and, as well, the business engines of our economy?
Secondly, we demand that these representatives will first poll the seniors themselves, whether they would not, at this juncture facing our nation, think it a great happiness to have heath care of some kind, provided by a trusted peer, and thereby avoid the unknown of a crumbling Medicare system in which they are forced to take their chances.
This modest yet revolutionary proposal has no other motive than to right the sinking ship that is our economic state, and to save a Medicare system for the elderly that our children can count on for their own health care needs, both to give and take, whenever those come.
Paul Ryan is the U.S. Representative from Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district.
Trawling V. Trolling
There is a difference between “trawling” and “trolling.” Apparently one of them involves a net.
British Media Taught How To Sit Down
“The BBC has employed a ‘chair champion’ to help staff moving to Salford Quays choose their seats — and learn to sit on them. Staff moving north to the BBC’s flagship development at MediaCityUK are being given a choice of three different high-tech chairs. The ‘chair champion’ helps them make their selection — then shows them how to use their choice correctly as part of the corporation’s health and safety training.”
"Groupon is Essentially Holding a Portfolio of Loans Backed by the Receivables of Small Businesses."
“I strongly encourage every business that is about to go under to call Groupon. It makes total financial sense — as a Hail Mary play. If you’re lucky, the upfront cash will be enough to help you stay afloat. If not, well, you were already going out of business.”
— The latest GroupOn takedown — one of dozens! — is intriguing.
Constabulary Forced To Dress Like Grown-Ups
“Capitol Police officers are sweating a new management decision to ban officers assigned to the Capitol from wearing shorts…. [U]nion representatives said they were told that Inspector Donald Roullier, who oversees the department’s Capitol Division, made the decision based on appearances — particularly the fact that shorts-clad officers do not look good carrying large automatic rifles.” [Via]
Coppers Called on Lord Bath's Bountiful Babe Bustup

Did you miss the big news this weekend? “Police have been called to the Marquess of Bath’s Longleat estate in Wiltshire after one his ‘wifelets’ was allegedly injured during a late night fight with a rival.” Mm hmm…
The women suffered a suspected broken nose in a vicious fight over who would “sleep with the peer” that evening at 18th century Longleat House, a source said. Lord Bath, 79, who has been described as the country’s most eccentric aristocrat, had apparently already retired for the evening, saying ‘You sort it out, I’m going to bed’.”
Voting: The Most Discouraging, Important Thing You Can Do
As of last Wednesday, two days after his press conference, a Marist poll showed that a majority — 56% — of Anthony Weiner’s constituents want him to stay in his job, and as Glenn Greenwald observed last week, theirs is the only opinion that really counts (cc: Pelosi, Israel and Wasserman-Schultz.) If I were one of them, I too would recall the following glorious beatdown before I betook myself to shop around for a new representative.
I mean, isn’t this what congressmen are for?
The worst of the many bad effects of the media spin ’n’ scandal machine is to get our collective eye off the ball, like a conjuror flourishing while he palms the card. And there is an election coming very soon indeed. The only thing about it that really counts is, if we have things we want the government to do for us, we have to find people who will fight to do ’em. A far from easy task!
Things Are Terrible!
The prospect of participating in the horribly flawed, very bad system of representative democracy that we now have in the U.S. is discouraging to many. What difference can it possibly make how I vote, people say, when they have got us all by the nuts anyway. There is no difference between the two parties! All politicians are corrupt weirdos! Look at all that work we did to elect Barack Obama and what the hell? Wars, wars, wars still, and why is Guantanamo not closed, really what the hell, and what of Bradley Manning, and scarcely anyone even indicted for the Wall Street mess or the mortgage crisis and maybe a new crash in the offing, and what about Elizabeth Warren and Peter flaming Diamond? Plus the lethal cuts to pretty much everything everywhere except for the bloody Orwellian wars and executive bonuses, and to top it off the rich, with very few exceptions, are not only refusing to pay their fair share but are grown pestilentially smug and entitled along with it, and now we have this Citizens United fiasco to worry about. Not all bad news though, the bullet-riddled corpse of Osama bin Laden has been tossed into the ocean, yay?, however illegally and messily this was achieved, and so we can get all those kids out of Afghanistan now, right?
Valid objections all, but I’m urging you to please clap on your nasal clothespin and get ready to vote anyway, starting now. Now — before the real craziness begins, while you still have some time to inform yourself to the hilt and use your woefully miniscule power to steer the conversation in advance of the sure-to-be-incredibly-vile campaigns, rather than during them, when it will already be far too late.
Because what do you think all these guys in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, Libya, the former Soviet Union — a really far too long and depressing list to even get into here — have been getting themselves killed trying to do? Vote, is what, in a representative democracy. Does it work? No! Does it work better than what they have currently got in Zimbabwe? YES.
Anyone who supposes that voting “doesn’t matter” might consider the leaked Citigroup memo, “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer,” written by Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod and Narendra Singh. Dated March 5, 2006, “Revisiting Plutonomy” was intended to be about investment strategies, not politics. Readers were advised to get into equities of companies that supply the plutocrats with their trinkets (“[f]avored names include LVMH and Richemont”) because even though everybody else was clearly about to croak in 2006, the rich would likely still be awash in lucre and able to afford trinkets galore (this turns out to have been largely true). However, these authors were unable to fathom exactly what it was they themselves were actually saying from a political perspective, to such a degree that they found themselves quoted in Michael Moore’s movie Capitalism: A Love Story, and their bosses have gone nuts trying to rid the Internet of their oily fingerprints. (These efforts have failed dismally; the memo is far from difficult to find online.)
It’s worth noting how often this happens. Each day brings a new example of a boggling lack of civic conscience among the rich. Plutocrats and their henchmen have lost touch with their essential humanity to such a degree that they have no idea that there are implications to their speech that render them, qua human beings, more readily comparable to pond scum. Which is really hilarious when you consider how much effort and dough these same guys expend on trying to get themselves perceived as being “civilized” or “discerning.” Forget it, plutocrats! Honestly, if there is the ghost of a chance of such guys being perceived as “civilized” they should stop buying all these Maybachs and ridiculous watches, and have a look at a few episodes of “Teletubbies” instead, where they can learn via very simple language such civilized concepts as Sharing and Caring.
Anyway. The money (pfft) quote in “Revisiting Plutonomy” is maybe this one:
Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfrachisement [sic] remains as [it] was — one person, one vote (in the plutonomies).
At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation (on the rich or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous laborers, in a push-back on globalization — either anti-immigration, or protectionism. We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions.
I cannot think of one single thing to tell you about the above paragraphs or the people who wrote them. Sorry, I’m just going to go fetch a glass of wine.
So, voting! Keep in mind also that around $3.5 billion is spent every single year on lobbying in Washington (that’s that we know of, not counting the Abramoff or “baksheesh” variety of lobbying.) Why? — why, in order to thwart any possible ill effects of you voting. By “possible ill effects,” I mean the prospect of your electing someone with convictions that oppose the desires of moneyed interests, such as foreign governments, large corporations or the gun-assault-weapon-totin’ nabobs of the right.
If voting didn’t matter, how come all these corpocrats and Koch Brothers and whatnot are spending zillions, too, in order to suppress voter turnout, not to mention all the illegal campaign shenanigans and gerrymandering and “caging” and the whole arsenal of repellent anti-democratic behaviors the plutocrats continually engage in? It matters, all right.
But They Could Be Worse
One need only take a gander at such places as North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia (this list, too, could go on for an unpleasantly long time) to see irrefutable proof of how very much worse things can get when people are not permitted to vote. It is difficult to believe, but absolutely true, that this right is apt to fall away, or to be taken away, if we do not exercise it. Tony Benn, an English aristo who gave up his peerage to became a famous Socialist MP, addressed this point in Big Ideas That Changed the World, a fun BBC documentary on the history of democracy.
Thoughout the history of the world, the rich and powerful have dominated it, and very few people have had any control of their own governments. […]
The basis of democracy is that we are all born equal and that equality must be accepted by those in power. Probably the main lesson is that if you don’t keep up the pressure for democratic control, you lose it. It’s use it or lose it. And that is something that people find hard to understand. There is never a final victory for democracy; it’s always a struggle in every generation and you have take up the cause time and time and time again.
And we’ve also learned that those rights can only be won collectively. But in the attempts to win those rights, many people have been imprisoned and tortured by those who have power and are determined to retain it.
In short, “freedom ain’t free” as the warmongers are fond of saying on their bumper stickers. Or to paraphrase John Philpot Curran, the price of such freedom as we have is eternal vigilance.
They Never Have Been Very Good
Magna Carta (1215), far from being the cornerstone of English democracy, extended rights to just 25 of the richest landowners. The people were entirely excluded from its protections. It wasn’t until the peasants went nuts over the Poll Tax in 1381 (The Peasants’ Revolt) that the possibility of the people having even a scrap of power over their own government even got onto the table in England. Whereupon the King agreed to the rioters’ demands and then promptly reneged and slaughtered a few thousand of them, plus their leaders, who were put to spectacular tortures.
So how long did it take for universal suffrage to happen in England? Put it this way: in 1853, two percent of the inhabitants of England, all of them rich, had the vote.
Fun fact: the first country to grant universal suffrage was New Zealand, in 1893. (By this I mean real universal suffrage, including women, which has to be spelled out because hilariously, “universal suffrage” was a popular phrase during the nineteenth century, but one that meant universal male suffrage, since the idea of women voting was inconceivable.)
Not Voting Is Kind Of The Same As Voting
If you want to exercise your rights come the election, start now, and read all the political news you can get your hands on. It’s not enough to watch Jon Stewart, because he and Colbert focus on just headlines. In order to make your vote count, you need details, especially about local news. Your vote effects a lot more change in the local elections than it will in the national ones, and local government has a huge influence over your daily life. Closures of libraries and parks, laying off teachers — much of this stuff is in the purview of local, not federal government. Local elections have even worse turnout than federal ones, so your vote is worth a ton, comparatively! Add a little canvassing and phone-banking in there and you might be shocked at what just one energetic person can accomplish.
What a candidate says during debates and in the last months of a campaign will unfortunately give you little to no idea of what he or she actually believes or how he or she would behave in office. Each candidate, particularly as things heat up at the end, will be tailoring his every syllable to the dictates of pollsters and campaign strategists, or “lying varmints” as they are also known, who don’t give one one-thousandth of a damn about anything but winning the election. There’s no law against lying in campaigns or in campaign advertising. You can’t sue anyone afterward for having misled you. However, if you start now, you can learn a ton and not be completely bamboozled by all the hype and pundits and bullshit that surrounds this thing, which was already an epic amount and it’s only going to be worse this time, owing to the screaming bloody horror of the Citizens United decision.
Werner Erhard, the founder of est (official name: The est Standard Training), was a terrific charlatan, but like those of all charlatans his spiel had a soupçon of truth to it. In the ’80s I knew a passel of rich cokeheads who were very keen on est and would call it “the Training” in conversation, for serious. (You really had to be fearfully rich to do blow in any kind of quantity back then, and blow was the perfect drug for the “philosophy” of est because it persuades each participant that his own thoughts are so incredibly valuable and penetrating for as long as the high persists, which is hours and hours, and then after a series of frantic phone calls in the middle of the night, hours and hours more, alas, until you either develop some self-control or your septum dissolves into a bloody mush. Anyway.) Here is the soupçon of truth that I heard from one of those est-holes, as we used to call them, long ago, and it really is valuable and relevant to the topic at hand: All forms of not playing are playing.
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman.
Which IPO Do You Want to Lose And/Or Double All Your Money In?

Rumors on the Internets put the Facebook IPO as coming early next year, which, BOOM, BANG, EVERYTHING BLOWS UP, CONFETTI, DEATH, BOTTLE SERVICE, THE FOUR HORSEMEN, INVISIBLE RICHES, CHINA BUYS BRAZIL, CATS AND DOGS HAVING SEX, THE END OF TIME, ALL THE LIGHTS GO OUT EVERYWHERE, THUNDERDOME, STERILITY, A NAKED OLYMPICS AGAIN, WE ALL TRY TO MOVE TO THE MOON, A SELECT FEW LIVE FOREVER BUT MOSTLY EVERYONE DIES. But first in IPO-landia comes Zynga (who? The makers of FarmVille) and Pandora. And Avaya (“a global leader in business communications”)! For one billlllion dollars! One billion dollars. One billion dollars. (One billion dollars.)