It’s Los Angeles vs. San Francisco in the fight for our online future! The music and movie industries have always cried foul over every new perceived threat to their business model. Thirty years ago they insisted that cassettes and VHS would be the end of them.
Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I never tire of the Downfall parodies, with Hitler in the bunker, railing about the latest tech controversy.
God doesn’t get involved with football. If He were going to do that, it should have been to prevent the tragedy at Penn State.
The New York Times has this must-read feature article about Stephen Colbert and what he’s doing with his SuperPAC money.
Medicare exists because the free market doesn’t work for elderly patients. Old people are profit eaters, so private insurers don’t want to cover their medical expenses. Medicare reimbursements are typically low compared to private insurance, so some health care providers are tempted to pad their bills. On Monday the PBS News Hour had a report on alleged Medicare fraud by Prime Healthcare in California.
Watch California Hospital Chain Eyed for Possibly Bilking Medicare for Millions on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
While not a political comedian per se, Louis C.K. will be the comic at this year’s Radio and TV Correspondents dinner.
If it’s true that the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t have a single, consistent message, it’s certainly also true of the Tea Party. Both groups want to “take back the country,” and in the case of the Tea Party I don’t really know what that means, other than they don’t want a half-black President who had a free-spirited mother and who lived outside of the United States for a significant portion of his childhood. In contrast, I think it’s pretty clear what Occupy Wall Street is demanding.
Occupy Wall Street includes some Anarchist types and Socialist wannabes, but there are a lot of young people who borrowed a lot of money to get a college degree, only to find there were no jobs to pay off those loans. They’re right to blame the Wall Street traders who took the financial markets down to their figurative knees in 2008. At the very least there needs to be accountability, prosecution, and regulation of the men and markets who got us into this mess. We don’t have that, and Bernie Madoff doesn’t count.
The latest example is Jon Corzine, an Obama ally, and what he did at MF Global. Yesterday, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook had an excellent discussion about this latest example of the ego-driven crimes of greed committed by the guys at the top of the financial heap — a heap of you-know-what.
[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2011/12/onpoint_1212_the-lessons-of-mf-global.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Jon Corzine and MF Global]So I would say that, yes, Occupy Wall Street does indeed have a valid complaint and a clear message. Jon Corzine shouldn’t just be sorry, and he shouldn’t just be subpoenaed. He should be prosecuted.
