From Digby, a discussion of when it is and is not appropriate to call a female lobbyist a ‘whore’. My take? It’s always appropriate to call ANY lobbyist a whore. It’s what they are. (Though in the comments one person suggested that the Congresspeople are the whores and the lobbyists pimps. It’s an interesting point).

From FDL: Yet another electric car boondoggle. Oy. 500 million dollars to build a car that after an 8 grand tax credit giveaway still costs 40k, thus being too expensive for 90 percent of the American public, PLUS it runs on li-ion batteries, which range from untested-to-unsafe, PLUS there’s no good source of lithium, which has to be strip mined, and most of the supply in the entire known world is either in Bolivia or Tibet.

I’m still waiting for when the GM Volt enthusiasts have to go head to head with Free Tibet people in street demonstrations after China starts strip mining Lhasa to make Li-ion batteries.

Oh yeah, and the sweetheart deal to open this factory making a product that almost no one can afford in the midst of a recession comes with, in addition to the enormous loan (aka bailout) from the Feds.. local tax concessions. Another giveaway, straight from the budgets of local schools, most likely.

Sigh. Morons.

So let me see if I have this straight.

It’s a *good* thing that the US is giving a bigass loan to a boutique company to make a car that, after an enormous tax credit, will be unaffordable to 95% of the American public, during a steep recession?

It’s further a *good* thing that this car is being made, err, sorry, *proposed* by a small startup with no proven manufacturing record.

It’s even *better* that it’s based on a dubious technology (lithium-ion) with a long history of safety problems (fires that produce toxic clouds of smoke, heat and durability issues, see the long history of li-ion battery packs in laptops for more).

It’s *great* that this technology relies on an extremely limited material, i.e. lithium, that is often produced large-scale by strip-mining, and whose proven global supply is largely locked up in the Andes in Bolivia, a country which does not want to produce it for us, and certainly doesn’t want to sell it to us cheap, but just might want to be the new Saudia Arabia of the green power movement.

(You often hear insane talk about how there’s enough lithium in the oceans for a billion years, blah blah, which is irrelevant as the concentration is so low that nobody actually refines it from seawater, almost all lithium is produced from salt flats that were once part of the ocean millions of years ago. By this logic we should all be rich because of all the sunken ships full of valuable cargo; it’s in the ocean, ergo it’s accessible, right?)

Wow. Yeah. I’m totally down with this plan.

And of course, we’re not even privileged to see what kinds of ludicrous property tax deal Delaware has cut to get this factory. My guess is a lot of public school students in Delaware will get to make do with ten year old history books to pay for this cherry deal. Sigh.

America continues to disgust me.

Digby has been writing about the use of tasers as torture devices for a long time, but this latest incident with a camera recording police torturing a suspect with tasers and batons doesn’t so much speak to me about tasers as it does about the cruelty inherent in our people.

Americans have fully embraced their inner lunatic, I think. Between the town hall screamers and the tea partiers and the remnants of the Republican party, along with the Dems who sell out anyone and everyone to Goldman Sachs, I think we’re seeing the very end of the American Empire as we eat ourselves alive.

Man it’s depressing.

Warning, the following video contains graphic violence and torture.

Of particular interest, note that after their torture has reduced this man to a quivering wreck, at 1:25 they put on the handcuffs. He’s now completely immobilized and crying uncontrollably.

So they try to break his legs with a baton, presumably to shut him up.

I hate it here.

A few days ago I got an email spam from Sen. Leahy asking me to support his new bill to remove the antitrust exemption from insurance companies.

You know, the thing that allows them to create monopolies in most American cities so that you either pay whatever they ask, or just die in the street like a dog.

I agree with the bill, but I know those standard form emails don’t impress a lot of people, so I amended the one he has autogenerated to express a more personal message, and it was supposed to be sent on to my Congresswoman and two Senators.

Here’s my version:

I know you probably get a lot of these form emails, so I’m writing this part myself.

Not that I disagree with anything in the standard Leahy form email, but I think you get the background on the issue. Insurance companies are evil. Evil by design. I can’t imagine who thought, back in the dawn of time, that creating a system whose incentives drive companies to kill people for profit was a good idea. Honestly.

At the very least, we should force them to compete for the right to deny us basic lifesaving care. Perhaps that way we can cut the death toll, which currently stands at 45 thousand per year in this country.

Number of people who die in the rest of the industrialized world due to lack of health insurance? Basically zero. God bless America.

That’s why I really, truly do urge you to support the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act, S. 1681 and H.R. 3596.

If we must live our lives in a health insurance version of The Running Man, let’s at least try to keep the judges honest.

PS: Single-payer would make supporting this legislation unnecessary, as well as save the lives of 15 9/11s worth of innocent people a year. Just a thought.