I had a very revealing conversation with Marcy Wheeler of Fire Dog Lake the other day, and haven’t been able to talk about it here due to being super busy with the protest stuff.

Basically, it boils down to this:

1) She will not admit she was unbelievably wrong about Toyota’s electronics in the wake of the NHTSA report, because:
A) Not a single auto expert works for the NHTSA
B) There are still lawsuits pending, however:
I) If the lawsuits are resolved in Toyota’s favor, they don’t count, because:
a) Marcy Wheeler talked to some disgruntled former Toyota service people in 2007, and
b) she can read Toyota’s corporate mind and just knows that they have secret chip problems, and
c) she isn’t providing any evidence for any of these assertions

Follow that? I know it’s pretty amazing. This is what always gets me about Marcy Wheeler’s ‘reporting’ and one of the things that drove me to abandon FDL, save for David Dayen’s work and a bit of the community blogging. Wheeler is free to make whatever fact-free, paranoid, borderline racist/nativist accusations she wants, so long as they’re against typical liberal bugaboos (corporations, Republicans, foreign companies). Sometimes they turn out to be true; just as often, they’re baseless. Her fans ignore the misses and exaggerate the hits, and thus, a star is born. About half of her posts actually take the form of her asking for indulgence as she ‘goes into the weeds’, aka, raves fantastically about her latest pet conspiracy theory.

It looks more than a bit like apophenia, honestly. She sees elaborate conspiracies everywhere. In the Bush era, this was slightly more likely to turn up ‘results’, simply because they engaged in so many conspiracies at once.

That’s not praiseworthy for Wheeler, however; it’s just a sad commentary on the Bush government.

Anyway, when I confronted her about her Toyota fixation from last year, now conveniently forgotten, she engaged in the delusional self-justification I described above for a bit.

Image of Twitter conversation up on Flickr. Roughly arranged in chronological order; timestamps are visible anyway.

I wrote some stuff up in the comments at Ian Welsh’s place and people asked for more, so, I’m making this omnibus post.

In short, although I never normally link the two, I have been covering the protests here in Madison for The Zombie Rights Campaign, our charity/grassrootsy organizing group, and putting regular updates on the blog using a special tag. You can see all those posts by going to this link.

I have also taken tons of pictures and you can see the whole collection on Flickr here. Video has gone on the ZRC youtube channel here.

Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to keep up both blog fronts and handle these protests at the moment. I’m running ragged just trying to keep up.

Yet another critical flaw in the Exchange based system of ‘health care reform’ pushed by our industry captured President and his idolatrous fanboys(and girls):

THURSDAY, Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) — Under the new Affordable Care Act, the health reform package signed into law by President Barack Obama last March, millions of Americans whose income fluctuates during the year may lose health insurance for periods of time as their eligibility for different programs changes.

The authors of a new study appearing in the February issue of Health Affairs estimated that as many as 28 million U.S. adults might “churn” in and out of health insurance programs during the course of a year, sometimes losing coverage more than once.

“It’s a critical issue,” said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of The Commonwealth Fund, who was not involved with the study. “You could get a raise or lose a week of work or gain a week, and move in and out of coverage.”

…

By taking a look at U.S. Census data from the last five years, Sommers and a colleague estimated that in the first six months, 35% of families with incomes below 200% of the poverty level will change eligibility while half (28 million) would have crossed the threshold at least once during the first year.

An estimated one-quarter of beneficiaries will likely have their coverage disrupted by crossing the income dividing line at least twice in one year, and 39% will over the span of two years, the authors added.

Within four years, up to 38% will have their coverage disrupted four times or more, they predicted.

…

“It would be easier to fine-tune if it was a continuous program,” Schoen said, and it would reduce costs.

Yes, Medicare for all really *would* be better, in that it would stand a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working.

But hey, good job, Balloon Juicers. Now not only have you helped turn us into an official corporatocracy, but millions of people will be constantly losing health coverage, which they probably won’t be able to afford to use anyway, every year.

It’s like the O-bots built a machine to kick people in the teeth, over and over again. Fantastic.