Did you know that Republicans loved the health-care mandate all the time they criticized it? I mean, I understand it’s a Republican concept, but Paul Ryan’s love for it apparently is twice as much as President Obama’s. Steve Benen: Now, any serious person listening to the hysteria has to realize Republicans don’t actually mean any of this. Indeed, many of those characterizing the individual mandate as the death of the American experiment were endorsing the idea as recently as 2009 — during the debate over reform. But in case anyone thought to take the faux-outrage seriously, Simon Lazarus raises an important observation : the highly-touted House GOP budget plan, as shaped by Paul Ryan, includes a health care mandate, too. In fact, it includes more than one. The Ryan budget would reshape Americans’ access to health insurance mainly through two provisions, both of which pressure people to purchase private health insurance to an extent and through mechanisms that are materially indistinguishable from the supposedly toxic Obamacare mandate. One of these Ryan budget proposals — as yet little noticed by pundits or politicians — is almost an exact copy of its equivalent in the Affordable Care Act. Under both provisions, the result is the same: People who choose to carry health insurance have a lower tax bill than they would if they chose not to. In terms of their respective potential impact on individuals’ bank accounts and tax liability, the manner in which they affect individuals’ financial incentives, and hence the constraining effect on individuals’ financial choices to either buy or forgo health insurance, the two “mandate” provisions are identical. (Indeed, in most cases, the financial difference for the individual taxpayer made by the Republican tax credit would be greater — i.e., more “coercive” — than the ACA tax penalty.) In addition to cloning the ACA’s framework for coverage of adults under 65, the Ryan budget would also apply a similar approach to Americans currently covered by Medicare. Beginning in 2021, former Medicare-eligibles would receive a voucher they can apply to the purchase of private insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the vouchers would be worth approximately $6,000 for recipients age 65, and would be greater for older recipients, averaging $11,000 across the entire Medicare population. Of course, Americans would be required to continue to pay their annual Medicare tax throughout their working lives. Hence, the Republicans’ proposal to replace Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance also operates to “compel” people to pay for private health insurance policies. Moreover, this mandate is not even a pay-or-play option; Medicare taxes are mandatory, whether workers want to buy eligibility for old-age vouchers or not. Nearly every member of the House Republican caucus voted for this budget plan, and said nary a word about the freedom-crushing provision included by Paul Ryan. Howie Klein finds that Republican voters aren’t thrilled with Ryan’s budget proposal either: Even their own right-wing polling firm , that normally tells them whatever they want to hear, had bad news about Paul Ryan’s ultra-reactionary budget from hell, what he calls his “cause.” A plurality of voters still have no opinion about Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s long-term budget-cutting plan, but opposition has increased over the past several weeks. By a near two-to-one margin, they don’t like his proposal for tackling spiraling Medicare costs. And Ryan’s plan is also linked to how badly Wisconsin voters are feeling about the GOP: Zerban himself seemed buoyed by the results in La Crosse. When we contacted him this morning he also saw the Ryan effect setting in on Wisconsin Republicans: “We are seeing an incredible amount of opposition to the Ryan budget plan and Gov. Walker’s unprecedented power grab. Representative-elect Steve Doyle’s election last night confirms that. People all across Wisconsin are seeing the true colors of the GOP, and rejecting their mantra of reducing taxes for the wealthiest and balancing the budget on the backs of the hard working families of Wisconsin. The more people hear and look at Ryan’s un-bold plan to destroy prosperity, the more they hate it and the more it infects the entire GOP. Remember, they all voted for it.
Continue reading …Did you know that Republicans loved the health-care mandate all the time they criticized it? I mean, I understand it’s a Republican concept, but Paul Ryan’s love for it apparently is twice as much as President Obama’s. Steve Benen: Now, any serious person listening to the hysteria has to realize Republicans don’t actually mean any of this. Indeed, many of those characterizing the individual mandate as the death of the American experiment were endorsing the idea as recently as 2009 — during the debate over reform. But in case anyone thought to take the faux-outrage seriously, Simon Lazarus raises an important observation : the highly-touted House GOP budget plan, as shaped by Paul Ryan, includes a health care mandate, too. In fact, it includes more than one. The Ryan budget would reshape Americans’ access to health insurance mainly through two provisions, both of which pressure people to purchase private health insurance to an extent and through mechanisms that are materially indistinguishable from the supposedly toxic Obamacare mandate. One of these Ryan budget proposals — as yet little noticed by pundits or politicians — is almost an exact copy of its equivalent in the Affordable Care Act. Under both provisions, the result is the same: People who choose to carry health insurance have a lower tax bill than they would if they chose not to. In terms of their respective potential impact on individuals’ bank accounts and tax liability, the manner in which they affect individuals’ financial incentives, and hence the constraining effect on individuals’ financial choices to either buy or forgo health insurance, the two “mandate” provisions are identical. (Indeed, in most cases, the financial difference for the individual taxpayer made by the Republican tax credit would be greater — i.e., more “coercive” — than the ACA tax penalty.) In addition to cloning the ACA’s framework for coverage of adults under 65, the Ryan budget would also apply a similar approach to Americans currently covered by Medicare. Beginning in 2021, former Medicare-eligibles would receive a voucher they can apply to the purchase of private insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the vouchers would be worth approximately $6,000 for recipients age 65, and would be greater for older recipients, averaging $11,000 across the entire Medicare population. Of course, Americans would be required to continue to pay their annual Medicare tax throughout their working lives. Hence, the Republicans’ proposal to replace Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance also operates to “compel” people to pay for private health insurance policies. Moreover, this mandate is not even a pay-or-play option; Medicare taxes are mandatory, whether workers want to buy eligibility for old-age vouchers or not. Nearly every member of the House Republican caucus voted for this budget plan, and said nary a word about the freedom-crushing provision included by Paul Ryan. Howie Klein finds that Republican voters aren’t thrilled with Ryan’s budget proposal either: Even their own right-wing polling firm , that normally tells them whatever they want to hear, had bad news about Paul Ryan’s ultra-reactionary budget from hell, what he calls his “cause.” A plurality of voters still have no opinion about Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s long-term budget-cutting plan, but opposition has increased over the past several weeks. By a near two-to-one margin, they don’t like his proposal for tackling spiraling Medicare costs. And Ryan’s plan is also linked to how badly Wisconsin voters are feeling about the GOP: Zerban himself seemed buoyed by the results in La Crosse. When we contacted him this morning he also saw the Ryan effect setting in on Wisconsin Republicans: “We are seeing an incredible amount of opposition to the Ryan budget plan and Gov. Walker’s unprecedented power grab. Representative-elect Steve Doyle’s election last night confirms that. People all across Wisconsin are seeing the true colors of the GOP, and rejecting their mantra of reducing taxes for the wealthiest and balancing the budget on the backs of the hard working families of Wisconsin. The more people hear and look at Ryan’s un-bold plan to destroy prosperity, the more they hate it and the more it infects the entire GOP. Remember, they all voted for it.
Continue reading …Did you know that Republicans loved the health-care mandate all the time they criticized it? I mean, I understand it’s a Republican concept, but Paul Ryan’s love for it apparently is twice as much as President Obama’s. Steve Benen: Now, any serious person listening to the hysteria has to realize Republicans don’t actually mean any of this. Indeed, many of those characterizing the individual mandate as the death of the American experiment were endorsing the idea as recently as 2009 — during the debate over reform. But in case anyone thought to take the faux-outrage seriously, Simon Lazarus raises an important observation : the highly-touted House GOP budget plan, as shaped by Paul Ryan, includes a health care mandate, too. In fact, it includes more than one. The Ryan budget would reshape Americans’ access to health insurance mainly through two provisions, both of which pressure people to purchase private health insurance to an extent and through mechanisms that are materially indistinguishable from the supposedly toxic Obamacare mandate. One of these Ryan budget proposals — as yet little noticed by pundits or politicians — is almost an exact copy of its equivalent in the Affordable Care Act. Under both provisions, the result is the same: People who choose to carry health insurance have a lower tax bill than they would if they chose not to. In terms of their respective potential impact on individuals’ bank accounts and tax liability, the manner in which they affect individuals’ financial incentives, and hence the constraining effect on individuals’ financial choices to either buy or forgo health insurance, the two “mandate” provisions are identical. (Indeed, in most cases, the financial difference for the individual taxpayer made by the Republican tax credit would be greater — i.e., more “coercive” — than the ACA tax penalty.) In addition to cloning the ACA’s framework for coverage of adults under 65, the Ryan budget would also apply a similar approach to Americans currently covered by Medicare. Beginning in 2021, former Medicare-eligibles would receive a voucher they can apply to the purchase of private insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the vouchers would be worth approximately $6,000 for recipients age 65, and would be greater for older recipients, averaging $11,000 across the entire Medicare population. Of course, Americans would be required to continue to pay their annual Medicare tax throughout their working lives. Hence, the Republicans’ proposal to replace Medicare with partially subsidized private insurance also operates to “compel” people to pay for private health insurance policies. Moreover, this mandate is not even a pay-or-play option; Medicare taxes are mandatory, whether workers want to buy eligibility for old-age vouchers or not. Nearly every member of the House Republican caucus voted for this budget plan, and said nary a word about the freedom-crushing provision included by Paul Ryan. Howie Klein finds that Republican voters aren’t thrilled with Ryan’s budget proposal either: Even their own right-wing polling firm , that normally tells them whatever they want to hear, had bad news about Paul Ryan’s ultra-reactionary budget from hell, what he calls his “cause.” A plurality of voters still have no opinion about Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s long-term budget-cutting plan, but opposition has increased over the past several weeks. By a near two-to-one margin, they don’t like his proposal for tackling spiraling Medicare costs. And Ryan’s plan is also linked to how badly Wisconsin voters are feeling about the GOP: Zerban himself seemed buoyed by the results in La Crosse. When we contacted him this morning he also saw the Ryan effect setting in on Wisconsin Republicans: “We are seeing an incredible amount of opposition to the Ryan budget plan and Gov. Walker’s unprecedented power grab. Representative-elect Steve Doyle’s election last night confirms that. People all across Wisconsin are seeing the true colors of the GOP, and rejecting their mantra of reducing taxes for the wealthiest and balancing the budget on the backs of the hard working families of Wisconsin. The more people hear and look at Ryan’s un-bold plan to destroy prosperity, the more they hate it and the more it infects the entire GOP. Remember, they all voted for it.
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He taught the YBAs but abhors the idea of art as self-expression. Michael Craig-Martin talks to Stuart Jeffries about bucket design, his new show – and being jealous of Damien Hirst One evening, Michael Craig-Martin was driving along, listening to an absorbing discussion of contemporary art on Radio 4. “The guy who was talking was making some excellent points, but there were a few things I disagreed with. It only occurred to me after a long, long time that the voice on the radio was mine. I had to pull over because my heart was pounding.” What kind of person, you’ll be asking, doesn’t recognise their own voice? The kind of person who was born in Dublin, did toddler time in London, but spent most of his formative years in Washington DC, where he acquired a US twang. This still endures despite the fact he returned here in 1966 and became so synonymous with revolutionising the art scene that he’s known as the godfather of the Young British Artists. “The weird thing is I don’t even think I have an American accent.” It’s a great story and almost a metaphor for Craig-Martin’s vision of art. When he started drawing as a teenager in Washington, what struck him was how an image took on a life of its own, distant from the idea its creator had in their head – just as Craig-Martin’s radio voice became an alien phenomenon coming at him over the airwaves. “People call me a conceptual artist, as if the idea was all, but actually what interests me is what happens when the idea becomes a thing. Ideas are by their nature generalisations, something that can be applied to lots of things. But making art is about making particulars, and that particular something can be the generator of a generalisation.” Why do you care about this stuff? “When I was 12, I thought I had stumbled on a gold mine, but nobody around me seemed to care about it.” What little Michael had stumbled across, looking at reproductions of modern art, was a new vision introduced by Marcel Duchamp (who put a urinal in a gallery) and elaborated on by later artists. “Radical art – and I’ve always thought of myself as radical – is always at the frontiers, always speculative, always too radical to be really understood initially. It changes your frame of reference. That’s what Duchamp did.” It’s also what Craig-Martin’s most celebrated work of art did and does. An Oak Tree , from 1973, consists of a glass of water on a shelf in an otherwise empty gallery. “I was trying to work out what was the essence of a work of art. I thought it had to do with suspension of disbelief. You get it in theatre – why not in art?” When An Oak Tree was bought by the National Gallery of Australia in 1977, customs officials initially (and wonderfully) barred it from entry because it was “vegetation”. A rare example of life imitating conceptual art. But, I suggest, there is another vision of art. Not one that is speculative, but one that is reassuring. Isn’t it reassuring to capture the human spirit on paper, to make works that are beautiful? “None of that interested me. As I came across modern art, I knew the only thing to be was an artist. To do that, the only thing to do was drawing. So I took life-drawing classes. It was mostly middle-aged women and me.” What did you get from them? “Irritation. The presumption that life drawing underlies everything in art is fundamentally conservative.” A man with no style A retrospective of Craig-Martin’s drawings opens today at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. Visitors expecting something akin to Watteau’s immensely touching drawings – which are on display nearby at the Royal Academy, and show an artist seizing in chalk the essence of his human subjects while also expressing his own personality – will be confounded. There’s scarcely a human in Craig-Martin’s show, and every image is intended to obliterate rather than express the artist’s personality. “I’ve always wanted to make drawings that were absolutely style-less,” says Craig-Martin. After graduating with an MA in fine art from Yale, Craig-Martin began to draw mass-produced objects: sandals, sardine cans, milk bottles. “I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.” He gave up pencils and used crepe masking tape to produce ostensibly style-less drawings of them. Why? “I wanted to remove my hand from the process of drawing. I drew them without personal inflection.” But isn’t art about expression? “That’s not what interested me. I was interested in how form followed function. Take a bucket: it can’t be twice the size it is because if you filled it up, it would be too heavy to carry. The handle is in a certain place because if it was bigger, the side would hit your leg.” Increasingly, though, the form of manufactured objects does not follow their function. “Think of a mobile phone. You used to have a receiver with a defined earpiece and mouthpiece. Now you just have a box. Today everything looks like everything else. A phone looks like a computer looks like a camera.” There’s a risk, then, that this retrospective will look like a graveyard of once-ubiquitous objects. “True. You think objects are for ever, but mass-produced objects only came in with the industrial revolution and maybe won’t exist for much longer. The irony is that much of what I set out to draw, everyday objects, are curios. Milk bottles, who uses them? So the images become something other than I intended.” What was the intention? “I
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These men are aiming to resurrect the sketch show – with a time-travelling dinosaur and a wise old owl At a time when comedy is
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William Melchert-Dinkel posed as a woman in chat rooms and made fake suicide pacts A former nurse in Minnesota who encouraged an English man and a Canadian woman to kill themselves by chatting with them on the internet has been sentenced to almost a year in prison. William Melchert-Dinkel, 48, will spend 360 days in jail having been found guilty in March of aiding suicide. Evidence provided to the judge that posing as a female nurse he had communicated with up to about 20 people on suicide chat rooms. He had also entered into suicide pacts – never intending to keep his side of the deal – with 10 people. In the two counts presented to the court, Melchert-Dinkel was found to have encouraged Mark Drybrough, 32, from Coventry to kill himself in 2005, giving him tips on how to do it. He also aided the 2008 suicide of Nadia Kajouji, 18, from Ontario. In that case, he had taken on the persona of a young woman called Cami who appeared on the chat sites. As “Cami” he befriended Kajouji, entering into a suicide pact with her: they discussed several possible ways of dying. The prosecution told the judge that Melchert-Dinkel had an obsession with suicide and had revelled in the “thrill of the chase”. On several occasions he had given advice to vulnerable people about the most painless and efficient way of killing themselves. Defence lawyers argued that the two individuals who were involved in the charges brought against him had been intending to kill themselves in any case. Melchert-Dinkel’s right to engage in conversations on chat sites was protected by the first amendment on freedom of speech, they said. In deciding the sentence, the judge, Thomas Neuville, said Melchert-Dinkel’s actions had been calculated and intentional and had deceived those he engaged with. He gave him much less than the maximum 15 years in prison partly because he said the defendant was not the only cause of the two individuals’ deaths. Melchert-Dinkel presented the judge with a statement in which he said he was filled with remorse. Crime United States Canada Internet Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …] I haven’t been posting about it all that much, but we are continuing our donation drive till the end of this week. Won’t you please throw us a few bucks if you can? For Snail Mail: Crooksandliars.com P.O. Box 66310 Los Angeles, CA 90066 The monies collected are needed to help improve and expand C&L. Our newest plans are to upgrade the coming mobile site.Also we will be switching our video formats to work on mobile devices, plus the long process of re-encoding all our old videos for embed purposes. Thanks so much for you your support.
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Painters George Shaw and Karla Black, sculptor Martin Boyce and video artist Hilary Lloyd are finalists at Baltic, Gateshead There may be two painters on this year’s Turner prize shortlist, but traditionalists should pause before sighing with relief. One of them paints landscapes in the kind of enamel paint used for decorating model trains and aeroplanes; the other counts lipstick, bath bombs and bronzing powder among her unorthodox materials. The painters, George Shaw and Karla Black, are joined on the 2011 prize shortlist by sculptor Martin Boyce and video artist Hilary Lloyd. Prize juror Katrina Brown, director of the Common Guild in Glasgow , said the list was not representative of “one school, or cluster, or movement – there is every medium in the mix and it has a diversity and maturity about it”. In contrast to the Young British Artist-dominated shortlists of the 1990s, when the centre of UK artistic life appeared to be the few square miles around Shoreditch, this list is determinedly non-metropolitan, with only one of the artists – the Newcastle Polytechnic-trained Lloyd – based in London. “It is a sign of the maturity of the art scene in Britain that it is not all concentrated in the capital,” said Brown. Indeed, the whole prize will turn its back on London this year: the annual Turner prize exhibition, which opens on 21 October, will be hosted by the Baltic gallery in Gateshead . It is the first time in the show’s 27-year history it has been held outside a Tate gallery and only the second time it has been held outside London. Shaw, who studied in Sheffield, lives and works in Devon while Black and Boyce are based in Glasgow – where the last two winners of the prize, sculptor Susan Philipsz and painter Richard Wright, were brought up. Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain and chair of the jury, said that the Glaswegian focus was testament to the strength of the training available at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s. Curtis said of the two painters: “One may be seen as innovative but is actually quite traditional, while the other seems quite traditional but is actually quite innovative.” The work of 38-year-old Black involves cosmetic products – including nail varnish, eyeshadow and moisturiser – deployed on a grand scale in large installations that look more sculptural than painterly. But juror Godfrey Worsdale, director of Baltic, said her work could be compared to that of the abstract expressionists, the artist hurling cosmetic products across a surface just as Jackson Pollock cast paint over canvas. According to Brown, there is a conscious play on the gender associations of what she called Black’s “girly” palette of cosmetic pastels. But the artist also uses more “macho” materials, such as soil and earth. Black represents Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale. The apparently traditionalist Shaw, 44, paints the landscape of his upbringing – the Tile Hill housing estate in Coventry. In some ways his paintings appear photorealistic, but his palette is restricted by the Humbrol enamel paints he uses – materials usually more associated with hobbyist model-makers than with the Turner prize shortlist. These paints render his scenes “muted and sombre” with a curious surface sheen, according to Brown. His art depicts “forsaken places” – the dull, dark corners of postwar housing projects – and his paintings are often imbued with a “sense of foreboding” and appear to hover uncertainly between the present and the past of Shaw’s adolescence, said Brown. Landscape With Dog Shit Bin (2010) is one of his less romantic titles; but he can also give his bleak, Midlands views grand titles from the annals of art history, such as Assumption. Boyce, 43, creates sculptural installations that often reference the modernist design of the early 20th century. A set of designs for concrete trees made by the modernist French designers Joel and Jan Martel (1896-1966) have been a special focus for him: he has used the twins’ forms in sculptures, and even created a kind of alphabet out of their shapes. Lloyd, 46, is nominated for an exhibition at the Raven Row gallery in London, which she filled with video projections that also became, along with their AV equipment, a kind of sculptural installation. Unedited, and unfolding in real time, her films might focus on a motorway bridge under construction or the movement of a crane. The Turner prize winner will be announced at a ceremony in Gateshead on 5 December. Aside from Brown, Worsdale and Curtis, the judges are curators Vasif Kortun and Nadia Schneider. Previous winners of the prize include Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, Mark Wallinger and Martin Creed. Turner prize Awards and prizes Painting Sculpture Art Charlotte Higgins guardian.co.uk
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If anyone was truly disappointed here it would have been the watching Barcelona manager, Pep Guardiola, who saw almost nothing of the Manchester United team he will face in the Champions League final at Wembley on 28 May. This was, eventually, a spree. Anderson scored two simple goals in the latter stages against a Schalke team who had an unflagging wish to make some impact on the occasion. Their attitude was good but the reality was that they could not dent even the unusual United line-up that they faced. Nothing could deny Sir Alex Ferguson a third Champions League final in four seasons. United have exercised such authority in the tournament this season that they have denied themselves the acclaim they deserve. They are not only unbeaten in the competition but they have also conducted themselves in so steady a manner that the very thought of defeat has looked outlandish. In that regard, then, the final will take United into a wholly different set of circumstances. This match came virtually as a pause for relaxation. Schalke came with a little pride but no real hope. It made no difference that this was so thoroughly altered a United line-up. Those brought into the side, such as Darron Gibson, were rightly excited to be appearing in Champions League semi-final, irrespective of the fact that the tie was, in effect, already settled. The Bundesliga team might have preferred to be taking on a full-strength side that would in fact have been jaded. As it was, United capered to a 2-0 lead early in the evening. At that juncture, it looked as if Schalke would be even more fragile than they had been at home, where they lost 2-0. In the 26th minute Gibson released Antonio Valencia to score the opener. Five minutes later the much-admired Schalke goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer, bungled as he spilled an effort by Gibson into his net, off a post. Even so, Schalke had a purpose to their work before the interval that had been absent from the first leg. Rather than collapse, they cut the deficit almost immediately. The ball broke to Manuel Jurado and, while he was given far too much space by the United defence, the drive he sent high past Edwin van der Sar was still handsome. There was a trace of authenticity to the contest at such a moment. The match was being taken seriously enough, too, for Gibson, Paul Scholes and Anderson all to be booked before the interval. Still, it was impossible to forget that nothing would actually rest on the result of this match, unless Schalke were to go on what was a virtually unfeasible rampage. Some will deem Ferguson’s team to have been lucky in the draw, since their opponents have been feeble. Inadequacy was, for instance, the most obvious characteristic of Schalke in the first leg. It must be a rarity for a manager to turn the home leg of a Champions League semi-final into a rest day for some footballers who will be indispensable as United try to clinch the Premier League in the next week or two. For this fixture, only Van der Sar and Valencia were retained from the starting line-up for the first leg. Schalke came to this match with just a single realistic ambition. In theory, there was just enough time left to dispel the impression that they were semi-finalists by accident. They at least had to try to give some idea of how they had drubbed the holders, Internazionale, in the quarter-finals. Schalke had achieved that ambition in the first 45 minutes, but United still knew that the occasion represented a healthy pause for the footballers who will resume service when Chelsea come here in the Premier League on Sunday. Patronising as it may be to say it about opponents who are not remotely equipped to deal with Ferguson’s players, there was
Continue reading …President Bush Reacts to Osama Bin Laden’s Death with Will Ferrell from Will Ferrell Will Ferrell reprised his role as President George W. Bush Tuesday to react to the death of Osama bin Laden.
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