According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare will soak up more than 14 percent of gross domestic product by 2080. If the Roadmap were to be adopted, CBO says Medicare would take up less than 4 percent. As Ryan explained during an illuminating interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the hope is that converting Medicare into a voucher scheme would prod seniors to shop around to find the best value–that is, the best insurance policies, the best hospitals, the best doctors–and, in so doing, get health care that is as good if not better than they would have otherwise.

From Rep. Paul Ryan in the Ezra Klein interview:

What I also have in this bill is the health care services commission. It is a system whereby all these stakeholders in health care – providers, doctors, insurers, consumer groups, hospitals, unions – all come up with standard metrics that are standardized that we hold for price and quality and best practices. It’s a lot different than a comparative effectiveness approach. This way, the consumer sees who’s good and who’s bad. I think we need to make a big reach towards transparency.

New evidence that emerged in the last few days has resulted in the dismissal of all charges against Lincoln County Sheriff Timothy L. Daugherty, who was facing two counts of felony obstruction of justice and one misdemeanor charge of lying to a State Bureau of Investigation officer.

However, Assistant District Attorney Gwynn Radeker, who motioned for the dismissal after his request for a continuance was denied, indicated that the sheriff is far from out of the woods.

Radeker said new evidence doesn’t support the charges the sheriff faced, but indicates a need for further investigation with new and possibly more serious charges against Lincoln County’s top lawman a potential result.

From Kwak’s Part I:

It’s being pushed by Paul Ryan, in part because he’s the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, in part because he’s good-looking and articulate, in part to provide the party plausible deniability if it flops (like Bobby Jindal a year ago). The CBO says that it will balance the budget and even eliminate the national debt by 2080. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have commented on it. Klein says, “I wouldn’t balance the budget in anything like the way Ryan proposes. His solution works by making care less affordable for seniors. . . . But his proposal is among the few I’ve seen that’s willing to propose solutions in proportion to the problem.” Yglesias says “it’s totally unworkable.” But they’re both being much too kind.

It is also unfortunate that our city remains victimized by the Cheshire cat known as Sen. Don Vaughan, but to have his partner-in-crime, Nancy Vaughan, on city cowncil is a calamity. These two have threatened opponents with tax audit and jail. They routinely use GPD officers to push people around during campaigns.

And so it is with a heavy heart that I recently learned the true nature of District 3 Cowncilman Zack Matheny’s vocation. As you may know, he is employed by a very large locally-owned commercial real estate investment and management firm. One of the company’s divisions owns and manages senior living facilities. On the face, this division seems one part of a well-designed investment strategy. If it were only that.

A person who would know informs me that the tenants of these senior living facilities have, as a matter of course, been financially qualified by Matheny’s employer. They give notice and show up at these places bearing high commission/high risk investment opportunities for the old folks to purchase. Zack Matheny may not steal from his grandparents, but he’s damn sure doing it to yours. Exploiting captive, by definition impaired by age, customers with ill-advised products designed to line his pockets, Matheny is indistinguishable from the modern day confidence man. Of course, the banksters have ensured it is all perfectly legal.

But that don’t make it right. I used to think Matheny’s flop sweat at cowncil meetings was from apologizing to old folks all day for losing their money. There is at least some honor in that. The truth is much worse.

His employer, being exquisitely diversified geographically, probably never lets its grifters shit in their back yards, so Matheny’s working in places far from here. And since these investments will sour in private accounts, the corporation remains unblemished.

It’s the perfect crime.

A staggering €8bn-€10bn (£7bn-£8.7bn) may have been taken out of Greece by private investors since it became engulfed by economic turmoil in November.

Under pressure from the European Union and international markets to rein in the nation’s €300bn debt, socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, announced last week that he would have to enforce tough deficit-cutting measures. But the coming austerity package is leading panicked wealthy Greeks to divert their savings out of the country.

From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

Remember the proverbial run on the bank? Well, that was the norm (or rather the outlier) before governments decided to backstop entire financial industries residing within their territory. As a result, the post-Lehman version of “the bank run” will henceforth be referred to as “the country run” and for an example of one in practice, look no further than Greece.

The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the “salutary science of Hierarchiology”, “inadvertently founded” by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity.[1] Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

From Bloomberg:

John Thain, the ousted chief of Merrill Lynch & Co., was named to lead CIT Group Inc., the commercial lender that emerged from bankruptcy in December, after a nearly four-month search for a replacement.

Thain, 54, becomes chairman and chief executive officer immediately, New York-based CIT said today in a statement. The century-old lender had been led by Jeffrey Peek, another former Merrill Lynch executive, from July 2004 until Jan. 15, when Peek stepped down and board member Peter Tobin was named interim CEO.

The job restores Thain to the top of a public company more than a year after he was pushed out by Kenneth D. Lewis, then CEO of Bank of America Corp., which agreed to buy Merrill during the 2008 financial crisis. Thain inherits a company that was crippled by Peek’s foray into subprime lending before the bankruptcy. CIT still operates under constraints tied to a federal bailout in 2008 and is shut out from the commercial paper market, its traditional source of funding.

In an interview that will air Sunday on ABC, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says, “”We have much, much lower risk of [a double-dip recession] today than at any time over the last 12 months or so … We are in an economy that was growing at the rate of almost 6 percent of GDP in the fourth quarter of last year. The most rapid rate in six years. So we are beginning the process of healing.”

The timing of this statement is remarkable because, while the US is finally showing some signs of recovery, the global economy is bracing for another major shock – this time coming from the European Union.

The mounting debt and deficit problems in Greece might seem relatively small and faraway to the US Treasury – concerned as it is with China’s exchange rate and the ritual of G7 meetings, and likely distracted by the major snow storm now hitting Washington DC.

But the problems now spreading from Greece to Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy portend serious trouble ahead for the US in the second half of this year – particularly because our banks remain in such weak shape…

Tim Geithner and the White House may feel they must stand aloof, waiting for the Europeans to get their act together. This is a mistake – the need for US leadership has never been greater, particularly as our banks are really not in good enough shape to withstand a major international adverse event (e.g., Greece defaults, Greece leaves the eurozone, Germany leaves the eurozone, etc).

It seems the banksters want to have their cake and eat it, too. Global markets allow them to decrease the cost of goods and maximize securitization, but they don’t want to deal with the consequences. Of course, duplicitous circumstances are business as usual for this bunch.

Commenter, Bond Girl, won’t get fooled again:

Ever since our administration decided last year to (literally) buy the banks some time and help them “earn” their way back to solvency, it has been politically invested in (1) giving the impression of recovery regardless of what is really taking place, and (2) downplaying the banks’ persistent exposures. For this reason, they will not acknowledge potential problems until they are right on top of us, let alone develop plans as to how to deal with them. It’s kind of similar to how, with the previous administration, the credit crisis was “contained” until we were merely days away from the complete collapse of the financial system. I’m sure they believe the sovereign credit crisis is contained within Europe.

It’s hard to blame Germany, however, for being relectant to throw money at a bloated and corrupt government.

StatsGuy replies:

Structurally, we have the issue that elders did not save and health care costs (along with range of services and length of support) are rising, meaning that they can’t draw on owed obligations to sustain consumption (meaning that they need support from taxes, meaning that we’ll need much higher tax rates to support them unless they go back to work, but many skills have decayed due to years in retirement, and some are in poor health). But right now, taxes are a non-starter, so we’re covering consumption with debt (future tax load), even though the FUTURE relative base of tax payers will be even smaller.

There are ways out, but they are so politically toxic to the groups in power that I cannot see any solution emerging until the crisis hits squarely (e.g. Greece), but the US position as reserve currency will trump that for a long while. Threats to the world economy cause such a huge aggregate demand shock that we see “flight to safety”, and massive carry trade unwinds (we’re now in dollar carry trade unwind 2.0 – yay). Meaning the dollar will probably be able to go further into debt than any currency in the history of the world before it really blows up, and then all hell will break loose.

And again:

While the boomer generation might claim “we were promised this, the nation owes this to us”, recognize one truth:

When the “nation” promised those benefits, it was controlled by the boomer cohort – which did not save. They assumed 8% annual growth in equity values to fund future pension payouts. They assumed housing values would go up forever, and built houses with constantly increasing square footage. Thus, they did not fully fund those pension systems, and NOW those pensions have a huge gap – your argument presumes that the current productive cohort should harshly cut its own consumption (e.g. increase taxes massively) to pay for a gap that was incurred by the previous cohort – and thus allow the previous cohort to preserve its FULL consumption.

To the extent the current “capitalist” system is failing its elders, much of that is because its elders designed that system. Now that they’re starting to realize their mistake, their response is to demand that the next generation pay them their FULL benefits even though the real economy that they built cannot generate those benefits.

Michael Turner sees into the future:

Now, Timmy’s just *gotta* know: about 4% of that 6% spike was only inventory bounce. After all, it was deemed such in a widely publicized report from Goldman Sachs, no less. I’ve been given to believe he has contacts with that firm. (Or if not: surely he reads the financial press?) But he’s also probably noticed: nobody’s paying much attention to that analysis. Rah, rah, healthy growth has returned.

So when the bounce is over and growth falls back, he’ll be able to say, “Oh, we had good growth, everything was fine, but then the Eurozone went and imploded on us. Not my bailiwick. Not our fault. Not this time, anyway.”

On Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, she said his comments calling liberal groups “f-ing retards” was “indecent and insensitive” and cause for his dismissal.

But the former governor went to great and sometimes awkward lengths to insist that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh used the same exact term to describe the same exact group, it was simply in the role of political humorist.

Steve Marmel does the math:

If (Person) says (Thing Sarah Doesn’t Like) is (Righter Than or Equal To) Palin, it’s fine.

However:

If (Different Person) says (Thing Sarah Doesn’t Like) is (Left Of) Palin, it’s the worst thing in the whole wide world.

An anti-Palin screed wouldn’t be complete without hearing from the perpetual Palin basher, Andrew Sullivan:

These two potent messages – delegitimizing Obama as “the other” and as a weak-kneed traitor to the troops, and casting herself as the avatar of the real America, ready to die for its survival – are political gold…

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

I don’t know who he’s talking to. With whackjobs like Virginia Foxx and Sue Myrick as NC legislators, it’s not hard to believe Palin could be POTUS.

The scary part is if the Dems put up another charismatic bankster, I may have to vote for her… again.

Such has become the case with the Wife and I in Greensboro. We’ll be enjoying the Super Bowl quietly. After we were married, before Jody opened the store, we had a social life. They were wonderful people and we partied at someone’s house every weekend. Some folks in High Point actually postponed a party because due to the store, we couldn’t make it.

We missed the second date as well. Years later, we saw them and they had moved. They’ve never invited us over. We don’t blame them.

We don’t see her “best friend” because her husband adores Sarah Palin and I cannot be near him without suffering complete apoplexia.

It is such that the Wife enjoys the Real Housewives of Orange County in lieu of actual friends.

Six is the number of a critical bulletins Microsoft will release on February 9 that affect all the currently supported versions of Windows on both the desktop and server.

And a system restart will be required for these Windows patches, which will mean down time for servers. In fact, 10 of the record-tying 13 bulletins require a restart.