When ObamaCare Becomes NanoCare

I bet you didn't see this one coming: the Affordable Care Act is not going to be covering nearly as many people as originally thought. Since it was passed on the assumption that employers would be purchasing much of the mandated private insurance for workers, and millions of jobs have been and continue to be lost, the Congressional Budget Office now estimates that two million fewer people will be covered by 2016. More than 27 million Americans will still be uninsured four years from now. That is, if the Supreme Court rules favorably on the constitutionality of forcing people to purchase products from private vendors. 

In theory, this revised government estimate should make the deficit hawk critics happy -- since so many people will be getting thrown under the bus, it will also cost about $50 billion less than originally thought, too. People not getting the medical care they need will actually help balance the federal budget. Hooray for austerity!

But not to worry, says the CBO -- more people than ever will be eligible for the state-administered Medicaid programs because poverty is going up, up, up. So if you live in a state like Texas, which hopes to opt out of Medicaid entirely, you might want to think about emigrating.

Still, the CBO report goes on, the number of employers expected to pay penalties for noncompliance with the law is expected to increase, as are the individuals having to pay fines because they lack insurance. (That part is confusing. I am guessing that after the uninsured pay their fines, they can then qualify for Medicaid. Eligibility requirements for Medicaid are supposed to be looser once the law kicks in. And meanwhile, the Obama Administration is gifting Scrooge employers like WalMart and McDonalds with waiver after waiver after waiver. What an unholy mess). 

The CBO, to its nonpartisan credit, also takes note that American wages continue to stagnate. Therefore more children of struggling parents than expected will be eligible for the government-subsidized CHIP program. The CBO simply hadn't dreamed that one in four American children would be thrust below the poverty level when they started crunching their numbers two years ago in Obama's misguided effort to make his delayed health care plan deficit-neutral.

Julian Pecquet of The Hill offers a summary: 

The combined effects of the revised estimates over the 2012–2021 period add up to:

■ An increase of $168 billion in projected outlays for Medicaid and CHIP;

■ A decrease of $97 billion in projected costs for exchange subsidies and related spending;

■ A decrease of $20 billion in the cost of tax credits for small employers; and

■ An additional $99 billion in net deficit reductions from penalty payments, the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans, and other effects on tax revenues and outlay, with most of those effects reflecting changes in revenues.

As I laid out in a previous post, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the individual mandate in less than two weeks. The libertarian Koch Brothers are transporting busloads of "Keep Your Hands Off My Healthcare" astroturfers to demonstrate against the ACA, and the Obama administration is "facilitating" counter-demonstrations, even prayer vigils, to keep its behemoth of a signature accomplishment alive. Now that the CBO has estimated that the law is becoming ever more unwieldy because of the reality of the crappy economy, will the Court be that much more inclined to strike down the individual mandate? Without the provision that we all be forced to buy policies from insurance leeches, the whole law is kaput.

Obama blew it when he abandoned the single payer option. If he had really wanted to, he could have forced it through Congress via the reconciliation tactic.  So, while a declaration of unconstitutionality may be a blow to those lucky few people now benefiting from the measure, it will be a blessing in disguise to most of us. Almost two-thirds of those polled have expressed a preference for a Medicare for All program.

As former Labor Sec. Robert Reich puts it when making the case for Single Payer, nobody from either left or right would object to a payroll tax deduction, which is how it would be paid for. No court has ever struck down a payroll tax as being unconstitutional. Reich says:

Other federal judges in district courts - one in Virginia and another in Florida - have struck down the (ACA) law on similar grounds. They said the federal government has no more constitutional authority requiring citizens to buy insurance than requiring them to buy broccoli or asparagus. (The Florida judge referred to broccoli, the Virginia judge to asparagus.) Social Security and Medicare aren't broccoli or asparagus. They're as American as hot dogs and apple pie.

Fear, Loathing and Allergies

How can the weekend massacre of at least 16 sleeping Afghan citizens get any more shocking and disgusting? When the New York Times goes along with the U.S. government's propaganda machine, and attempts to whitewash what was essentially an act of terror into a pesky glitch. They bemoan the fact that this temporary aberration in our humanitarian effort makes us look bad. How unfair is it that the Taliban will get to seize on an "unfortunate event" by a lone gunman for some propaganda? The Times quotes one unnamed American military official as saying "the fear is that all these incidents, taken together, play into the Taliban’s account of how we treat the Afghan religion and people. And while we all know that’s a false account — think how many the Taliban have killed, and never once taken responsibility — it’s a very hard perception to combat.”

Yeah, it's hard out there for an invading military machine which commits atrocity after atrocity, night raid after night raid, drone attack after drone attack, to actually be called out for committing them by the real bad guys, isn't it?

The Times goes on to make the diagnosis that the Afghan people have developed an "understandable allergy" to a decade of American occupation. As one reader pointed out in the comments section, the use of the word "allergy" in describing the outrage and despair of an occupied people is cavalierly dismissive. An allergy, after all, is an abnormal reaction to an innocuous substance. In its insidious choice of words, The Times is deriding blowback by the victims of American imperialism as an unhealthy overreaction. An earlier article in the same newspaper describes the American invaders as being under siege:

American officials scrambled Monday to understand why a veteran Army staff sergeant, a married father of two only recently deployed here, left his base a day earlier to massacre at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan. The devastating, unexplained attack deepened the sense of siege for Western personnel in this country, as denunciations brought a moment of unity to three major Afghan factions: civilians, insurgents and government officials.

Not once to we hear any details from "the paper of record" about the actual victims of this massacre. A  majority were children, but like all "collateral damage", any vestige of the human beings they once were has been glossed over in favor of how their inconvenient deaths have presented a dilemma to the American overlords.  The real victims are the maligned invaders, it would appear. This is like the kid who murders his parents and then whines to the judge about being left an orphan. Here is my own comment in response to the Times article:

The unnamed military official quoted in this article has some chutzpah. He has the nerve to complain that this massacre and other abuses will be used as propaganda fodder by the Taliban, and that the occupying Americans are just warm cuddly puppies who totally respect the people whose Korans they burn and whose corpses they desecrate? This is either an indication of monumental ignorance, or imperialistic arrogance of epic proportions.

The Afghan people have been occupied against their will for a decade. The children murdered in what was really an act of terrorism have never lived in a country that was not occupied. And all the Americans seem to care about is how this "isolated" bad behavior puts a monkeywrench into their strategy and their psy-ops campaigns to win hearts and minds.

The American response to these outrages is always the same: express some shallow and unctuous regrets, throw some bags of cash at the impoverished "collateral damage", promise some vague accountability, cover up as much as possible, claim that these escalating abuses are isolated instances and above all, blame the victims if they continue to resist the benevolence of their invaders.

President Obama fit in his condolence call to Hamid Karzai while riding in his limo on his way to watch his own kid play basketball on Sunday. While he considers the massacre "tragic and shocking" it in "no way represents the exceptional character of our military."

We ought to rename this country the United States of Arrogance.

Democracy in Action: Supreme Court Prayer Vigils

Just one day after the White House announced the creation of its brand new ethical transparency website*, it is flatly refusing to divulge information about the scores of faith-based and other special interest groups it managed to corral yesterday. The Administration is coordinating a massive propaganda campaign to gin up public support for its embattled Affordable Care Act. Without naming names, Team Obama has coyly admitted that it will be "facilitating" a prayer vigil outside the Supreme Court as the justices mull over the ACA's constitutionality later this month.

Robert Pear of The New York Times reveals the White House propaganda push with typical government doublespeak: 

The advocates and officials mapped out a strategy to call attention to tangible benefits of the law, like increased insurance coverage for young adults. Sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations, White House officials denied that they were trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill. They said a main purpose of this week’s meeting, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, was to give the various groups a chance to learn of the plans.

Translation: Speaking from both sides of its blow-hole, the WH is not encouraging the rallies, but rather instructing the veal pen when, how and where to partake in them.

The part of this "strategy" that really creeps me out is that a branch of our government is encouraging a totally illegal display of religious magical thinking on public land in order to promote a policy agenda. We are coming to expect, and accept, the daily whittling away of that increasingly arbitrary document known as the Constitution. Here is the comment I wrote in response to the Times article this morning:

It will be hard for the administration to defend a health care law that doesn't even kick in for another two years. The rationale for postponing full benefits -- to appease the deficit hawks -- amounts to sheer malpractice when you factor in the increasing ranks of the uninsured (50 million-plus), largely left unprotected because of job losses after the financial meltdown. And while people are on tenterhooks waiting for 2014, the private insurance leeches are raking in record profits as they inflict ever higher premiums and co-pays to guarantee they stay profitable. They should have been put out of business two years ago. The president should have kept his campaign promise and backed at least a public option. Instead, he sold out to the corporations. He and Congress did not follow the wishes of the electorate.

And now the White House has to rely on a massive public relations campaign to convince people there will be a better tomorrow, tomorrow. And frankly, the government helping to coordinate a prayer vigil outside the Supreme Court to ask for God's help in forcing us to keep the insurance parasites in business just reeks of medievalism and desperation.

Instead of praying to the guy in the sky, let's resume a national campaign to demand Medicare for All. Let's join the rest of the civilized world.

It appears that the Obama Administration got wind of planned astroturf Tea Party rallies and tent revivals and Supreme Court lawn parties sponsored by the likes of the Koch Brothers to protest the insurance company giveaway law. Once burned by the infamous 2009 Town Halls, they have decided to fight prayer with prayer, misinformation with pep rally glitz, the Lord's Prayer with a Hail Mary. They were also likely taken aback by a recent Gallup poll which shows that a majority of people, including Democrats, are not entranced with ObamaCare. Even those believing that it has its positive points also think that mandating Americans to buy private insurance is unconstitutional.

Whatever. Praise the Lord, and donate generously when the political collection plate is passed your way.

* See previous post for link.

Funny Stuff

It must be the silly season, or the full moon, or the big Solar Storm wreaking havoc with grids and the GPS, but I haven't encountered so much ironic humor while trolling the internets in months. In just the past hour alone, I have been treated to a three-fer laugh riot by simply doing a quick scan through my email and the Times website.

First, the email. In the same week that saw Attorney General Eric Holder claim transparency by giving a public speech opaquely defending the secrecy of the Obama Administration when it decides to kill people, the White House has announced a new website devoted to ethics and transparency:

The idea that government is more accountable when it is transparent is a principle that President Obama has worked hard to make a reality in his administration.

That's why the President pledged “to create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format.”

This site, ethics.data.gov, is designed to be a fulfillment of that promise.

 You can supposedly punch in a name, or a keyword, and oodles and oodles of info will pop right out at you. It purports to rip the White House Visitors' Log wide open! I haven't tried it out yet, and don't know that I ever will. My hesitancy has a little something to do with the Obama re-election campaign being involved in a massive data-mining scheme -- bringing me to my second object of hilarity.

A story in today's Times lays out the secretive, massive high-techie-tackiness of his Chicago political arm, and how campaign workers have all sorts of sneaky ways to find out who we are, via tracking cookies and other nefarious methods. (There is also a great piece in ProPublica outlining how those annoying Obama emails begging for donations are subtly tailor-made to apply to each unique donor). Anyway, here's the part in The Times piece that cracked me up:

Many of the small donors who gave early and often in 2008 have failed to rematerialize, (though officials say that with new donors and increasing enthusiasm they have no doubt that they will at least raise the $750 million they did then). Some of the volunteers who went to work enlisting friends and neighbors have been turned off by unmet expectations and the hard realities of partisan Washington, though the Republican attacks on Mr. Obama this year have helped bring some back into the fray.

And, campaign officials say, they have literally lost track of many reliable Democratic voters, particularly lower-income people who have lost their homes or their jobs or both, and can no longer be reached at the addresses or phone numbers the campaign has on file.

So Mr. Obama’s re-election team is sifting through reams of data available through the Internet or fed to it by its hundreds of staff members on the ground in all 50 states, identifying past or potential supporters and donors and testing e-mail and Web-based messages that can entice them back into the fold.

This is priceless. They're actually attempting to locate the poor slobs who lost everything to the biggest, unpunished financial fraud conspiracy in American history, and thinking these people will be in any position or mood to give money to the biggest political sell-out in history. Don't forget to peruse the reader comments, especially the ones who still have listed phone numbers and get annoying daily -- daily! -- calls from the Obamatrons.

And last but not least, here is the third blackly humorous item on the agenda. Another Times story bemoans the fact that the corrupt Afghanistan government has not prosecuted a single case of corruption since the occupation, despite the fact that the righteous Americans are leading by democratic example! My stomach literally still hurts from the eruption of guffaws that one brought on. The Americans are said to be livid that Karzai has refused to go after crooks in his own country, despite being presented with tons of evidence by the generals. Karzai is inexplicably reacting to demands to prosecute his banksters with "interference, obstruction and delay." Wow. He probably had just gotten off the phone with Eric Holder, collecting some helpful tips in passive aggression.

Glenn Greenwald was having a field day with this one. "It’s simply shocking," he writes, "to find a country which would allow its political class to be dominated by those who 'have profited from the crony capitalism that has come to define its economic order' and who “nearly brought down” its banking system. What must it be like to live in such a country?"

The Pathology of Greed

Hardly a day goes by that we don't read an infuriating account of the bad behavior of rich people. This week, it was revealed that union-busting billionaire Chicage heiress and Obama bundler Penny Pritzker also makes a career out of systematically getting the property taxes on her many estates drastically reduced. There is a body of proof as high as a penthouse that the uber-rich as a whole are insatiably greedy, inhumane and really not as smart as they fancy themselves to be. If they had as much brains as they do money, they'd have the sense to shut up and hide. But narcissists can never shut up and hide. They flaunt, they preen, they throw their contempt in our faces.

Nevertheless, I was shocked, shocked at the latest extreme demands that the heavy-hitting lobbying group known as The Business Roundtable are making of the  government they so obviously control. It used to be that the oligarchs worked behind the scenes and behind closed doors as they peddled their influence to presidents and congress members and treasury secretaries. No more. The BRT has come out with a public manifesto called Taking Action for America. It's just about as cravenly ugly as it gets. It's for the benefit of a very select few and to the detriment of the many. It's a veritable counter-attack against the Occupy Movement. It even parodies the Declaration of Independence and begins with: "We, the CEOs of America...."

In a nutshell, the kleptocrats of the BRT want what little taxes they do pay reduced, environmental regulations scrapped, laws governing humane working conditions for their employees relaxed, their contributions to workers' health care and pensions slashed, the already watered-down and delayed measures in Dodd-Frank financial reform to just go away, and Medicare and Social Security "reformed".

And here's the really scary part. They released their report after meeting with President Obama and receiving some encouragement. They were also slated to meet privately with Treasury Secretary Geithner to discuss the details and logistics.They're openly bragging about how they are working closely with Congressional conservative Democrats (and yes, they really do call them Blue Dogs) to get their legislation passed. They're crowing about how the Beltway corporate media  just love, love, love their ideas! As far as they are concerned, they have themselves a done deal. And they may be right.

Of course, the proposals are couched in the tried and true doublespeak linguistics  of "job creation" and "economy healing." The BRT aims to hook us with a long intro about how terrible the unemployment crisis is for all those poor workers out there, and how they can help. But it's really nothing more than a repetition of the mantra of voodoo Reaganomics. If the government will only release the millionaires and billionaires from their shackles, they will be free to trickle down their golden drops of beneficence on the rest of us!  Ummm -- haven't we already seen how well that theory has worked out?

True to form, these transglobal corporate heads just love to refer to themselves as "small businessmen" who are being inordinately hurt by such cumbersome anti-pollution regulations as the Clean Air Act. They provide a laundry list of regulations they want tweaked. For example, they reckon that it will cost them too much money to comply with proposed EPA guidelines for solid waste removal. And they are vehemently against a requirement making them divulge the toxic chemicals used in hydrofracking, their excuse being that forcing them to list the ways they poison our water will put a damper on "innovation" (translation: limitless profits). 

And make no mistake: the one percenters want to destroy Social Security by privatizing it. Of course, they don't say so in so many words. Their sanitized version goes like this: "Complex and burdensome regulations" such as forced FICA contributions "are slowing the recovery and hampering job creation."
The BRT would much rather help workers start individual retirement savings plans, and "educate" the doofuses on how to scrimp and save and plan ahead:

Ensure that requirements do not discourage retirees from continued work.... Enact reforms that bring Social Security into long term financial balance as soon as possible to minmize disruption and give Americans the lead time to plan appropriately.

Translation: People are lazily retiring too early! Kill Social Security and either make people work until they die or force them to purchase junk pension plans created by the private sector, all the while humanely forewarning them they will have to make do with much, much less. 

Democratic Lame Duck Rep. Heath Shuler, who is leading yet another secretive "Gang" effort in Congress to achieve a draconian Grand Bargain of safety net cuts, is quoted on the BRT webpage as simply loving these plutocratic ideas: "Taking Action for America is the right plan at the right time," he gushes. "America’s business leaders have detailed a jobs and growth strategy that will benefit American workers. I call on my colleagues to work with me, the Business Roundtable and all stakeholders to act this year." 

And Barack Obama also seems to be totally on board with his corporate cronies:

These are relatively modest adjustments that can stabilize our economy, give you the kind of business confidence you need to invest.That means working together to reform our tax system so that we are rewarding companies that are investing here in the United States, making sure that we are able to cut our tax rate here but also broaden the base," he said.

The president said more should be done on energy and providing educational and job-training opportunities for workers, in line with what the BRT outlined on Wednesday.

"I'm prepared to be a partner in that process," Obama said.

"But we're going to have to have everybody pulling together," he said. "The business community is going to have an important voice in how that moves forward."

Tell me again why some people still believe that this President's new-found campaign populism should be taken seriously. 





Co-Presidents Obama and BRT's Jim McNerney (of Boeing) Share a Tender Moment



Holder: Tough Times Call for Murderous Measures

When you're the U.S. Attorney General whose assignment is to sanitize state-sponsored murder, it is best to do so in a law school a thousand miles away, as opposed to, say, an actual Washington press conference. It helps if you do your 'splainin' to a select group of academics who understand, or pretend to understand, your legal nitpicking and double-speak, and who won't upset your gravitas. You reckon you can get away with saying there is a difference between "due process" and "judicial process" at a friendly place like Northwestern University in Chicagoland, the home turf of your boss's political machine.

You will not be facing a media mob shouting out inconvenient questions -- such as, why hasn't the government responded to a FOIA request for documents relating to the drone strike assassination of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son? Exactly how many thousands of women and children have been part of your collateral damage, anyway? When you are Eric Holder, you intellectualize the slaughter, and try to get away with bullshit like this:  

Let me be clear: an operation using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces, and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: First, the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

Eric Holder conveniently did not find it necessary to mention any evidence of how the government determined that the target of the assassination was actually a "senior operational leader of al Qaeda", rather than, say, a loathesome provocateur, or why the "applicable law of war principles" could be applied in a country (Yemen) with which we are not at war. Here is just a little more of what he said:

Al qaeda leaders are continually planning attacks against the United States, and they do not behave like a traditional military – wearing uniforms, carrying arms openly, or massing forces in preparation for an attack. Given these facts, the Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning – when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become clear....

Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces.....

The Constitution’s guarantee of due process is ironclad, and it is essential – but, as a recent court decision makes clear, it does not require judicial approval before the President may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war – even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.

So, by repeating the claim over and over again that Awlaki was an al Qaeda mastermind plotting attacks, Holder makes the case that saying something often enough makes it true. Yet, he and his boss refuse to provide the evidence behind the legalese, because they deem it to be top secret. Rather than admit that there is in fact no credible evidence, they hide behind the convenient curtain of national security. Bush taught them well.  

Holder was also careful to add that such targeted killings (he just hates, hates, hates that critics are calling them "assassinations") are ever so humanely carried out, so as not to impose "unnecessary suffering" on hapless innocents who may have the poor taste to get in the way. Here again is his dry legalspeak way of putting it: "Under the principle of proportionality, the anticipated collateral damage must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Finally, the principle of humanity requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering".

In other words, if some women and children get killed along the way, their numbers are acceptable, and their deaths will not be needlessly prolonged. Isn't it too bad that President Obama is being forced into humanely killing people? These are the most extremely unique times in all of recorded history! Here a threat, there a threat, everywhere a threat-threat. "It is an indicator of our times," Holder cravenly pontificated on the need to kill. "Not a departure from our laws and values."

Besides, nobody really cares about targeted assassinations on foreign soil, as long as a photogenic Democratic president who loves his gorgeous wife and and adorable kids and cute puppy dog is doing it. He outlawed torture, didn't he? The drone targets hardly feel a thing when they have the good sense to die quickly, disappear from sight, and not linger on and on, calling attention to themselves. So let's continue expressing 24/7 outrage at a fat slob of a provocateur named Rush Limbaugh, and yammer some more about whether crazy Rick Santorum can win Ohio in the GOP sweepstakes tonight. 

Collateral Damage in Pakistan

Defending the Inquisition

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

There are false equivalencies, and then there are feckless equivalencies. A newspaper columnist has just compared N.Y. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to  Rush Limbaugh slander victim Sandra Fluke.  Mike Lupica of the Daily News has had it with the abuse being heaped on Kelly for having the guts to trash civil rights in the name of public safety. If you think the War Against Women is bad, says Lupica, then the War Against Ray Kelly is just plain horrid. So much so that Islamophobic anti-civil libertarians are fighting back with a rally today at Police HQ to support continued police surveillance of Muslims of every age, gender, residence -- anywhere and everywhere and forevermore.

The livid Lupica sputters that Kelly is being attacked out of pure "turf war" spite by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times  and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who've all taken umbrage at his spying spree. Lupica was so mad that he made a typo which unintentionally speaks the truth:

They do this as Kelly continues to do everything he can — and within the law, despite the coverage — to keep the city safe at the most dangerous period in his history. The Times even asserts that the kind of surveillance employed by Kelly and the NYPD produces no “obvious payoff for public safety.”

Even as legal experts are weighing in and speculating that the police spying program is most likely illegal, and Attorney General Eric Holder is "taking a look" at the practice after being intensely pressured to do so, Kelly is fighting back. He could not have picked a more telling venue to defend himself in a speech over the weekend: the Cipriani Club on Wall Street. The Cipriani's balcony was the infamous site of champagne-sipping one percenters hurling insults at OWS protesters last fall. Of course, the NYPD conducts part of its surveillance from the Goldman Sachs office building, so it's no surprise he picked the financial district to give his little talk. Kelly surmises that while most Muslims are law-abiding citizens, you have to keep an eye on them. They're prone to being radicalized:

We know that while the vast majority of Muslim student associations and their members are law-abiding.we have seen too many cases in which such groups were exploited..... The notion that the Police Department should close our eyes to what takes place outside the five boroughs is folly, and it defies the lessons of history. If terrorists aren’t limited by borders and boundaries, we can’t be either.

Kelly conveniently failed to mention that most, if not all, of the "exploited" groups and individuals are actually entrapped by the police and/or FBI and arrested to much fanfare after they are convinced by informants and undercover agents to aspire to blow things up. Law enforcement m.o. is to find marginally intelligent or mentally disturbed people who can be easily used as tools in the phony War on Terror. None of those charged was ever really capable of or even close to carrying out an attack. They got caught on tape saying they hated America, or admired Al Qaeda, or maybe wanted to blow stuff up. That was enough to charge, even convict, them.

In his column today, Lupica gives us two feeble examples of how the NYPD surveillance program has made us safer:

 Let Kelly continue to use NYPD surveillance of conversations inside an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, one attached to a mosque, that helps New York cops keep a Herald Square subway station from being blown sky high.

The names you want to know about on that one, guys who certainly were a threat to public safety, were Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, eventually arrested and tried and convicted in federal court. Siraj, who worked in that bookstore, ended up getting 30 years. And there is the “spying” that last year resulted in the arrests of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohammed Mamdouh and a plan from radical Islam to bomb a Manhattan synagogue. 

Lupica doesn't tell you that Siraj was set up by an informant and was strung along with bribes from the police -- or that Elshafay was a schizophrenic who was convinced to plead guilty and testify against Siraj. You can read all the details here. The other two alleged terrorists whom Lupica cites were initially investigated by the FBI, who dropped the case for lack of credible evidence. The NYPD got the sloppy seconds, and the charges were eventually reduced. The duo, in effect, pled guilty to "wanting to" blow up a synagogue.

Lupica chooses to ignore the facts, and instead warns the public to "get off Kelly's back, and get out of his way":

At a time when you look around at what passes for political leaders in a presidential election year from both parties, watch them blow with the wind, you have actual leadership from Kelly, who stands his ground and tells the truth about the city in which he works and the world in which he lives.

You don’t go to war against Ray Kelly on something as important as this; you stand with him. Sometimes you wonder if Kelly’s loudest critics, the ones from politics or the newspapers or the protesters in the street Saturday yelling about him, have forgotten what year it is.

I think Mr. Lupica has forgotten what century it is. He seems to have wandered into a time machine and traveled back to the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem Witch Trials, or even as recently as the 1950s and Joe McCarthy's Red Scare. Man's inhumanity to man knows no expiration date, though, and Lupica is exactly correct: 2012 is turning out to be a very unforgettable medieval year.