“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
This is the first thing one learns in law school. Or so it seems to me, anyway.
And it dollars up on the hoof right smart, too.
You may think of Jeffrey as just another wrinkled weenie on the roller grill in the Devil’s 7-Eleven, but lawyers have been dining out on him for years, and the feast ain’t over yet.
The lawyers in Congress have demanded that his files be released, and the lawyers in the Justice Department have been (and still are) cherry-picking them with a liberal application of the black Magic Marker, which means the elected ambulance-chasers may bring obstruction-of-justice charges, contempt charges, or even impeachments, which would cause the executive shysters to hire top-shelf mouthpieces of their own, and you didn’t exactly have to be brilliant to see this bullshit coming, though you do have to foot the bill.
Merry Christmas. No, don’t unwrap that box. We’ve got the receipts, but they won’t take it back.
“What’s in a name? that which we call a hose / By any other name would smell as sour.” Apologies to The Bard.
Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.
This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:
“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”
This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.
But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.
And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.
Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.
Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”
So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:
Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.
It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.
In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.
A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.
And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.
Black Friday? Not entirely. As long as you avert your eyes from the news, that is.
And from your email in-box, too. Jaysis H., etc. Everybody and his bookkeeper is trying to sell me something. Take a break, f’chrissakes. I’m still digesting last night’s feast.
Well … truth be told, as feasts go it was fairly light dining. Green chile stew, salad, freshly baked cornbread, and raspberry cobbler with whipped cream. Fake beer for me, real beer for Herself.
While feasting we watched a couple episodes of the old HBO series “Deadwood,” a tale of unfettered capitalism ascendant in which much of the dialogue sounds like Pestilence Piggy addressing the press.
In one episode a gambler and whoremonger growing fat on fear of and hatred for the government ordered the newspaper office ransacked, its machinery vandalized and shat upon.
So, yeah, ripped straight from today’s headlines. Art imitating life; horseshit and gunfire.
Before we sat down to eat I slipped out for a bracing 90 minutes on the Soma Double Cross, tooling around the Elena Gallegos Open Space and a few of its neighboring trails. Lots of folks out, hoofers and rollers, either working up an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner or sweating out the gravy. And no wonder, with temps in the low 50s, though there was still a bit of mud in the shady spots after last Thursday’s rain.
The DC is a good choice for EG: 42mm Soma Cazadero tires at 30/35 psi, a low end of 24x34T, and grippy IRD Cafam cantis for when shit gets real. Eight-speed bar-cons and XT/Ultegra derailleurs. The 54cm frame is small for me, but has a longish top tube, so I don’t look like a frog trying to hump a helmet when I’m in the saddle. The little sucker is really frisky in the swoopy, twisty bits.
I enjoyed myself so much that I went right back out and did it again today. One more thing to be thankful for. Like leftovers.
Some people voted for this shit. I sure hope they like the taste.
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son? And what did you hear, my darling young one? I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’ Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’ Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’ Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’ Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
An earlier online transaction had gone walkabout, wandering from Abilene to Albuquerque only to pull a U and mosey right on back to Texas, where it reversed course yet again and returned to Albuquerque. Not to me, mind you. Just somewhere here in town. Me, I was passing the time watching bots, banks, and Budget rent-a-vans with Oklahoma plates perform “The Dance of Late-Stage Capitalism.”
In Chicago they have been awaiting a delivery of another sort altogether. National Guardspersons from Texas. “Be All That You Can Be,” the ads used to say. If this is all you can be, try harder. Fulfillment is elusive. I mean, I wanted to be a rich and famous political cartoonist and just look how that turned out.
Job fairs like a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement extravaganza in Texas seem popular among a certain subset of job-seekers. More so than, oh, say, working in America’s agricultural industry, replacing the people the ICEholes are dragging off to Christ only knows where.
“I’m looking for a career, not a job,” says a 25-year-old would-be masked avenger from San Antone, a contract worker in the solar-energy industry, one cross around his neck and two more in his ears.
Ho ho. A “career” in the very government being stripped for salable parts like a stolen Honda Civic in a chop shop. A fine place to be awaiting fulfillment. And ICE couldn’t care less if you’re a former sergeant at arms for an outlaw motorcycle club, or just look like one. Say, are those Iron Crosses in your ears? And is that a “Blut und Boden” tat? You got a signing bonus coming, son!
You’re gonna need those fat stacks Big Gummint is promising you, Bubba. Have you checked the price of groceries lately with the workforce gone walkabout? If you were an humble farmworker, just trying to feed America’s families and your own, you might could swipe a peach now and then for yourself.
Mad Blog Media 