Is it just me, or is Google having issues this morning? I can’t get into Google mail or news.

This is going to piss everybody off, I fear. The President is in Afghanistan explaining how he has signed a deal to withdraw U.S.troops by the end of 2014, but MSNBC keeps running a banner saying that the deal will keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2024.

He’s saying the U.S. will not build permanent bases in Afghanistan, and that U.S. military personnel will be in some kind of supporting non-combat role. It’s going to take a while to digest this.

Does President Obama play too much golf? That’s what the wingnuts are screaming about today. I ran into some dippychick on Facebook who wrote (in this thread, which is a hoot in itself) that the President has done “More golfing than all other presidents combined.”

True? Well, those of us of limping into our vintage years might remember another president who played a remarkable amount of golf. This is from a Golf Digest article:

Dwight David Eisenhower got in his share of golf, and then some. A study of the 34th president’s daily itinerary during his eight years in office from 1953-’61 turns up a staggering 1,000-plus days of golf, including almost 800 rounds everywhere from Augusta National to Cypress Point to Turnberry and beyond.

This was while he was President, mind you. On top of that, Ike had a putting green installed on the White House lawn. Imagine what the wingnuts would do if the Obamas did that.

By contrast, according to this anti-Obama website, President Obama has played 95 rounds of golf since his inauguration, as of April 21. I suspect that’s about average for presidents. It’s probably good for their physical and mental health, frankly.

I was a lot younger then, of course, but I don’t remember people going ballistic about Eisenhower playing golf. They just joked about it.

According to CNN, Woodrow Wilson played even more golf than Ike did. Wilson played every day, it says, which I assume includes the duration of World War I. Which kind of makes the idea that a president must not play golf while troops are in the field kind of ridiculous.

There are claims that George W. Bush was savaged for playing golf during the war in Iraq, but I don’t think it was the golf that irritated people. It was the attitude.

He could have kept playing for all I cared. I just wanted him to can the attitude. But he canned golf and kept the attitude. Oh, well.

I don’t know how far back you’d have to go to find a President who played no golf at all while President. I remember reading that Ulysses S. Grant was introduced to golf while traveling in Scotland, after he left the White House. He said he thought the game was good exercise, but he didn’t understand what the ball was for.

Anyway — it appears that the Right is pushing the meme that the Obamas are living some ritzy, ostentatious lifestyle unseemly for a President and First Lady. They have been seen in public wearing evening clothes! How outrageous! No presidential couple ever did anything like that before!

Seriously. The only thing that would make these nitwits happy is if the First Couple dressed only in overalls and got their exercise pulling weeds in the watermelon patch.

Here’s a cheerful article from Forbes, official journal of the cluelessly over-privileged — there’s been an upswing of hospitals suing patients who are unable to pay their bills.

According to the Charlotte Observer, over a five year period (2005 to 2010), North Carolina hospitals – most of which are tax-exempt non-profits – filed more than 40,000 lawsuits against patients with overdue bills. In at least one stunning example of patient-engagement, the article highlighted a bill collector who told an elderly woman “You have the right to remain silent.” Most of the lawsuits wind up against people that were uninsured – a category that typically pays the highest possible retail rate for healthcare services.

You’ll love this part:

In another example of aggressive collections – this time reported by the New York Times – debt collectors are starting to appear earlier in the healthcare process – including bedside in the ER. One organization, publicly traded Accretive Health is “embedding collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment.”

Whatever you do, don’t leave home without proof of insurance, if you have it. Consider having your policy information tattooed on your body somewhere, just in case. Otherwise, if you are unconscious, you could die before the hospital figures out who you are and whether you are insured.

But get this graph (click to enlarge):

Click to Enlarge

This is from the American Hospital Association, and it’s showing us the billions of dollars of unpaid bills hospitals are stuck with every year. And the thing I wish someone could get across to baggers and wingnuts and everyone else who doesn’t want to pay for “entitlements” is — we’re all paying those bills.

The average U.S. family and their employers paid an extra $1,017 in health care premiums last year to compensate for the uninsured, according to a study to be released Thursday by an advocacy group for health care consumers.

Families USA, which supports expanded health care coverage, found that about 37% of health care costs for people without insurance — or a total of $42.7 billion — went unpaid last year. That cost eventually was shifted to the insured through higher premiums, according to the group.

And of course this is a stupid, cost-inefficient way to pay for health care for the poor. A lot of those dollars represent uninsured people who didn’t seek medical help until some long-festering health problem was becoming critical, and also more expensive to treat. In theory, it ought to take less money out of our pockets to simply pay for health care for the poor with tax dollars, giving the poor better access to preventive and care for chronic illnesses.

But instead, too many of us scream stupidly about taxes and don’t notice that we’re already paying for this stuff, and we’re going to pay one way or another. Pretending that we aren’t paying for it is kind of stupid.

Paul Krugman makes the point that rising education costs are strangling the future –

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

Oh, sure. Go to college. Start a business. Mom and Dad will just lend you the money.

This reminds me of the English twits who withheld aid from Ireland during the Hunger, telling themselves that deprivation would teach the lazy good-for-nothing Irish to take some initiative and learn to work. Really, some of them said that. There’s a good article on British policies during the Irish Famine at the BBC that makes those twits sound just like today’s Republicans.

Krugman points out Mittens’s famous cluelesses, then goes on to point out that getting an education isn’t necessarily helping young people today –

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them.

You’ve probably heard lots about how workers with college degrees are faring better in this slump than those with only a high school education, which is true. But the story is far less encouraging if you focus not on middle-aged Americans with degrees but on recent graduates. Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time — a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education.

College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.

Of course, as Krugman goes on to explain, conservatives are doing everything possible to make the situation worse instead of better. They keep voting to shrink the economy instead of grow it. Nothing I’ve seen recently says “We Are Idiots” more clearly than Club for Growth’s call to vote “no” on student loan subsidies. They should change the name to Club for Stunting.

I am about to go somewhere, but in the meantime do feel free to discuss the “Republicans are the problem” article that is getting so much attention. See also Doghouse Riley, who says “It took you thirty years to notice this?”

Re Doghouse: In the Republican Party’s defense, it wasn’t all Joe McCarthy back in the 1950s. Eisenhower was a Republican, too, and behind the scenes Eisenhower and some of his close advisers — including Nixon, for pity’s sake — arranged to maneuver McCarthy into the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were his undoing. It’s not true that the Republican Party was always twisted and crazy. What happened is that the twisted and crazy parts of it metastasized and killed the rest of it. And the current crew makes Reagan seem benign.

John McCain, whose success in life came to him because he is a former POW who married money, has gone ballistic because the Obama campaign had the bad taste to remind everyone who killed Osama bin Laden. Yeah, and who was that guy who promised to do that and then quit? Oh, yeah …

Meanwhile, the Breitbrats are flapping about because they found a memo offering some details to the OBL operation, and they learned that the President did not design the mission and was not in charge of minute-to-minute tactical operations. Nor did he ride into Pakistan on a magic carpet and kill OBL personally. Instead, based on the tactical advice of the military, he gave the go-ahead to proceed with the mission.

Which is not news. That’s how I understood the mission all along. Are these yappers brain damaged?

Charles Johnson:

You can tell that President Obama’s successful operation to find (and kill) Osama bin Laden really eats at the right wing; the faux arguments from the wingnut blogosphere are getting more and more obtuse and absurd. Of course, they’re writing for an audience that doesn’t care, as long as they get their daily serving of rancid Obama Derangement stew.

See also Tbogg.

So the House passed a new “cyber security” bill called the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation would give employers and the government pretty much unlimited access to your personal cyber stuff without your knowing about it. ZDNet calls it “more heinous than SOPA.”

Techdirt says,

The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all

Naturally, this thing was rammed through the House mostly by the Republicans. You know, those same people who are eternally screaming about the evils of Big Gubmint and how trying to get more Americans covered by health insurance is an assault on our Freedoms.

To be fair, 42 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting “yes,” and 28 Republicans joined the Dems in voting “no,” which in the minds of many progressives is proof that one party is just as bad as the other.

Now, here’s the really rich part: President Obama is threatening to veto this monster, and House Speaker Orange Julius Boehner claimed that this means President Obama wants to “control the Internet.” Seriously.

All together now: Freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. What today’s GOP is all about.

The White House said,

“CISPA would trample the privacy and consumer rights of our citizens while leaving our critical infrastructure vulnerable.”

Sounds like the perfect Republican bill.

How this will fly in the Senate I do not know. The Senate bill is being co-authored by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, which does not reassure me.

This is the sort of thing that makes me crazy.

I spoke with an older woman for a while who will vote for Obama because she’s as much a radical feminist as any Catholic nun, although she was really concerned about the health care law. She believes Democrats cut Medicare, probably because conservatives and media spent two years telling her Democrats cut Medicare. I asked her if she had noticed any cuts in Medicare and she said “no” and then we just stood there looking at each other.

The ACA found ways to cut Medicare spending but not Medicare benefits. Mittens is on record as planning to shove seniors into the private insurance market with a “premium support” voucher that will not be allowed to increase as much as health care costs are expected to increase.

Another good read:

“Tucker Carlson’s Downward Spiral“

You’ve got to read Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the Time 100 Influential People Gala. Guaranteed to make you spew whatever liquid you are drinking all over your monitor.