I’m not sure what to make of this. I know little of the background. But I wanted to flag the report to find out more and see if others can shed more light.
There’s a post at ArtsJournal.com about a musician named Boujemaa Razgui who is a Canadian citizen who lives in New York with a Green Card. He’s an accomplished flautist who plays various handmade flutes around the world. To quote the post by Norman Lebrecht, he travels and performs with “a variety of flutes of varying ethnicity, each made by himself over years for specific types of ancient and modern performance.” To cut to the chase, he was flying into JFK from Madrid a week ago when customs officials decided they were ‘agricultural products’ and destroyed them all on the spot.
Happy New Year to everyone in eye-shot of this post! And especially, Happy New Year to our dedicated readers. Thank you from all of us here at TPM. Running this operation, with all the freedom it’s given me, the opportunities, is one of the great blessings of my life. And so I also want to thank and wish a great 2014 to the 20 odd people who help me run it.
I’ve seen over the last few days that a lot of people aren’t sorry to see 2013 go. I’m really, really looking forward to 2014 too. But I’ll confide something to you. For me, 2013 was a good year. And a good year for this organization. A really good year.
Check out this 1999-2000 era photo of New York’s new First Family with the Clintons. Regrow the beard, I say. Click after the jump to see the full size version …
The State of Utah has appealed directly the Supreme Court to halt same sex marriages in the state.
This is a great story to end the year on. Ken Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot (nice place, I’ve shopped there), says Pope Francis is bumming out the tycoon class by giving all the love to the poors. (I mean, Langone doesn’t seem to be a big Matthew 19:21 kinda guy, does he?) And if it keeps up, they may cut off their contributions for things like restoring St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
This reminded me of when Jesus said, “It is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for a Pope to understand complex financial instruments or the challenges faced by those who labor with them.”
To ring in the New Year, what’s your Matthew 19:24 riff to honor Ken Langone?
Yesterday I surveyed the progress of Obamacare to date. About 6 million new people insured under the program so far. A bit over 2 million have enrolled in ACA-compliant policies via the state and federal exchanges. About 4 million have enrolled under Medicaid expansion. An unknown number have enrolled in ACA-compliant policies directly through insurance companies, in many cases because they got fed up using healthcare.gov in October and November. If you add in the number of young adults under 26 now enrolled under parents’s plan you add another 3 million. But then I asked, how many people now do not have coverage because of Republican governors and/or state legislatures who decided to opt out of Medicaid expansion.
Well, here’s the number: 5 million people.
TPM Reader PB thinks I’m being too soft on the GOP’s Benghazi lies …
I think your coverage of Benghazi is overlooking the fact that the original GOP attack was designed to muddy the waters and cover up Mitt Romney’s disastrous campaign gaffe when he broke his self imposed 9/11 campaigning truce to attack the President while the attack was still going on.
Yesterday we learned that a big surge of sign-ups at Healthcare.gov in the last days of December pushed the number of enrollees through the federal exchange to more than 1.1 million. That’s a big number. But it’s still small when you consider the number of people who lack insurance in the country and small compared to the targets set for sign ups by the end of the year.
But it’s not the whole picture.
TPM Reader LF considers the debate we should really be having about the Benghazi attack …
There is one other really important point about the nonsense surrounding Benghazi–it has made it absolutely impossible to have the real foreign policy discussion that we need to have. The reality is that, whatever the particular cause in Libya, the real cause of what happened is that in Libya we adopted an aggressive, forward-leaning foreign policy.
What should we make of the NYT’s blockbuster weekend report on the September 11 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi? According to the Times, there’s no evidence that al Qaeda was involved in the attack and there’s substantial evidence that the fabled anti-Muslim video actually played some role in fomenting the attack.