Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

I was promised a recession.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

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Archives for September 2013

The Ransom Note Has Been Released

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The terrorists have stated their demands:

A draft of the GOP leadership’s proposal to lift the debt ceiling through December 2014 is circulating and it’s the equivalent of a letter to Santa for the party’s base.

The bill, obtained by the National Review, tacks on items including a one-year delay of Obamacare; tax reform in the image of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI); approval of the Keystone pipeline; expanded offshore drilling and other pro-oil and coal energy reforms; increases in military spending coupled with deeper cuts to domestic programs; repealing a fund in the financial regulatory reform bill; means testing for Medicare; repealing the Obamacare prevention and public health fund and medical malpractice reform.

You have two weeks, or the economy gets it. And if you are wondering how these guys got so crazy, just remember they start out crazy:

Kentucky’s chapter of College Republicans have dug up one of the weakest “gotcha” moments in recent political memory.

The group posted cell phone video of Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes being picked up by her husband at what appears to be Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport.

The video shows Grimes, who’s serving her first term as Kentucky’s secretary of state, climb into the back seat of the couple’s black Chevy Suburban while her husband wheels around her suitcase and places it into the cargo area.

Grimes then immediately pulls out her phone as her husband drives away, with no other passengers in the SUV.

“We think you’ll agree – this. is. weird,” the College Republicans said in a press release.

While it’s possible that a state official who’s running for national elected office might have some business to catch up on after a flight, the College Republicans think it reveals something more essential about Grimes’ character.

“(Grimes) thinks she’s so important that she needs to ride around town in the back seat of a black suburban … driven by personal chauffeur, her husband,” the group said.

Yes, it is very weird for someone to be picked up by their spouse at the airport. These people are clinical.

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Shameful

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Matt Zeller:

Five years ago, my Afghan interpreter Janis Shinwari saved my life in a firefight against the Taliban. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to save his as the Taliban placed him on a kill list for his service to the US military.

Afghan and Iraqi interpreters are promised that if they give the United States military one year of “faithful and valuable service”, they and their immediate families will receive Special Immigrant Visas to come to the United States. Janis has served our military for the past nine years. He has more than earned his place in America, so you can imagine our joy when after years of pleading with the State Department, the US embassy in Kabul issued him and his family US visas two weeks ago.

But this past Saturday, everything came crashing down. Janis called me at 2am in a panic. After giving him and his family their salvation, the State Department revoked it only two weeks later without any explanation.

Zeller believes that the Taliban heard about Shinwari’s visa and called up the embassy and told a bunch of lies about him. This is apparently a tactic that was used frequently when Zeller was in country.

Zeller ran for Eric Massa’s seat in NY-29 after Massa imploded – that’s the textbook definition of a thankless, and ultimately pointless, task. I hope he’s more successful getting his former interpreter a visa.

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The quality of mercy is not strnen

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I wish more people told this like it is (and Barro’s still a registered Republican):

How Many Decades Do Republicans Get To Jerk Us Around On Health Care?

Ross Douthat thinks I’m too pessimistic when I say Republicans will never support constructive proposals on health policy.

Given plenty of time and patience, he says they might enact a positive health care agenda.

Of course, that’s also what they say about monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare.

Tom Edsall asks how the conservatives got so radical. His answers range from fairly insightful socio-psychology to liberals drive a car like this beep beep, conservatives drive a car like this BEEP BEEP, but the real answer is simple: they got this radical because they could. Conservative “intellectuals” like Douthat and Irving Kristol will go along with whatever crazy shit they think might help conservatives get elected, ostensibly nonpartisan pundits like Ron Fournier will say “both sides do it” no matter what either side has done.

There just hasn’t been much incentive for conservatives to be non-crazy or non-radical, not for many years.

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I aint got no Satisficing

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Satisficing is one of my favorite concepts and words. Yes, my name is Richard Mayhew and I am a nerd of unusual size.

And in a just world, satisficing and the related concept of bounded rationality would have made Milton Friedman a very smart, very interesting thinker who had some excellent things to say about the world around us and not the economic intellectual father of the current socio-political superstructure that is around us today.

Wikipedia has a good definition and example:

Satisficing, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice,[1] is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet an acceptability threshold. This is contrasted with optimal decision-making, an approach that specifically attempts to find the best option available. A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculation.

The word satisfice was given its current meaning by Herbert A. Simon in 1956,[2] although the idea “was first posited in Administrative Behavior, published in 1947.”[3][4] He pointed out that human beings lack the cognitive resources to optimize: we usually do not know the relevant probabilities of outcomes, we can rarely evaluate all outcomes with sufficient precision, and our memories are weak and unreliable. A more realistic approach to rationality takes into account these limitations: This is called bounded rationality.

And here is a good example:

Example: A task is to sew a patch onto a pair of jeans. The best needle to do the threading is a 4 inch long needle with a 3 millimeter eye. This needle is hidden in a haystack along with 1000 other needles varying in size from 1 inch to 6 inches. Satisficing claims that the first needle that can sew on the patch is the one that should be used. Spending time searching for that one specific needle in the haystack is a waste of energy and resources.
 

Another useful example is thinking about picking up an attractive person to hook up with as graphed against time at the bar.  Early in the night, individuals may be attempting to optimize the matching process and hook-up with the most attractive person who is willing to say yes to them.  As the night goes on and failure to score with the 10, the decision process changes until at last call, the decision is to hook up with whomever is willing to say yes.  This is slightly different than the decision process described in A Beautiful Mind bar scene, although all of the men in that scene were engaged in satisficing decision making.   

 

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I’m being oppressed and made better off

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Conservatives are having fun with stories like the following:

Ian Hodge, 62, is one of nearly 13,000 central and eastern Pennsylvanians who will soon need to shop for health insurance because Highmark Inc. is discontinuing their coverage at the end of the year.

Highmark has announced it is withdrawing five of its insurance plans that don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act, key parts of which take effect Jan. 1.

The hash-tag #TCOT is flinging poop under the quip “Obama lied, my health plan died”.
 
Let’s look at the details as to why Highmark is cancelling these plans:
 

The new regulations, for instance, prohibit insurers from denying coverage to applicants who have pre-existing health problems….

Highmark’s Classic Blue is a guaranteed-issue plan, meaning the Hodges and other customers were not required to inform Highmark of their health status to get coverage. But applicants couldn’t count on coverage for any pre-existing condition for their first 12 months under the plan….

Under the Affordable Care Act, beginning Jan. 1, all insurers must issue policies regardless of an applicant’s health history.

The guaranteed issue policies were Pennsylvania’s “solution” to some people with pre-exisiting conditions who fell through the cracks.  The individual insurance market in Pennsylvania is segregated (until Jan. 1, 2014) into two broad groups.  The first is medically underwritten individual insurance.  The risk pool for medically underwritten insurance is younger and healthier than typical.  The second group is the guaranteed issue group which has older and sicker individuals in it.  Jan. 1, 2014 changes this paradigm as all health insurance written on or after that date will be community rated so this distinction no longer serves any purpose.
 
Mr. Hodge from the article was paying $1041.85 per month for him and his wife for Highmark Classic Comprehensive Blue.
 
I only could easily find the 2012 product sheet for this plan.  It looks like the 2012 version at that rate for a married couple would have an in-network deductible of $3,000 with co-insurance above that at 80% on the next $30,000 for total family potential out of pocket of $9,000.  After $30,000 in medical expenses, the plan covers everything after that.  Pre-exisiting conditions are not covered for the first year.
 
That coverage is not too good.  It is inadequate and unaffordable coverage under Obamacare regulations.  Under Obamacare, the policy above is Catastrophic at best.
 
Looking back to yesterday’s data dump from HHS, the lowest Gold plan in Pennsylvania for a 27 year old is $205 per month.  Given that rates can not vary by age by more than a factor of 3, that Gold plan for Mr. and Mrs. Hodges can not be more than $615 per month per person.  Buying as a family will probably reduce that rate to be equal to what they are paying now.  This calculation does not include any tax subsidy.  Gold would be a massive improvement in coverage over what they have now.
 
Using the Kaiser Family Foundation Zip code specific calculator, Silver plans are available to a family of 2 in a random Lancaster County zip code for $5,070 under the typical case scenario,  total costs for the family of two without tax credits would be no more than $10040 before subsidy.  That is significantly less than the $13,000 in premiums the Hodges are currently paying.  Throw in the fact that the value of coverage has increased dramatically, the Hodges will be significantly better off.
 
Stop the oppression by improving the material condition of people….
 
 
 

 (updated a math error)

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