Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

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

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The willow is too close to the house.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

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Archives for September 2013

When I Say Jump, You Ask “How High,” Damnit

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Both sides. Liberal media. Oooga Boooga:

Sen. Ted Cruz has been speaking on the Senate floor for almost 19 hours, as of this post. The talk is not technically a filibuster — he can’t actually block the Senate from going about its business — but symbolically, it’s more or less the same thing. The point is to show one’s opposition to something through a demonstration of physical will.

Which is why you can forgive conservatives for being upset with the mainstream media’s coverage of the Cruz affair. When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an “embarrassment” in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board.

“Gee I wonder why NYT and WaPo and everyone else gave ecstatic coverage to Wendy Davis but not to Ted Cruz. I just can’t make sense of it!” John Podhoretz, the conservative columnist, tweeted on Wednesday morning.

The conservatives yell “BOO,” and the media flinches. No discussion of the differing circumstances. No discussion that Davis was trying to stop a law being passed under shady circumstances while Cruz is trying to backdoor invalidate a law passed by both houses, signed by the President, and deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. Nope, none of that. Fuck you Dylan Byers.

Take it away, Mr. Pierce.

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Time to make the donuts

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The Donut Hole in Medicare Part D (the prescription drug benefit) is slowly going away.   Medicare Part D has four tiers of coverage.

Here is the 2013 benefit design:

  • Deductible phase where Medicare pays 0% (2013 $325)
  • Basic coverage where Medicare pays 75% ($325.01 to $2,970)
  • Donut hole where Medicare pays 2.5% ( $2,970.01 to $4,700) (Medicare has negotiated large discounts with providers)
  • Catastrophic coverage where Medicare pays 95% of costs ($4700.01 to infinity and beyond)

There is a reasonable non-spite rationale for this benefit design.  I don’t think the rationale works well as it was implemented as the donut hole was too high to discourage drug use that could be safely discouraged.

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Open Thread: GOP “Still Evil”, McMegan Still Wrong

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Jon Chait at NYMag finds McArgleBargle’s argument indefensible, because “Subsidizing Farmers But Not the Poor Still Evil“:

House Republicans are fighting to impose a $40 billion cut to the food-stamp program while also fighting to lock farm subsidies in place at a higher level than Democrats want. The combination of positions strikes me as indefensible. After all, farmers earn more than the average American, and there’s no rationale for handing government money to somebody just because they own a farm as opposed to a convenience store or a hot-dog stand.

Megan McArdle stands up to say the Republican position is perfectly defensible. McArdle doesn’t like farm subsidies but is even more outraged at disparagement of Republican fiscal priorities, urging, “It seems worth trying to answer the question, rather than merely marinating in our own moral and logical superiority.” The Republicans have a perfectly defensible basis for cutting benefits for poor people but giving them to farmers, she explains — reciprocity:

Here’s one reason Republicans might support farm subsidies, but not food stamps: the sense that you have to do something to get them… They’re not being given money just for breathing.

Actually, that’s not true. The Department of Agriculture does hand out money to people to do nothing. So, yes, they are being given money just for breathing. In fact, breathing is optional — millions of dollars in farm subsidies go to farmers who are dead. This underscores the fact that farm subsidies are a reward for people who own farmland, which they may well have inherited….

Bill “Always Wrong” Kristol better look to his laurels, because McMegan shows real determination to assume his Wingnut Wurlitzer crown for insistent plausibility at a 180-degree angle from the truth.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Tech. Dudes.

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Because I grew up with four younger brothers, I knew this was gonna happen. Via NYMag, Andrew Couts at Digital Trends tests out his iPhone 5S’s touch recognition system:

… Lastly, I went with the most secure body part I could think of – and all I will say is that I had to take off my pants. Unlike the knuckle and elbow, however, registering my nether region was a breeze. (It was quite chilly, in fact.) And not only did I successfully register this private part with relative ease, I was also able to use it to unlock the device. I think you can understand why there isn’t a video of this one.

Of course, using your junk to secure your iPhone isn’t just gross and absurd, it’s also impractical – you won’t be able to unlock your handset in public without drawing some unwanted attention, for example. But given that you leave your fingerprints everywhere, and that hackers have already broken through Touch ID’s defenses using a photocopy of a fingerprint and some wood glue, your manhood may be the most secure option you have.

Now, excuse me. I have to go buy some Purell.

Apart from finding the brain bleach, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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The rates are in

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Health and Human Services has released the rates for the federally run Exchange marketplaces in 36 states.  They are really good:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2013/MarketplacePremiums/ib_marketplace_premiums.cfm

Here are the big take-aways:

  • $145 a month for the cheapest Bronze plan for a 27 year old making $25,000 a year is definately affordable
  • Family coverage at either 2nd cheapest Silver or cheapest Bronze is extraorinarily affordable —
  • Competition does wonders
  • Networks matter, some pricing will be higher in outlier counties compared to core counties.

This thing is going to work.

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I used to watch CHIPS, now I load glock clips

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One thing that strikes me about the current crop of GOP bad men is that they sure are an unlikely group of tough guys. Ted Cruz, a former law student so effete he wouldn’t deign to study with graduates of the “minor ivies”, and Rand Paul, a mild-mannered Duke-educated ophthalmologist, aren’t likely to spill the blood of any tyrants outside of role-playing games.

They aren’t plain-spoken heartland alternatives to elite librul east coasters, they’re just the even douchier former classmates of elite librul east coasters.

It goes to show that all the love for Joe the Plumber was a sham. Teahadists may decry book-learnin’ but in the end they revere it. They’ll support Ted Cruz’s shenanigans but they wouldn’t support the same from Jim Inhofe or Sarah Palin, at least not as much, because they think Cruz is smart. He doesn’t call the VP “O’Biden” and he did well in school. That has more cachet with teahadists than they’re willing to admit.

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