If you’re looking for an alternative to reading about the shutdown, Matthew Baldwin is writing for a month about his son, who has classic autism. Here’s the first post. It’s really good.
Here’s an open thread.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 59 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
If you’re looking for an alternative to reading about the shutdown, Matthew Baldwin is writing for a month about his son, who has classic autism. Here’s the first post. It’s really good.
Here’s an open thread.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 27 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Poor
Remember the Obamaphone program that gives undeserving poors the luxury of having their own prepaid cell phone so they can talk to each other while they drive to the store in their welfare Cadillacs to buy t-bones and flat screen TVs? Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s full of cheaters:
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday accused five wireless service providers of obtaining duplicate payments from a federal fund for low-income consumers. The FCC wants the companies to repay the extra money and, in addition, to pay $14.4 million in fines.
The wireless providers allegedly violated rules of the Lifeline program, which has helped people afford basic telephone service since 1985. It was expanded to cover pre-paid cell phone service in 2005 under former President George W. Bush.
This wasn’t chump change, either: over three years, the FCC thinks it can reduce overcharging by $2 billion once the 1.1 million duplicates are removed from the program.
by David Anderson| 47 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Just a few notes from Day 1 of the Exchanges and what they mean:
About 2.8 million people visited healthcare.gov – the main website for the 36 state exchanges being run by the federal government – between midnight and mid-afternoon, theU.S. Department of Health and Human Services said….
Kentucky’s exchange, kynect, saw 57,625 unique visitors from its midnight launch until 2:30 p.m., according to the Kentucky governor’s office. Nearly 2,000 applications had been started, with 1,235 completed. The kynect contact center fielded 3,243 calls and 110 e-mails. The average visitor stayed on the site for 11 minutes….
Between the Federal and the State exchanges there were ten million web hits. The financing and actuarial tables work out if roughly seven million people sign up for insurnance. The first day conversion rate in Kentucky and other states are fairly low. That is expected as buying health insurance is a big deal with a lot of options. Pricing, networks, benefit configurations are being released for the first time in a comprehensive manner. People should take time to look at their options, figure out what two or three really meet their needs and then think about trade-offs. My company has been modelling a repeated shopping experience for months now and that is probably what we will get. People will come in, look around, narrow their choices, and leave. Then they’ll come back a couple more times until they choose. I expect spikes in enrollment around the 15th and 30th of the month as well as another spike right after Thanksgiving as people sign up for coverage that can go into effect on Jan. 1.
huge interest and balky technology that led to a series of glitches, delays and even crashes that marred the first hours of the centerpiece of President Obama’s health law.
Responding to mistermix — this system was load tested — the load was just more than anticipated and was more active than anticipated. Thankfully servers are reasonably scalable, and fixes were going into play by mid-afternoon.
The big takeaway is that people are interested, and the technology side of the equation should be quickly patched.
Seven million new people are needed to sign up for the Exchanges including a little more than 2 million young people. I think we’ll hit that by Thanksgiving if yesterday is an indicator. As a side note, it is seven million covered lives, not seven million contracts. This is a slight difference. If I insured my family on Exchange, we would be one contract but four covered lives. I think it is safe to say that of the 10 million hits, those hits represent at least and probably a good deal more than 10 million potentially covered lives. Having enrollment in Exchange go over 7 million would be a very good problem to have.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Assholes
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
Could not happen to a more deserving bunch of nihilists. Dave Weigel reports on the sorry scramblers:
Ideally, as of [Tuesday] morning, Republicans were hoping that Democrats would come to Jesus and agree to form a conference committee to hammer out the continuing resolution. As of this afternoon, Republicans thought they had a Plan B (honestly, more like a Plan F at this point) that would scramble the “narrative” of the shutdown and bring Democrats back into the ring.
The plan sort of came from Sen. Ted Cruz. On Sunday, Cruz could see that Barack Obama would demagogue the shutdown by wailing that Republicans were taking away veterans’ benefits, closing public parks, playing the new Miley Cyrus single on blast, and so forth. “I think we ought to start passing continuing resolutions narrowly focused on each of the things the President listed,” said Cruz.
On Monday evening, a few House Republicans started talking this up. Again, this afternoon, it became full-on GOP strategy, with the House GOP reading a small bill that would fund veterans’ benefits, public parks, and the District of Columbia. After 7 p.m., it would get a vote.
Before that vote, you could find plenty of Republicans high on the strategy. Mike Lee, Cruz’s Senate life partner, gave a speech attempting to flip the “taking government hostage” attack onto the Democrats. “Let’s leave Obamacare for another day and not hold the vast majority of government functions hostage when the vast majority of government functions don’t have anything to do with the implementation and enforcement of Obamacare,” he said. His phrasing confused people, and on a conference call Sen. John Cornyn seemed to think that Lee had just surrendered…
Lee and Cornyn made the same mistake. They didn’t see how the Democrats could bring down the bill. But they could, easily. Republicans were trying to suspend the rules to pass the mini-CR, protecting it from Democratic tricks or amendments. That meant they needed a 2/3 vote of the House; since 428 members were voting, they needed 286 of ’em. That freed up most Democrats to kill the bill, and 164 of them did so…
So: For the second time, the GOP pursued a Ted Cruz strategy to embarrass Democrats into taking tough votes, underestimated how many of them would take them, and won nothing but a talking point.
TNR‘s Noam Scheiber thinks “Conservatives Have Already Lost Control of the Shutdown Narrative”:
It’s no secret why Republicans are facing a PR debacle over the shutdown they triggered. Not only have conservatives chosen an unpopular issue on which to make a stand—polls consistently show that Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a fairly wide margin. The Tea Partiers have exacerbated the problem by choosing a massively unpopular approach to getting their way. The latest Quinnipiac poll finds that voters object to defunding Obamacare under threat of shutdown by a yawning 50-point margin. (In fairness, an earlier CNBC poll put the margin at a mere 41 points.) …
… Watching Fox on Tuesday inspired that rubber-necking impulse you typically only get when a Fox anchor is forced to pronounce a foreign-sounding name… Fox was all ready to go with its Obamacare set pieces—overburdened websites, 800-number backlogs. And it dutifully looped them into its coverage. But given its investment in the appearance of keeping viewers informed, it couldn’t exactly go AWOL on the biggest political story of the year. Instead it spent the day flailing…
As if to mock the despairing apparatchiks, every half hour brought another report from a correspondent in the field surveying the landscape of shuddered facilities. The Statue of Liberty. Bunker Hill. My favorite was a group a World War II veterans who’d trekked to Washington to tour the World War II memorial, only to find it barricaded when they got there. Fox played the footage over and over, clearly sensing a prime Kulturkampf opportunity—aging war veterans made to suffer indignities by socialist president. But none of the Foxies narrating the story could quite figure out what to do with the fact that it takes government money to build memorials, and government money to keep them open. And so it just hung out there as an implicit rebuke of Republicans…
Much more to enjoy, at the links.
Open Thread: Schadenfreude, It’s What’s for BreakfastPost + Comments (133)
by John Cole| 53 Comments
This post is in: Sports
The Pirates won a playoff game.
Also, I loved this announcing crew, but bald and fat Cal Ripken looks like Darth Vader without his helmet.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Assholes, Decline and Fall, Outrage
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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There’s nothing like a professional when you want it done right, and the current disaster has brought out the consummate professional in Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
… In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court…
This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains…
by Tim F| 21 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Whatever else you talk about today, take a minute to remember a fellow named Christian de Duve.
Born in 1917 in the United Kingdom to Belgian parents who had fled the devastation of the Western Front during the First World War, de Duve spent his early life in the village of Thames Ditton near London. After the war, in 1920, he and his family returned to Belgium and the young Christian went to school in the Flemish city of Antwerp. He embarked upon his career as a researcher when he enrolled as a medical student at the francophone branch of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (1934–1941). He could speak four languages, a skill that would later help save his life.
de Duve decided to specialize in endocrinology and joined the laboratory of the Belgian physiologist J. P. Bouckaert, where he started his research under the difficult circumstances of the Second World War when facilities and financial support for basic research were very limited. Drafted by the Belgian army, he served as a medical officer in France where he was taken prisoner of war by the Germans. Thanks to his excellent knowledge of German and Flemish, de Duve was able to outwit the enemy and escape back to Belgium, where he immediately returned to his research.
He studied insulin and glucose signaling, every time with someone who later won the Nobel Prize, before he won the Nobel himself for discovering the peroxisome. Like the best scientists do he went on contributing until his death this week at the age of 95. Safe travels to wherever such people go next.