Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

T R E 4 5 O N

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

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

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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Archives for April 2014

Public-Private Poutrage

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Modern conservatism in the US is predicated on a bizarre, ongoing inversion of reality. Item: an addled B-movie actor explodes the national debt and is lionized as a champion of small government. A cowardly, none-too-bright male cheerleader from a patrician clan is packaged and sold as a brush-clearin,’ neo-Churchillian, genius cowpoke.

The party that bankrupted the country through ruinous, pointless warmongering and Wall Street wilding markets itself as the fiscally responsible foreign policy grownups. The party that lets a gun manufacturer flak organization intimidate it into allowing terrorists and the floridly insane to purchase unlimited semiautomatic weapons bills itself as tough on crime. Etc.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that conservatives’ perception of their ongoing defeat in the culture wars is exactly the opposite of reality on every level too. But that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh at the ahistorical ranting. Cue the Powertools, lamenting the resignation of erstwhile Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich:

So the liberals claim another scalp. This is something new in our history, as far as I know. Until now, private citizens could hold whatever political beliefs they wanted, and support political causes as they chose.

Ever heard of the McCarthy hearings? Where a wingnut senator persecuted private citizens and destroyed their livelihoods because of their political beliefs? See, when the party of free markets decides to regulate political beliefs, it does so via the government.

What happened to Eich is a free market phenomenon. You can make the argument that the companies and developers who balked at the prospect of working with a CEO who thinks gays are icky should have given Eich a chance. But the companies and developers are independent agents who are free to vote with their feet because freedom.

Over at Heritage.org, they’ve discovered the power of government policy in leading social change:

Policy should prohibit the government from discriminating against any individual or group, whether nonprofit or for-profit, based on their beliefs that marriage is the union of a man and woman or that sexual relations are reserved for marriage. Policy should prohibit the government from discriminating in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation, or contracting against such groups and individuals.

Okay, so you guys were for prohibiting the government from discriminating against same sex couples in tax policy, employment, licensing, accreditation or contracting, right? Nope.

Once again, the self-proclaimed anti-nanny state crusaders and champions of free markets are revealed as sniveling hypocrites. Hoocoodanode?

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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More good news for people who like bad news

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Last week, I mentioned that the CBO will be issuing an updated projection for PPACA costs sometime next month. 

The Congressional Budget Office will take their new information on enrollment and run it through their model.  Their model will say that the subsidies for the first year of operation are higher than projected from the last run of the model in February.

The February projection assumed a $9 billion cost reduction mainly because a million people it had previously assumed would have signed up would not have signed up.  Oops!

Right now it looks like the extended open enrollment via the “blue box” method is bringing in even more people. 

ACASignups.net passes along the nugget that California has 500,000 in the extended enrollment (started but not completed) status.  Charles makes a soft projection of the national implications of that number:

if they were the only state which did this (which is what it sounds like), it suggests that instead of 20% of the total, that 500K is more likely perhaps 1/3 of the national total….

So…I really don’t know. My best guess at this point is that we may be looking at somewhere between 1.0 – 1.5 million additional exchange QHP enrollments during the 4/1 – 4/15 period.

So the CBO headline will not be that Obamacare costs $9 billion more than projected, but $13 or $15 or $20 billion dollars more than projected.  The CBO will probably not alter their out-year projections for total uptake as they’ll model the person that they assumed would have skipped out on 2014 enrollment but entered the Exchange in 2015 will have just entered a year “early”. 

The increase in cost will be due to two factors.  The first is increased subsidy costs.  80% of the people on the Exchange qualified for subsidy.  If that ratio holds, that means an additional 800,000 to 1,200,000 people will be getting monthly subsidies.  The second factor is that fewer people will be paying the mandate penalty.  The absolute lowest revenue loss would be $100 million dollars, probable revenue loss is $300 to $500 million dollars. 

Overall, increased costs and decreased revenue because more people than projected are getting covered is a very good thing, but it will produce another round of stupid ads and even dumber pundit bloviation.

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$2.32 per person per month

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That is the great “risk corridor” and “death spiral” potential of one major Exchange carrier.  Highmark is an insurer for Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia.  They did well on the Exchanges this year by picking up over 100,000 new members in Pennsylvania.  However their actuaries were off by a little bit.

Insurance News Net:

Highmark Inc. gained 104,000 members through the Affordable Care Act’s online exchange — far more than any other insurer inWestern Pennsylvania.

But that boost in business has a cost.

The state’s largest health insurer expects to lose $2.9 million on its exchange business in Pennsylvania from July 1, 2014, to June 30, 2015, according to a filing with the state Department of Insurance.

The actuaries, flying blind, were able to get within a large cup of coffee.  The article states that the major source of error was an underestimation of how much “catch-up” care that previously uninsured individuals were consuming in the first three months of the open enrollment and active policy period.  I think that this error will narrow as the last minute surge of healthier and younger people who either signed up last week or are in the process of signing up now through the blue box enrollment period enter the acturial calculations.  But even if the revised projection is perfect, and the age/health composition of the Highmark risk pool does not get younger/healthier, their base rates have to increase by the cost of a good cup of coffee. 

So how do we get death spiral stories out of that? 

We don’t.

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Later Night Open Thread

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Here is a picture of the man as we work our way through GoT to get ready for season 4:

theman

Yes, I know he is fat and I fully expect Ronnie Roo to yell at me, but you really just can not appreciate how big of a cat he is- he’s the longest and broadest cat I have ever known. He’s prolly 3-4 lbs overweight, but overall, he is just the biggest most glamorous cat ever.

His fur is so much different from Tunch. When you put your hands in deep into Tunch’s fur, with his pudgy body and smaller frame and really short, but thick hair, it was like sticking your hand into a bunch of cotton balls. But with Steve, when you stick your hand and pet him, it is like petting muscular silk. It’s so weird- his fur is silky smooth, but his build is so much more muscular and sinewy and his bone structure is just massive. His shoulders and haunches are just massive compared to any other cat I have ever known. Oh, and the snoring.

Since Shawn has moved in, I have also discovered that I am a shitty fixer-upper. On a daily basis, I get asked- “Why didn’t you fix this? You have the tools and the parts,” and the only response I have is “I’d probably hurt myself and I guess I didn’t really notice it was broken. It wasn’t on a computer screen or on a book or on my tv or a pet and it did not get in the way of cooking.”

On the other hand, I am apparently the best cook he has ever met, so there is that, and we have really accomplished so much on the house. He notices shit, we fix it.

Self discovery. Sometimes it really sucks. On the other hand, I am the happiest I have been in years. So nice having a friend around who looks at things differently. Someone actually asked if it would be trouble with us living together under one roof, and we both laughed, because we lived together in a room the size of my kitchen with two bunks, a desk, and two wall lockers, and didn’t kill each other, so I figger we will be ok in a big house with our own rooms and bathrooms.

Ahh, well, done rambling. Have a big day tomorrow checking out cars I won’t buy.

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Late Night Open Thread: Weird Gig of the Week

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Looks like the Koch Bros are preparing to fund their very own Project (No) Veritas — presumably with actors of less fundamentally repellant aspect than James ‘Dead Andrew Breitbart’s Dress-Up Houseboy’ O’Keefe. Joe Coscarelli at NYMag has an exclusive:

… In a cryptic job listing that went out today to a New York City improv theater, aspiring comedians were offered the opportunity to be involved in a “travel gig” later this month. “Koch Industries wants to identify current and emerging social and economic issues and the underlying emotional drivers and motivations behind them,” said the vague casting notice, via the branding company Firefly. “This research project will take a cross-section of people, ask questions, and then based on the answers, the improvisers will perform scenes.” Sounds hilarious (and lucrative!)…

The complete ad is at the link; it’s listed as a one-week ‘travel gig’ for seven to eight people, so Charles and David are showing their usual frugality when it comes to The Help. My advice to the lucky applicants would be to get full salary payment in advance, and don’t fall for the ‘buy your own tickets, the HR department will reimburse you later’ stunt, either.

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Car Talk

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Went to the local Honda dealership today to look at some more cars, and I was driving my father’s Honda Element (they are at the beach again), and when I pulled into the used car area to talk to the salesman, man did his eyes light up. Before I could even ask him about a car, he was asking if I was going to trade in the Element. Apparently, people love Honda Elements, which they no longer make, but if someone trades one in, he can basically sell it the next day for an instant commission.

Really liked the Nissan Murano, but the car that fit me perfectly physically was a 2008 Lincoln MDX. I’ll never buy it because the mpg is terribad, but of all the cars I have sat in, it was instantly the most comfortable.

Tomorrow I am going to go do a test of a couple Ford’s- the Escape, the Edge, and I may look at a pickup truck for shits and giggles, and then I am going to go check out Toyotas.

All of this is just procrastination until I go buy the fucking Subaru.

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Open Thread: It’s A(nother) Start…

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Like Sisyphus, all we can do is persevere. From the Washington Post:

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to make public a long-awaited report that concludes that the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation measures did not produce valuable intelligence and that the agency repeatedly misled government officials about the severity and success of the program.

The decision, opposed by three Republicans on the panel, means that the findings will be sent to the White House and the CIA, putting the agency in the awkward position of having to declassify a document that delivers a scathing verdict on one of the most controversial periods in its history.

“The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman, said in a statement Thursday. “The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen.”

U.S. officials said it could be months before the executive summary of the panel’s inquiry is released to the public. But Thursday’s vote marked the formal end of a four-year Senate investigation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics against terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

President Obama has signaled his support for the public release of the findings and an executive summary, a 481-page section at the front of a classified report that in its complete form runs to more than 6,200 pages and includes detailed accounts of the CIA’s treatment of dozens of detainees…

The report, based on a review of millions of internal CIA records, found scant evidence that the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques generated meaningful intelligence. It accuses agency officials of overstating the significance of alleged terrorist plots and prisoners, and exaggerating the effectiveness of the program by claiming credit for information detainees surrendered before they were subjected to duress.

For years, the agency made inaccurate statements to the president, the National Security Council and Congress, [Maine Sen. Angus] King said. “That’s one of the most disturbing parts of this — the institutional failure.”…

Interesting note from Politico:

Panel staffers said they were not authorized to release a breakdown of the vote on seeking declassification, though POLITICO confirmed that GOP Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Jim Risch of Idaho and Dan Coats of Indiana voted against declassification. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) voted present.

When you can’t get Tom Coburn to deliver a stirring defence of “My Agency, right or wrong” (with an optional chorus of ‘Let the Eagle Soar’) I think it is fair to assume that the CIA has thoroughly befouled its bedsheets.

And I know the easy, ‘rational’ response here is to shrug and say something flip about the Church Commission, but this is the political equivalent of confronting an addict — it’ll be excruciatingly unpleasant and the odds are against it making a permanent difference, but it’s an essential first step regardless.

***********

Apart from pushing rocks uphill, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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