Step right up to the #Bitcoin ATM and the future of money https://t.co/WEA2MeUq8W
— Nick Ghoullespie (@nickgillespie) October 27, 2014
Every time one of these glibertarians post something like this, I mentally hear this:
Clowns.
by John Cole| 78 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Clap Louder!, Clown Shoes
Step right up to the #Bitcoin ATM and the future of money https://t.co/WEA2MeUq8W
— Nick Ghoullespie (@nickgillespie) October 27, 2014
Every time one of these glibertarians post something like this, I mentally hear this:
Clowns.
by Betty Cracker| 123 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2014, Election 2016, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Torture, Assholes, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Shitheads, Sociopaths, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, The Wingularity
As Election Day nears, the battle for King Shit of Turd Mountain, i.e., the contest between Charlie Crist and Rick Scott for governor of Florida, has produced a shit-storm of negative advertising. Commercial after commercial projects images of the combatants in sinister poses and evil lighting, accompanied by strained voiceover accounts of their misdeeds in office.
Obviously, the Crist Photoshop team has the cushier job: I don’t think there’s a photo in existence of Rick Scott where he doesn’t look like an alien creature from a reptile off-world come to foreclose an orphanage and grind the inhabitants into feed-paste.
But yesterday, there was an ad I hadn’t seen before featuring former Governor Jeb Bush excoriating former ally Charlie Crist as a career politician only interested in personal aggrandizement. The stones. The fucking stones on those Bushes.
Bush 2016: The Restoration is apparently a thing. Here’s a puke-inducing paragraph from a NYT article published yesterday about the alleged upswing in Jeb Bush’s political prospects:
Just six years ago, at the end of the last tumultuous Bush presidency, this would have been all but unthinkable. But President Obama’s troubles, the internal divisions of the Republican Party, a newfound nostalgia for the first Bush presidency and a modest softening of views about the second have changed the dynamics enough to make plausible another Bush candidacy. And while Jeb Bush wants to run as his own man, invariably this is a family with something to prove.
Unpacking that paragraph is like opening a rancid diaper pail, but let’s brace ourselves and give it a go: “President Obama’s troubles?” Yes, he has them, mostly traceable to Stately Bush Manor and exacerbated by the Bush-aligned vandals in Congress.
“Internal divisions of the Republican Party?” Oh, you mean that GOP rebranding campaign gone awry in which the Republican Party nominated scads of pekoe-huffing troglodytes who lost winnable races and turned the GOP presidential primary into a crackpot bake-off?
“Newfound nostalgia for the first Bush presidency and a modest softening of views about the second?” Bush I is a doddering old fart who occasionally weeps with shame in public over his fuck-up namesake. He will be forever overshadowed by the half-wit he served as VP, and his son empowered a cabal of sociopaths to complete the cycle of destruction Poppy’s boss set into motion.
And now we’re seriously being asked to countenance another Bush run at 1600 Pennsylvania? Just shoot me now. (You can get away with it here in Florida — thanks to Jeb’s partnership with the NRA.) I can’t be objective because I utterly despise them all. But is there really a Bush restoration movement afoot outside of the Bushies, their minions and political columnists? Y’all help me out here: I haven’t seen any evidence of it.
God, that article. “This is a family with something to prove?” Fuck them. “The Bushes, Led by W., Rally to Make Jeb ’45’?” From the current generation until the sun goes supernova and vaporizes this planet, fuck the Bushes, and fuck the putrid media hacks who enable them by framing the ambitions of that clan of psychotic leeches as if writing a human interest piece on a sports dynasty.
When the Obama administration decided not to pursue its vile predecessors for their ghastly war crimes and corruption, I understood the rationale, even if I didn’t agree with it entirely. It would have paralyzed the government in the midst of a cascading global crisis.
But the question of justice denied aside, this spectacle of the Bush family rehab alone is evidence that the dirty fucking hippies were right: We should have driven a stake through the fat black heart of that bunch when we had the chance.
This post is in: Open Threads
Working on a couple posts that I will put up later, but here is an open thread for now.
BTW- sometime in the last couple of days marks four months since I quit drinking. Not keeping count or track and the only reason I know is because my insurance finally took care of all their part and I got my bill today. Not bad- only about 2k over all. I’m cool with that. Cheaper than drinking, that’s for damned sure.
by David Anderson| 75 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Just a few good ideas that I saw this morning:
Question: if there’s no medical reason for the quarantine tent in New Jersey, would the nurse’s insurance company fight the bill?
— Niels Lesniewski (@nielslesniewski) October 27, 2014
Really good question. Medical insurance tends to pay for “medically necessary” care and little else above and beyond that. If there is no good reason for a quarantine, the lawyers will have fun.
A good idea for the Sustainable Growth Rate/doc fix problem:
The solution to the SGR mess, then, may be simpler than convoluted formulas and political horse-trading. The Medicare Advantage program can serve as a “baseline” for physician reimbursements. For instance, traditional Medicare can take the second-cheapest MA plan in each county across the country, and base physician payments on that plan’s reimbursement schedule, plus any penalties/bonuses required under the program….it would make sense to test such an approach before implementing it across the board. Medicare could pick, at random, a set of counties where reimbursements would be based on private plans for a set period of time. Quality and cost data could then be analyzed to determine whether this method is worth it.
That is from Yvegeniy Feyman at Forbes, and this type of proposal is one that should, in a normal functional political environment be able to be debated, get through committee with a couple of tweaks and then piloted for a couple of years to see if it works. And if it works, or mostly works, a slightly tweaked out proposal would be rolled out nationally. Medical reimbursement, after the decision has been made that medical care for the elderly is a social obligation, should be a technocratic discussion under a functional political system. Unfortunately, I don’t think this idea is going anywhere.
by David Anderson| 14 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Utah had been on my list of highly probable Medicaid expansion states for a while now. They’ve been in talks with Health and Human Services (HHS) for a 1115 waiver and their discussions have been wide ranging. Last Friday, it looks like the outlines of a deal have been agreed to:
“They are giving us more flexibility than has been given to any other state in America. We are breaking some new ground,” Herbert announced in his monthly press conference on KUED.
Herbert said he soon will send to the Obama administration a letter outlining the agreement they’ve reached on Utah’s alternative, his Healthy Utah plan…
The governor expects to share details of his plan with legislators in mid-November, and there will be a 30-day comment period for the public as well….It provides “more individual responsibility, to have people take care of their own health care,” and has them pay part of their premiums, he said.
I want to see the deal. My bet is that it will be closer to Healthy PA than the pure Arkansas private option, as some of the buzzphrases are irrelevant to premium support models.
So when can we expect to see people covered? My bet is enrollment starts in March with coverage starting in April 2015, assuming the plan is approved in November.
Medicaid expansion is coming in many different flavors, and each flavor has different lead times.
This post is in: Food, Open Threads, Science & Technology
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GOP tricks, scienterrific treat, per the NYTimes — “To Improve A Memory, Consider Chocolate“:
In a small study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, healthy people, ages 50 to 69, who drank a mixture high in antioxidants called cocoa flavanols for three months performed better on a memory test than people who drank a low-flavanol mixture.
On average, the improvement of high-flavanol drinkers meant they performed like people two to three decades younger on the study’s memory task, said Dr. Scott A. Small, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s senior author. They performed about 25 percent better than the low-flavanol group.
“An exciting result,” said Craig Stark, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research. “It’s an initial study, and I sort of view this as the opening salvo.”
He added, “And look, it’s chocolate. Who’s going to complain about chocolate?”…
Well, I’m sure they’ll find someone. Details at the link, with all the predictable cautions about small samples, large doses, the need for further studies, and the inadvisability of gorging on Halloween chocolate bars that have been processed to remove most of the vital flavanol epicatechin. But, hey — chocolate!
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Apart from hoping this won’t just be the next resveratrol, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
Monday Morning Open Thread: Delicious NewsPost + Comments (61)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Religious Nuts, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
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Canadian Jeet Heer, in the New Yorker, on “The Line Between Terrorism and Mental Illness“:
… According to Dr. Thomas Hegghammer, the director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Zehaf-Bibeau fits a profile of “converts with a history of delinquency among the Westerners in ISIL. He’s a little older than average; otherwise, there is nothing unusual about his profile.” Conversion to Islam itself isn’t a cause of violence, as we well know—Dave Bathurst, for instance, is an apparently peaceful citizen, disturbed by his late friend’s act of mayhem. What seems to be the problem, rather, is the fusion of radical jihadist ideology with other personal problems, whether they be alienation, anomie, or various shades of mental illness. In a world where “clash of civilizations” rhetoric is pervasive, it is possible that radical Islam offers the same appeal to some unstable individuals that anarchism had for Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, and that Marxism had for Lee Harvey Oswald. If you are alienated from the existing social order, the possibility of joining, even as a “lone wolf” killer, any larger social movement that promises to overturn that society may be attractive. For a person radicalized in this manner, the fantasy of political violence is a chance to gain agency, make history, and be part of something larger.
“Islamic-extremist online recruiters are very good at pulling in people who are mentally vulnerable,” Heather Hurlburt, of the Washington-based think tank New America, said. She suggests that an effective response to the problem will draw at least as much on the insights of mental health as on the intrusions of the security state…
The War Nerd, from his teaching position in Kuwait City, is more direct:
… So, two soldiers are now dead, Canada’s uncommonly flustered, and all because the RCMP didn’t do the obvious, and let these guys go where they wanted to go. If the RCMP had taken DNA samples, front and side photos, and seen them off at the airport with a “Mazel tov!”, Canada would be a lot better off. It took both Rouleau and Zehaf-Babeau weeks, between being refused a passport and their final act, to work up the courage to kill at home. Most wannabe jihadis feel a certain grudging sentimentality for the country where they grew up, which makes them more willing to kill for God far, far away from home than to kill people who look like the kids they grew up with. These two only killed at home when the Syrian option was shut down for them.
So what was the downside of letting them go? The most likely outcome was that both would have been cannon fodder, dead in their first month.
Late Night Horror Stories: Terrorist or Head Case?Post + Comments (58)