Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

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

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

So very ready.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

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Open Sports Thread: “Majority of ex-NFL players expected to accept concussion settlement”

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Per Jason Hirschhorn at SB*Nation:

Following years of legal haggling, most of the retired NFL players eligible have decided to accept the terms of the NFL concussion settlement, according to a report by ESPN’s Outside the Lines. Tuesday is the deadline for players not satisfied with the proposed settlement to opt out and pursue the case in court on their own outside of the original class. OTL claims that out of more than 18,000 plaintiffs, “as little as a few dozen — and no more than a few hundred” will actually decline the settlement.

With the majority of eligible players expected to accept the terms of the settlement, it increases the likelihood that Federal District Judge Anita Brody will grant approval at a fairness hearing in November.

Brody rejected the original $765 million settlement proposal due to concerns of insufficient funding. The NFL subsequently agreed to an unlimited settlement that includes cash payments and medical monitoring. However, a number of plaintiffs in the case have argued that the unlimited settlement is compromised by a complex set of criteria for determining eligibility for compensation. For instance, the settlement does not cover players diagnosed with CTE after July 7 or recognize tests for CTE among living players (something that researchers have only recently been able to do).

Plaintiffs who choose not to accept the settlement can choose to opt out and pursue the legal fight on their own, or they can object and make the case that Judge Brody should reject the deal. While few retired players will decline the settlement, that should not be mistaken for satisfaction with the terms. As OTL notes, this may simply be the best of an unfavorable situation…

More info at the link. Any thoughts?

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Shitshow in SD

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I had written off the South Dakota Senate race as a gimme for popular former governor Mike Rounds, but boy was I wrong about that. This doesn’t quite rise to the level of the Wendy Davis ad that John posted below, but it leaves a mark:

The short story is that Rounds is getting some mud from an EB-5 scandal spattered on his heretofore pristine britches. EB-5 is a law that lets rich foreign investors buy their citizenship by investing in companies, and the head of a private company that was skimming from SD’s EB-5 effort committed suicide last year. Rounds endorsed the EB-5 effort and the DSCC and Democrat Rick Weiland’s campaign are going after him hammer and tongs.

In addition to the EB-5 scanda, Rounds has two other problems. First, he hasn’t raised shit for cash–he’s got $750K on hand which is low for a House campaign, never mind the Senate. So when outside PACs and the DSCC lay down $3 million in ads, it’s hard for Rounds to respond. Rounds has spent less than $1 million on ads during his entire campaign. Rounds’ second problem is that a sort-of Republican is running in the race, Larry Pressler. Pressler is the former Republican Senator who’s now cast himself as a centrist (and probably voted for Obama), and it’s likely he would caucus with Democrats, plus or minus a few pirouettes and tours en l’air. Pressler is now polling near Rounds, with Weiland not far behind. The DSCC ad wisely just pummels Rounds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Democrats in the state strategically hold their noses and vote for Pressler, depending on how the final race polls look. At this point, however, I’d give to Weiland if I were in a giving mood. He ran Daschle’s field operation through some of the toughest campaigns any Democrat has faced in the last 20 years, and he’ll know how to spend the money wisely in the next couple of weeks.

If you want to read more about this race, here’s a suitably negative take on Rounds’ prospects from Jonathan Ellis at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. It’s also nice to see Larry Lessig’s PAC doing something useful instead of just bemoaning Citizens United, by throwing a million bucks behind Weiland.

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The Truth Hurts

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Last week, all the DC fluffers reporters and courtesans in the Washington press were having conniption fits about the following commercial:

There is nothing wrong, evil, mean, or out of bounds about that commercial, despite the fierce protestations of the sweater of the month club at Morning Joe and among the rest of our failed media. It’s simply the truth. A tree fell on him. He was paralyzed. He sued and got millions. He has then spent the rest of his life doing everything he could to stop anyone else from receiving the same kind of treatment he had. It’s no different from Ayn Rand receiving Social Security and Medicare and Paul Ryan using benefits to propel him to where he is now in order to get where he is.

At any rate, guess what? The ad is working:

The pollster for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis defended her controversial TV ad Sunday, saying it’s working as intended despite widespread criticism that using the image of an empty wheelchair in an attack ad on a disabled candidate was mean-spirited and unfair.

Davis pollster Joel Benenson, who advised Barack Obama in both of his presidential races, said the ad underscored the theme they’ve been hammering on for months: that Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott is an “insider” who sides with the rich and powerful over average Texans.

Asked about the use of the wheelchair in particular, Benenson noted that Abbott himself had “prominently featured himself in the wheelchair in his ads” in the Texas governor’s race.

“This ad is not about Greg Abbott in a wheelchair,” Benenson said. “This ad is about Greg Abbott’s behavior and actions with other victims after he had his opportunity and rightly sought justice and received a substantial amount of money.”

The reason it is working is because it is the truth. While this may make Taegan Goddard and other well-off pundits recoil in horror in the face of honesty, the people get it.

*** Update ***

I’ve been sending out spittle flecked tweets, and Goddard responded:

Nowhere in his tweet or the link he provided does it mention the efficacy of the ad. Instead, it’s all Akin comparisons and this:

Nastiest Ad of the Year?

The Fix: “Wendy Davis is almost certainly not going to be the next governor of Texas. Apparently, though, she’s willing to try just about anything to alter that reality.”

Her new ad is among the most vicious you’ll ever see.

Not sure why he is trying to lie about it. Actually, I think what I mean is I’m not sure why he thinks he can lie about it, given that the words “not effective” appear nowhere in the tweet or post. Just plain weird. Page hits are a helluva drug.

And for the record, I’ve never had anything against Goddard until this nonsense. Maybe he just had a bad day or something. This kind of simplistic punditry is very easy to do (see also, every post I have ever written), so maybe he was just phoning it in and following the rest of the stampeding fauxtrage herd. Who knows?

For the life of me, I still don’t understand why anyone would find this ad below the belt or offensive. It’s just true. If there is anything offensive about the commercial, it’s Abbott’s actions.

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Security, Theatre, Risen

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For the NYTimes, Thomas E. Ricks, no pacifist, reviews James Risen’s new book:

In “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, sets out to portray the many seamy sides of the war on terror during the past 13 years…

We are plunged into an unsettled noirish world in which scam artists and thieves swarm government agencies, peddling phony software and other novel tools for the war against terror. The Bush administration was throwing money at the terrorist problem, and plenty of people were willing to catch a few bundles. Mr. Risen begins by following about $2 billion from the United States to Baghdad, which was then stolen, with much of it ending up in a bunker in Lebanon “in what may be one of the largest robberies in modern history.”…

The best section of the book is probably the last, about the trespasses against the United States Constitution committed by the National Security Agency. Here, Mr. Risen’s style becomes clearer and his narrative surer. The tale of Diane Roark, who worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee, is both hair-raising and representative of the post-Sept. 11 era, in which accountability and transparency in government, basic elements of a functioning democracy, were badly eroded. When she realized that the N.S.A. was collecting data on American citizens, she tried to find out more, and then to warn people. She assumed that she had stumbled across a rogue operation. She asked members of Congress about it, and got nowhere. She then contacted a federal judge who oversaw intelligence matters, only to have the judge report her to the Justice Department. She went to officials she knew at the C.I.A. and the White House.

Ms. Roark eventually realized that all these people had known about the N.S.A. program, and effectively approved of it. She retired from her Congressional job and moved to Oregon, only to wake up one morning in July 2007 to find F.B.I. agents with a search warrant and a sealed affidavit that allowed them to go through her house, apparently to look for evidence that she leaked data about the N.S.A. to newspaper reporters. Mr. Risen notes that others who discussed their concerns about the N.S.A.’s constitutional transgressions received similarly harsh handling, one reason that Edward J. Snowden fled overseas when he leaked documents about United States intelligence agencies’ surveillance of American citizens…

… “We have scared the hell out of ourselves,” he quotes an expert on terrorism as saying. That conclusion is a fitting epitaph for the first decade of the current century. Mr. Risen certainly makes the case in this book that America has lost much in its lashing out against terrorism, and that Congress and the people need to wake up and ask more questions about the political, financial, moral and cultural costs of that campaign.

Josh Gerstein, Politico‘s court reporter, shares a different angle:

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson said in an interview released Sunday that she regrets not pushing the Times to publish a story by national security reporter James Risen about a reportedly flawed CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program — an account that unleashed a nearly seven-year drive by the U.S. government to force Risen to identify his sources.

Risen elected to put the story in a book he wrote, “State of War,” which was published in 2006, several years after the Times elected not to detail the saga in which the CIA was said to have botched an operation to provide flawed nuclear blueprints to Tehran through an intermediary…

Prosecutors have suggested in court filings that Risen’s decision to publish the story despite the Times’s refusal to do so undercuts his grounds for defying subpoenas demanding the identities of his confidential sources. After a series of court battles that Risen ultimately lost, the government is again considering issuing a fresh subpoena to him to testify at the trial of a CIA officer accused of providing him with classified information, Jeffrey Sterling. The trial is now set for January 2015.

Abramson’s stance could help bolster Risen’s argument that the information was newsworthy, particularly as concern about Iran’s nuclear program ramped up in the past decade…

In the “60 Minutes” broadcast Sunday, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said he would not be pressing the effort to force Risen to divulge his sources…

The “60 Minutes” story referred at several points to the possibility that Risen might end up jailed for refusing to reveal his sources. Unmentioned in the program was that Attorney General Eric Holder has indicated on several occasions that he will not take part in sending a journalist to jail over his reporting and that President Barack Obama has made a similar statement.

It is most sincerely to be hoped that the current administration is wise enough to leave this particularly fetid chunk of Security Theatre to the slow judgement of history, but when it comes to Michael Hayden, well… as the saying goes, if he shakes your hand, count your fingers afterwards.

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Monday Afternoon Open Thread

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I’ve done many rotten, inconsiderate things in my life, but I’ve never forced a dog to wear a Halloween costume. Someone made this poor bulldog dress up as Princess Leia:

princess leia bulldog

I did recently make one of my dogs wear a Tim the Enchanter hat, but just for a few seconds to get a picture. I also once put a reindeer antler headband on our late, lamented male boxer to get a picture of him out in the yard, but he shook them off, hiked his leg and pissed on the fake antlers, putting an end to that indignity forever.

But actually purchasing or constructing a Halloween costume for a pet? Nope. Have you? Will you require your pet to dress up this Halloween? Will you dress up yourself?

Open thread.

[H/T: Buzzfeed]

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Voter ID laws: partisan, but also really, really racist

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Voter ID laws offer a classic case of Republican win-win for Republicans in that they both help the party win elections and they hurt minorities. Now insofar as it reflects basic machiavellian calculation you can sort of understand the GOP trying to tip the rules of the game in their favor. On the other hand raw fear and hate of different people is just shameful and self-destructive.

Fortunately social science has a great protocol for testing a large group for different kinds of bias. Take for example gender bias in science. Everyone knows that women have a harder time getting high-profile postdocs, securing faculty positions and winning grants but nobody had a solid handle on why. To resolve that a research team sent one identical resumé to over a hundred different research faculty and asked them to rank the candidate on various metrics. The one and only difference on the applications was the name – half had a male name on the top and the other half was female.

Responses showed a startling and highly significant disparity. On average the female candidate scored lower in competence. Faculty ranked the identical female application as less hireable, they were less interested in mentoring her and they proposed paying her an average of $4,000 less*. Female faculty showed just as much bias as men.

The scientific sting works well because it is easy and cheap. It works because people have no idea they are even taking part in a study so you can’t just lie like people do to a phone survey. You can never point a finger at any one single person since it only studies how a group behaves, but in a number of ways that works out for the better. You know that good feeling that you get when someone singles out a bad actor? That feels good because it lets people tell themselves the problem is over there, in those bad people. A study is a lot more effective when it speaks for everyone. In the study I linked science collectively fell on its face. I can tell you that study shook a lot of us quite deeply. Making us all second guess our own snap judgment will ultimately do a lot more good than it does to put any person in the pillory and hand the rest of us rotten fruit.

Group data also matters a lot more to the person who does not have power. More than any single bad actor a young scientist or a black/hispanic person voting mostly wants to knwo what kind of headwind he or she will face when they apply for a job, give an interview or show up to vote (bolding mine).

USC researchers developed a novel real-world field experiment to test bias among state legislators. In the two weeks prior to the 2012 election, they sent e-mail correspondence to a total of 1,871 state legislators in 14 states.

Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),

My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have
driver’s license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,
(voter NAME)

[…] One group of legislators received e-mail from a voter who identified himself as “Jacob Smith.” The other received email from “Santiago Rodriguez.”

[…] Crucially, in each state in the study, legislators really could have simply responded with a “yes” — drivers’ licenses were not required in any of the states in order to vote…[L]egislators who had supported voter ID laws were much more likely to respond to “Jacob Smith” than to “Santiago Rodriguez.”

It should come as zero surprise that Republicans were a lot more motivated to help Mr. Smith vote. The Washington Post breaks down the data in graph form, but they do it in a weird way.

voter-id1

People who did not co-sponsor voter ID laws answered Santiago Rodriguez more often than sponsors did, but that list includes both Republicans and Democrats. If you take those black bars representing the disparity between answering Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Smith and split up the data like the original authors did, the data makes a bit more sense.

asfd

Shockingly, Republicans who sponsored voter ID laws really do not want hispanic people to vote. Republicans who did not sponsor the laws still feel a little oogy about hispanics but much less so and Democrats showed no bias at all (actually 1.8% in favor of Mr. Santiago, but far within the margin of error).

Consider this another edition of things we already know, proved by science.

(*) This last point is a really big deal. I have worked in science for those salaries, and a person can at least make do on the average salary proposed for a male applicant. The proposed female salary was on par with what graduate students make, which is pretty close to starvation wages for a young professional. I would have considered walking away from science if that was the best I could get.

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Adequate panelling

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Network Adequacy will be the biggest publicly visible challenge of health insurance plans in 2015. The fundamental issue is that there is a set of significant disconnects at multiple points. A network can be deemed adequate by state and federal regulators but the public as a whole will find it grossly inadequate as people can’t find providers who are willing to take them as a new patient or schedule an appointment in a reasonable time frame.

The first disconnect is what does a regulating entity consider adequate coverage compared to what people consider adequate coverage. Mayhew Insurance has to file its networks every year with the state regulating entities as well as a private, non-profit quality assurance enity (NCQA). When we file with the state, we have to show that for seven categories of providers that we have at least 90% of the potentially covered lives are within either thirty or sixty driving minutes of two providers, and for another twenty or so categories, there is at least one provider available. For Big Central County which hosts an NFL team, an NHL team, an NBA team and a team that theoretically plays Major League Baseball although the results don’t support that contention, we could theoretically file a single county network with only twelve primary care providers and have it meet state regulatory guidelines. State regulators have access standards, they don’t have ratio standards. NCQA has access and ratio standards. Submitting that same theoretical network of 12 primary care providers in Big Central County would lead to a failing grade from NCQA as that would be one PCP for every 200,000 potential lives and one PCP for every 12,000 covered lives.

There are two problems with these regulatory level filings. The first is that the standards are very low for large urban counties.  These are loose standards. When Mayhew Insurance is attempting to sell a network to a new large group, the filing standards that we brag about are significantly different. We brag that we have three PCPs that accept new patients within 5 miles of 95% of the employees of that group. Our selling point is that their employees will have an easy time finding lots of providers that will take the patients. The HR department of a sales target does not care if there are thirty three docs near their employees if their employees can never get an appointment for them. Those docs are from the sales target point of view, superfluous.

The second is that they are mainly counting providers who will are contracted for that network; not providers that are contracted for the network and accepting new patients. This is known as panel status, and it is a critical distinction.  This is where most valid complaints about companies baiting and switching consumers on the basis of their networks will come from.  The providers are in network, and willing to take patients at the contracted rate, but they are not taking new patients.  Current patients who changed insurance won’t be kicked out of the practice, but new patients won’t  be allowed in.  Insurers will advertise that 94% of providers in a region take their coverage while members who sign up on the basis of that claim can’t find a provider who will take them as a new patient.

Panel status is a key challenge from a data perspective. Panels can be open to all, they can be closed to all, and they can have five hundred shades of gray in between. For instance, the dad of one of my daughter’s friends is a dermatologist. He is par with Mayhew Insurance for all products. We use him to demonstrate network adequacy in a pair of outlying counties for the dermatology specialty but he is a real world data problem.

For filing purposes, he is marked as active and open. However, in reality, he has research and teaching committments for 70% of this time, 20% of his time is spent at a weekly teaching clinic at a Major Academic Medical Center and 10% of his time is spent in those two outlying counties. He shares an office with several other specialists so the first and  third Thursday of the month, he spends the morning in Middle of Nowhere County and after lunch he goes to East of Nowhere County. For those Thursdays, he takes anyone who makes an appointment. The rest of his time, his panel status is still considered open, but it is only open to absolutely fascinating cases that aid in his research and publication priorities.

How do you categorize his availability? It is limited but open. For regulatory filing purposes, he counts as proving access to three counties. To the HR department of a target sales group, he is open and on all the geo-accessibility reports of being willing to provide care for the employees of the target group. However for the individual who has something funky going on and needing help, there is a very good chance that his panel is either completely closed as his scheduler will redirect a phone call for wart removal or practically closed as the next appointment available in East Nowhere County is in four months.

He is a bit of an extreme case, but these data challenges drive confusing as hell policy and publication decisions.

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