Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

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

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Books are my comfort food!

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Accountability, motherfuckers.

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

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

Consistently wrong since 2002

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

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Friday Recipe Exchange: Chilly Enough for Chili

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jeffrey w chili bowl

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I’m having difficulty typing this because at the moment I’m sitting on the couch with a Great Dane draped over my shoulders like Grandma’s shawl. I’m not sure why, just where he landed this morning. And…now he’s snoring. I will do my best.

Sometimes JeffreyW and I have this odd blogging-psychic link and end up cooking similar meals days apart. I knew I was going to do a chili themed recipe exchange as soon as there was a chill in the air and football/baseball/hockey were in full swing (it’s like sports Christmas). So I wasn’t terribly surprised when I opened up the blog earlier this week to see he had created a chili themed post.

Chili is one of those recipes that appears to be capable of causing intense debate, so consider the following as our entries into that debate. Then you can discuss amongst yourselves the merits of your old family recipe for chili. Beans, no beans, fritos, no fritos, vegetarian, spicy or mild. And while your are at it, what’s else is on your plate for the weekend?

The recipes:

Super easy chili, recipe here.

JeffreyW’s Chorizo Chili here.

Even this week’s Dinner menu involved chili: Kid Friendly Chili-Mac, menu and recipes here.

For some great ideas to do with your leftover chili, see Jeffrey’s photos here.

For tonight’s featured recipe, a different take on chili:
jeffrey w white chicken chili

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Find Your Own Pitch, Robodude

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(Warning: continuing autoplay)

From the Washington Post:

Christopher Schmidt was flying a quadcopter with a camera attached to it at Magazine Beach Park in Cambridge, Mass., and taking in views of the Boston skyline when a hawk decided to take back its airspace.

Magazine Beach, incidentally, has that name because its first use as a public utility was to store individual households’ and visiting ships’ gunpowder stocks — it being considered far too risky, in the days of the Founding Fathers, to keep such dangerously combustible material in private homes. Big gubmint innerferince!, Second Amendment absolutists…

ETA: Schmidt was on the late local news. The quadcopter is fine (he turned off the propellers when he saw the hawk hit so it wouldn’t be injured), but its battery pack got knocked loose, so he was surprised the video made it!

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Apart from marveling at changing styles and mores, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?

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Ebola There, Ebola Here

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Latest development, per an “NBC exclusive”:

The first trial of an Ebola vaccine in Africa has started, researchers said Thursday, with the vaccination of three health care workers in Mali…

It’ll be months before any vaccine would be available, and even then it will be a small amount, probably used to protect health care workers. But experts say it’s a vital first step to getting doctors, nurses and technicians to even come and help fight the outbreak. Health workers are among those at highest risk of getting infected…

Mali isn’t affected by Ebola but experts agree it’s important to conduct trials in Africa. Another trial is expected to start in Gambia soon…

The vaccine is made using a common cold virus called an adenovirus that does not make people sick. It’s had a little piece of Ebola virus attached – a small part that cannot cause disease, either. In animals, such a vaccine has been shown to stimulate the body’s immune response against Ebola virus.

The trial has been set up quickly. Usually, it takes six to 11 months to get a vaccine trial started because of all the regulatory and ethical hoops. This one got started in two months…

Thomas Duncan has died, so he will not be charged in either Dallas or his native Liberia. The other Ebola-related news out of Texas is more positive, at least for those most intimately concerned:

… Officials on Thursday announced that a local sheriff’s deputy examined for possible infection with the virus had tested negative and was sent home from the hospital.

None of the other 48 people who officials say had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola at a hospital here Wednesday, have showed symptoms of infection. Because no one has been exposed in 11 days, officials say, the likelihood of a new case is diminishing.

But live images on local television of an ambulance racing the deputy to the hospital on Wednesday were enough to convince many here that Ebola was more dangerous than officials were letting on….

Some people in the community have been shunned for their ties to Ebola. Erick McCallum, who owns the company that sterilized the apartment where Mr. Duncan became ill, said he lost a lot of business because of it. He said some of his employees, who also work as local firefighters, have been told not to come to work at the fire station for a few weeks.

“It’s not rational, it’s just a lack of knowledge,” he said. The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, became frustrated upon hearing that parents were keeping their children out of school.

“Oh, my goodness,” he said in a telephone interview, taking a long sigh. “I sat on the couch of a survivor in Africa holding her hand. Her little child was bouncing off the walls because the neighbors would not allow her to go outside and play with the other children.” He said he expected that type of reaction among uneducated people in developing countries, but not in the United States, adding, “I’m saddened.”…

New screening procedures have been announced:

Federal health officials will require temperature checks for the first time at five major American airports for people arriving from the three West African countries hardest hit by the deadly Ebola virus. However, health experts said the measures were more likely to calm a worried public than to prevent many people with Ebola from entering the country…

American health officials believe Mr. Duncan did not have a fever when he arrived in the United States, a view seconded by his family. “There’s a sense that this is a be-all-and-end-all and that this will put up an iron curtain, but it won’t,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “At the very most, all we are buying here is some reduction of anxiety.” He added, “That’s worth something because, at the moment, we have a much larger outbreak of anxiety than we have of Ebola.”

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Harrassing the “deserving” poor

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Ann Marie Marciarille has a pair of posts about Medicaid and expansion that I think bring up a very good point. The Medicaid expansion in slightly more than half the states has expanded eligibility from what is effectively a politically powerless and disenfranchised primary user base of children and poor women as well as elderly individuals in nursing homes, to a less disenfranchised and potentially politically powerful group of working poor.  The working poor will never have as much power as the non-working rich, but they have some ability, especially at the local and state level, to organize and press for their interests. 

Post 1:

A friend from Minnesota asks if I have heard of the “old” Medicaid rules on child support assignment being applied to  “new” Medicaid ACA-expanded  beneficiaties…..

Does this mean Medicaid’s more draconian aspects will finally see the light of day in public debate? Will the inclusion of working poor people create a constituency for a Medicaid program that does not dovetail with child support/medical support frameworks — like that found in Minnesota — apparently premised on the idea that Medicaid beneficiaries are getting something for nothing and payback is our mission?

Post 2:

As I have discussed elsewhere, we are conflicted about Medicaid so it is no surprise that the ACA is conflicted about Medicaid. Most particularly, the ACA does nothing to alter state discretion to seek state recoupment of Medicaid costs from Medicaid beneficiaries who received basic medical services through Medicaid at or after the age of 55.

No, I’m not talking about Medicaid recoupment of nursing home costs but, rather, recoupment of basic Medicaid medical costs.  This, in some states, is old hat. California, New York, Massachusetts and others have been recovering funds from the estates of 55+ Medicaid beneficiaries who received basic health services under the program for decades. But now that the reach of Medicaid in these Medicaid expansion states is broadening Medicaid eligibility to greater numbers of citizens with assets (read: the family home) the tension between Medicaid’s historical status as a program where, to some extent, the benefit is returned to the government and its re-invented status as the health insurance provider of last resort for those too poor to shop throught the exchanges is made manifest.

These types of rules have been put in place as part of the favorite American game of determing who is and is not part of the deserving poor.  Those rules applied to Medicaid when it was truly the poor person’s program and not a broad based payer of last resort.  To some, anyone who qualifies for Medicaid, even with the income eligiblity expansion is a “loser” who deserves random harrassment, but beyond those assholes and sociopaths, it is harder for the American voting  public (which is quite different and generally more privileged than the general public on a variety of measures) to see the value of harrassing people who they either know or could have seen themselves to be. 

 

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Quick hits

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Just a few quick hits as my coffee brews:

  • The gap between the blue line and the red line is where most of our pay raises went for the past generation.  If those two lines are equal, then healthcare costs are growing at the rate of the general economy’s inflation, which means more cash in our pockets.

  • New York Times Upshot on Medicaid recipients liking Medicaid:

    A study published in the journal Health Affairs found that poor residents of Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas, when asked to compare Medicaid with private coverage, said that Medicaid offered better “quality of health care” and made them better able to “afford the health care” they needed….But repeated surveys show that the program is quite popular among the people who use it. A 2011 survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 86 percent of people who had received Medicaid benefits described the experience as somewhat or very positive. A slightly more recent Kaiser survey showed that 69 percent of Americans earning less than $40,000 a year rated the program important to them or their families.

 

Speaking off the cuff, this makes sense as the the Medicaid recipient’s counterfactual is not Medicaid or a Cadillac plan; it is Medicaid or nothing or a patchwork of charities with lots of different hoops to jump through.  Could Medicaid be better– hell yeah, but does it do a decent job of providing healthcare to people who otherwise can not afford it; yes. 

 

The last two items were expected as uninsured care of all types should be going down, especially in Medicaid expansion states.  The first one, Emergency Department usage decreasing is a bit of a positive surprise as the Massachusetts evidence suggested increased ED utilization.  I am  curious as to what Arkansas is doing to decrease utilization — can it be taken to scale?

  • Should see a decline in Solvaldi utilization for patients who are not in Hep-C crisis as everyone is waiting for the FDA to approve several new Hep-C drugs/drug combinations
  • This video below will produce several hours of discussion at the next referee clinic. My college  chapter was split 50/50 on whether or not there was offside or a good goal including an even split among the MLS/FIFA ARs. I have offside as the keeper has to respect the central runner who attempted a play onto the ball.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Good News on Voting Rights

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legal technicality campaign ad non seq

(Non Sequitur via GoComics.com)

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Adam Liptak, in the NYTimes, “Courts Strike Down Voter ID Laws in Wisconsin and Texas“:

The Supreme Court on Thursday evening stopped officials in Wisconsin from requiring voters there to provide photo identification before casting their ballots in the coming election…

Around the same time, a federal trial court in Texas struck down that state’s ID law, saying it put a disproportionate burden on minority voters…

The challengers to the Wisconsin law asked the Supreme Court to block the voter identification requirement for now, saying it would “virtually guarantee chaos at the polls.” Whatever the legality, they said, the state cannot issue enough IDs and train enough poll workers before the November election.

The law requires absentee voters to submit identification. But forms sent before the appeals court acted did not include that requirement. State officials had said they would not count ballots returned without copies of valid ID…

Thursday’s ruling from Texas, issued after a two-week trial in Corpus Christi, found that the state’s voter ID law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose,” Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos wrote.

A spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general’s office said it would immediately appeal “to avoid voter confusion in the upcoming election.”

Ryan P. Haygood, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, welcomed the decision. “The evidence in this case,” he said, “demonstrated that the law, like its poll-tax ancestor, imposes real costs and unjustified, disparate burdens on the voting rights of more than 600,000 registered Texas voters, a substantial percentage of whom are voters of color.”

And you say that like it was a bad thing, mutter the Good Ol’ Boys.
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Apart from redoubling our efforts to Get Out the Vote, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the week?

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