Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

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

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

People are complicated. Love is not.

We still have time to mess this up!

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

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

Wait, what?

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

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

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The lights are all blinking red.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

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More on PreferredONE

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Last week, I posted that PreferredOne, the largest insurer by membership on the Minnesota Exchange, was leaving the individual market.  They were losing money on the policy and I looked at some basic information and came to the following conclusions:

It is not shocking though.

I think a few things are happening.

PreferredOne either was… over optimistic on their acturial modeling or had…engage in an extremely aggressive loss leader pricing strategy to build membership. If this was a loss leader strategy, than it may have been too effective…. People with high utilization and high complexity of cases are expensive on the medical side as they go to doctors/hospitals a lot AND they are administratively costly as they are calling in for help and care coordination on a frequent basis.

Secondly, the back-end infrastructure to support Exchange is extensive, especially as the risk spreading mechanisms such as risk adjustment require significant technical support. Building that type of infrastructure from scratch is painful and expensive. PreferredOne seems to have been only a commercial group insurer with a small staff before it decided to dip its toes into the water for individual Exchange.  It had no pre-exisiting model it could rip off to modify for Exchange.

It had aggressive pricing, a population that is higher need than normal, and not a lot of administrative/technical depth.

And now a local reporter up in the Twin Cities looks into the details of the decision (h/t Charles Gaba):

PreferredOne is not providing any explanation beyond a letter to MNsure from its CEO that said continuing to offer coverage through the exchange “is not sustainable.”

After looking into the company’s filings and talking to others in the market, that seems to be a fair assessment….

In a news release a year ago, PreferredOne was pleased to announce that it offered “the lowest-cost individual and family health care insurance plans available at all metal levels in eight of the nine MNsure pricing regions.”

PreferredOne had made its decision. It was going to grab some market share.

It worked splendidly, too….

For those keeping score, that’s $1.31 paid out for every dollar coming in, a medical loss ratio of 131 percent….

 So once someone actually looked at the facts, PreferredOne engaged in optimistic acturial assumptions, aggressive loss leader pricing and later on, it was shown that they don’t have a deep technical back-end.  Not too surprising.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: More Holder

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Glenn Thrush, at Politico, on “The backstory of how Obama lost his ‘heat shield’“:

… Holder, who began his stormy five-plus-year tenure at the Justice Department with his controversial “Nation of Cowards” speech, has chosen what seems to be the ideal (and maybe the only) moment to call it quits after more than 18 months of musing privately about leaving with the president and senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, a trio bound by friendship, progressive ideology and shared African-American ancestry.

It was now or never, several current and former administration officials say, and Holder – under pressure to retire from a physician wife worried about a recent health scare, checked the “now” box. “It was a quit-now or never-quit moment,” one former administration official said. “You didn’t want confirmation hearings in 2015 if the Republicans control the Senate. So if he didn’t do it now, there was no way he could ever do it.”

Holder—described by associates as President Obama’s “heat shield” on race and civil rights—sprung it on the president over the Labor Day holidays. Obama didn’t bother to push back as he has in the past, even though staffers say he winces at the prospect of a long confirmation battle, whomever he chooses for the nation’s top law enforcement job.

Holder’s announcement gives Obama several weeks to pick and vet a successor who would face confirmation hearings in the lame-duck session after the midterms. Holder has “agreed to remain in his post until the confirmation of his successor,” a top Justice Department aide said, as an insurance policy against GOP foot-dragging.

His timing also has a personal dimension. The keenly legacy-conscious Holder has never been in better standing, leaving on arguably the highest personal note of his tenure, after a year of progress on his plan to reform sentencing laws and just after his well-received, calming-the-waters trip to Ferguson, Missouri, during the riots in August. In a background email to reporters, a senior Justice Department official struck a victory-lap tone, writing, “The Attorney General’s tenure has been marked by historic gains in the areas of criminal justice reform and civil rights enforcement. The last week alone has seen several announcements related to these signature issues.”…

Thrush goes on to a laundry list of possible Holder successors — Deval Patrick had already turned it down; Kamala Harris has now done so…

… Other names under consideration, but considered less likely, according to check-ins with half a dozen current and former West Wingers: Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney in Manhattan known for his aggressive Wall Street prosecutions; Ron Machen, the young U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.—a job once held by Holder; Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a former state attorney general; former Joe Biden aide Neil MacBride, an ex-federal prosecutor in Virginia who is now a partner at the law firm Davis Polk; ex-White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, another Obama favorite; and Labor Secretary Tom Perez, another former head of the civil rights division—and currently the only Latino candidate mentioned by insiders.

There’s also at least one high-profile long-shot on the informal list being circulated inside Obama’s camp: former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who left Washington in 2013 to take over the massive University of California system, according to one Democrat with close ties to the White House. Napolitano was the original choice for the job at the start of Obama’s first term – a favorite of then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Holder, who had considered himself the sole front-runner for the job, was startled during the 2008-09 transition period when he was handed a Department of Justice binder that included headshots of himself and Napolitano as potential AGs.

The Holder-Napolitano rivalry was legendary: Once, after the former Arizona governor asked Holder about his future plans, the AG joked to a friend, “Sometimes I feel like Janet is touching me just to see if I’m still warm.”…

Also in Politico, Rush Limbaugh prefers to massage his dittoheads’ fear glands:

“There may be a Supreme Court vacancy, and I can see [President] Barack Obama nominating Eric Holder to fill it,” Limbaugh said Thursday on his radio program, according to a transcript…

“[Holder]’s just gonna be replaced with Al Sharpton or somebody like him. I mean, that’s what the [Department of Justice] has been turned into. Eric Holder has subverted the Department of Justice and now it’s no different than if Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton were running it, and whoever Obama nominates is gonna be Obama Jr. or Obama III in there,” Limbaugh said…

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Apart from speculating on another Friday doc-dump, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the work week?

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Late Night Fun Read: Our Guy, Barney Frank

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Even after the bowdlerizers got there, it’s still a fun article, for those of us who remember Rep. Frank fondly:

After retiring from Congress at the end of 2012, Barney Frank sat down to write a political memoir. As one of the first openly gay members of Congress and a lifelong fighter for LGBT rights, the former Massachusetts Democratic representative had plenty of material to work with. The only problem was his inability to use a computer.

“I usually use dictation and have someone else transcribe,” Frank, 74, said in his studio apartment in Newton, Mass. “I had to learn how to use the computer. But I was so ­club-fingered that I kept accidentally shutting the machine down.”…

“Apprasebtly, none of my Dem,crstic occllesagues fesred tghat my p;rom ince wouild cause a problem for the pastry,” he wrote of rising up the ranks in the Democratic Party. “I very much boibut that this eould have been true for an openly gay leader of a very prominent committee tnwtey years esrleir.”

It’s going to take until next spring to get this book edited and out onto shelves. Frank said he will also record the audio version, so fans can hear him narrate in his authoritative mumble.

But in the meantime, a group of about 46 bright young minds get the opportunity to hear Frank’s stories once a week firsthand. This speakeasy, a fun-yet-garbled combination of personal history, legislative battles and slightly off-color jokes, can be found Wednesday nights at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government…

“The major thing is I don’t flinch when the phone rings anymore,” Frank said in the interview from the apartment that he has been renting for the past 15 years… He spends most of his time away from this bachelor pad up in Maine with his husband. “My nerve endings were raw. When the phone rang, it was a problem I had to help resolve. I was just worn out by the end.”…

Frank may be remembered for any number of things: for being a witty, irascible debater (once he told a woman that trying to talk to her was like trying to have a debate with a dining-room table), for his work on the financial reform bill, or for his work on the gay rights movement. So what is it that he hopes he will be remembered for?

“Being smart enough to not answer a question like that,” he said.

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Open Thread: Bring Out Your Waders, Hip Boots Won’t Be Enough

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Well, Deval Patrick’s already said, thanks but no thanks. “As soon as I know what my next job is, I will tell you, I promise. But it will be in the private sector,” he said.”

Paul Waldman, at the Washington Post, on “Why the fight over Eric Holder’s successor is going to be very ugly“:

… Holder has already served longer than all but a few attorneys general in history, so this announcement shouldn’t be a surprise. But with an election coming up in a little over a month, we could see a spectacularly angry confirmation process. So here’s a prediction: no matter who the White House picks to be the next attorney general, the Republicans will wage a relentless effort against him/her, and almost all of it will be, in one way or another, about race…

…[F]rom the very beginning of his tenure, Holder has been frank in his public discussion about issues of race where Obama has been reticent. Indeed, it has sometimes appeared that Obama has let Holder say the things about race that he wishes he could say but can’t…

Steve Benen ticked off some of the things Holder has done to cheer liberals and anger conservatives… Many of those issues, like voting rights, are directly about race, while others, like Stand Your Ground, are implicitly but inevitably about race. Now place that in a context where many conservatives believe that Barack Obama’s entire presidency is about exacting vengeance upon white people for the sins of age-old racism. While they attach this argument to almost anything (the number of time right-wing radio hosts have told their audiences that the Affordable Care Act was intended as “reparations,” punishing whites for slavery, is beyond counting), when it comes to Holder, the line is a much more direct one…

When Republicans get a chance to question the person nominated to replace him, each and every one of those issues is going to come up. The nominee is going to be asked to repudiate everything Eric Holder did. And when that doesn’t happen, Republicans in Congress will turn on the nominee with everything they can muster, in a demonstration to their base that they feel their anger.

Maybe it’s just my Celtic/Viking berserker genes, but my impulse would be: Bring it on, Repubs. Nominate someone Monday morning, President Obama (give your enemies the weekend to make themselves ever more foolish in public), and demand Congress come back into session to approve your nominee no later than October 6. Remind the low-info voters why it’s never a good idea to sit out the midterms.

Even the hardcore grifter/27%er GOP is smart enough to have started dragging their feet already:

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today issued the following statement regarding Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation:

“It is good news that Eric Holder has announced his resignation. Sadly, he has proven to be the most partisan attorney general in our history, repeatedly defying and refusing to enforce the law….

“To ensure that justice is served and that the Attorney General is not simply replaced with another extreme partisan who will likewise disregard the law, the Senate should wait until the new Congress is sworn in before confirming the next Attorney General. Allowing Democratic senators, many of whom will likely have just been defeated at the polls, to confirm Holder’s successor would be an abuse of power that should not be countenanced.”

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Open Sports Thread: The NFL’s Tax Status

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David Roth, SB Nation, “Meet the woman who wants to make the NFL pay its taxes“:

It happens every year, briefly and usually around Super Bowl time. That’s when the matter of the NFL’s tax-exempt status percolates to the surface, generally as a result of all the outrageous things that the NFL demands from whatever city is lucky enough to host the Super Bowl that year, and which kind of idly enrage those so-inclined. Most states exempt 501(c)6 non-profit organizations — trade groups, ordinarily, like the Chamber of Commerce or National Beef Council — from state income and sales tax, and the NFL is classified as such. The NFL also pays no federal corporate taxes.

This tends to offend, especially given the NFL’s notable dedication to profit and power above just about everything else; it also violates the spirit of the law, as Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann points out, because the NFL is more like a closed cartel than an industry organization. And offend it does, generally for that one week in January. And then things roll on for another 50 or so weeks, more or less as it has since Congress first granted the NFL 501(c)6 status back in 1966…

But a New Orleans-based activist Lynda Woolard hit upon an idea that might force a little bit of accountability upon an organization that’s otherwise proven itself resistant to it. Several years ago, she started a Change.org petition aimed at revoking the NFL’s tax-exempt status. Since then, first slowly and then all at once, the movement has picked up momentum — the campaign now has the endorsement of a wide array of prominent national political figures, and the petition has more than 363,000 signatures. In the last week, two Senators — Maria Cantwell of Washington and Cory Booker of New Jersey — have introduced bills aimed at ending the NFL’s nonprofit status. The unlikely coalition supporting this cause includes an independent Senator from Maine, an arch-conservative Senator from Oklahoma, and a libertarian-leaning congressman from Utah.

Woolard, an artist and a Crescent City resident for over twenty years — and a die-hard Saints fan — was politically galvanized after Hurricane Katrina, and has dedicated herself to organizing in the years since. It’s not her only job, but it’s one she’s embraced with rare passion…

What was your inspiration for starting this petition — that is, what was the moment when you decided that the NFL’s tax-exemption was unjust enough that you wanted to organize and try to do something about it?

The Super Bowl riders were something I learned about after I started the petition… and I have learned much more about the intricacies of the NFL’s finances in the course of talking to like-minded sports writers and sports fans over the last few of years. Besides the fact that this multi-billion dollar industry being governed by a non-profit seems, on the face of it, unfair to everyone else who works hard and pays taxes, I really started the petition as a tool to gain some financial leverage over the NFL, and as a mechanism to call in the only body who seemed to have any authority over them: Congress.

I felt like every season started with some issue that fans felt uncomfortable with, but that we had no power to do anything about, whether it be the player lockout, the replacement refs, the growing body of evidence that the NFL hid reports linking concussions to later life disabilities, and so on. We just see that list of concerns getting longer today…

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Safe Bets

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In a country that allowed George W. Bush to assume office, twice, It’s impossible to be absolutely sure any given mope or miscreant won’t manage to win sufficient electoral votes or the negotiable allegiance of five Supreme Court Justices. That being said, there’s an awful lot of chaff being emitted in advance of 2016.

No matter how many Mormons and/or vulture fund managers tithe, this guy is not going to be elected President in 2016 (thank you, Paul Constant):

… There’s an undercurrent of smugness in contemporary Republicans, a belief that if Mitt Romney had won the presidency in 2012, America would be a paradisiacal wonderland by now. And that pro-Mitt undercurrent seems to be going mainstream.

Why, no less a foreign policy expert than Ann Romney declared yesterday on Fox News that if we lived in an America headed by a President Romney, ISIS would not be the huge problem that it is. Romney believes her husband “would have tried to arm the moderates in Syria,” which would have curbed the ISIS threat, along with “other things that would have happened that would have made the equation a little bit tilted in our favor.” Do you see the error you have made, America? …

Nor will this guy, much though I hate agreeing with anyone working for WaPo‘s “The Fix” blog:

…[N]ot to take anything away from Webb’s service — including as a war hero, Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan and one-term senator from Virginia. It’s just that there wouldn’t seem to be a more unlikely presidential hopeful than Jim Webb… He retired after one term in the Senate and didn’t seem to particularly enjoy being in public life…

Nor, except in my nightmares, this guy (thank you, Mr. Kilgore):

Jeb ‘16—The Excitement Builds!
It’s no secret the GOP Donor Class loves Jeb Bush and would like to see him run for president. But if you have any doubts, read this unintentionally hilarious spin sent out via Politico’s Mike Allen today:

As Jeb Bush plunges into a frenzy of fall travel for Senate candidates, his allies insist a presidential campaign is becoming more of a possibility than even they thought a few months ago. He’s doing a lot of under-the-radar prep, including foreign policy tutoring and meetings with tech gurus. And several of his friends think he is leaning more yes than no…

In the next breath, Allen is admiring Bush’s practice of holding fundraisers IN FLORIDA for Senate candidates in other states… As to why this would “amp up demand for the former Florida governor,” Allen is as “opaque” as the man he’s hyping.

And, finally, I think we can safely cross this guy off the list…

Anyone who thinks it’s too early to talk about the 2016 presidential campaign should be aware that the Right has just chosen its Big Narrative for the cycle, via the Free Beacon’s discovery of correspondence between Hillary Rodham and—wait for it!—Saul Alinsky. It was previously known that HRC had written (both favorably and unfavorably) about Alinsky in a college thesis on community organizing (it would have been rather difficult to ignore him on that subject—sorta like writing about Chick Fil-A without interviewing the late Truett Cathy). But direct correspondence is a new thing.

No, it doesn’t reveal any revolutionary plotting between the two, and yes, this was forty-six years ago. But we’re off to the races…

… because I’m fairly sure “not being dead“ is referenced somewhere in the Constitution. Looks like the Wingnut Wurlitzer is ready to anoint him as the VP candidate, though!
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Apart from pointing & mocking, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Thursday Evening Open Thread: Safe BetsPost + Comments (144)