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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Let me file that under fuck it.

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

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

The willow is too close to the house.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

All hail the time of the bunny!

White supremacy is terrorism.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

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You are here: Home / Archives for 2014

Archives for 2014

The Daniele Watts Story Plot Thickens

by Elon James White|  September 18, 20142:12 pm| 177 Comments

This post is in: This Week In Blackness

New details in the Daniele Watts story, the black actress detained by police after showing her white boyfriend affection in public, have made this story a lot less nuanced in some ways and a lot more complicated in others then originally thought. While her boyfriend, Brian Lucas, showed his ID, Watts refused and was handcuffed in public before being released without charges. Both Watts and Lucas felt the police showed racial bias and that Watts was treated as if the police suspected she was a prostitute and Lucas her john. But images taken by witnesses show that maybe this was just some old-fashioned lewd behavior in public:

New photos posted online Wednesday appear to show actress Daniele Watts straddling her boyfriend in their parked car with her shirt pulled up to expose her breasts. …“They were f*cking,” [Los Angeles Police Sgt. Jim] Parker said a witness reported. “He was in the passenger seat with his legs outside.” … One of the workers [from across the street] asked the couple to stop, TMZ reported, but a witness said Lucas began “horizontally bongo-ing her boobs back and forth.” The witness said Watts grabbed a tissue a short time later from the center console, wiped Lucas off, and tossed it onto the grass along the street.

And an audio clip leaked from the incident that has an exchange between Lucas and the officer seems to also show that while he defended Watts online, Lucas suggested that she was “overly sensitive” about the “black and white.”

Nothing like a humiliating public incident and a little throwing under the bus to test the endurance of a relationship.

Team Blackness also discussed an expanding diversity gap between Democrats and Republicans, the truth about poor people, and Rush Limbaugh on seduction.

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The Daniele Watts Story Plot ThickensPost + Comments (177)

The Daniele Watts Story Plot Thickens

by Elon James White|  September 18, 20142:12 pm| 11 Comments

This post is in: This Week In Blackness

New details in the Daniele Watts story, the black actress detained by police after showing her white boyfriend affection in public, have made this story a lot less nuanced in some ways and a lot more complicated in others then originally thought. While her boyfriend, Brian Lucas, showed his ID, Watts refused and was handcuffed in public before being released without charges. Both Watts and Lucas felt the police showed racial bias and that Watts was treated as if the police suspected she was a prostitute and Lucas her john. But images taken by witnesses show that maybe this was just some old-fashioned lewd behavior in public:

New photos posted online Wednesday appear to show actress Daniele Watts straddling her boyfriend in their parked car with her shirt pulled up to expose her breasts. …“They were f*cking,” [Los Angeles Police Sgt. Jim] Parker said a witness reported. “He was in the passenger seat with his legs outside.” … One of the workers [from across the street] asked the couple to stop, TMZ reported, but a witness said Lucas began “horizontally bongo-ing her boobs back and forth.” The witness said Watts grabbed a tissue a short time later from the center console, wiped Lucas off, and tossed it onto the grass along the street.

And an audio clip leaked from the incident that has an exchange between Lucas and the officer seems to also show that while he defended Watts online, Lucas suggested that she was “overly sensitive” about the “black and white.”

Nothing like a humiliating public incident and a little throwing under the bus to test the endurance of a relationship.

Team Blackness also discussed an expanding diversity gap between Democrats and Republicans, the truth about poor people, and Rush Limbaugh on seduction.

Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS

 

The Daniele Watts Story Plot ThickensPost + Comments (11)

Annals of Choot-Spa

by Betty Cracker|  September 18, 20141:27 pm| 135 Comments

This post is in: Gun nuts, Open Threads, Assholes, General Stupidity, Teabagger Stupidity

Welfare rancher Cliven Bundy not only demands that the gubmint provide free pastureland for his cattle because freedom, he expects the feds to maintain fences to keep his mendicant moo-cows off the gubmint interstate:

A Las Vegas woman has sued Cliven Bundy after she crashed into one of his cows on Interstate 15.

Danielle Beck was riding in a car that collided with the animal April 14, two days after federal authorities backed down from an armed confrontation with the scofflaw rancher and his supporters in a dispute over unpaid grazing fees, reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The cow was killed [:(], and the 40-year-old Beck suffered broken bones and other injuries when her boyrfiend crashed into the livestock and drove over an embankment about 10 miles from Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville.

[snip]

“It’s a state problem, it’s not our problem,” Bundy said. “We really feel bad when it happens. We sure don’t want it to happen, but we’re not liable.”

[snip]

Bundy said he was within his rights to make a claim against Beck for the loss of his livestock.

“The person whose car hit that cow is liable to me,” Bundy said.

That cow might be alive today if the feds hadn’t backed down. (Or it might be a pot roast.) Anyway, can this fucking mooooocher finally go to jail now?

Christ, I can only imagine the reception I’d get if I refused to pay taxes for 20 years and then demanded that the government shoo my chickens out of the street. I guess I need moar guns!

Annals of Choot-SpaPost + Comments (135)

Then we raised a glass to JFK or that’s how rough riders roll

by DougJ|  September 18, 201412:35 pm| 210 Comments

This post is in: Readership Capture

I once saw Ken Burns IRL, walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain, and he appeared to be a nice, unassuming guy. But I don’t know if I can take another one of his miniseries.

Are any of you going to try to watch the “Roosevelts”? I think I know what I need to know about Teddy and Franklin: according to Wikiepdia, Teddy was known for his “`cowboy'” persona and robust masculinity” (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and without even looking at Wikipedia, I know that Franklin was the most important person in the history of western civilization. I don’t know quite as much about Eleanor beyond an SNL bit “What If Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?” (soon to be made into a book by Niall Ferguson, btw).

I may try to watch some of “The Roosevelts”, but I think the only way I could stomach that much Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Bechbloss would be if I drank a lot. So how about a “The Roosevelts” drinking game?

Just to start:

A close up of a black and white photo lasts more than 15 seconds — take a drink.
You hear player piano music — take a drink.
Michael Bechbloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin appear onscreen at the same time — finish your glass.
Somebody says “bully pulpit” — take a drink.

Update.

Someone talks about what Obama could learn from FDR — finish the entire bottle.

Then we raised a glass to JFK or that’s how rough riders rollPost + Comments (210)

Insurers leaving the Exchanges

by David Anderson|  September 18, 201410:18 am| 22 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance

Some drop-outs are more important than others.

We’ve seen some insurance companies drop out of the Exchanges this year. My take on a New York drop-out was that it was good news as the enrollment was miniscule and the products were not reasonably priced. The insurer was just too small to compete and there was minimial hope for significant membership gains to cover their back end costs:

384 people are too few people for an insurance company to offer a commercial or commercial like product for two significant reasons. Either reason is a good enough reason for a company to get out of this market segment….
From a policy point of view, unpopular and comparatively expensive plans exiting the marketplace is a good thing in states with deep markets and significant participation. It sucks that 384 people will need to find new policies next but they are highly likely to get better and cheaper policies instead.

This is not the case in Minnesota. A major insurer is dropping its participation from the Exchange on both the individual and SHOP side of the equation.

The insurer with the lowest rates and most customers on Minnesota’s health care exchange is pulling out…
According to a company statement, MNsure policies make up only a small percentage of PreferredOne’s entire enrollment but take up a significant amount of resources to support.
PreferredOne had 59 percent of the individual market for MNsure enrollees as of Aug. 6….

This is a significant disruption to the Minnesota market. It is not shocking though.

I am eyeballing the pricing for a 35 year old non-smoker in the Twin Cities on Health Sherpa and platinum plans without subsidy are cheaper from this provider than most baesline Silver plans. I think a few things are happening.

PreferredOne either was amazingly over optimistic on their acturial modeling or had decided to 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 as the low cost platinum planss would have been very attractive to people with significant pre-exisiting medical conditions or known medical risk. 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. PreferredOneseems 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. On a quick glance at these basic facts, dropping Exchange makes sense. It sucks for the people who have to re-enroll in new plans at higher price points but 2014 was always a beta test year, and we know that companies would be entering and leaving different markets which is why the markets were never expected to stabilize until the 2016 open enrollment period. Preferred One is not the only significant exit, as Hawaii lost a large provider for the SHOP exchanges for the same basic reason.

Insurers leaving the ExchangesPost + Comments (22)

There Ain’t No Entertainment and the Judgments are Severe

by @heymistermix.com|  September 18, 20149:04 am| 42 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs

In case you haven’t been following Rob Ford’s latest, his biopsy results show a rare, aggressive sarcoma. Never fear, though, because the Ford family subbed Doug for Rob on the mayoral ballot last week after the tumor was discovered. Because of their quick last-minute action, Ford Nation will still be able to vote the deep feelings of their white suburban reactionary hearts.

Doug, who’s more of the backroom dealer than a frontman, is considered a weak replacement for Rob, though I wonder how someone who would mark a ballot for Rob would be overly concerned about fitness for the task at hand when evaluating a candidate for mayor. But apparently Ford Nation thinks that Doug lacks the Johnny Walker wisdom of Rob, because a Tory (Progressive Conservative) aptly named John Tory is now leading Doug and the liberal in the race, Olivia Chow.

My secretly Canadian friend tells me that Toronto is an object lesson to all cities contemplating annexation of the suburbs. If he’s right, the Fords are the sour indigestion that remains long after the sweet tax base of tracts has been ingested. I’ll let our beaver tail eating readers weigh in on that in the comments.

As for Rob, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. If he weren’t at the core a mean, wife-beating, bullying asshole, I might be moved to say something nice about his buffoonery. Instead, all I can say is good riddance.

There Ain’t No Entertainment and the Judgments are SeverePost + Comments (42)

Creatures of Myth and Legend

by Betty Cracker|  September 18, 20147:53 am| 100 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!

If you’ve been laughing at wingnut stupidity on blogs for awhile, you may recall the SadlyNaughts’ righteous mockery of an idiot who misread the sign below as “Sasquatch Israel:”

sasquatch israel

Said moron wrote an indignant post based on his misreading of the sign, in which he accused the sign holder of purveying anti-Semitic, eliminationist rhetoric by implicitly denying Israel’s legitimacy with the comparison to Bigfoot.

Sure, it’s a stretch. But wingnuts bloggers don’t live in the Eden of low hanging fruit in which we lefties frolic. They frequently have to manufacturer causes for outrage. Why just yesterday, Power Tool John Hinderaker conjured a mythical creature known as an anti-Israel politician in the United States of America:

Elizabeth Warren is a heroine to many liberals, who hope she will challenge Hillary Clinton from the left. Even apart from the concept of anyone being to Hillary’s left, this seems bizarre to me. [hahahahahahaha – Ed.]

[snip]

What does it take to be a left-wing icon in today’s America? There are multiple elements, but one requirement is a visceral hostility to Israel. That hostility was on display when Warren appeared at Tufts, I believe earlier today. A member of the audience said:

Eva Moseley, I’m not a student, I’m not an alumnae, but was in faculty life. I was also a Holocaust refugee and I’m extremely concerned that Jews don’t do to another people what was done to them.

This received thunderous applause, in the midst of which Warren responded, “I think that’s fair.”

And that’s it, kids: Sasquatch Israel! Never mind that Warren staunchly defends America’s <3 BFF 4EVER relationship with Israel, voting in favor of sending Israel hundreds of millions of dollars during its recent dustup with Hamas and defending the occasional errant bombing of schools and hospitals on the grounds that Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields. Nope, Hillary Clinton is the leftiest lefty who ever lurched leftward, and Elizabeth Warren is a shrill anti-Semite who wants to grind plucky lil’ Israel beneath her cruel Fauxcohontas moccasin. Yep, these people are crazy.

Creatures of Myth and LegendPost + Comments (100)

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