Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

People are weird.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Everybody saw this coming.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

The words do not have to be perfect.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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Think of the Kids

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Penn State fans are all pissed off at Rutgers fans for wearing Ped State t-shirts and some inappropriate signage (seen above) because apparently we are now supposed to think of the kids. The Rutgers AD was forced to issue an apology, and all I can think about is the chutzpah of the Penn State folks. These are the same Penn State fans who, when notified that Penn State would no longer be disqualified from post season play (something I agree with, because none of the players at Penn State currently there had ANYTHING to do with this, so why should they be punished) had the following reaction:

Yeah. Think of the kids.

Basically, screw Penn State and their whiny, enabling fan base who still want to honor the man who sat by and did nothing while Sandusky ran a child rape factory in the locker room. And to answer the question posted above in the first tweet, how would I explain the sign to my kids? Simple, if I had a kid, I’d tell him to stay the fuck away from Sandusky, Spanier, Schultz, and Curley, and not to ever go into the Penn state locker room (props to Bobcat Goldthwait– relevant part starting about 30 seconds in)).

Speaking of people your kid should stay away from, Adrian Peterson, to the surprise of no one (you do this kind of thing once, you’ve done it a hundred times without getting caught), might be a serial child abuser, and the Vikings might want to rethink putting him back on the field as they did today. Assholes.

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Cat Rescue Bleg – Maryland/DC Area

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contessa

From commentor Karen:

I’m in a bad situation… I have a 14 year old kitty named Contessa who is diabetic.

I have Rheumatoid Arthritis. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in April… I’d be getting a double mastectomy. My whole world stopped from that moment and was only about the cancer. I gave Contessa as much of myself as I could but it wasn’t what she deserved or needed.

When I went in for surgery, I had something set up where a pet sitting person would feed Contessa, inject the insulin and do the litter. Between the hospital stay and the rehab to rebuild my strength it was almost three weeks til I got home. She was very angry at me but I tried as hard as I could to make it up to her. I had someone that was still handling the care of her because I was weak as a kitten but I thought eventually I’d be able to take care of her again. I haven’t been able to take the RA drugs for two months, which hasn’t helped. On Thursday the 4th I got admitted into the hospital again because I’d developed an abscess and a bad infection and just got out on Friday the 12th and I’m even sicker from the drugs I had to get an IV for to make me better. I needed emergency surgery and now have a drain on each side of my chest.

I am getting help in paying for the care of her but that can’t last forever. My RA has progressed with a vengeance to the point where I’ve fallen three times in two weeks and I need to use a rollator everywhere. Taking care of myself is difficult since I live by myself in independent living and I have no help. The help I’m getting to pay for the cat care can’t go on forever and I can’t take care of her myself so I’ve come to the realization that I need to give Contessa up. I’m trying to find the best options available. I live in Maryland, outside of DC.

I’m hoping that a Balloon Juicer will be willing to take Contessa… It breaks my heart to give her to someone but I know that it will be better for her to give her to a good home. If I can’t find a place for her I’ll have to bring her over to the shelter, I’m afraid she’ll be put down. Thank you for any help you can give me, I appreciate it very much!

If anyone has a lead — someone who can take in Contessa, no-kill shelters in DC, any other help you might know about — leave a comment, or email me (click my name in the right-hand column, or annelaurie (at) verizon (dot) net) and I’ll put you in touch with Karen.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Mess with the Bull…

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Word that the Breitbart News Network is being audited by the IRS doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of lamestream media attention, but happily Crooks & Liars gave Matt Osborne of Breitbart Unmasked a wider platform to explain the charges:

Brietbart News, LLC announced Tuesday that they are being audited by the IRS. This is absolutely not a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to their business practices, but of course the website proclaims that the whole thing is a sinister plot by the Obama administration to shut them up…

It’s worth noting that the IRS is reviewing the site’s finances for 2012, which is the single most interesting period of time they could investigate, as it’s the year Breitbart died in the middle of an important transition.

A proud C student, Breitbart made sure he was the smartest person in the room by hiring low-rent people who would eat from his hand. He was also an authoritarian whose hand guided everything. This became readily apparent shortly after he died in 2012, when the ‘Big’ sites were all suddenly changed to Breitbart.com without redirecting the old URLs, cutting off search engine and social media traffic to the old content.

This move had been poorly-planned before his death, and was poorly-executed afterwards. Not only was it a preview of mismanagement to come, my sources suggest the switch was made to avoid tax liabilities related to the way Andrew had avoided his contractual liabilities after 2006.

The Next Gen lawsuit is also interesting because it names Andrew’s wife as a co-defendant. He died intestate, having never bothered to give her any kind of legal cover, so she remains the responsible party to answer legal action against his estate. And his fortune might have been considerable in 2012: Andrew reportedly collected almost $10 million in venture capital funding from two big donors a few months before his death, but it’s not clear what happened to that money, and the organization has done everything possible to keep anyone from finding out…

***********
Much, much more at the link. Apart from enjoying the schadenfreude, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Risk adjustment and the Red Queen race

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The three R’s of Obamacare are Reinsurance, Risk Corridors and Risk Adjustment. These three steps are attempts to stabilize the individual on-Exchange marketplace by changing the incentive structure of insurance companies. Reinsurance and Risk Corrdidors are short term plans while Risk Adjustment is a long term program. We’ll talk a lot about Risk Adjustment today, but let’s go over the other two first.

Reinsurance is a back-end payment made by the federal government to insurers that have “shock” or “catastrophic” claims. For 2014, reinsurance was in play for claims between $45,000 and $250,000. The federal government would pick up 80% of the costs of these claims for a maximum federal exposure of $164,000. The average pay-out will be significantly less. Reinsurance is financed by a $63 per member year fee for people with major medical insurance. The goal of reinsurance is to remove some of the tail risk of big claims. 2015 will have a $44 reinsurance fee. 2016 has not been announced yet.

The goal of risk corridors is to create a three year window of forgiving rate estimation for insurers if one is not a cynical bastard. If one is a cynical bastard, the risk corridors create a three year window of loss leader membership building. In either case, it provides a transitional time frame for insurers to figure out what the Exchange population looks like while segmenting the market. Pricing for a given actuarially value, network scope and buggering thy neighbors in races to the bottom on sick people avoidance schemes, should converge into tight clusters. During that time, the Federal government takes on some of the downside of losses based on too optimistic actuarial assumptions while also taking on the upside of too pessimistic actuarial assumptions. If a company’s medical expenses are more than 3% but less than 8% (a 5% range) greater than expected, the Feds kicked in a 50% payment of the gap (up to 2.5%). Losses above 8% saw the Feds pick up 80% of the excessive loss. The converse is true on gains. The Feds would get a slice of the gains.

Federal reinsurance and PPACA risk corridors are temporary programs.  Risk adjustment is a long term program.

The basic goal of risk adjustment is to discourage insurance companies from cherry picking only healthy members. Risk adjustment uses claims history at the individual level to assess the projected medical risk (general health) of an insured population. Each insurer receives their own aggregate per member risk score, and then money is moved from low risk/healthy groups to high risk/sick groups to compensate the sicker groups for their increased risk of medical expenses in the upcoming year. Risk adjustment has been a feature of American healthcare for decades, and it is especially notable in Medicare Advantage as well as Medicaid managed care.

So how does this happen?

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Bright Lights, Small City

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This is super cool:

The 42,000 people living in Burlington, Vermont can now feel confident that when they turn on their TVs or power up their computers they are using renewable energy. With the purchase of the 7.4 megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric project earlier this month, the Burlington Electric Department now owns or contracts renewable sources — including wind, hydro, and biomass — equivalent to the city’s needs.

“We’re now in a position where we’re supplying Burlington residents with sources that are renewable,” said Ken Nolan, manager of power resources for Burlington Electric Department, earlier this month. “The prices are not tied to fossil fuels — they’re stable prices — and they provide us with the flexibility, from an environmental standpoint, to really react to any regulation or changes to environmental standards that come in the future.”

According to Nolan, the utility will get about one-third of its power from the Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station, one-third from wind energy contracts, and one-third from the hydroelectric stations Winooski One and Hydro-Québec. The McNeil power station is a biomass facility that primarily uses wood chips from logging residue leftover from the harvesting of wood for other products.

How about since the military itself (that’s Admiral Mike Mullen, not some candy-assed hippy dippy tree hugging freak, mind you- and here is a good .pdf download from the CNA corp’s militry advisory board) states that climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing global security, we slash the military budget by 2/3’s and invest it in renewable energy? That would be great, if for no other reason than allowing me to make it through an election cycle in West Virginia without being inundated by campaign ads with all the candidates fellating the coal industry. Ads like this:

That’s the DEMOCRAT who is about to lose to Shelley Moore Capito in the race to replace Senator Rockefeller, in part because her campaign has been as desultory and insulting to Democrats as Mike Oliverio’s back in 2010. Democrats around here have not yet learned that if you give the people a choice between a Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll choose the real Republican every time. As such, say hello to Rep. McKinley and soon to be Sen. Moore Capito.

At any rate, considering one of our national political parties completely lost their shit over energy saving light bulbs and removing phosphates from dish soap (phosphates that poisoned the waters of Lake Erie rendering Toledo without drinking water, btw) , I’m not going to hold my breath. Not to mention, we have a lot of brown people left to kill in the Middle East, and that costs money.

Can I get a “Fuck Yeah, ‘Murrika!”

*** Update ***

Apparently these communists are also all bent out of shape over a little change in the weather.

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The Tail End of the Appalachian Trail

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The Wonkinatrix over at Wonkette has all the juicy details about the Sanford divorce. Some lowlights:

    – That Mark was a deadbeat dad who was found in contempt of court for his refusal to make his court-ordered child support payments;

    – that the previously unexplained prohibition against Mark flying airplanes at children arose because “crazy cousin” John played “chicken” by flying an actual passenger airplane at the Sanford kids;

    – that Mark and his ex-wife’s primary concern, following the deaths of TWO kids who drowned at Coosaw Plantation, the Sanford family farm, was not about making the farm safer, but rather, protecting their financial assets in case any more kids died there;

    – Mark repeatedly offered to get back together with his ex, while he was still banging his Argentine lover.

    – Mark’s needless lie about legal representation.

I used to think he was just an asshole and she was insane, but I was wrong. They are both insane assholes, and if ever there was a match made in heaven, it was these two. They should try to settle their differences, because unless they both manage to marry into the Cheney or Palin clans, I doubt anyone will have anything to do with them romantically ever again.

I feel bad for their children and I feel bad for Maria Belen Chapur, who was blindsided by Sanford’s break-up via facebook. But hey- at least it wasn’t via text, amirite?

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