Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

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

Republicans do not trust women.

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

“Alexa, change the president.”

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Wait, what?

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

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Archives for 2014

Tell the DJ I just want to hear some rhythm and blues music

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I thought I’d do another radio music post, since the last one. I haven’t gone over to dark side of Sirius and Pandora and Spotify and Wait Wait Don’t Tell me and all that stuff, but I have to admit, I don’t listen to that much regular radio when I drive. I listen instead to a local totebag music radio show that I call “Acoustic Sunrise With Sean Regan”, although it has a different name that I can’t always remember, another totebag show from Louisiana, “American Routes”, and to old school weekend on the Rochester R&B station 103.9. I have my quibbles with all of them — too much Susan Tedeschi-type stuff on Acoustic Sunrise, my zydephobia kicks in sometimes with “American Routes”, and I’ve never been able to figure out what hours of the weekend are old school on 103.9. But I’ve heard a lot of great songs on all of them that I’d never heard before or hadn’t heard before in a long time and had forgotten.

What radio programs do you listen to? Bonus for local ones. And what’s your favorite forgotten song (something that was on regular radio once but has now mostly vanished)? To narrow it down, I’ll pick my favorite era, the 70s. I’ll go with these:

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Today in Police State Insanity

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How many large policemen does it take to subdue a 4’10” 75 lb sophomore in High School?

If you answered less than three, you just don’t understand appropriate force:

Perez, with her mom and her brother by her side, described the chain of events that led to the officers wrestling her to the floor.

She says her reading teacher caught her using her cell phone in class, which is against school rules, and told her to go to the hallway. That’s where Perez says she was confronted by an assistant principal who demanded she relinquish the phone. Students caught using phones in class are required to turn them over to school administrators and then retrieve them at the end of the school day, for a fee.

“I just didn’t want to give up my phone,” said Perez who said she was talking to her mom who suffers from medical conditions. Perez said she was trying to make sure her mom was OK.

“She asked me for the phone and I didn’t want to give it to her, because I was scared. I ended up walking down the stairs trying to get away from the AP (assistant principal) and then she had already called the cops.”

The HISD resource officers also demanded she hang up the phone and hand it to them. Perez admitted she refused again.

‘He grabbed my hand, one of them was right here, one grabbed my hand, I didn’t want to let go of my phone because I was on the phone with mom,” she said.

Perez was detained. Her mom says she was turned away when she rushed to the school to make sure her daughter was OK. And as of Wednesday morning Perez said school officials had not returned her cell phone, in lieu of a $15 fee she would need to pay.

On the upside, they didn’t tase her to death

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(West of) Boston Meet-Up, TOMORROW, 5pm

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Making an executive decision, here — since people didn’t like the idea of Solea, and the Spousal Unit thinks Donahue’s is the easiest for us to get to…

Where: Donahue’s, 87 Bigelow Avenue
Watertown, Massachusetts

When: Saturday, Sept. 13, 5pm – ???

Confirmed attendees, at the moment: Me, the Spousal Unit, commentor EFGoldman & Mrs. EFGoldman, visiting fireperson SiubhanDuinne from Atlanta.

Lurkers and guests, as always, welcome!

Leave a comment here if you think you can make it, or email me — click on my name in the right-hand column, or annelaurie (at) verizon (dot) net.

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Healthcare 2020

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Last week, I made a comment at the end of a post about my son and his first asthma attack:

A high first dollar health plan (which is where the entire US system is going)

Very valued and insightful commenter JL asked a very good set of questions about my thoughts on the intermediate future of US healthcare:

” A high first dollar health plan (which is where the entire US system is going) ”
I did not realize that RM’s diagnosis of the overall direction of the US healthcare system was so grim.
Why, oh why, does the US insist on continuing this 30+ year failed experiment? It has been 30 years since Mark Pauly basically drew an X on a piece of paper and asserted that all markets were the same and like minded economists acted like, and even asserted explicitly that the market for health care was the same as the market for ice cream, and if you interfere with perfectly informed consumer decisions, its just a subsidy that will result in people consuming too much care, just as they would eat too much ice cream if the price were kept artificially low.

The thoughts below are 30% technical judgments which I believe I have some particular knowledge and insight on, and 70% political judgment where I know that I am just someone on a blog and my judgment/insight/foresight is no better than societal norm.

My basic thought pattern on this is informed by this quote on American policy making:

You can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility.

We still have a lot of dumb decisions with very deeply entrenched stakeholders left to buy-out before we can have a fully somewhat rational healthcare system.

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Late Night Open Thread “With Little More Than… “

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Where are the godsdamned tumbrils?

From the NYObserver article:

PolicyMic had over 1 million uniques a month by July 2012, according to internal company metrics. As successful as the model was in bringing in content and readers—particularly young 20-somethings who were used to discussing political issues on Facebook rather than reading The New York Times—it did not ensure quality, a gap that was highlighted when PolicyMic invited contributors to apply for writing fellowships and realized that none had the chops to make it as writers.

Without a consistent voice and with big-name media including BuzzFeed and Gawker ramping up their own contributor models, PolicyMic struggled to gain traction as a brand. By 2013, the founders decided to pivot away from the contributor model and hire writers to report and repackage news of interest to millennials, a lucrative demographic that has become the brand’s defining characteristic.

“Our value proposition is we understand smart millennials, we can help reach them on a deeper level,” he told the Observer over watermelon lemonade coolers at a Le Pain Quotidien near the former Mic offices (they left Midtown for hipper Hudson Street last month). In multiple conversations, the Mic team was quick to cite the spending powers of the 80 million millennials, half of whom are college-educated and most of whom are addicted to smartphones.

In March, the start-up raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding, led by Netscape’s Jim Clark. Venture capital firms like Lightspeed Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Red Swan, the Knight Foundation and Digital News Ventures again invested, bringing the total funding to $15 million since launch.

Following the most recent cash infusion, the company dropped the ‘Policy’ from its name. Rebranded the snappier Mic, the site got a bold, approachable new look along with verticals such as sports, culture and gender identity…

“While I don’t buy a lot of arguments made about millennials vis-a-vis our purported apathy, entitlement, and so on, it’s common sense that we know a different set of facts about the world than our parents do,” Identities section founding editor Samantha Meier, Harvard ’12, said in an email (she left in December for The Public Goods Project). “We’ve only been alive for so long.”…

Why does the NYObserver find these people so meaningful, and also charming? Here is the publisher’s Wikipedia entry:

Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American businessman and investor. He is the principal owner of Kushner Properties, his family’s real estate holding and development company, and The New York Observer, a newspaper publishing company which he purchased in 2005. He is the son of American real estate magnate Charles Kushner and is married to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of American business magnate Donald Trump…

At least the robber barons of the original Gilded Age left behind some pretty mansions. This crew, not so much.

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Other Sports Open Thread

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If you’ve seen Rescue Me, you’ve seen the clans I grew up among. I have just enough lace-curtain striver in me to be extra-extra-super-glad certain people never made it to the Naval Observatory, even if we’ll never get them out of the public eye. Via Raw Story, here’s Alaskan political blogger Amanda Coyne:

… The details are a little sketchy, but there’s enough of them, from enough different sources, that a story emerges, a story that according to the gossip Gods, looks kind of like this: There’s some sort of unofficial birthday/Iron Dog-type/snowmachine party in Anchorage. A nice, mellow party, until the Palin’s show up. There’s beer, of course, and maybe other things. Which is all fine, but just about the time when some people might have had one too many, a Track Palin stumbles out of a stretch Hummer, and immediately spots an ex-boyfriend of Willow’s. Track isn’t happy with this guy, the story goes. There’s words, and more. The owner of the house gets involved, and he probably wished he hadn’t. At this point, he’s up against nearly the whole Palin tribe: Palin women screaming. Palin men thumping their chests. Word is that Bristol has a particularly strong right hook, which she employed repeatedly, and it’s something to hear when Sarah screams, “Don’t you know who I am!”… As people were leaving in a cab, Track was seen on the street, shirtless, flipping people off, with Sarah right behind him, and Todd somewhere in the foreground, tending to his bloody nose…

It’s probably some familial consolation that they still have stalkers…

ETA: Update from Amanda Coyne:

I wrote about the Saturday-night Palin family brawl in my Loose Lips column—my version of a gossip column–hoping that some other news source, preferably a local news source, would pick it up, and run with it. I’m a one-woman show here. I’m the writer, the editor, and the business manager, and I’m trying to cover the state’s political races. As I write this, I’m at a health care conference in Girdwood, trying to learn as much as I can about why healthcare costs are so astronomically high in Alaska, when they have appeared to be declining elsewhere. (Expect a post on that later)…

Executive director of the Iron Dog, Kevin Kastner, wants people to know that this was in no way an Iron Dog party, though some Iron Dog racers may have been there.


Not all professional snowmachine racers!…

ETAA: Via Crooks & Liars, Patrick at Politicalgates is all over it:

… It was the birthday party for former Iron Dog winner Marc McKenna, the party for his 40th birthday. However, the party did not take place at his house, but at the house of another couple who hosted the birthday party for him in Anchorage… There were about 100 people at the party.

Marc McKenna invited Sarah and Todd, but not the rest of the family, so he was quite surprised when the whole gang showed up.

Another thing which we have to correct is the claim that Tripp witnessed the fight. The truth is that Tripp was in the limousine outside the house, apparently asleep, while the brawl happened. When the fight started outside of the house, the limo driver then drove down the block with Tripp, so that Tripp did not have to see the ugly scenes which were unfolding…

See, that’s high-class, caring parenting right there — always get the littlies well out of range once the punches start flying. It seems to have been Todd’s birthday as well — happy b’day, daddy, from your darling daughters…

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