Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

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

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

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

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Republicans in disarray!

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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Isn’t It Enough You Aren’t In Jail?

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Like the Wall Street brokers who trashed the country with their recklessness but still demanded we be in awe of them and respect their feelings, it seems that police want the right to murder with impunity and still be worshiped by polite society. Anything less, and the whining begins in earnest:

The president of the police union in Cleveland, Ohio, said over the weekend the “Justice for Tamir Rice” shirt worn by football player Andrew Hawkins was “pathetic.”

Hawkins, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, dressed in a shirt that read, “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” on the front, and “The Real Battle for Ohio” on the back, during pre-game warm-ups on Sunday. Twelve-year-old Rice was shot by police outside of a recreation center in Cleveland on Nov. 22 for holding what was later determined to be a toy “airsoft” gun. Crawford, 22, was fatally shot by police for carrying a toy gun inside an Ohio Wal-Mart in August.

Jeff Follmer, president of the Cleveland police union, reportedly said that Hawkins’ shirt was disrespectful, and demanded an apology from the football team.

“It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology,” Follmer wrote to a local ABC News affiliate. The police union didn’t immediately respond to msnbc’s request for comment.

The Browns responded, saying that management respects both the Cleveland Police Department and NFL players’ rights to support certain causes.

This loudmouth meathead is speaking on behalf of the very same Cleveland Police Department that gunned down a 12 year old and was cited by the Justice Department for being an insane clown posse with actual circular firing squads of innocent people, among multiple other crimes and transgressions too numerous to count.

Meanwhile in NYC, New York’s “Finest” continues their wankfest/whinefest, with Patrick Lynch, still feeling misty eyed about the cold shoulder people are giving cops after they were caught on tape murdering Eric Garner, has decided to up the cop douchebaggery a notch:

New York City’s police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, is urging its members to ban Mayor Bill de Blasio from their funerals, the latest episode in the ongoing clash between the mayor and the city’s law-enforcement power structure.

Officers are encouraged to fill out a form on the union’s website titled “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” to request that neither de Blasio nor Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito attend their funeral, should they be killed in the line of duty.

The form reads:

I, _____________________, as a New York City police officer, request that Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito refrain from attending my funeral services in the event that I am killed in the line of duty. Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice.

For months, PBA President Patrick Lynch has complained about what he views as insufficient support from the mayor, particularly after the July 17 death of Eric Garner, who died after NYPD officers put him in a chokehold. In the wake of the incident, de Blasio recounted telling his 17-year-old biracial son, Dante, about the need to be careful around police officers. Lynch accused de Blasio of “stirring the emotions of the street” and throwing officers “under the bus.”

Man, fuck these guys. Just do your goddamned job and stop killing innocent people. How fucking hard is that? And spare me the bullshit about how dangerous your job is:

In 2013, out of 900,000 sworn officers, just 100 died from a job-related injury. That’s about 11.1 per 100,000, or a rate of 0.01%.

Policing doesn’t even make it into the top 10 most dangerous American professions. Logging has a fatality rate 11 times higher, at 127.8 per 100,000. Fishing: 117 per 100,000. Pilot/flight engineer: 53.4 per 100,000. It’s twice as dangerous to be a truck driver as a cop—at 22.1 per 100,000.

Another point to bear in mind is that not all officer fatalities are homicides. Out of the 100 deaths in 2013, 31 were shot, 11 were struck by a vehicle, 2 were stabbed, and 1 died in a “bomb-related incident.” Other causes of death were: aircraft accident (1), automobile accident (28), motorcycle accident (4), falling (6), drowning (2), electrocution (1), and job-related illness (13).

Even assuming that half these deaths were homicides, policing would have a murder rate of 5.55 per 100,000, comparable to the average murder rate of U.S. cities: 5.6 per 100,000. It’s more dangerous to live in Baltimore (35.01 murders per 100,000 residents) than to be a cop in 2014.

Oddly enough, when loggers, fishermen, pilots, roofers, and garbage collectors commit murder, we arrest and prosecute them, and they don’t take to the media demanding a tongue bath from the public and the mayor. So just stfu. I’m sick of it.

This whining is enough to make you want to write a song.

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“Uncle Joe” Biden Is A Joker, But He’s Serious About Violence Against Women

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So, in the midst of all the horrible news last week, the usual outlets were yukking it up about some speech by Joe “I’ll kill your son” Biden. And that was a true quote!

But there was more to the speech, and NYMag has a full transcript:

… Look, let me just say it straight: violence against women is a stain on the moral character of a society, in any society in which it occurs. It’s an obligation of all societies, particularly the men in society, to stand up and do all in their power eradicate that stain. And it is a stain on the conscience of a country. This is an issue, that has been made repeatedly tonight, of basic human rights.

My dad said it differently. He said, ‘Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity.’ That was my dad’s favorite word, the one we heard most often. We should be attacking this virus, this stain, with a profound sense of urgency. Urgency. For as I speak, there are thousands of women around the world being brutalized. Mutilated. Killed at the hands of those who allegedly love them and care about them…

This notion that women are chattels is a central part of our culture, inherited from our Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but also in many other cultures, and our law. I asked my staff, when I started to write the law, two men and four brilliant women, one of whom is here today, and went on to be a distinguished professor of law for ten or twelve years, I asked her to come back and be my council. And I asked them to go out and do a survey of the laws on the books in the states to determine where and whether or not, this implicit bias that somehow it’s the woman’s fault, somehow it’s a man’s right, are written in the laws.

They wrote a paper, and I’m happy to send it to any of you who are interested, because you may be. It’s over 23 years old. We listed in almost every state in the nation, the application of law was different. In the State of Delaware, my home state, if you consented to go out with me, if you were a voluntary partner, no matter what I did to you, no matter how brutally I raped you, I could not be convicted of first-degree rape. If I jumped out of an alley and brutally raped you, I could be convicted of first-degree rape.

Think of the premise: you must have done something. You must have somehow, inexplicably consented somehow, to something. I could not be convicted of first-degree rape…

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Glibertarian Uber Alles

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Ride share service/tech darling/social media punching bag Uber got into trouble again during the early stages of the Sydney hostage crisis by jacking up fares to 4x base rate, and Matt Yglesias reminds us that this is a feature of Uber, not a bug and wants to know what the big deal is.

Uber’s stubborn refusal to conform in this regard is, in a way, admirable since it gives us all something to talk and think about. Can they make it work?

One possible solution would be to copy the major consumer-facing industries that do impose variable pricing — hotels and airlines. The way these companies generally manage to get away with it is through a massive lack of transparency. You can’t look up “the price” of a United flight from Newark to Chicago, and then see whether the price at any particular time reflects a surge multiple of the base or not. You need to go online, try to book a flight, and then just see what they want to charge. Hotels operate the same way.

In both cases, the actual price-determining formulae are much more complicated than Uber’s surge multiples. Consumers don’t exactly love these industries, but by making it unclear when prices have spiked, airlines manage to get away without storms of social media outrage over spiking prices.

Many retailers accomplish something similar by making the “official” price ridiculously high, and then offering various discounts. At JC Penny, the question is whether your shirt will be 25 percent off or just 15 percent off, a non-transparent framing of surge pricing that people seem to like better.

So really, Uber’s problem is that their just too transparent in their desire to charge whatever the market will allow. Hell, Yggy loves this idea so much he wants to see it elsewhere.

Popular hatred of demand-responsive pricing is in many ways a huge challenge for transportation policy. That’s because most wonky analysts think the government should be acting more like Uber, while most people seem to want the government to force Uber to stop acting like Uber.

Rather than under-pricing street parking and leading to constant shortages and fights,cities should be charging market rates for scarce space. This would both make it easier to find parking, and generate a big new stream of revenue that could be used to boost incomes (through lower sales taxes) or increase public service levels. Similarly, traffic jams could be made a thing of the past through congestion pricing on roads. Here, again, demand-responsive pricing would not only help address a specific problem, but unleash a gusher of useful revenue.

These are good ideas and well-known in the policy community, but they’re rarely implemented. That’s presumably for the same reason it’s hard, but not necessarily expensive, to get a table at a popular restaurant on the weekend — politicians fear the public backlash.

Alas, if only we consumers were all smart enough to see how awesome Uber’s model is, and how the relentless pursuit of profit is in fact awesome for everybody here on planet Earth Fereginar.   Look, the only thing people seem to hate more than Uber is government acting like Uber, and deservedly so. Once government becomes surge pricing and rent seeking all day all of the time, it’s no longer government, it’s tragicomic bureaucracy.  The backlash might even be justified when people figure out that having to fork over “congestion pricing” or take the long way home is just another regressive scheme to stick it to those damn poors.

Besides, if Uber’s the best model, won’t the markets decide?  Man, this is silly glibertarian nonsense, even for Team Vox.  Hell, let’s have surge pricing on everything: water, pork chop sandwiches, thinkpieces, everything.

It’ll be great cause it’s transparent, wheeeeeeeee!

 

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Continuing the VP Update

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We’ve already checked in with has been – how about the never was?

The Sarah Palin Channel is conducting a fascinating investigation into just how little content it can publish without losing subscribers. Palin has published fewer than 22 minutes of video this month, and even that abysmally small number is inflated. For example, Palin’s post on December 4th is three minutes and 26 seconds long, but the final 1:20 is a SarahPAC video posted to YouTube more than three years ago. The longest video she’s posted this month was her Hunger Games-inspired Ask Me Anything (runtime: 6:44), which, by definition, is just Palin giving off-the-cuff responses to her fans’ questions. And the only piece of content she’s published in the last seven days is a 97-second-long video titled “The Never Resolved Debt Crisis,” that was shot in 2013; this is spun as “never-before-seen” content, rather than a boring bowl of word salad that should have been left in the garbage where it was originally dumped.

I know a few people who vote Republican, but I don’t know anyone who would pay $9.95 a month to subscribe to the Sarah Palin channel. Who are these people? Has anyone here ever met one?

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Good news in Tennessee

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I have to admit, I was a bit too dour and pessimmistic in evaluating the probability of Republican dominated states expanding Medicaid in 2015.  I figured it might be just the Mountain West submitting applications for program starts on either July 1, 2014 or January 1, 2015, but I was wrong.  Tennessee is submitting a waiver to their legislature for approval to expand Medicaid.  And given the circumstances, it looks to be a fairly reasonable waiver application.

The first part is very similar to Utah’s premium support model for people who work at places with employer sponsored coverage but can’t afford it:

Tennesseans 21 to 64 years old will be offered a choice of the Healthy Incentives Plan or the Volunteer Plan.

The Volunteer Plan would provide a health insurance voucher to participants that would be used to participate in their employer’s health insurance plan.

This is reasonable.  The second portion is a modification of the Healthy Indiana’s HSA model that has not yet been waivered:

Participants in the Healthy Incentives Plan may choose to receive coverage through a redesigned component of the TennCare program, which would introduce Healthy Incentives for Tennesseans accounts, modeled after Health Reimbursement Accounts, which can be used to pay for a portion of required member cost-sharing.

I have not seen the actual waiver language as it has not been written yet.  However if this is a deal in principle that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has signed off on, then the probable cost sharing maximums will be split into two groups.  For people who make between 100% and 138% FPL, maximum cost sharing will be roughly the equivilent of cost-sharing Silver maximums, so they’ll be seeing 94% or 95% acturial value coverage.  For people who make under 100% FPL and would not otherwise have qualified for Tennessee Medicaid, maximum cost sharing is probably under $300 per year if we use Utah as a benchmark for what CMS will approve.

This program should cover 150,000 more people.

So this is a good day for Tennessee and human decency.

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Laugh and think, this is Australia (Open Thread)

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Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald has a very good article on yesterday’s reaction in Australia to the cafe siege.

When I chanced to walk through Martin Place a little after 11am on Monday, I saw the police clustered closely around the Lindt Cafe. I saw the police cordon as I stood among some hundreds of onlookers.

The police evidently had the situation in hand. The crowd was curious, but might as well have been watching a busker for all the tension in the air. Some onlookers snapped photos. Some left as others arrived. The scene was perfectly calm.

It was only when I turned on the TV an hour or so later that I realised the magnitude of our dimwittedness. We were supposed to be terrified.

The Prime Minister led in shaping our responses. He called a press conference but had no information to offer on the incident except that he had held a meeting to discuss it. He took only one question, to explain that he had no details but that the NSW police did.

“We don’t yet know the motivation of the perpetrator,” he said, then freely speculated that he was politically motivated. It was “very disturbing”.

Indeed, the police operation seemed to me (from my vantage point locked in a building five blocks away) to be exemplary – buildings evacuated, police lines erected, negotiators brought in, calm officers on the television (notably, the exceptional Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn) telling everyone to stay calm and get on with their day, a “steady as she goes, freeing the hostages is our number one priority” press conference to end the day, all with remarkable efficiency.

Even the media did a decent job, even if, by mid afternoon, they had run out of people who might have been in Martin Place if they hadn’t missed their bus to interview, and had moved on to showing news stories about who was reporting what. By 7pm, when I got home, they had all been talking for so long that speech had descended into verbal soup. I swear I heard one newsreader (I’m looking at you ABC24) speak a single sentence that managed to mention international news coverage of the incident, the plight of the hostages, hashtags trending on the internet, ISIS flags, how muslims were mostly nice people who thought terrorism was bad, and Barack Obama’s senior security advisor in no more than thirty words. It was very impressive, but terrifying, so I turned it off and watched Martin and Saga find more dead bodies instead.

By tomorrow morning, most of the media will have started removing their pants in order to inspect each other’s fundaments. Yes, sometime tomorrow some dickhead will say something stupid about jihad, or an even bigger (or perhaps just younger) dickhead will make a big man of himself by making fun of some woman threatening society by doing her shopping in a hijab, and a feeding frenzy will begin. There will be hashtags and counterhashtags and burka videos, for and against. Someone will let Jackie Lambie out of whatever box they had her stashed in today and she will say something dumb and racist. Politicians will have serious press conferences to tell us that terrorism is a terrible thing, and how the answer is another filter or letting Scott Morrison poke brown people with a pointy stick.

The idiot with a gun will get, as Mr Hartcher describes it, the overreaction that is the measure of his success.

Hopefully, God (or more likely the skills of those police negotiators) willing, somewhere amongst all that lot, the hostages will walk out to safety.

Whatever happens, the thing that stands out for me is how today was, as Mr.Trowel described it, “quiet and much like any other day” in my office and, I suspect, thousands of other offices and shops throughout Sydney.

After the flurry of texts and calls to friends and loved one had died away, everyone got on with their day. People wandered into to other people’s offices, just to check they were ok, or took breaks together to find out what was happening. Coffee runs were made. The Partners’ lunch stretched to “everyone grab a plate and one piece of bread only”. I had meetings with a couple of very clever young women, and at about 3pm, when the building reopened, most people quietly went home.

I’m not suggesting that being calm in a serious situation is some special Australian trait.

Whether it’s planes flying into buildings, or tsunamis, or bombs on trains and buses, or just a broken gas main, people, on the whole, just buckle down and get on with it, save what they can, offer what comfort they can, and go home for a drink.

Tomorrow, come good or bad news, the media and political circus begins in earnest.

If only we could just leave them to it – get on with our day, be nice to each other, comfort those who need our comfort, and go home for a drink instead.

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