Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

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

This blog will pay for itself.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

White supremacy is terrorism.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The National Guard is not Batman.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

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

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

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Archives for 2014

Open Thread

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Sitting in a Tim Horton’s while my car windows are tinted. I decided to get them done since I wear regular eyeglasses and no longer wear sunglasses, and the glare is just really bad on my eyes and I don’t think I am able to drive as safely as I would like to because of it.

At any rate, apparently in WV there are a number of arcane rules regarding how much tint you are able to have. According to the tinter (is that what you call them?), 39 is the darkest you can go to pass the annual inspection. It won’t be a problem if you get pulled over, but they are a real stickler at inspections. Since “39” meant nothing to me, I had him show me, and I pointed at a car and asked if that was 39 (because it was just WAY to dark and if that was 39, I wanted less). He told me no, that that was a 20 and it was factory stock. At this point I am now completely confused and asked him why they were allowed to have 20 but I am only allowed to have 39 (even thought I don’t want 20, but the rules were confusing me)- if my car had been tinted at the factory, would 20 be legal?

It turns out that SUV’s are allowed to have their windows tinted darker than cars (for reasons I didn’t get in to with the guy because he was starting to get that look my grade school teachers used to get when I was in question mode). I finally saw a 39, and that seemed fine and not too dark, when really what I am most concerned with is getting rid of glare.

It makes no sense though about the SUV/Car differences, because the reason I would want something as dark as a 20 on my rear window is because of the damned SUV headlights behind me blinding me at night. At any rate, another day in the life of Cole.

Oh, and I have no idea what the appeal of Tim Horton’s is- their soup is awful and the coffee is only marginally better than Starbucks (which I think is dreadful- why do they burn all their beans?), but the wifi is pretty decent, so there is that. There is a loud man sitting two tables over who seems to think he is the only one in the establishment, as he is loudly having business conversations on his phone. I’m debating if I should start responding to him as if I was on the other end of the phone call just to see what he would do. This is another odd quirk of mine- I hate people using their cellphones in public places for extended conversations. IF I am in the grocery or somewhere and someone calls me, I respond to the question or whatever, and then immediately tell them I am in public and will call them back later at a more appropriate time. I guess I am just weird.

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White People, Ferguson, And The Offensiveness of ‘Ma’am’

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Last week Elon and Crystal Wright, of “Conservative Black Chick” fame, went on CNN’s Reliable Sources to talk about race and perception in Ferguson.  Not surprisingly, Wright proceeded to talk over both host Brian Stelter and White, use such popular broken tropes to support the lack of indictment like black on black crime, and virulently object to being referred to as “ma’am.”

We’re just glad there are people out there like Wright so racist white people can sleep well knowing there’s a black person out there that shares their views.

Team Blackness also discussed Ferguson protestors being in the running for Time person of the year and the backlash to several St. Louis Rams players putting their hands up to show their support for the Ferguson protests.

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Because I Love You

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Working on a bunch of stuff, so almost no time to blog, but in eavesdropping on a Twitter conversation about the various awesomenesses of the Scots, combined with the lethal power of bagpipes, I came across this:

You can thank me later.
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In any event, it seems to me we could use — certainly I can — a daily leaven of the absurd to help confront the weight of all the stupid/evil that so dominates the rap, Jack, these days.
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The thread’s most indeed open, but if anyone wanted to list favorite lethal song morphs, I wouldn’t mind.
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(PS — tagged this “music.” Not sure if I should have.)

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217-60-1-5

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Those were the critical numbers for the Affordable Care Act to assemble a minimal winning coalition in 2010.

The actual winning coalition was 219-60-1-5 on everything except mandatory Medicaid expansion.

I am of the opinion that Nancy Pelosi probably had a few extra votes in her back pocket if she needed them, but this is pure specualtion that caps the spare votes out at five or six votes.  I am of the opinion that President Obama would be willing to sign something significantly more liberal.  That leads the binding constraints on a changed PPACA minimal winning coalition to be both the Senate as any defector from the aye to the nays could kill the bill, or Chief Justice Roberts.

When I think of PPACA within this framework, my analysis quickly leads me to assume that there were very few tweaks that could have been passed with a sufficient minimal winning coalition that were not already included in the bill.  So when I see Senator Harkin say the following, I want to pull my hair out:

He wonders in hindsight whether the law was made overly complicated to satisfy the political concerns of a few Democratic centrists who have since left Congress.

“We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,” Harkin told The Hill. “So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.

“What we did is we muddle through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively,” he added….

“We had the votes in ’09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate,” he said.

He believes Congress should have enacted “single-payer right from the get go or at least put a public option would have simplified a lot.”

“We had the votes to do that and we blew it,” he said.

There were never the votes for Medicare for All in 2009 if we assume the minimal winning coalition is 217-60-1-5.  I agree with Senator Harkin that it would have been better, more efficient and much smoother implementation to go for Medicare for All.  However, as we saw with the proposal to drop the Medicare buy-in age to 55, there were multiple  veto players (Sen. Lieberman of CT) who were not even willing to extend a successful single payer system at all to a logical target population.

The choice was not Single Payer or PPACA in 2010, the minimal winning coalition for PPACA included multiple veto players who would have vetoed Single Payer in the Senate and the House.  The choice was PPACA or something extremely close to PPACA (you can convince me about a tweak here or there plus drafting fixes would have passed with the same coalition) versus nothing.  And since we only had PPACA instead of a fine tooth combed revised PPACA, the actual choice was PPACA or nothing given the minimal winning coalition built.

Is PPACA perfect.  Fuck no.  Is it a massive improvement over the status quo.  Fuck yeah.

Was single payer a passable option in 2010 — fuck no.  So let’s take a good win when we can and celebrate it.

 

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Baby Einstein

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Here’s one to add to the grifter file:

Greater Works Charter School will no longer open in Rochester in 2015, part of the continuing fallout over lies in the resume of its 22-year-old founder.

Ted Morris Jr. represented himself to the New York State Education Department as a precocious businessman and educational advisor with bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees earned mostly online. In fact, he has no college degrees and scant professional experience.

He resigned Nov. 25, the day most of the misrepresentations came to light and just a week after the school gained approval from the state Board of Regents. […]

For such a young man, “Dr.” Ted is sure a very prodigious liar, since he he inflated his role as administrative assistant at a non-profit into CEO status, and also claimed a different alma mater in a previous filing with the state. No matter: Ted’s little grift was one of the few chosen by the state for funding:

In the fall 2014 charter approval cycle, 51 organizations submitted letters of intent, 17 were invited to submit full proposals, and only four, including Greater Works, were approved, according to the state education department.

In other words, 34 applications were written out in Crayola on Big Chief tablets, or scribbled on the back of 7-11 receipts. 17 of them used full sentences at the 8th grade reading level, and were invited to put pen to paper for a handwritten note to the state. 1 of the 4 that made it through that arduous process was “Dr” Ted’s. No wonder every charlatan, quack and ne’er-do-well wants to open a charter school.

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State Of The Disunion

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Steve Benen notes that Republicans may look to punish President Obama by refusing to let him come before Congress in next year’s State of the Union address. It’s petty, it’s obnoxious, it’s childish, in short, it’s perfect for today’s GOP.

Proponents of this idea tend to note that Congress isn’t required to welcome a sitting president onto the House floor to deliver an annual national address. That’s true. According to the Constitution, the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union.” For much of American history, this led the White House to deliver a written report to lawmakers.

But with the advent of radio and television, nearly every president since Woodrow Wilson has taken advantage of the national platform a State of the Union address provides.

And now there’s a push to deny President Obama that opportunity in early 2015, all because conservatives are unhappy about the administration governing on immigration policy.

I continue to believe Republican leaders won’t go this far. In fact, if they did, the backlash would probably be pretty brutal – imagine the message it would send to the nation and the world if a far-right Republican Party, for the first time in American history, refused to allow the first African-American president to deliver a State of the Union address from the House floor, all as part of an extended tantrum over immigration.

In 1999, a Republican Congress welcomed President Clinton to deliver a SOTU even after he’d literally been impeached, despite the fact that the GOP-led Senate was still weighing whether to remove the sitting president from office. They let Clinton speak a month after impeachment, but they’ll block Obama? Please.

Here’s my question for Benen: after six years of hideous, awful racist behavior, ranging from yelling “YOU LIE!” at a previous SOTU address to openly questioning the place of his birth to sitting party officials sending out photoshopped pictures of the President as a witch doctor to calling him a traitor over, well, just about everything, what inside Steve Benen’s head indicates that there will be any backlash whatsoever to the GOP telling President Obama to go screw himself rather than be allowed to speak?  We gave the Republicans control of Congress anyway.

These assholes shut the government down a year ago and have regularly threatened to do everything from impeach the guy to taking away health insurance from millions just be be a bunch of spiteful harpies. What the country thinks of treating the nation’s first African-American president like subhuman scum was made painfully apparent a month ago by two-thirds of America not giving enough of a damn to even vote, and a majority of those who did vote rewarding the Republicans for doing it.

There is nothing foul enough that Republicans can do to or say about President Obama that voters will ever punish them for and they know this.  In fact, we’ve proven time and again that voters will blame Obama for his own treatment and instead give the Republicans more power and influence over our country at all levels of government in order to specifically allow the GOP to take increasingly outrageous action against the man and his positions.

Hell, if the GOP canceled the State of the Union address, the majority of America would approve.  It’s not like we’d actually listen to what he has to say anyway, right?  We don’t give a damn in this country anymore about the state of this goddamn union, and last month’s election made that fact indelibly clear.

Benen may very well be correct that the Republicans may not follow through on this little Mean Girls burn book plan of theirs, but man you are completely kidding yourself if you think for a picosecond that “fear of a brutal backlash” has anything to do with their calculations.  America tuned out GOP tantrum-throwing long ago and just decided that it was all Obama’s fault anyway, and if he’d just go away the Republicans will stop crapping on the carpet every 35 minutes and we could get back to work here in America, right?

Even completely melting down our economy bought the Democrats all of two years in charge, and Obama was under 50% approval by December of 2009.  Let’s not kid ourselves more than we have to in order to get through the day without having to drink before noon here.

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Not being stupid is smart

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I am actually fairly optimistic about long term health care spending in this country declining while quality is also improving for one simple reason.  The baseline of stupid, counter-productive, non-coordinated, mistake prone folk practice is so high that we are at least five or six reform iterations  away from needing innovative ideas or genius level work to get gains.  There are a lot of areas where not being stupid or visibly counter-productive would produce very large improvements in quality and cost.  Aligning incentives, rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behaviors on the payer and provider side of the equation will carry us through the next couple rounds of reform.  Those rounds won’t be universal improvements, but the weight of change has to be positive.

PPACA is attempting to align incentives correctly on the idea that hospitals should be places where people get better instead of worse.  It is an amazing idea.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has been penalizing hospitals that have high readmission rates.  CMS has also teamed up with hospitals that serve most of the patients in this country to share best practices on reducing infections and “never” events.  Hospitals get paid more if they do good work, and get paid less if they create lots of preventable problems.  This is not ground-shaking policy theory here.

Vox has some details on early results of these programs:

The number of patients who had a hospital-acquired condition — anything from an infection of a surgical site or a fall during recovery — fell by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013. That translates to 1.3 million fewer harmful incidents than if the 2010 rate had held constant and 50,000 fewer patients death. The declines span all different types of care. Surgical infections fell by 19 percent. Pressure ulcers (which patients often develop spending days lying in bed) declined by 20 percent…

This decline in hospital-acquired conditions has coincided with a similar drop in hospital readmissions: cases where patients come back to the hospital after something was screwed up the first time. Hospital readmissions began to fall in 2012 after holding constant for years, a change that the Obama administration estimates has saved 15,000 lives

This is a big Biden deal.  We are eliminating some of the stupidity, some of the counter-productiveness, some of the human suffering from our healthcare system and saving significant money at the same time.  This is a double win on quality and costs.  And it is not limited to only Medicare as most of the time best practices are universal best practices among a particular patient pool, so someone on a commercial insurance plan who is hospitalized will now benefit from better central line administration procedures that came from CMS kicking hospitals in the ass.

The day to day politics can be depressing as hell, but the basic scope of potential change is so large and the powerful levels of change are lying about being asked to be used, that I am still reasonably optimistic about the next half a generation that we as a society can cover more people and do so better at far lower costs than business as pre-2009 usual would have projected.

 

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