Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

When we show up, we win.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Stand up, dammit!

You cannot shame the shameless.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

This blog will pay for itself.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

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And a Good Riddance

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Not a very surprising development:

Michael G. Grimm, the Republican Party’s lone congressional representative in New York City, announced late Monday night that he would resign effective Jan. 5, two weeks after he pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion.

The decision to call it quits by Mr. Grimm, of Staten Island — perhaps best known for threatening to break a reporter in half and throw him off a Capitol Hill balcony — came after a conversation on Monday with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, which a person close to the speaker confirmed. In a statement released by Mr. Grimm’s office just before midnight, he said, “I do not believe that I can continue to be 100 percent effective in the next Congress, and therefore, out of respect for the Office and the people I so proudly represent, it is time for me to start the next chapter of my life.”

Mr. Boehner appears to have done what a midterm election, constant ridicule in the news media and a guilty plea in federal court in Brooklyn could not: persuade Mr. Grimm to go away.

I’m not sure how much convincing Boehner had to do, because Grimm is about to face a judge and plead for his freedom, and it is kind of hard to go before a judge and pretend to be contrite while being a macho asshole for everyone else declaring that even God himself won’t make you resign. Again, IANAL, but I would think that his defense team explained to him that this was an either/or proposition- you can keep your freedom, or you can keep your seat, but the odds of you keeping both are pretty slim.

At any rate, Staten Island, which is basically NYC’s version of Alabama, will no doubt vote in another sociopath who will vote against their interest.

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Applying a bronzer

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Planet Pundit asked a good question about the effect of creating a baseline Bronze for everyone to get into with the option to buy-up:

 the impact of moving all 18-64 year old adults over to a Medicare “Bronze” Plan and letting everyone who cared to carry, themselves or their employer paying for, Platinum-Gold-Silver Plan?

In a rational, political world where there was a broad agreement that health insurance was a general public good, this would be a good idea, and it would be a rip-off of several European systems where the state provides or pays for a minimal floor of coverage and people can buy up if they choose to do so.  It would cost money and it would be an expansion of Medicare plus it would be multiple layers of additional administrative complexity for billing as most claims would have a primary payer of Medicare for Everyone as the base 60% and then a Medicare-E supplmental policy, but providers are already used to the two tiered billing structure in Medicare, so it would be doable.

A slightly different twist on this proposal would be creating Medicare Bronze as the default coverage for people who otherwise did not sign up for coverage during either Open Enrollment or a special enrollment period and did not qualify for any other coverage (CHIP, Medicaid, employer coverage etc).   Avik Roy and other conservative health care reform proposals have similiar minimal catastrophic coverage default options built into those plans.  They propose a lower acturial value for the default coverage as they think the problem with American health care is Americans have it too easy, but at that point, it is a technocratic argument over which dial to twist and how far.  These proposals would use the funds that would otherwise have gone to pay for premium assistance and cost sharing assistance subsidies if the person applied for coverage and used those funds to pay for catastrophic coverage as a default.  It would not be great coverage, but it would be hit by a bus/congrats you have cancer coverage.

Either idea relies on a broad agreement that basic health care should not be a fear and bankruptcy inducing event, and that society has a broad and general interest in keeping as many of its members reasonably healthy.  If we have that agreement, than it is a matter of figuring out what to cover, how to pay for it, and what needs to be taxed in order to pay.  Some people would want skimpier coverage and broad based consumption taxes to finance private insurance Tin plans, while others would want Bronze plans run by Medicare paid for by higher income taxes.

However, we live in a world where a significant chunk of the political elite either believes that health care is a common market good (and disregard Ken Arrow), is a viable means of social control through fear, functional sociopaths or act as if they believe one of three preceeding statements.  Right now, that group has control over the entire legislative process, so good ideas like a baseline catastrophic coverage would be too French and against our freedumbs to die quietly in the corner if we get hit by a bus and don’t have a benevelent employer sponsored health plan.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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economic data revision toles

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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At Vox, Ezra Klein interviews aspiring psychohistorian Paul Krugman:

… Ezra Klein: A fear I hear about a lot lately is the idea that we’ll build a self-improving artificial intelligence that will ultimately destroy us.

Paul Krugman: The history of artificial intelligence is that it’s always ten years ahead, and that’s been true for about 50 years.

Ezra Klein: But let’s assume it does emerge. A lot of smart people right now seem terrified by it… I wonder, reading this stuff, whether people are overestimating the value of analytical intelligence. It’s just never been my experience that the higher you go up the IQ scale, the better people are at achieving their goals… It often seems to me that one of the reasons people get so afraid of AI is you have people who themselves are really bought into intelligence as being the most important of all traits and they underestimate importance of other motivations and aptitudes. But it seems as likely as not that a superintelligence would be completely hopeless at anything beyond the analysis of really abstract intellectual problems.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, or one thing we might find out if we produce something that is vastly analytically superior is it ends up going all solipsistic and spending all its time solving extremely difficult and pointless math problems. We just don’t know. I feel like I was suckered again into getting all excited about self-driving cars, and so on, and now I hear it’s actually a lot further from really happening that we thought. Producing artificial intelligence that can cope with the real world is still a much harder problem than people realize…

More fun stuff at the link, but my personal favorite remark from the good Professor:

“[A]s a Times columnist, I can’t do endorsements, so you have no idea which party I favor in general elections.“

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Apart from keeping, as R.A. Lafferty would say, “tongue so firmly in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice”, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Monday Evening Open Thread: More Like This, Please

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Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on “An Elaborate Plot To Make Darrell Issa Crazy“:

Over at Bloomberg Politics, Margaret Talev has lit the fuse by which dozens of heads may go supernova all at once. I mean it, this woman is calling for the mother of all cable-news tantrums. She may also be calling for the immediate spontaneous combustion of Darrell Issa and anyone standing within a 15-foot radius of him. Amid other suggestions as to how the president can continue to do the job he was elected (twice) to do, and fck with the minds of the opposition at the same time, both laudable goals, she drops the big one. I like her style, I must say…

Talev’s piece is titled “Five Ways Obama Can Mess with Republicans in 2015,” including campaign finance reform: “So-called dark-money nonprofits, such as those affiliated with the Koch brothers, could find it much harder to muck around in elections. Under current practices, up to half of these groups’ money can be spent on politics. Changes to the Internal Revenue Service regulations governing 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations could shrink the percentage they can devote to election activities such as advertising… “ (Her other suggestions are excellent, also.)

I’d bookmarked a couple of articles about Issa’s latest pre-Xmas wet fart doc-drop acknowledging, as the NYTimes primly put it, his “Inquiry into IRS Lapses Shows No Ties to White House.” Or, as Michael Hiltzik explained “Issa’s Big Dud” in the LA Times:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) wasted enormous congressional resources over the last 18 months trying to inflate the IRS “scandal” into a mountain. The release Tuesday of his final, petulant report on the affair marks what may be its final decline into a mouse.

The bottom line: Contrary to his assertions in countless appearances on Fox News, there’s no evidence that the Obama White House directed — or indeed was involved in any way — in the supposed targeting of conservative nonprofit groups for special scrutiny by the IRS. There’s no evidence that “tea party” groups were exclusively targeted, as opposed to tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations from across the political spectrum….

Much of the report underscores how flagrantly partisan and majestically useless Issa has been as a government watchdog. (He’s giving up the committee chairmanship in 2015 because of term limits, ceding the gavel to Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah.) It treats political activities as somehow a legal right of c-4 organizations, though that’s not what the law says — not if they want to retain their tax exemptions and donor confidentiality privileges…

One point that the Issa report fails to make is that the investigation undoubtedly succeeded in its ulterior purpose, which was to hamstring the IRS in pursuing its statutory duties and undermined its already flagging reputation. Aggressive enforcement of the 501(c)4 standards is off the table. In the year-end spending bill passed this month, the agency’s budget was gutted — cut by $356 million from last year, $1.5 billion below the administration’s request.

For Issa, who is Congress’ richest member, and plutocrats from shore to shore, an intimidated and underfunded IRS is heaven. And that’s what we’ve got.

Insofar as President Obama can counter this Oligarchs’ Revolt via executive order, I’m in favor!
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Apart from hoping for a better 2015, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Monday Evening Open Thread: More Like This, PleasePost + Comments (150)

Long Read: “Is the Most Powerful Conservative in America Losing His Edge?”

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What’s the journalistic step beyond beat-sweetener? Public ego massage? Molly Ball, at the Atlantic, does a workmanlike job of promoting Erick Erickson as the face of the new, younger, media-hip GOP. (I did not know that Erickson actually grew up in an American oil contract workers’ compound in Dubai, but it helps confirm his fitness as the Voice of the GOP Gated Community.) Rush Limbaugh’s name is invoked, but the GOP elder who seems to have the most to fear from the Erickson depicted in this story is Mike Huckabee:

… RedState draws about a quarter of a million unique visitors a month, according to comScore—a fraction of the audience of conservative sites like Newsmax and The Daily Caller. Erickson himself is not nearly as visible a pundit as, say, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove. But he may be more influential: His pronouncements can decide whether a policy lives or dies. His anointment can lift a candidate out of obscurity. Members of Congress have him on speed dial.

Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he consults Erickson regularly, and the conservative faction of the House GOP looks to RedState for guidance…

Erickson’s influence stems from the fact that he’s not just a pundit—he’s an activist who gets involved in contentious primary battles, bestowing endorsements that draw attention and cash to little-known candidates. In 2009, he came out for Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race when the former state legislator was polling nearly 50 points behind and the whole GOP apparatus was backing Charlie Crist, the former governor who has since switched parties. More endorsements for Rubio followed, including from the deep-pocketed Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth, and Crist dropped out of the primary to run as an independent. Rubio ended up winning the general election by 19 points.

Other conservative challengers who benefited from Erickson’s endorsements in the 2010 cycle include Mike Lee, who took down Bob Bennett, a three-term Republican senator from Utah, and Rand Paul, who ran in the Kentucky Senate primary against Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate, Trey Grayson.

A South Carolina state lawmaker named Nikki Haley was considered a long shot for the 2009 gubernatorial nomination when she caught Erickson’s fancy with her conservative zeal. For 10 days straight, RedState featured her on its front page, urging readers to donate. Haley gained momentum, and a late endorsement from Sarah Palin helped catapult her to the top of the field. “RedState was there in the very beginning,” Haley, who considers Erickson a “dear friend,” told me. “I was ‘Nikki who?’ ” Haley was just reelected to a second term as South Carolina’s governor, and has been on the longer lists of potential 2016 vice-presidential nominees.

Ted Cruz came from 3 percent in the polls and a three-to-one cash disadvantage to win his 2012 Senate primary in Texas, thanks in part to Erickson’s boosting. Cruz has attended every one of RedState’s annual “Gatherings” since they began in 2009. Cruz and Erickson have become friends, and Erickson has said Cruz is as great as “all the Beatles in one person” and called him “the leader of the conservative movement.” (Cruz returns the favor. “RedState gives people a voice,” he told me.)…

So Erickson is the rooster who crows so loudly, he can make the sun come up. Every morning!

… Spending so much of his childhood overseas also made him an outsider to American racial dynamics, Erickson says. He claims that, unlike Americans who grew up here, he lacks an intuitive understanding of racial politics. It’s a slightly absurd claim, reminiscent of the parodic color-blindness of Stephen Colbert (“I don’t see race!”), but, unlike some others in talk radio—Limbaugh, for instance—Erickson does not pepper his show with racial provocations. As we drove to get [his young daughter] Evelyn from her private Christian day school, where acres of neatly trimmed sports fields gleamed in the sunshine, he told me, with a sad shake of his head, that he believed only time, not government intervention, could heal America’s racial wounds…

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Sleazy, Skeezy Scalise

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Republican “minority outreach” marches on towards a new era of post-racial America…

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority whip, acknowledged Monday that he spoke at a gathering hosted by white nationalist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002, thrusting a racial controversy into House Republican ranks days before the party assumes control of both congressional chambers.

The 48-year-old Scalise, who ascended to the House GOP’s third-ranking post earlier this year, confirmed that he was a speaker at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization.

That organization, founded by famed white supremacist David Duke, has been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But in a statement, Scalise’s spokesperson emphasized that the then-state lawmaker was unaware at the time of the group’s ideology and its association with racists and neo-Nazi activists.

“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” said Moira Bagley, Scalise’s spokesperson. “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families.”

She added, “He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”

Bonus points for being the one Republican politician in Louisiana who was “unaware” in 2002 of who David Duke was.  Rand Paul should really pick this guy to be his veep, they’d make a great team.  You know, like nitro and glycerin.

Super bonus points for Steve Scalise having 12 years of a political career going from speaker at a David Duke convention to the number 3 guy in the House of Representatives without anyone in the Village noticing.  The whole “Republican Party as the Last Bastion Of Pure Whiteness(tm) thing” is a feature, not a bug, America.

Now would be a good time to blame the problems in America with race on Obama, I guess.

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Bowl Game Open Thread

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Bowl season is going strong, and I am currently watching the Aggies and the Eers.

Shawn was just on the back porch drinking coffee and yelled for me to come, so I ran out, and there is a hawk in the back yard hunting things. Rather than be excited about a hawk sighting, I went in to full mother hen mode and did a head count of the piglets.

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