Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

“But what about the lurkers?”

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

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

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Fight them, without becoming them!

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

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

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On Darren Wilson

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I didn’t break any laws or do anything unethical in 4 combat tours as an Infantryman. To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t harm any innocents. But when I say my conscience is clear, I mean it only in the sense that I did what was necessary to achieve my mission goals and bring my troops home alive while keeping my honor and theirs intact.

I have nightmares about Iraq and Afghanistan. They come less frequently now after seven years, but I cannot escape the reality that young men died because of my actions. They died by my hand, and at my orders. They weren’t “demons”, and they weren’t evil, even as they were trying very hard to kill me and my troops.

I trained for that for years, and I’m sitting here today. I guess that I was good at it, or good enough anyway. I KNOW I did the best I could to be a good man.  But I ended those lives. Some were young, some were not. Everything they ever were or ever would be, I took from them and I have to own that.

So when Darren Wilson says his conscience is clear and he sleeps well, I don’t know what he means. I suspect that his concept of a clear conscience and mine are two entirely different things. Because 7 years after my last tour, I still don’t sleep well. I smoke too much, and I drink too much, and I have occasional thoughts of suicide. Some days, I just don’t give a damn about anything.

A counsellor told me once that I “owed it to the guys who didn’t come back from those hellholes to live a good and happy life, because they can’t.” I try to be a good husband and a good parent, and I work hard at my job to support the VA in its mission of caring for those who have borne the battle. I try to find things to take joy in. But I can’t escape the fact that I don’t really deserve to be here.

So no, I don’t understand what Darren Wilson is talking about when he says he’s OK with what he did. I have feared for my life and I have fought for my life, and I don’t get to where he is. And while I feel broken a lot of the time, I think he may be more broken than I ever was.

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Mid-Afternoon Open Thread

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Steve woke me up at 5:30 again this morning, and it is snowing and blustery outside, so I am about to take a long afternoon nap. One of my fraternity boys (Christion- Rosie’s favorite) has been staying here since Friday (he had no ride home until tonight), and he has been crashing on the couch for the last couple of days, and man does he make me jealous. Not only is he able to sleep through Steve, but he can sleep through anything. The boy can nap, too. He can go from being wide awake to sleeping soundly in about the time it takes him to put his head on a pillow. I had forgotten what that was like- just having two speeds, on and off. I used to be like that when I was in the younger and in the army- I could sleep anywhere anytime. Easy as flipping a switch, and I had no idea what a luxury it was. Jealous, I say. That whole spiel about youth being wasted on the young, etc.

Almost had another stereotypical Cole disaster today. My general store makes a special sandwich and lunch that differs every day, and today was chili. I really like their chili, so I went to the store and got a styrofoam container for lunch. Walking home, I slipped a little bit on the slush, and because I am so conscious about injuring my shoulders again in another fall, I always tuck my arms in and clench my fists so if I do fall, I’ll just fall and let my padded body absorb the blow.

At any rate, I regained my footing and didn’t fall (YAY ME!), but I did manage to clench my fists so hard that I punctured the styrofoam container in my right hand and shot molten hot chili all over myself. Damnit.

Here’s Lily, snoring on the home office couch, because she is a dog and that is what they do:

princesspea

Some times a comfy couch isn’t enough, and you just gotta have the pillow, too. I’m about to wake her up, but only because I am going to say “Lily, naptime,” and she will run into the bedroom and get under the covers. Yes. We’re co-dependent, and I am not ashamed to admit that I can not sleep unless I feel my litte lump curled up next to me.

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Good News Everybody

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Open Enrollment Part Deux is working as HHS is releasing early data (via the Washington Post):

 nearly half of those who have just signed up for insurance do not currently have coverage through the federal insurance marketplace. That group — 48 percent of 462,000 who picked a health plan during the week that started Nov. 15…

In the first month of last year’s sign-up period, slightly over a half-million people completed insurance applications through the federal marketplace, and nearly 30,000 then went on to choose a health plan. The new figures show that this time, in the first week, just over 1 million people completed applications and almost half of them picked a health plan….

The new data do not include 14 states, including Maryland and the District, that are running separate insurance marketplaces under the law.

So roughly 220,000 new enrollees and 242,000 re-enrollees in the first week on Healthcare.gov for 2015 compared to a nationawide first month total of 106,185 from all sources in 2013.

What does this mean?

The short version is that things are working very nicely.

The longer version is that 220,000 new enrollees from Healthcare.gov probably implies close to 300,000 total new enrollees once the state exchanges are factored in.  This would be 12 times the rate of 2013 which would be impressive if Healthcare.gov and several of the state exchanges were not totally fubared for two months.  There is a decent chance of half a million new enrollees and a million re-enrollees by the end of this weekend.

And then that is when the back-end of Healthcare.gov will start getting a work-out.

Medicare is currently at the tail end of their annual open enrollment period.  Traditionally the Monday after Thanksgiving is Medicare’s busiest day by far for Open Enrollment as people have had a chance to talk with their family about their options as well as a looming deadline (December 7, 2014 this year) forces action.  I think the same dynamic will be in play for new enrollees although the deadline for January 1, 2015 coverage will not be until December 15.  Re-enrollees will be auto-re-enrolled if they do not make a choice by December 15.  So by Christmas, 2 million new enrollees and 6 million plus re-enrollees will be receiving ID cards for January 1, 2015 coverage.  After that, we should have a quiet period as the next soft deadline is January 15 while the hard deadling is February 15.

 

 

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Fuck Chuck Pt. 2

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If deficits and debt were supposed to be an actual issue in 2009/2010 instead of a bludgeon against liberal change during the course of a recession that is still competing with the Great Depression, one would think that a program and policy that implements actual structural reforms to the labor market by beginning the slow process of disentangling health insurance and more importantly insurability from employment and reducing the long run costs of a major social welfare program without harming the recipients and beneficiaries of that program, but actually expanding coverage of benefits would be a major policy win that would lead to its sponsors bragging.

The Affordable Care Act is a massive structural reform that is expanding social insurance coverage while reducing long run costs while also engaging in labor market structural reforms.  Below is a table of the CBO’s mandatory Medicare expenditure projections that shows how the cost curve is continually bending.

CBO Medicare projections
CBO Medicare projections

Some of the cost curve is technical changes to economic projections.  A decent chunk of the difference is the rapid drop in projected costs of Medicare Part D as the drug pipeline for expensive on-patent new drugs is thinner than many thought it would have been.  Another and more important chunk is due to a combination of new programs in the ACA that is slowly shifting the United States away from a per widget fee for service model towards a population health model where the incentives to save money are lining up to actually save money.  To do this, Medicare Advantage is no longer a massive transfer to insurance companies buying better hookers and more blow but reducing the pricing differential to where the value proposition between Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare are approaching parity.  It means penalizing providers who readmit too many patients within a month of a hospital discharge.  It means trying to get hospitals and providers to focus on chronic condition management to save money over the long term.  Those things seem to be working to some degree.  This is structrural reform without inflicting pain on the bottom 90% of the population.

At the same time, the ACA is a labor market reform which should, over the long term, produce a more flexible and risk taking labor force.  The CBO has projected that 2.5 million full time equivilent workers will voluntarily remove themselves from the labor force because they were tied to the labor force for health insurance reasons only.  They wanted to be doing something else, but they were prevented due to market failures in the individual health insurance market.  People who had a good idea but a good reason to worry that they were uninsurable if they went on the individual market can now take a risk to run with their own idea, or leave Giant Evil Corporation to work at a little 7 person boutique firm.

If you think that the biggest problems with the American economy are supply side instead of demand side, the ACA is a significant supply side structural reform.  It is also a massive demand side reform as the ability of more Americans to engage in the health insurance market place should reduce the aggregate level of optimal savings which should make it slightly easier to get out of a demand trap.

Or shorter Richard Mayhew: Shut the fuck up Chuck

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Let’s Make a Deal

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a_police_investigator_walks_past_the_wreckage_of_a_1993_ira_bombing_that_injured_14_civilians_and_five_policemen_right_rep_peter_king_on_capitol_hill_sept_14_1999

Oh, shut the fuck up Peter King, you noxious blowhard:

Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said Tuesday that President Barack Obama should invite Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson to meet with him at the White House.

“I think it would be very helpful if President Obama went and met with the police officer, or at least invited him to the White House,” King said on Fox Business Network.

“And say, ‘you’ve gone through four months of smear and slander and the least we can do is tell you that it is unfortunate that it happened and thank you for doing your job.'”

Reflecting on Obama’s speech last night, King said he thought the President’s remarks were “lackluster.”

“I wish he said one good word about the police — one good word about Officer Wilson who had gone through all this,” King said, noting that the controversy affected both the defense and the prosecution.

I’ll make a deal. You meet with the families of these people first:

f course it was Irish, not Islamic terrorism that King championed. So that’s different. Right? For decades, King was one of the keenest, most reliable American voices supporting the Irish Republican Army during its long and murderous campaign.

According to King, the terrorist movement was “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland.”

In Northern Ireland, the conflict was drily referred to as “The Troubles.” But that understatement hides the brutal nature of an ugly, squalid conflict during which more than 3,600 people were killed. Republican terrorists were responsible for more than 2,000 of these deaths. The scale of the carnage was such that, on a per-capita basis, a comparable conflict in the United States would kill 700,000 Americans.

And King was at the heart of it: In the 1980s, he was a prominent fundraiser for Noraid, the Irish-American organization that raised money for the IRA and was suspected of running guns to Ulster, too. Indeed, King’s rise to prominence within the Irish-American movement was predicated upon his support for the IRA at a time when New Yorkers were softer on terrorism than they are now. Noraid helped win King his seat in Congress, making him, in some respects, the terrorists’ Man in Washington.

On his travels to Northern Ireland, King would stay with members of the IRA and spend his evenings in IRA drinking clubs, soaking up the atmosphere and, I dare say, enjoying the craic.

In 1982 he told a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County, New York, that “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.” That same year, an IRA bomb killed eight people in London’s Hyde Park. Two years later, the IRA almost succeeded in murdering the British prime minister. Only good fortune saved Margaret Thatcher’s life. In 1987, an IRA bomb murdered 11 civilians in Enniskillen during the annual Remembrance Day service. These are merely some of the more infamous IRA atrocities. There isn’t space here to list them all.

King was such a well-known figure in Northern Ireland that one judge presiding over a murder case in which the accused were members of the IRA, threw King out of his Belfast courtroom because, as the judge put it, “he was an obvious collaborator with the IRA.”

Then maybe President Obama might sit down with the man who killed an unarmed teenager. Why? I don’t know. Wilson seems to have no regrets. And if he should go to the White House, I hope to hell the Secret Service frisks Wilson. Guys got an itchy trigger finger and is easily scared.

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The Nightmare Scenario

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No No No No NO NO NO:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 81, underwent a heart procedure Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court announced.

Justice Ginsburg “experienced discomfort during routine exercise” Tuesday night and was taken to the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, the court said in a statement. The justice underwent a coronary catheterization procedure to place a stent in her right coronary artery.

“She is resting comfortably and is expected too be discharged in the next 48 hours,” the statement said.

Kathleen Arberg, the court’s public information officer, added that “Justice Ginsburg expects to be on the bench on Monday.” The court is scheduled to hear two arguments that day, including one on how the First Amendment applies to threats conveyed on Facebook.

Listen up, Notorious RBG- you are officially not allowed to have any more health scares. Get well soon, also too.

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