Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

When we show up, we win.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

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

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

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

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

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

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

In after Baud. Damn.

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

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

The lights are all blinking red.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

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Is it wrong that I am smiling?

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Big Chris Christie scandal coming to light. You may read the documents here, courtesy of Talking Points Memo.

On Sept. 9 and Sept. 10, Wildstein was apparently receiving ongoing updates about the “traffic disaster” in Fort Lee. On Sept. 10, Wildstein said to someone via text message that Fort Lee’s mayor had reached out to Bill Baroni, another Christie appointee, expressing worries about “getting kids to school.”
“Help please. It’s maddening,” Sokolich wrote in a message to Baroni.
That message appears to have been passed on to Wildstein who wrote, “Is it wrong that I am smiling?”
It is unclear who Wildstein was corresponding with, however the recipient of his message said, “No.”
“I feel badly about the kids,” wrote Wildstein. “I guess.”
“They are the children of Buono voters,” joked Wildstein’s correspondent, referring to Christie’s challenger in last November’s election, Barbara Buono.

What you learned in 5th grade remains true:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Wednesday canceled his only public event for the day after multiple media outlets published emails and text messages linking Christie aides to lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, the Newark Star-Ledger reported.
Christie had planned to speak in Ocean County about housing recovery after Hurricane Sandy, but announced that the event was canceled in an email without citing any reasons.

chris-christie-finger-wagging

Bullies are cowards. Always.

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When procrastination lost its fun, you’re fucking lazy

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The enrollment model for Obamacare is deadline driven. The pre-launch model was that there would be early interest and shopping but very little buying in October, a bit more buying in November as people who knew that they were in desperate situations decided to knock out a stresser by purchasing a plan that would be effective 1/1/14, and then a mad dash from Cyber Monday to December 15th for 1/1/14 healthcare.

And then there would be a quiet three weeks as no one would shop over Christmas and the New Year’s. A minibump for 2/1 coverage was expected the week before 1/15, and then quiet again until Valentine’s Day as people bought coverage effective March 1st. After Valentine’s Day, there would be a month long enrollment extravaganza that would make December look like a light work-out as the mandate would force the procrastinators to get insurance or pay the penalty by March 15th for April 1st coverage. The final expectation is that the demographic mix would look bad in the first couple of months as people who know that they are in significant need of health insurance would be the first to sign up, but healthier people would procrastinate until forced to make a decision.

That was the basic model. And it is a reasonable extrapolation of the Massachusetts’ experience. The roll-out clusterfuck shifted some of the early enrollment to December but it looks reasonable. If anything the off-peak enrollment is coming in higher than I would have expected. For instance, Conneticutt is processing a thousand enrollments a day post Dec. 23 deadline. That is roughly a third of their average December enrollment without a deadline pressure. Brainwrap passes along Nevada numbers that show the post Dec. 23 pace is similar to the pre-Dec. 23 pace.

Additionally the early state level enrollment demographics are solid according to TPM:

Here are the percentages of enrollees between ages 18 and 34, from six states, including California, the most populous:

  • California: 21 percent
  • Colorado: 18 percent
  • Kentucky: 32 percent*
  • Maryland: 25 percent
  • Rhode Island: 20 percent
  • Washington: 18 percent

senior adinistration official described the Massachusetts experience to TPM, when that state rolled out its health reform law in 2007. During each of the first three months of enrollment, young adults made up 17, 17 and 24 percent respectively of the sign-ups, a pretty close match to the proportions in these states under Obamacare.

But in each of the final three months, young adults accounted for between 34, 36, and 34 percent, respectively, a significant jump.

We saw in December that procrastination is a powerful force and only deadlines will get a lot of people to make a decision. However, there seems to be a fairly large cohort of motivated slackers who did not get 1/1 coverage but are actively seeking out 2/1 coverage and if that holds, the January and February numbers will be large. I don’t think they will be December enrollment numbers but these months should blow November out of the water. And then we hit the March manic mandate deadline.

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Well, this is awful

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A North Carolina teenager suffers from schizophrenia. His family calls the cops for help during an episode.  The first officers on the scene taser and restrain the boy, Keith Vidal, 18 years old. Another car rolls up, and, according to the boy’s parents, Mark Wilsey and Mary Vidal, the new officer on the scene decides to handle the situation his way:

“We don’t have time for this,” Wilsey recalled one of the officers saying before he fired in between the two officers who were holding the teen down.

1280px-Thetriumphofdeath

You can guess what comes next:

The Boiling Spring Laes Police Chief has cleared his officers of any wrong doing at the scene. Chief Brad Shirley says an internal review shows his officers did not break any laws.

That may not be the last word. The local prosecutor is investigating:

DA Jon David offered few new details other than that the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) had been called in to investigate. He said that it would take time to determine if a crime had been committed…

…but the parents have their doubts:

the family said that they were not invited to attend….Outside the press conference, the family held signs, demanding justice for Keith Vidal.

It is early days, of course, and the lawyer for the cop suspended after the incident says his client will be seen to be innocent, which is the presumption until a jury says otherwise.  All the usual disclaimers apply.

But on the facts established so far (like this one: “The first unit on scene reported a confrontation in the hallway, but told Brunswick County Dispatchers several times that everything was OK.”), this looks very bad indeed.

And even if there are mitigating circumstances that come to light, still, this is what happens when guns are the first tool you reach for instead of the last.

That’s the deep problem with American gun (nut) culture.  There are just too many guns out there, available to anyone “responsible” or not.  The reality, of course, is that there are lots of situations where guns are inappropriate and lots of people for whom guns are just a really bad idea.

Some of those people are cops.

The last full measure of the misery of this story?  Shortly before Wilsey and Vidal had to witness their kid gunned down in front of them, they lost their daughter to a car wreck.  I can’t imagine…

I hugged my son extra hard when I got home last night, I can tell you.

Image:  Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562.

 

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Scorpions and Frogs

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ memoir won’t be released for another week, but it’s already being aired out as a partisan football. As Anne Laurie pointed out yesterday, Bob Woodward mines the book for evidence of the naive “Obambi” persona he projects onto the president (in contrast the the wily, all-knowing veteran Woodward imagines himself to be).

MSNBC’s Sarah Muller reviews some of the same passages Woodward highlights and provides excerpts that paint a slightly different picture:

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates wrote. “For him, it’s all about getting out.” He added, “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for the mission.”

Woodward breathlessly explains that this is “one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat.”

You know what else it is? A near-perfect reflection of the American people’s ambivalence about that benighted war. And subsequent events have proved Obama’s mistrust in both his commander and Karzai as prescient.

For some reason, Woodward didn’t cover this passage, which was highlighted by Muller:

Still, the former defense secretary praises Obama’s high-stakes choice to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound as “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.”

Let’s put on our thinking caps: Why would Woodward leave that part out?

Both Woodward and Muller’s accounts highlight Gates’ skewering of Joe Biden. Gates also had this to say about the White House staff in general:

“The controlling nature of the Obama White House, and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who had actually done the work, offended Secretary Clinton as much as it did me.”

Poor babies. It sounds like Gates grinds an entire arsenal of axes. No surprise there: Gates is a Republican, and that is their nature. In a response to the book, here’s what an administration official said:

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden issued a response to reports about the book, saying that President Obama “deeply appreciates Bob Gates’ service as Secretary of Defense, and his lifetime of service to our country.”

“Deliberations over our policy on Afghanistan have been widely reported on over the years, and it is well known that the President has been committed to achieving the mission of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, while also ensuring that we have a clear plan for winding down the war, which will end this year,” the White House response says. “As has always been the case, the President welcomes differences of view among his national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies.”

And that’s as clear an illustration of the nature of the Obama administration as you’re likely to find.

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Three little Fonzis

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….An article proposes some doable progressive goals — guaranteed jobs, universal basic incomes, sovereign wealth funds, state banks, and a land tax. A bunch of libertarians — Radley Balko, Charles W. Cooke (never heard of him before but he seems to be big on twitter), and Nicky G — lampoon the goals as the impossible dreams of dirty hippies.

Turns out Sarah Palin’s Alaska has a big sovereign wealth fund:

In 1976, Republican Governor Jay Hammond started Alaska’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), which has come to be called the Alaska Permanent Fund. The way it works is Alaska has a big pile of money that it uses to buy up the means of production (sometimes called stocks and bonds). Those investments yield returns and revenue for the state. Right now, Alaska plows that revenue into its universal basic income (UBI) program, which is called the Permanent Fund Dividend. The way it works is the state sends a check to every single Alaskan each year. Last year, it was $900, but in better years, it has been as high as $2000. For a family of four, that’s a $3,600 and $8,000 income boost respectively.

The Alaska communist story gets more interesting than that though. The way Alaska builds the principal of the fund is in line with another of Myerson’s proposals: take back the land. You see, the oil wealth in Alaska happened to reside underneath public land. Instead of doing the red-blooded American thing and just giving all of that natural wealth that nobody creates away to oil companies, Alaska held on to its ownership and collects royalties from the oil. Those royalties are plowed into its SWF. So what you have in Alaska is a state that is leveraging publicly-owned natural resources to build a SWF that pays out a UBI. Or as conservatives on twitter call it: a communist hellscape.

The reasonoids and WaPo editorial board types can scream like stuck pigs all they want, the simple fact is that many left-wing populist economic policies are both popular and possible. Not liking the policies is one thing, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but it’s a lie to pretend they can’t be done or that REAL AMERICANS hate them.

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