Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

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

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Wait, what?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

This blog will pay for itself.

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

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Their shamelessness is their super power.

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

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

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Premium insulation

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I have never really understood the argument that rate shock would collapse the Obamacare Exchanges (at least as long as the Feds can subsidize all eligible policies).  The subsidies are designed to transfer the risk of premium rate increases above the rate of general economic growth to the Federal government and off of the individual.  Subsidies are determined as the gap between the second lowest silver and the expected family contribution.  The expected family contribution is a function of income as a percentage of Federal Poverty Line so that someone at 101% FPL is expected to contribute 2% of their income for the premium of the 2nd Silver and someone at 399.99% FPL is expected to contribute 9.5% of their income for the premium of a second Silver.  If the price of the 2nd Silver doubles, the contribution stays constant.  If the price of a 2nd Silver drops in half, the maximum family contribution stays constant.  Subsidized buyers are insulated from price changes.

Kaiser has a good chart that I’ve snipped a part that shows this argument:\

Kaiser and premium subsidies

Alaska saw a 28% increase in 2nd Silver prices for 2015.  The post-subsidy cost for the example decreased by a dollar.  Coloardo saw a 15% decline in price for the 2nd Silver.  The post-subsidy cost also declined a dollar.  The dollar decline is due to inflation bumping up the poverty level brackets slightly so $30,000 in 2014 supports a slightly higher family contribution than $30,000 in 2015.

Arizona is an interesting case.  In both years, the example policy holder is not getting subsidy as the 2nd Silver cost is below the maximum family contribution.  In this case, the Arizonan saves $20 a month due to increaed competition if they switch policies to chase the lower premiums.

There are two major advantages to this program design.  The first is that it provides predictability and security for individuals who make under 400% FPL.  Their premiums will only increase as their purchasing power increases due to either more income or fewer dependents in the house.  Secondly, and I think more importantly, it transfers pricing risk from atomized individuals who can’t do much about it to a big powerful entity (the Federal government) that can do something about pricing that is getting out of control.  What that something is in this political climate is nothing but future political climates, a big buyer who can throw its weight around can get a good deal.

 

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Friday Morning Open Thread: “Tears of Joy”

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[warning: continuous autoplay]

The late news on local station WCVB/Ch.5 was delayed 16 minutes, because they’d aired President Obama’s prime-time address. Transcription of the video, as reported by Jorge Quiroga:

CHELSEA, Mass. —Chelsea proudly calls itself a city of immigrants.

There are thousands living and working there illegally, and on Thursday night Pres. Barack Obama gave them a reason to smile and cry tears of joy.

At Tito’s Bakery, they watched Obama on TV and his speech was translated in Spanish.

“I think it’s amazing,” Maria Belen said. “I think its six years too late.”

Lourdes Alvarado Chavez remembers her own good fortune.

“I came to this country when I was 11, and my parents became resident aliens when in 1986 amnesty came out.”

Obama said neither amnesty nor a path to citizenship is being offered…

Many were smiling ear to ear even though Obama’s executive order is only temporary and could be overturned after he leaves office.

Speaking of (not-joyful) tears, the GOP was pre-outraged, as reported by Betsy Woodruff at Slate:

Conservatives hate everything about the president’s imminent immigration move, starting with its timing, and one House member is hinting that the executive action could result in impeachment, and maybe even prison time….

Not so outraged as to consider delaying their Thanksgiving recess by a few hours, though, so they must not consider it that important.

***********
Apart from waiting for a possible Friday doc-dump (from the Ferguson grand jury, for instance), what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the week?

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Late Night Open Thread: Not the Droid Dem You Were Looking For…

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A lot of progressive Democrats have agitated, not without reason, for a serious challenger to the “coronation” of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Well, now we’ve got one. Per Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics:

Jim Webb, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s administration who served one term as a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, has launched a presidential exploratory committee. Late Wednesday night, Webb uploaded a 14-minute statement to YouTube, and a campaign site—Webb2016.com—went live…

It probably says something about Webb’s dark horse status—or about the priorities of the media—that Webb2016.com was registered on Oct. 20 and nobody really noticed. Webb, who was a star candidate as soon as he was drafted to run for Senate, became known as a thoughtful politician who did not care for the grip-and-grab of campaigns…

After the Democrats’ 2010 election rout, Webb spoke out with unusual candor about the ways the party had lost working class white voters. He announced just three months later that he would retire from the Senate, clearing a path for the much more electorally inclined Tim Kaine to run for his seat. In 2012, a liberated Webb kept on criticizing the way Democrats had governed under President Barack Obama. He returned to the campaign trail to stump for the president anyway…

More details and video at the link.

Okay, Jim Webb is no Elizabeth Warren, not even a Martin O’Malley-style policy wonk. Just two months ago, EvenTheLiberal TNR dismissed the idea that Webb would actually run (“Webb’s anger has served him—and, oftentimes, his country—well over the years. The problem with all of this is that once the proximate cause of Webb’s anger is resolved and his frustration dissipates, so does Webb’s interest in politics.”) — their latest dream Democrat seems to be Sherrod Brown. But Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight looks at some numbers and says “Jim Webb Would Make A Good Anti-Clinton In 2016“:

… Over the course of the past year, seven national polls included a breakdown by political ideology. In those seven polls, Clinton tended to do better with Democrats who consider themselves liberal…

The difference isn’t huge, but it’s clear Clinton has less support among moderate and conservative Democrats than she does among liberal Democrats.

Additionally, three CNN surveys have asked Democratic primary voters whether they prefer Clinton, a “more conservative Democrat” or a “more liberal Democrat.” Clinton has averaged 67 percent in these surveys. The more liberal Democrat has averaged just 11 percent. The more conservative Democrat, on the other hand, has averaged 18 percent. Again, Clinton is the heavy favorite, but anti-Clinton voters prefer a more conservative option.

The same holds true for independents that lean Democratic… Again, Clinton does well with all groups, but there’s more room on her right than her left…

My emphases. It’s hard to believe from out here on the (not so) far left DFH fringes of modern American political discourse, but there’s a lot of “conventional wisdom” conviction that Hillary Clinton is actually left-of-center. (If one assumes, like Politico, that the CW center runs from GHWBush on the left to GWBush on the right, HRC does look like a radical leftist.) We’ve already started mocking the possibility of any Democratic contender running to her right, but maybe that’s a problem with our perspective.

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Open Thread: The GOP Morans Want A Shutdown

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gop 12 step shutdown toles

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

.
… Because, as they see it, they were rewarded for past shutdowns. This appeared before the President’s address, but the post-speech GOP screeching seems to support its thesis. Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics:

One year and one month ago, the Republican Party was doomed. Its conservative wing in the House, egged on by outside groups like Heritage Action, had refused to include the Affordable Care Act in the must-pass funding bill. The result, a two-week government shutdown, was a “total disaster” for the GOP, a mistake that threatened the majority. Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina firm favored by Democrats, found “as many as 37 Republicans” in danger…

The revisionist history of the shutdown began as soon as the shutdown ended. When the Democratic Senate bottled the Republican House’s ACA-defunding bills, House Republicans started moving “piecemeal bills” that funded portions of the government. By January 2014, Texas Senator Ted Cruz could say that he “repeatedly voted to fund the federal government.” And through the rest of 2014, Cruz claimed that the shutdown fight, rather than distracting from the first wretched fortnight of HealthCare.gov, turned Obamacare into a winning Republican issue…

“This is the second shut down where the GOP got blamed and saw no catastrophe at the ballot box,” wrote RedState.com’s Erick Erickson on Tuesday. “Every horror story every talking head within the GOP Establishment trotted out to scare congressmen and senators into caving turned out to be crap.”…

In those circles, it’s clear that the president can be stared down on immigration. And it’s clear that a fight, even if it led to shutdown, would be either rewarded or forgotten by voters when they returned to the polling booths in November 2016. The reality of the Affordable Care Act had, after all, ended up winning elections for them in 2014. Why wouldn’t the reality of Obama’s new blunders elect the Republicans of 2016?

It’s all deeply frustrating to Democrats. Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly, whose district’s contractors and federal employees recoiled at the shutdown, had subsequently watched his state reelect its Republican congressmen and nearly knock off its popular Democratic senator. There clearly was no shutdown hangover for Republicans.

“From their point of view, frankly, while it had a temporary impact on their polling numbers, they fully recovered from that and paid no price at all on Nov. 4,” said Connolly as he headed into a vote. “Politicians are all Pavlovian at a very elemental level. What’s rewarded, what’s punished. They look at that, and they think it seems to have been rewarded. It certainly wasn’t punished.”…

Never underestimate the destructive abilities of a malign idiot — or a party full of them.

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Thursday Evening Open Thread

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gop man date morin
(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

Did someone say “man date”?… From Mark Joseph Stern, at Slate:

On Wednesday, the viciously anti-gay National Organization for Marriage finally released its 2013 tax filings—two days late, in direct violation of federal law. The results are nothing short of brutal. NOM raised $5.1 million last year—a 50 percent drop-off from its 2012 earnings. Two donors accounted for more than half of that money. And the group’s “Education Fund,” which churns out anti-gay propaganda and homophobic calumny, raised less than $1.7 million, a 70 percent decline from 2012. NOM closed out the year more than $2.5 million in debt…

… Gay marriage is here to stay; a $100 (or $100,000) check to NOM won’t change anything. Maybe a few former donors have even changed their mind about the whole gay marriage issue. Either way, most people know a lost cause when they see one. And anyone not totally blinded by bigotry can see pretty clearly that NOM is waging a war against the inevitable…

… In the near future, NOM’s higher-ups will release that they’re on the brink of officially folding. At that point, they’ll give the piggy bank one last shake, then jump ship for good. The resulting collapse will be pitiable, painful, and pathetic—a finale befitting an organization built on a platform of nothing but hate.

Apart from small, hard-won victories — and, of course, the President’s address — what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good

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I’m usually with Glenn Greenwald on a variety of issues, but this latest post about the failure of the USA Freedom Act to pas makes absolutely no sense to me:

There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public advocates” at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat.

When pro-privacy members of Congress first unveiled the bill many months ago, it was actually a good bill: real reform. But the White House worked very hard— in partnership with the House GOP—to water that bill down so severely that what the House ended up passing over the summer did more to strengthen the NSA than rein it in, which caused even the ACLU and EFF to withdraw their support. The Senate bill rejected last night was basically a middle ground between that original, good bill and the anti-reform bill passed by the House.

* * * * *

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

Here in the US of A, where you have Senators and Congresscritters bought and owned by various entities, all you are ever going to get is mildly positive. Mildly positive is a win when it comes to Congress, and incrementalism is the only way anything major ever happens in the United States. Mildly positive is the basic premise of the ACA, which I think we all would agree has been a GOOD thing. So no, even though the bill goes nowhere near far enough, I’d rather a couple slices of bread than none because I couldn’t have the whole loaf.

Second, if we don’t turn to government to reform government, we might as well just give up. Glenn lists several options where real reform can happen:

1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy.

Na ga ha pen. Sure, you might have a few people out there who will be able to go off the grid yet maintain connected to the intertrons, but this is such an unviable option I’m not going to give it any more thought.

2) Other countries taking action against U.S. hegemony over the internet.

We’ll wait and see, although I am of the opinion that many of the repercussions listed (denial of the Boeing contract, etc.) were just opportunism using NSA surveilance as a pretext. Regardless, no matter what happens, surveillance will still occur. Maybe not to the same scale, but it will happen.

U.S. court proceedings.

That is the U.S. government. And when things are overturned, lawmakers (also the government, btw) will create legislation to work around the ruling to do what they wanted to do (and by proxy, what the American people apparently voted them into office to do). Glenn notes he has little faith in SCOTUS, and given their behavior in the drug war, he shouldn’t, so I’m not really sure how this is an option or even worth considering.

Greater individual demand for, and use of, encryption.

Again, this may work for sophisticated users, but the average person is not a sophisticated user. Hell, I know how to use pgp encryption with gmail, but I don’t. Why? Because no one I email knows how to use it or cares to do so.

All in all, this column makes no sense to me. If you want to rein in the surveillance state, you fight for every single scrap you can get, and then you fight for more.

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