Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
A: Wherever he wants.
He takes up almost the entire damned Ottoman. And I can never get enough of those paws:
A worthy successor for Tunch, and exactly what this house needed. I have no idea what people see in meek or small or timid cats who run and hide. I want a big cat with big cat attitude and big cat love.
Q: Where Does a Twenty Pound Maine Coon Sleep?Post + Comments (42)
I’ve had company all day and haven’t been able to blog, but let me just say this quick so that we have it on the record- the fact that I had to watch Melissa Harris-Perry, one of the most fundamentally decent human beings to grace my television, break down and cry because of what someone else said about Mitt Romney’s kid, makes me want to fucking puke. Sure, the comment was offensive, but she didn’t make it, and sometimes people say shit on live tv.
But let’s compare what some jackass said on tv to what Romney and Ryan wanted to do to America and what their policies would have done to African-American children not lucky enough to be adopted by a quarter-billionaire white guy. Or what the party Romney belongs to has done to make sure young Miss Romney has a helluva time voting. And so on.
And that doesn’t even get into the repellant shit that Republicans say on a daily basis. When has Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Ron Fournier or Krauthammer or Will or Malkin or Novak or any of the rest of those douchebags and the thousands of others I could list ever apologized? Pat fucking Buchanan made a living for two decades spewing racist and anti-Semitic bullshit on tv, was paid handsomely, and no one ever fucking flinched.
Stop being such damned pushovers, liberals.
Hello, kiddies.
Happy New Year! Yes, most of the last few days is a blur, thanks for asking.
As part of my new year resolution to write more, I have a post on the Utah marriage decision, but it’s gotten a bit enormous, so it’s not ready yet. In lieu of that for the moment, I give you a flower that has just come out in my little garden here in Sydney.
How are you all?
KC vs Indy game is pretty exciting! I don’t really care who wins, but I’m half rooting for Indy now just because of their incredible comeback from 28 points down.
I do care who wins the next one: Nawlins Saints, baby! Please feel free to discuss football or whatever.
I know John already hit this story, . (ETA this, in response to a complaint that there’s a lot more wrong with Brooks et al. than my fixation on journalistic malpractice admits: The deep problems with David Brooks and Ruth Marcus and their takes on marijuana legalization lie with the actual policy — the racism built into drug prohibition in the US, the folly and cost of the drug war, the relative risks of cannibis vs. such legal drugs as tobacco and the demon rum and all that. David Weigel nailed both Marcus and Brooks for many of those stupidities yesterday, and there’s plenty more good work showing just how awful was the work issuing from these supposed paladins of public intellection. I’ve got another axe to grind, perhaps just a hatchet, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been given much internet notice, so I’m back on my David Brooks is Always Wrong™ beat.But there’s another angle here on Brooks’ column that the generally great internet response didn’t hit, so I’m back on my David Brooks is Always Wrong™ beat.
I have to admit, what first got me going on this one was Brooks relentless self-righteous self-congratulation — to wit:
We graduated to more satisfying pleasures. The deeper sources of happiness usually involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
I don’t have much to say there — others said it better* — and anyway, I couldn’t get much past thoughts of Brooks engaged in anatomically improbable auto-erotica, possibly involving oxidized farm implements.
Worse, to me anyway, was how swiftly this “moderate” least-government possible type went for the jackboots. He wrote about folks’ “deep center” and the moral decay that comes when we fail to do the right thing, like continuing to criminalize America’s favorite weed. To Brooks, what’s wanted is
…government [that] subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
So much fail in so little space. You could fisk this almost word by word for the craptastic silliness on display.
I could go on. As Weigel and many others pointed out, favoring prohibition is fundamentally racist; as Maia Szalavitz writes at Time.com, Marcus and Brooks are deeply, profoundly ignorant of basic science of marijuana use and its impacts.
Shooting one’s mouth off in the absence of any real understanding of a subject is the mark of the pundits that dominate so much of Washington discourse. It’s a profound sin to me, a betrayal of the central obligation of any journalist: to get it right for their readers — where right doesn’t simply mean avoiding trivial errors of fact, but distortions of the frame of the story that leaves “accurate” quanta of knowledge utterly misrepresented. Unfortunately, there’s no real penalty in modern elite journalism for simple deception, as long as Politifact doesn’t actually find out that you weigh less than a duck.
But Brooks did cross another journalistic line in this column. In one six word phrase Brooks goes all Reefer Madness on his readers, emphasizing the damnable fury of ol’ Mary Jane. He writes in a list of the bad things about marijuana “that it is addictive in about one in six teenagers”…
That’s the complete quote, by the way. I’m not leaving out any modifiers or expanded context.
And here’s the thing: its simply wrong — and should have been obviously so.
David Brooks Goes One Toke Over The LinePost + Comments (104)
There have been a couple of operational glitches during the first week of the Exchange policies going live. Betty catches the problem that healthcare.gov is having problems dealing with changes in family situations, most notably adding a baby to a family’s policy.
The bigger issue is a Medicaid enrollment file problem as the Washington Post reported earlier this week:
More than 100,000 Americans who applied for insurance through HealthCare.gov and were told they are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) remain unenrolled because of lingering software defects in the federal online marketplace, according to federal and state health officials.
This problem is mainly concentrated in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Both of these problems are the equivalent of stubbing one’s toe. They are not fatal problems. Both problems will probably have the same work-around for the next couple of months. Enrollments and policies will be back dated, and claims will be retroactively paid.
This is not a big deal.
Retroactive enrollment has happened all the time in the pre-Obamacare insurance industry. Yesterday a co-worker retro-added a group to a 2nd quarter 2013 start date. 15% of my time last year was spent on a project which retroactively changed tens of thousands of claims.
Babies are even easier to deal with. Under previous law, babies were always retro-added to their day of birth as long as the insurance company was told within 30 days of birth. Some states required all babies to be covered by their mother’s policy for the first thirty days of their life. Going forward, parents should do the same thing with their Exchange insurance as parents have done with private insurance when they have a newborn; call their private insurer and fill out a form to get the kid covered.
Systemically, insurance companies would prefer not to retro anything as any process that is touched by human hands is more expensive than allowing automated processes to deal with standard operating procedures. Short term retro-modifications as healthcare.gov transitions from an enrollment and payment system to a comprehensive member management system will work.
King crab legs are the new t-bone steaks (via):
Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said he’s heard “so many times” from constituents standing in line at the grocery store behind a shopper buying king crab legs. “Then he sees the food-stamp card pulled out and provided. He looks at the king crab legs and looks at his ground meat and realizes because he does pay income tax, he doesn’t get more back than he pays in. He is actually helping to pay for the king crab legs when he can’t pay for them for himself.”
Doubling down on race-baiting is a losing strategy long-term, but it may work in 2014.