Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Consistently wrong since 2002

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

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

Stand up, dammit!

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

No one could have predicted…

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Archives for 2014

When Don Lemon Sinks His Teeth into a Hard News Story, He’s Getting to the Bottom of It

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The CNN anchor’s latest crime against decency:

LEMON: Can I ask you this, because — and please, I don’t mean to be crude, OK?

TARSHIS: Yeah.

LEMON: Because I know some of you — and you said this last night, that he — you lied to him and said “I have an infection, and if you rape me, or if you do — if you have intercourse with me, then you will probably get it and give it to your wife.”

TARSHIS: Right.

LEMON: And you said he made you perform oral sex.

TARSHIS: Right.

LEMON: You — you know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn’t want to do it.

That sound you hear is millions of gay men mentally erasing “Get a blowjob from Don Lemon” off their bucket list.

In all seriousness, if you are wondering why many women do not come forward about their rapes (and in this day and age, you might want to wonder what the fuck is wrong with you, as there is ample evidence as to why women DON’T come forward), here’s another data point. Because if you do come forward and relive the horror and humiliation and everything that goes with having been raped, some asshole on national television might actually ask you “Why didn’t you bite his dick?” Let’s also note that these claims by women about Cosby have been around for a long time, but just now people are talking about it. Because a MAN brought it to the forefront, and as part of a comedy routine. Think about how messed up that is.

Why does Don Lemon have a job today, CNN?

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American Rand Stand

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First, some ground rule suppositions:  Yes, the NSA absolutely needs to be reined in to stop metadata collection and privacy abuses.  Yes, the Senate NSA reform bill up for a vote yesterday was not perfect, but the bill would have stopped metadata collection in exchange for extending authorization to search existing phone records into 2017.

The bill failed to clear a Republican filibuster by two votes yesterday. 41 Republicans voted no.

One of those votes was a senator from my state, Rand Paul.

Paul said he voted against the bill because it would have extended the Patriot Act provision that allows the NSA to search Americans’ phone records. He has consistently opposed the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Leahy’s bill extended the provision’s expiration to June 2017 — as a compromise, in order to change the law to stop the NSA from holding onto phone records. Under Leahy’s bill, that duty would have been handed off to phone companies. The companies’ records could only have been searched with a surveillance court’s order.

While Paul said he “felt bad” that the bill failed, because it “probably needed my vote,” he also claimed the country was “one step closer to restoring civil liberties,” because the Patriot Act provision’s expiration date will not be extended.

Paul’s bedfellows on the vote to kill NSA reform made doomsaying predictions on the Senate floor, saying the legislation would allow Islamic State terrorists to perpetrate another 9/11.

The perfect became the enemy of the good here, and considering the vast majority of Republicans voted against this because SECRET TERRORISTS WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY, any bill to stop the NSA has even less of a chance in the next Congress.

The fact remains that Democrats put a bill up to stop the NSA, and it was Republicans who killed it. Whether or not you believe the bill was not robust enough, Republicans have assured zero action will take place to deal with privacy issues and the NSA.

And really it’s all about whether or not you take Rand Paul at his word, and as one of his constituents who has repeatedly seen his voting actions not match his rhetoric, I do not.  He’s a liar and whenever possible he’s self-serving (I know, shocking right, a senator doing that.)

But that’s just it, Rand Paul loves to portray himself as a non-typical Republican senator who will see things get done on the issues of civil liberties.  When given a perfect opportunity, he instead sided with typical neocon Republicans and spits out a lame excuse as to why, unless you believe that no NSA bill at all is “one step closer to restoring civil liberties” and all.

What he did was defuse a 2016 primary attack that he knows will be leveled at Ted Cruz: “He voted with Obama and the Democrats to weaken national security to help ISIS terrorists”.  Paul’s trying to have it both ways and he always has, while the Democrats are the ones pushing for NSA reform.

No, the parties are not the same on civil liberties. And in the end, Rand Paul sided with the GOP because in the end, he’s a typical wingnut Republican. So don’t tell me he’s a “champion of civil liberties” when given the only real political opportunity for advocating for meaningful NSA reform ahead of an incoming GOP Senate that won’t even take a vote on the NSA in the next two years, he instead was a coward and a Glibertarian douchebag.

Period.

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Fixing directories

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Web directories are one of the key points of differentiation between plans on the Exchanges.  A single company can offer half a dozen networks that may all come from the same base but have different inclusions and exclusions.  Other plan’s networks may be built as special snowflakes where there is minimal and coincidental commonality with the majority of the other networks offered by the same company. Mayhew Insurance currently is selling to the general public eleven networks and three tiered benefit products that are keyed on networks.  We sell four seperate networks on the Exchanges.  It is confusing to figure out which doctor is in which network when the directories are perfectly working and reasonably accurate.  It is near impossible to figure out if the directories are wildly inaccurate.  And that is if you are only looking at Mayhew Insurance.  It gets next to impossible if you are looking at four or five seperate companies with four or five seperate networks per company.

California regulators are showing the size of the problem:

 a California regulator found that two major health insurers violated state law and significantly overstated the availability of doctors on their new health-law policies.

More than 25% of physicians listed by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California were not taking Covered California patients or they were no longer at the location listed by the companies, according to state reports released Tuesday…

For Anthem, the state determined that 12.8% of doctors listed as in-network providers in the exchange were not willing to accept Covered California patients. Another 12.5% were no longer at the location listed in Anthem’s directory.

In examining Blue Shield, the state found that 8.8% of doctors listed were not honoring exchange coverage and 18.2% were not at the location listed by the insurer.

There are two sources of error here that require very different clean-ups by the insurers.  The first is scrubbing the list of false providers.  The second is cleaning up the office location data set.  

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Open Thread: King of the Pig Factories

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He’s common as pig tracks, and happy as a pig in… muck. The Des Moines Register on their hometown hero’s current plans:

Iowa’s Steve King is expanding his footprint as a presidential kingmaker.

The conservative congressman with the fitting last name is launching his own annual multicandidate forum for presidential hopefuls…

The inaugural Iowa Freedom Summit will be in Des Moines on Saturday, Jan. 24, more than a year from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. King’s co-host is Citizens United, a conservative organization best known for influencing campaign finance in this country.

Three Republicans who are seriously weighing 2016 presidential bids are already booked as headline speakers for the summit, which will have no cost to attend: Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

Every Republican who’s thinking about a White House bid has been invited, King told the Register.

The kingmaker universe in Iowa is growing increasingly more crowded, with U.S. Sen.-elect Joni Ernst now on the scene, along with the forceful figures of U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley and newly re-elected Gov. Terry Branstad, who just engineered a wholesale takeover of the state party headquarters….

Presidential candidates have long courted King’s stamp of approval. He gave his blessing to Fred Thompson in the 2008 presidential cycle, although not until just a couple of weeks before the caucuses, blunting the effectiveness of the endorsement. In the 2012 cycle, he came close to endorsing Mitt Romney, but ended up holding off his praise for the former Massachusetts governor until after the caucuses.

King told the Register that he will endorse this cycle…

My cynical DFH interpretation: Rep. “calves the size of cantaloupes” King has now got some hardcore local competition for the dumb hateful xenophobe demographic, and he thinks he may have hoarded his endorsements a little too long during the Obama elections. So he’s advertising his services for the new cycle immediately, and simultaneously announcing his partnership with Citizens United, who (for this one event) will provide the free lunch…

Would it be wrong to pray for an outbreak of norovirus at the conference hotel?

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Open Thread: I Miss Doghouse Riley

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… although the stuff now coming out of Mike Pence’s piehole would probably kill the poor man all over again. From the Crooks & Liars post:

… The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration announced last month that beginning in 2015, it would no longer request a waiver to the federal work requirement for certain people who use the SNAP program. Up to 65,000 single Hoosiers could lose food stamp benefits unless they are working 20 hours a week or attending job training.

Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Pence argued that 50,000 people had joined the Indiana workforce since 2008 so it was time to return to a “core principle” of welfare reform.

“How do you feel about people who say you are targeting poor people?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked the governor.

“I’m someone that believes there’s nothing more ennobling to a person than a job,” Pence insisted. “And to make sure that able-bodied adults without dependants at home know that here in the state of Indiana, we want to partner with them in their success.”…

Think Progress pointed out last month that there were 2 million people in the Midwest seeking jobs, but only about a million jobs available. And that’s not counting the thousands of people who are no longer counted as unemployed because they gave up looking for a job…

Video at the link, if you want to watch the Fauxbot tonguebathe Pence about how his command of all the GOP buzzwords might inspire “people” to encourage a presidential run. If you’ve been trying to lose weight, it will definitely put you off your dinner.

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Down Goes Keystone

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The Senate voted today on the Keystone pipeline, the environmental disaster that would ship Canadian oil overseas, create only a handful of jobs in the United States, and probably won’t be built right now because gas prices are so low. The vote failed 41-59. I don’t have the deets on who actually voted, but the following Democrats are on the list of the usual suspects:

In addition to the chamber’s 45 Republicans, all of whom were expected to support the bill, Landrieu was joined by 10 more Democratic co-sponsors: Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, Montana Sen. John Walsh, North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.

Three more Democrats had pledged last week to support the measure: Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Delaware Sen. Tom Carper and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey.

One more time for morons who continue to push the notion that it was Obama who killed the public option- the vote for something so obviously bad was THAT close with a Democratic majority AFTER an election cycle.

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