Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Everybody saw this coming.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

This fight is for everything.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Bark louder, little dog.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

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Archives for October 2015

Friday Evening Open Thread: No Violin Tiny Enough

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From the NYTimes:

It is a portrait of deep frustration. Jeb Bush’s campaign has 10 paid staff members in Iowa, it has made 70,380 phone calls to state Republicans and it has collected 5,000 email addresses. For all that, it has recruited just four volunteers statewide and has identified only 1,260 supporters…

On Saturday, both [Bush and Rubio] will appear with eight other Republican candidates at a forum in Des Moines. Iowa, the state with the first nominating contest, has been rocky terrain for Mr. Bush because of its large evangelical bloc and hostility to mainstream politicians…

The ghost of Teri Schiavo has zero fvcks to spare for you, Gov. Bush.

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Now that you’ve got a metric for “low FUN bar to clear,” what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?

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Maybe Too Much TV Is a Bad Thing

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Apparently there is such a thing as too much TV. And add some malt liquor to the mix and things go horribly wrong. A New Mexico man, after watching The Walking Dead, thought his friend was a zombie and tried to kill him:

Then, Perry told police, the victim, Christopher Paquin, 23, tried “to bite him,” according to a statement from cops. Perry “reacted by brutally beating” Paquin with his hands and feet, the release said, and also used an electric guitar, kitchen knives and a microwave to kill the victim.

The sad part? This is what we used as a “light” news story.

Team Blackness also discussed yet another questionable civilian shooting by police near St. Louis, for the first time a prosecutor will go to jail for wrongfully convicting an innocent man, and a camerawoman tries to sue a Syrian refugee she tripped that was caught on tape.

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PowerPoint Presentation of the Darned

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Earlier, valued commenter Germy Shoemangler alerted us to the location of a leaked PowerPoint deck from Jeb’s recent “Imma Tell My Mom, Dad and Big Brother You Were MEAN to Me” conference. There are 112 slides in the presentation. One hundred! And twelve!

Until I saw that, I didn’t think it would be possible for me to feel pity for the soulless fat-cats, sundry hucksters and hired political hatchet-men aboard the HMS Jebtanic. But damned if I didn’t experience a twinge of sympathy, imagining their despair as their beady little eyes adjusted to the dimmed lights and fixed on the slide counter at the bottom of the projection screen.

There’s a yawning chasm between my politics and values and theirs, but sweet merciful Christ, we’re all human beings! Anyhoo, here’s one of several slides that showcase Rubio’s deficits in a bid to stop donors fleeing toward the diminutive upstart (remember, this was before the debate):
risky bet

Another slide calls Rubio the “GOP Obama,” which illustrates how perfectly insane these miserable fucksticks are. “GOP Obama”?!?!? As if, motherfuckers!

I take back what I said earlier about our common humanity. They deserved every moment of soul-crushing boredom they endured during that interminable slideshow. I hope the tuna salad sandwiches on the catered snack trays were both stale and soggy and that the cokes were flat, with nary a drop of bourbon in the room to ease their pain.

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BoBo Redux: Who You Gonna Believe

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…Bobo, or what the candidates very clearly say they are going to do.

Which is to say: not to disagree w. DougJ, but the signature line in David Brooks latest grotesquerie isn’t the closer. It’s this:

At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable.  What matters is how a candidate signals priorities.

Umm. David.  We remember George Bush’s plans.  They signaled his priorities just fine…and he proceeded as promised to turn a robust budget surplus into the biggest upwards income redistribution in memory, along with deficits from here to Atlantis.

I had thought to fisk the whole damn column, which is full of low-hanging fruit.  But really why bother?  It’s all there in that don’t “get too worked up” by what alledged “wonks” actually say about the policies they wonkishly espouse.  Because it’s not like they mean it.

Except they do.

And once again we see:  David Brooks is a terrible public figure not because of his politics but because of his character, his willingness to be a loyal apparatchik transcribing whatever counts as pravda in that universe in which Republicans are the natural party of power.

Pieter_Brueghel_the_Elder_-_The_Dutch_Proverbs_-_Google_Art_Project

Or to put it another way: he both is and broadcasts a stupid person’s idea of what a smart conservative sounds like.

PS:  Krugthulu agrees.  What I like best about this is the absence of even a shred of collegial courtesy.

Which is as it should be.  If you’re going to opine in public, then it’s your job to do so by saying what you really think.

Image:  Pieter Breughel the Elder, Dutch Proverbs — The Topsy Turvy World. 1559.  I highly recommend checking out the image at the link.  The notes embedded in the picture explain it’s relevance here.  See, e.g. the roses before swine above.

 

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Kynect Versus The Purple People Eaters

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Speaking of state exchanges and the color purple (prose or otherwise) heading into the final weekend before Tuesday’s gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, just a gentle reminder of what’s at stake here should Republican Matt Bevin win over Democratic AG Jack Conway and Kynect and Medicaid expansion goes away for 450,000 Kentuckians.

Two years into Obamacare, clear regional patterns are emerging about who has health insurance in America and who still doesn’t.

The remaining uninsured are primarily in the South and the Southwest. They tend to be poor. They tend to live in Republican-leaning states. The rates of people without insurance in the Northeast and the upper Midwest have fallen into the single digits since the Affordable Care Act’s main provisions kicked in. But in many parts of the country, obtaining health insurance is still a problem for many Americans.

These trends emerged in an analysis we undertook with the help of two organizations that are closely monitoring the progress of the health law. Last year, we used similar data to show the the substantial effects Obamacare had on reducing the number of Americans without health insurance. This year, the same groups updated their estimates of where America’s uninsured live, and the change is a lot less drastic. States that were late to expand Medicaid, including Pennsylvania and Indiana, showed substantial reductions in their uninsured residents compared with last year. In other places, the changes have been more modest. In a few — like Mississippi — things appear to have gotten worse, with fewer people having health insurance this year than last.

A county-by-county map makes this even more clear:

Now that Indiana and Pennsylvania are on board with Medicaid expansion, it’s very clear that the red states in the South  (and Missouri) that are under GOP rule are in real trouble. Arkansas is the lone holdout as GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson hasn’t been able to kill it yet after inheriting it from his Democratic predecessor.

But you’d better believe that Matt Bevin will put Kentucky back into the nearly solid purple of the South if he wins in a few days.  He’s gone from wanting to scrap it totally to considering the same block grant expansion/private insurance hybrid mess that Hutchinson wants in Arkansas, but that would still kick hundreds of thousands of people off Medicaid onto private plans, and he still wants to scrap Kynect completely and force Kentucky to go to a federal exchange (again wasting millions of taxpayer dollars in the process) in order to get those plans, and at a far more expensive monthly premium level.

It’s a pretty clear choice on Tuesday, folks.

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Not substantially different to spam the Exchanges

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There is a problem with how  the second Silver subsidy point is calculated for the PPACA Exchanges.

A company can offer numerous plans that have minuscule differences in benefit configuration.  Each plan counts as a separate entry in the Silver category, so a company can spam the Exchange with isomorphic plan designs.  If a company is fairly confident that its base configuration is in the running to be either the #1 or #2 lowest priced Silvers, there is minimal marginal cost of slightly tweaking benefit designs by bumping up co-pays or shifting some deductible dollars to co-insurance dollars or otherwise making small marginal and effectively meaningless changes to a plan to spawn mirrors.

There is little pay-off if the insurer creating near mirror plans is in a market where there is tight clustering at the second Silver price point.  If there is an eight dollar spread between the first Silver and the 2nd Silver, adding another 5 plans between Silver # 1 and Silver #2 does not significantly change the subsidy point.

However if there is a spread of $40 dollars between the #1 Silver and the #2 Silver, adding a Silver between those two points so the new subsidy point is only $5 more than #1 Silver, spamming the Exchanges makes sense.

Chicago has an excellent example of this for the 2016 plan year.

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