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Archives for June 2018
Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and FBI Director Wray Testify Before the House Judiciary Committee
The Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director Wray are currently before the House Judiciary Committee. DAG Rosenstein is trying to testify, but Congressman Jordan won’t stop screaming at him. Rosenstein has clearly had enough. The live feed is below. I’ve got it set to start with Jordan’s abuse of Rosenstein so you can see just what the climate is like.
Open thread!
Changing spreads in 2019
The Kaiser Family Foundation is keeping track of 2019 rate filings for the ACA. Their Table 1 has the least expensive Bronze and Gold plans as well as the benchmark Silver plan in a single major city in each state that they’ve updated. This is very valuable albeit incomplete data as the story in central cities can and often is different than the story in rural areas.
What I find interesting is the changes in the spreads from 2018 to 2019. For people who are eligible for premium tax credit subsidies, those subsidies are calculated based on the benchmark Silver plan. The benchmark is the second least expensive Silver plan in a county if there are multiple Silver plans or the premium of the only Silver plan. If a person buys a plan that is less expensive than the benchmark, they get all of the savings. If they buy a plan that is more expensive than the benchmark, they pay all of the incremental costs.
In 2018, we saw significant spreads as the termination of Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies led to most states putting CSR costs into only the Silver plans which made Gold and Bronze plans comparatively cheaper. Now that insurers have more policy certainty, I am curious as to how the relative prices are projected to change in 2019 compared to 2018.
It varies a lot. Some cities like Burlington Vermont will see Gold and Bronze plans get at least $100 cheaper relative to the benchmark in 2019 than 2018. We should expect significant increases in subsidized enrollment as Vermont will be Silver Switching this year instead of doing nothing like they did in 2018.
Richmond, Virginia will see the relative prices of Bronze plans increase slightly while the least expensive Gold plans will get far cheaper. This makes the unlikely assumption that Medicaid expansion will not alter final pricing.
At the same time, subsidized folks who are not buying the benchmark plan will be slightly worse off as the least expensive Bronze and Gold plans have wider premium spreads this year than they did last year.
The important take-away is that the ACA is a county by county story with very idiosyncratic premium shocks built into the subsidy structure.
You be the referee
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. The England-Belgium game is going to be one hell of a refereeing challenge. Both England and Belgium will be advancing to the knock-out round. The problem is one side of the bracket is far scarier than the other side. The winner of the group goes into the scary bracket.
Here is the situation per the Ringer:
each side has a goal differential of plus-6, and each has scored eight goals, tied for the most of any team in the World Cup. The next tiebreaker is head-to-head performance, so if England and Belgium were to play to a draw in their final game, the winner of the group would be determined by “fair play”—based on how many yellow and red cards the teams accumulated over the course of the group stage.
England has two cautions and Belgium has three cautions.
Let’s assume that each team desires to go to the weak bracket.
England’s preference order is therefore:
Lose, draw with at least 2 more yellow cards than Belgium, draw with 1 more yellow card than Belgium (to equalize yellow card count and go to drawn lots), draw with same or fewer yellow cards or win outright.
Belgium’s preference order is:
Lose, draw with same or more yellow card count as England, draw with 1 less yellow card in the game, draw with 2 or less yellow cards in the game or win outright.
No one wants to win which means each team’s first choice of losing is highly unlikely.
England really needs to get at least one more yellow card than Belgium. Belgium knows that England has a strong incentive to get one more caution.
All of these players are highly skilled professionals. They all know how to go into challenges in ways that will almost guarantee cautionable contact. Thankfully, there is enough of a shadow of a future that bone breaking, tournament ending tackles are not incentivized. Enough of them are skilled enough assholes who will talk their way into cautions.
So what do you do as a referee?
Just do your fucking job!
So much that is wrong with our government comes down to people not doing their fucking jobs. They have jobs with clearly defined responsibilities, but they either don’t understand what their role is or they think it’s too small for a person of their eminence, and so instead of doing their actual jobs, they appoint themselves Guardians of the Republican and go on to fuck everything up.
Exhibit A is James Comey, who was so obsessed with his image as the Last Honest Man that he threw out the clearly defined procedures that were in place to ensure that FBI investigations didn’t interfere with elections and inserted himself into the 2016 race to disastrous effect. Thanks, Big Jim!
On the high end of the teeter-totter, Lil’ Marco offered himself up as Exhibit B yesterday with this deeply stupid tweet, which I am convinced represents the sentiments not only of himself but of all the craven fuckwits in the GOP who are kowtowing to Trump:
Many Republicans won’t criticize Trump even when they don’t agree with him b/c it means siding with a media that nevers cuts him a break,turns even little things he does into an act of evil,are also unfair to them & in the end will still attack you anyway https://t.co/jv3A18ka4V
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 27, 2018
Like Comey, Rubio has lost sight of what his job is, and there’s really no excuse for that since it is clearly defined in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, right under the goddamned preamble. As a member of the legislative branch, under the separation of powers concept, Rubio and his colleagues are to serve as checks and balances on the other branches of government, which comprise the executive and judicial branches, not the fucking media.
I told him as much yesterday when I responded to his dumb tweet. But did he listen to his constituent? Noooo! Here he is doubling down yet again this morning:
As expected,the reaction of the “usual suspects” to this tweet yesterday either proved my point or missed it. Many in the media & Trump bashers are not self aware enough to realize how biased & dishonest a very large % of GOP voters & officeholders view them & the impact it has https://t.co/4Nnlh6OxoV
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 28, 2018
Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, he’s saying that legislators are embracing the words and deeds of a president they don’t agree with because the media and political opposition are mean. It’s the senatorial equivalent of the “shrill liberals made me racist” defense Trump’s asshole supporters have been deploying lately.
Rubio went on to triple and quadruple down because, like many stupid people, once he fixates on an idea, he clings to it like a piece of gum on a dainty little ankle-high boot. It’s not Rubio’s job to police the press, but by Grabthar’s Hammer, it’s a lot easier than doing his ACTUAL fucking job.
Maybe the Democrats can incorporate “put people back to work” into their messaging for the upcoming elections. Not for unemployed voters — for the all-too-employed shit-stains like Rubio who simply refuse to do the jobs they already have.
Thursday: The End Of The Beginning
Yesterday’s matches were exciting until the last moment. Just crazy, crazy stuff. I think that VAR has been a great boon to the game and look forward to more evolutions.
I heard a great program on the BBC last week or the week before that played an audiogram with thuds being the frequency of shots on goal from the World Cups of the 60’s to now and it was striking because there were like 50 on average then and 20 now. The game has changed – players are more fit, better trained, playing and improving year-round. Defense is better and so there are many less shots on goal per match, but that doesn’t mean that the games are boring, just that players aren’t taking nearly as many shots from farther out because they are trained to not waste the opportunity and instead to go closer or pass. Interesting, and something to keep in mind when looking at modern or future changes.
And so today we have the final matches for the group stage.
At 10, Senegal v Colombia and Japan v Poland. I’m watching match 1 and rooting for Los Cafeteros. I have family history in Colombia and so of course they have my full support. I might even make an arepa for a mid-morning snack! For match 2, I expect Japan will win, but am ready for more twists and turns, and should they lose, Colombia could come out on top in the bracket!
At 2, England v Belgium. Should be an incredible match, great football. I cannot wait!
At the same time, Panama v Tunisia will be the final match of the group stage. The results won’t matter as both teams are heading home. I hope Panama wins as I want them encouraged to come back. It’s amazing what a victory can do to improve funding and attention for future teams!
Enjoy the matches today everyone. Friday is a day off, and then shit gets real on Saturday at 10!
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Ratify the ERA
Back at the end of May, Illinois became the thirty-seventh state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. (Thirty-eight states are required for ratification.) Even though I didn’t post about it at the time, events of the past few weeks have confirmed my conviction that embedding the ERA in the Constitution is one of our best weapons against the creeping authoritarianism of the revanchist GOP and its dishonest brokers in all three branches of government. And I’m not alone!
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2014 remarks at the National Press Club said if she could choose any amendment to add to the US Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment. “I think we have achieved that through legislation, but legislation can be repealed, it can be altered,” Ginsburg continued. “So I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion — that women and men are persons of equal stature — I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”
It will probably not come as a surprise that the states which have so far failed to ratify are those of the Confederacy, plus Utah and Arizona. That doesn’t mean any of these states are unflippable, not even Arkansas (hello, Senator Doug Jones) or Georgia. The original 1970s impetus to revive the ERA — which, it should be remembered, was first proposed in 1923 — was vitiated by a series of state-level legal and social changes. But Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, and the Reichtwing jubilation greeting the Oval Office Occupant’s chance to steal another seat on the Supreme Court, make it clear that the ERA is every bit as essential to our continued existence as a free nation as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Without protection at the highest level, our rights to equal protection will never be more than provisional.
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Ratify the ERAPost + Comments (164)