Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Bark louder, little dog.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

This really is a full service blog.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

Books are my comfort food!

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

This fight is for everything.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Second rate reporter says what?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

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Archives for July 2018

Gentleman’s C

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Badger and I had puppy school last night. He’s in the middle of the class, I’d guess — better than some, worse than others.

He and I both live very cloistered lives, I realized. We’re not used to interacting with strangers, and it stresses us out.

In him, this anxiety manifests as trembling, irritability and occasional growling. Same here, I guess.

Next week, we’re working on “leave it!” Hopefully I’ll benefit from the training; “leave it” has never been my strong suit.

Open thread!

ETA: When we got home, we were so keyed up from the experience that we needed to decompress in our own ways. He ran around like a maniac, and I had a glass of bourbon. Later, he mounted sneak attacks on my husband and me while we dozed. Next week, maybe Badger will have the bourbon and I’ll run around the block…

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Breaking News: Allen Weisselberg Issued a Federal Grand Jury Subpoena

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Allen Weisselberg, a longtime financial gatekeeper for President Donald Trump, has been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury in the criminal probe of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Mr. Weisselberg is considered a witness in the investigation, the people said. It isn’t known whether he has already appeared before the grand jury or what questions prosecutors of New York’s Southern District have had for him.

Tim O’Brien, one of the President’s biographers, wrote about Weisselberg yesterday.

Weisselberg isn’t a bit player in Trumplandia and his emergence on the Cohen-Trump recording – as someone possibly facilitating a scheme apparently meant to disguise a payoff – should worry the president. Weisselberg has detailed information about the Trump Organization’s operations, business deals and finances. If he winds up in investigators’ crosshairs for secreting payoffs, he could potentially provide much more damaging information to prosecutors than Cohen ever could about the president’s dealmaking.

As I noted in a column in April, the press and others have sometimes characterized Cohen as the man who knows all of Trump’s secrets or even, errantly, as someone who ran the Trump Organization with the president’s children. Not so.

Weisselberg, on the other hand, has worked for the Trump family since the 1970s, and knows more about the Trump Organization’s history and finances than nearly anyone. Almost 71 years old, he joined the company after graduating from college and worked for the president’s father, Fred, as an accountant. He has since become the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and one of the president’s closest business confidants (alongside Jason Greenblatt, who was Trump’s in-house legal counsel before the president named him as a special diplomatic envoy to the Middle East).

Weisselberg also served as treasurer of the president’s troubled philanthropy, The Donald J. Trump Foundation, which the New York State Attorney General has sued for allegations involving “extensive and persistent violations of state and federal law.” The suit says the foundation routinely and willfully broke the law by engaging in self-dealing that ultimately came to include illegal coordination with Trump’s political campaign. Weisselberg hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.

(I interviewed Weisselberg extensively for a 2005 biography I wrote, “TrumpNation.” Trump unsuccessfully sued me for libel and Weisselberg testified during the case, which was dismissed in 2011.)

Over the years, Weisselberg’s professional duties also came to include handling Trump’s personal finances as well as the Trump Organization’s corporate finances. He has paid household bills, made large purchases for Trump, and has communicated with Trump’s outside investment advisers. After Trump became president his lawyers created a trust that safeguards his interest in the Trump Organization while ostensibly managing the company without his input. The trust is run by Weisselberg and the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

O’Brien provided a brief bit of commentary after Wall Street Journal broke:

Weisselberg knows where every dime that every came in came from and where it went. Perhaps more than any other development in the various investigations into the President, his campaign, his business, his and his children’s charities, and the Russian active measures and cyberwarfare campaign; this one investigative action by the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York is the most significant so far.

Open thread!

 

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Shitty Cops Abuse Power on Behalf of Garbage President

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Remember earlier this month when Stormy Daniels got busted on misdemeanor vice charges in Columbus, Ohio? (Yeah, it seems like a year ago to me too.) The charges against Daniels were soon dropped, and she donated her tips from the night to the two local strippers who were arrested along with her, which makes Stormy Daniels a classier act than every adult Trump and all their supporters, combined and multiplied by infinity.

Soon thereafter, the city attorney announced that the office had dismissed the charges against the other two dancers and would no longer waste the district’s time with stupid charges like those on which Daniels was arrested. As many of us noted here at the time, the incident reeked of a politically motivated hit.

The vice squad initially claimed Daniels had been arrested during a human trafficking and prostitution undercover operation — she wasn’t targeted, they said, but rather just happened to be in a club that was under investigation. Columbus Police Department emails from a whistle-blower that were published yesterday seem to expose that story as a big fat lie.

The emails seem to show that lead arresting officer, Detective Shana Keckley, planned the bust well in advance of Daniels’ arrival. Days before Daniels came to town, the cop sent photos of Daniels and Trump from her home email account to her work email as well as a map of the club where Daniels would be performing. After the bust, she crowed about the national attention and exchanged email high-fives with other cops, asking one to not mention her (Keckley’s) name on Facebook.

Via the Fayette Advocate, which has posted copies of the emails:

“I got the elements….we arrested Stormy this morning, she is in jail.” (“Elements” are the burden police officers must meet in order to make an arrest.)

In another email dated on July 12 at 3:50 a.m., Keckley writes to another police officer bragging about Daniel’s arrest — without mentioning her by name — saying, “You’re Welcome!!!!!….Thank me in person later.”

Keckley went on to send additional emails, including one to Shane Keckley — purportedly her husband — writing, “It is all over CNN. I wanted you to know before everyone contacts you.”

Most cops are Republicans, and in the age of Trump, most Republicans are willing to disbelieve their own eyes and ears in their cult-like devotion to Trump. It wouldn’t be surprising if such devotion is even stronger among cops since Trump has gone out of his way to valorize the police and reinforce their biases.

A central ritual of Trump’s ongoing campaign rallies is a chant to jail a retired public servant who has been thoroughly investigated and cleared of criminal wrongdoing. Trump routinely abuses his office to demand that the Department of Justice disregard due process and pursue political vendettas on his behalf. So it’s also not surprising that his staunchest followers would heed that call to abuse power when a Trump nemesis happens to enter their jurisdiction.

After the charges against Daniels were dropped, the CPD tweeted a statement from the chief:

These emails should serve as Exhibit A in the investigations into the officers’ motives, and if it’s the political hit job it appears to be, the officers involved should be fired.

This story isn’t getting much attention. The charges were dropped. Daniels is in the adult film business. Everyone already knows Trump is a degenerate, so even stories with a salacious element that are linked directly to Trump have a “dog bites man” quality. But this story is especially chilling because of the flagrant abuse of power in the service of partisan politics.

We’ve heard a lot about stochastic terrorism over the past few years — the incitement of random violence via public demonization. What the Columbus cops did seems to be a species of stochastic fascism. We’ll find out soon enough if that sort of freelance oppression is allowed to stand.

PS: The lead cop in this politically motivated arrest is named Shana Michelle Keckley. Her husband, also a CPD cop, is named Shane Michael Keckley. That’s kinda weird, isn’t it? Has anyone ever seen them in the same room at the same time?

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Local Races, Kansas (Aug. 7 Primary): SHARICE DAVIDS

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Anyone from the area got an opinion on the Kansas primary? Davids certainly seems to be in my / our wheelhouse — and not just because she’s been endorsed by both Gloria Steinem and Janelle Monae. Of course it’s Bleeding Kansas, it’s a crowded primary, and there’s been bigfooting from outside groups that may not have Democratic interests at heart… but *still*…

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Site neutral payments in Medicare

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Medicare will pay two very different rates for the same exact service performed on nearly identical patients in two offices that share a wall in a strip mall professional office building. One, lower rate is paid for physician owned entities while a much higher rate is paid to the office that is classified as a hospital outpatient location. These two locations may have the same doctors working in the suites. The only meaningful difference that drives significant payment deltas is the ownership structure.

For the health policy geeks, the following tweet is huge news:

 

The 2015 budget deal had started the process of going towards site neutrality by stopping the payment bump from going to locations that were bought after the bill was signed into law. It grandfathered the older facilities and their payment bump. This is a much bigger deal. It is a proposed rule change that will attempt to equalize payments that occur in the outpatient setting without regard to ownership structure.

This is good policy from Health and Human Services.

It is also a policy proposal that will create a massive lobbying battle.

(Disclaimer: I work for Duke University which is significantly entangled with Duke University Health System. I imagine DUHS financial analysts are on their 11th cup of coffee this morning trying to figure out what the rule means to DUHS. I imagine that the rule would be a significant swing in revenue one way or another).

In 2016, HHS issued a draft rule that attempted to remove some of the perverse incentives of Medicare Part B drug administration. The existing rule that they wanted to change had Medicare pay doctors the average price of an office administered drug plus six percent. This creates a strong incentive for doctors to choose more expensive drugs if there clinically viable alternatives as the check which flows from six percent of a big price is bigger than the check that flows from six percent of a small price. HHS proposed to significantly reduce the percentage kicker while adding a flat fee administration fee. This would change the perverse incentive. The rule died as there was a massive howl of protest from the doctors who routinely prescribed the high cost drugs (oncology is a big field).

I think that the same dynamic will be in play with this rule. HHS is trying to remove a perverse incentive. This rule change will create winners and losers. I think the losers will scream far more loudly than the winners.

If HHS can get this rule through or at least something substantially similar to it, this would be a significant improvement in payment policy but the politics and power dynamics are going to be tough.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Welcome to His World

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Spent most of yesterday dealing with a dental appointment, so I didn’t get the chance to post about the unhinged behavior of the Oval Office Resident during his VFW speech. (In a more normal era, it would’ve dominated the news cycle for days.) He’s begging what should be a loyal crowd to accept a version of recent news that does not comport with reality…


 
And suddenly, some of the faithful are no longer buying the schtick!

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