Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s finish the job.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

The lights are all blinking red.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Ah, the different things are different argument.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

This blog will pay for itself.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

“But what about the lurkers?”

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

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

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

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“Refreshed My Recollection” Is The New “Oh Shit”

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The Times today has a report on…how shall we say it?…

…

Gordon Sondland’s sudden rush of shit to the heart when he realized that credible testimony to the impeachment inquiry placed him squarely in the crosshairs for a perjury charge:

In the addendum, Mr. Sondland said he had “refreshed my recollection” after reading the testimony given by Mr. Taylor and Timothy Morrison, the senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council.

What does this suddenly repaired memory reveal about Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy?

The disclosure from Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, in four new pages of sworn testimony released on Tuesday, confirmed his involvement in essentially laying out a quid pro quo* to Ukraine that he had previously not acknowledged.

“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Mr. Sondland said in the document, which was released by the House committees leading the inquiry, along with the transcript of his original testimony from last month.

Oh. And if you’re a Trumpanzee…Shit.

Nothing about this is good for Trump, nor, really Sondland himself, who is now seen by more or less everyone as an untrustworthy hack now on the record with a story that kills any chance for help from Trumpworld.  But at least he’s dodged the most immediate personal legal threat.  For now.

I think I’m in agreement with the Shitgibbon on this one matter at least: let’s focus on the substance, shall we?

ETA: Also, as a twitterer reminded me, enough with the “quid pro quo” cutesy crap. Trump and his team were extorting a foreign leader to produce false material about a political opponent in service of Trump’s reelection. That’s not the rough and tumble of bargaining between nations.  It’s straight up Mafia thuggery: “Nice country you got here.  Shame if something happened to it.”  This isn’t (just) an impeachable offense. It’s a crime, and Trump and his aides are as-yet-unindicted mobsters

Open thread.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, Two Rats, 1884

 

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The Worst People

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Donald Trump is a dim-witted conman, but like any half-bright male baboon, he knows how to dominate rivals. Our long national nightmare of governance by a lesser primate (any random baboon would be a VAST improvement) is interspersed with darkly comic glimpses of arrogant fanatics and sundry knaves being ritually humiliated for disobedience and/or publicly shitting in their own hats when commanded to do so by a corrupt and ridiculous buffoon.

Secretaries of State Tillerson and Pompeo illustrate the two options admirably. Tillerson gave up being a powerful executive of a rapacious multinational polluter to take orders from an absurd cocksplat, endure serial humiliations and then get fired while on the toilet. In the final analysis, he may have escaped the Trump orbit less ignominiously than his successor, who has publicly shat his hat: [The Times]

WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo was briefed by agency officials on the extensive evidence — including American intercepts of conversations between participants — showing that Russian hackers working for the government of Vladimir V. Putin had interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign. In May 2017, Mr. Pompeo testified in a Senate hearing that he stood by that conclusion.

Two and a half years later, Mr. Pompeo seems to have changed his mind. As Mr. Trump’s second secretary of state, he now supports an investigation into a discredited, partisan theory that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Trump wants to use to make the case that he was elected without Moscow’s help. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” Mr. Pompeo said last month. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”

Mr. Pompeo’s spreading of a false narrative at the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the most striking example of how he has fallen off the tightrope he has traversed for the past 18 months: demonstrating loyalty to the president while insisting to others he was pursuing a traditional, conservative foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo, 55, now finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress that Mr. Trump and his allies hijacked Ukraine policy for political gain — and as congressional investigators look into what Mr. Pompeo knew of the machinations of Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

Pompeo is evil, but he’s not stupid. He knows this crackpot “Ukraine framed Russia” conspiracy theory is garbage. But there he is, outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to Sean Hannity and treating the professionals he led at two separate federal organizations as extras in the Trump Show. Here’s hoping the cowardly, careerist fuckbucket gets a send-off that makes Tillerson’s toilet firing look like a gold Rolex retirement ceremony.

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Georgia’s 1332 waiver reinsurance thoughts

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Georgia’s governor released a plan for a 1332 waiver.  This waiver has two severable steps. The first is a reinsurance step.  ACA reinsurance has a source of funds that are not derived from premiums cover some portion of claims. The external infusion of money means premiums don’t have to be high enough to cover all claims and all administrative costs. Instead, they just have to be high enough to cover some portion of claims and all of the administrative costs.

Georgia is proposing a reinsurance scheme that varies by geography. The health economists are going to love this, especially in rating area 13 as it provides a great source of variation and clean discontinuities. The policy objective is to bring down gross premiums in rural, expensive regions more than in urban and suburban regions. This is a valid policy objective. Colorado is running a reinsurance scheme similar to the proposed Georgia scheme for the same exact objective.

Georgia 1332 reinsurance scheme in 3 regions
Georgia 1332 reinsurance scheme

The other notable aspect of this proposal is the amount of claims that the reinsurance scheme is proposing to eat. The attachment point which is the claim value where reinsurance starts is only $20,000. That is a knee replacement or a somewhat complicated C-section. Many other states won’t start their reinsurance until the claims run to $40,000 or $50,000. And then the reinsurance program runs to $500,000. This is much higher than usual. None of this is bad. It is a lot of reinsurance.

 

 


 

Finally, the Georgia market has some significant premium spreads between the cheapest plan in a metal level relative to the benchmark premium. Big spreads are great for healthy, subsidized folks as they will see cheap net of subsidy plans. Small spreads push healthy subsidized folks out of the market as they are priced out. Regions with large, current spreads and high (80% coinsurance) will see much smaller spreads in 2021 than they do now. This will bring some uninsured and unsubsidized folks into the marketplace while pushing some currently insured and subsidized out. I argued in August that states have to make choices:

All states will face an environment of guaranteed issued, community‐rated, subsidized private market insurance, available Medicaid expansion for working‐age adults at an enhanced federal cost‐sharing and wide waiver authority that is constrained by law and clear administrative procedures. Within this framework, states will need to find ways to smooth the edges of the law and address issues and populations that are not well served by the law. They have the tools to do so, but the decisions to trade‐off the well‐being of some groups for the gains of others will remain a potent political and policy problem.

Georgia is making a choice.

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So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it

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Don’t forget to vote in your local elections today if you have them. Where I live, in Monroe County, the Republicans have dominated county politics for years, but there’s been a big shift in registration in the past three years, amounting to a 3-4% net gain for Democrats. I asked a friend if Dems have a chance this year and he said no because they don’t turn out for county elections.

Commenter MikeJ once said that too many liberals were

too cool to actually approve of anything. The whole thing smacks of effort, man. Democrats are also famous for only liking the first album (or better yet, the unreleased demos.)

Don’t be that guy. Go out and vote Democrat today no matter how uninspiring your candidates are.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Steyer Now Has An Honorable Excuse to Quit

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If he had any sense, Steyer would’ve made this post obsolete already… but if he had any sense, would he have declared in the first place?

Of course he can stay in the race — clearly he’s got the funds, and the self-absorption, to do so — but the longer he fights his inevitable expulsion, the worse he (and… sigh… the DNC) are gonna look. Take the L, Mr. Steyer. And if you don’t want to worry about strangers yelling at you in the street, make a big honkin’ monetary donation to Senator Harris’ campaign on the way out.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: In for the Long Haul

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On today’s fireworks schedule:

A federal appeals panel said on Monday that President Trump’s accounting firm must turn over eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns to Manhattan prosecutors, a setback for the president’s attempt to keep his financial records private…

In its ruling on Monday, the three-judge appeals panel did not take a position on the president’s biggest argument — that he was immune from all criminal investigations. A lower court had called that argument “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”

Instead, the appeals court said the president’s accounting firm, not Mr. Trump himself, was subpoenaed for the documents, so it did not matter whether presidents had immunity…

“There is no obvious reason why a state could not begin to investigate a president during his term and, with the information secured during that search, ultimately determine to prosecute him after he leaves office,” Judge Katzmann wrote for the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

By keeping the ruling narrowly focused on the subpoena directed at Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, the effect may be to allow the Supreme Court to uphold the decision without having to issue a far broader ruling against the president…

Under a deal reached by Mr. Trump’s lawyers with Mr. Vance’s office, the subpoena will not be enforced while Mr. Trump seeks review of the appellate ruling in the Supreme Court, provided that he asks that the court hear the case in its current term, which ends in June.

IMO, dragging it out until five months before the election really gives it that deep philosophical ‘I might die, or the king might die — or maybe the horse will learn to sing!’ flavor (of desperation).

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Little Prince Rand Speaks Up, Again

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… As per usual, the Little Prince feels like he’s a BSD when surrounded by fellow grifters:

Yep, the Oval Office Occupant went down to Kentucky, for an ego-boost. There were plenty of protestors outside the (not full) arena, but the Secret Service screens the folks Trump might hear.

Somebody do a emergency wellness check on Daniel Dale:

What’s the excuse for the trip?

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