Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

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

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2020

Archives for 2020

Federal Appeals Court Blocks Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: 

Partially good news.

A federal court on Friday upended a central pillar of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, ruling that asylum seekers must be allowed into the United States while their cases weave through American immigration courts.

In their opinion on Friday, the judges said the policy is “invalid in its entirety” 

Additionally,

In a separate ruling on Friday, the same panel of appeals court judges rejected another of the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict asylum. In that case, the judges reviewed a policy that blocks anyone who had entered the United States illegally — as opposed to presenting themselves at a legal port of entry — from applying for asylum.

Not clear what happens next.

Government lawyers may quickly move to reverse the decision, before border agents are once again overwhelmed by thousands of people who must now be processed and allowed into the United States. They could request an immediate stay, or an “en banc” review by all of the judges on the Ninth Circuit — once a reliably progressive venue that has seen a number of recent conservative appointees under President Trump. Another option would be to request that the case be taken up by the Supreme Court, where President Trump has secured a conservative majority.

Federal Appeals Court Blocks Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ PolicyPost + Comments (33)

COVID-19 By The Numbers

by | 187 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Let’s look at some numbers just to get a sense of COVID-19’s possible effects. This is not a prediction or an attempt to find precise numbers. Just something to wrap your mind around.

United States population: 329,000,000 (US census)

Number of deaths in 2017: 2,814,000 (CDC)

Deaths from influenza and pneumonia: 55,672 (CDC)

Cases of influenza: 9,300,000 to 45,000,000 (CDC)

That’s a wide uncertainty, no doubt because not everyone who has influenza goes to the doctor, much less is tested.

The numbers of cases of influenza are kept down by vaccinations and immunity in people who have had a similar strain of influenza in the past. COVID-19 has no such mitigating factors, which is why limiting people’s movement becomes important.

Don’t bother to try to make the numbers of deaths from influenza and pneumonia fit neatly with the cases of influenza. My purpose in this post is to provide a general sense of how COVID-19 might affect the United States and give some numbers for you to make sense of.

Right now, the death rate for influenza is generally agreed to be about 0.1%. For COVID-19, it’s about 2%.

If there are as many cases of COVID-19 as there are of influenza, that gives 186,000 to 900,000 deaths. That’s compared to 56,000 for influenza. Heart disease kills about 650,000 people a year, cancer 600,000 (CDC). And, without a vaccine or immunity from earlier infections, those numbers could be larger.

COVID-19 By The NumbersPost + Comments (187)

More Reasons To Ignore Nate Silver

by | 160 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Some of you may have noticed that Nate Silver has become an insufferable bad-hot-take machine, obsessed with driving clicks by talking about the hour-by-hour minutiae of his team’s forecast models. We now have published scholarly evidence that this may be bad for democracy.

In a very robust-sounding paper*, which I admittedly have not read in its entirety, researchers suggest that:

an increase of 20% over even odds in this study lowered voting by 3.4%, and an advantage of 40% [around what Clinton had in the 538 2016 forecast] lowered the voting by 6.9%. If as the evidence provided above suggests, Democrats were more affected [than Republicans]…, probabilistic forecasts may have a strong enough effect on turnout to constitute an important factor influencing the election.

Similar to the observer effect in physics, where you change the result by measuring it, the widespread consumption of these forecasts may well undermine the very things they seek to report. Importantly, this effect was not seen in research subjects who were only shown poll results.

Here’s a good thread on the paper!

When a draft of the paper was published in 2018, Nate Silver dedicated an entire episode of his podcast to “rebutting” it. You can see the rebuttal of the rebuttal here. I’m inclined to believe the authors, for Nate Silver has become a terrible hack. Apparently he was more recently urging scholarly journals not to publish this piece, which is super classy.

Open thread!

*This link is to last year’s draft of the paper; the paper itself was published this month, and is behind a paywall.

More Reasons To Ignore Nate SilverPost + Comments (160)

‘Their final, most essential command…’

by | 91 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

The New Yorker has an article up about Trump’s visit to India, the violence that spiked while he was there and the lies both governments are telling about the events:*

Two things happened in Delhi on Tuesday, and the gulf between them illustrated India’s wild, alarming swerve from normalcy. At the Presidential palace, Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit by attending a ceremonial dinner: an evening of gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges, wild Himalayan morels, and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets. Half a dozen miles away, northeast Delhi was convulsed with violence.

Since Sunday, mobs had been destroying the shops and homes of Muslims, vandalizing mosques, and assaulting Muslims on the streets. In their chants of “Jai Shri Ram,” praising a Hindu deity, their loyalties were clear. The attackers were Hindu nationalists, part of a right wing that has been empowered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government; many of them were even members of his party. The Delhi police, who are supervised by Modi’s home minister, seemed to side with the mobs; one video caught cops smashing CCTV cameras, while another showed them helping men gather stones to throw.

Several reports said that policemen stood by while the attackers went about their business. In a few spurts, Muslims retaliated, and the streets witnessed periods of full-scale clashes. A policeman was killed, and an intelligence officer was murdered and dumped in a drain. At least thirty-eight people have died: shot, beaten, burned. At the Trump banquet, the Navy band played “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”

As we know, obliterating truth is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Trump sees Modi as a kindred spirit. (Tthough to be fair, Modi seems a thousand times more savvy and capable than Trump could ever hope to be.) So, it’s not surprising that Indian officials and Trump parroted Modi’s propaganda even while the violence unfolded around them:

Television journalists went out to work wearing cricket helmets, for safety; videos showed Muslim slums on fire; and the death toll climbed. Yet Ajit Doval, India’s national-security adviser, visited northeast Delhi on Wednesday and said, “Everything is normal. People of all communities are living in peace and love…”

Modi himself restricted his comments to just two tweets; in fact, he stayed away from the customary joint press conference at the end of Trump’s visit, leaving the American President to field questions about the turmoil. “He wants people to have religious freedom, and very strongly,” Trump said, of Modi.

As horrendous as Trump is, in a way, we Americans are more fortunate than India (and Russia and Hungary, etc.) because, unlike Modi, Putin, Orbán, etc., Trump is a walking collection of untreated personality disorders and not particularly bright.

His massive inferiority complex prevents him from surrounding himself with competent people, and his stupidity doesn’t allow him to game out scenarios beyond their immediate effect on himself. So far, this has limited the damage he’s able to inflict to some degree.

That said, we must make the most of the upcoming opportunity to oust our homegrown demagogue. We may not get another chance.

*Paragraph breaks inserted for readability and bold font for emphasis added.

‘Their final, most essential command…’Post + Comments (91)

COVID-19, Medicaid block grants and other notes

by | 8 Comments

This post is in: , ,

COVID-19 is an excellent example of potential shock for Medicaid financing in a block grant context.

If there is a widespread community infections and plenty of people unexpectedly being admitted to hospitals for significant care, things could get expensive fast in an unanticipated manner.  Commercial insurers will pass most of the cost to reinsurers and the federal government will be able to readily absorb the Medicare and VA bumps.  However, Medicaid will likely be a significant payer in a plausibly bad scenario.  Legacy Medicaid eligibility categories will have states pay between a quarter and half the incremental costs while the feds pick up the rest.  Adults who are covered by Medicaid expansion will see their state pay a tenth and the feds the rest.

A few weeks ago, CMS released a letter to state Medicaid directors inviting them to ask for block grants for the adult, non-blind/aged/disabled population. Two flavors of block grants were available; the first was a total program block grant which would grow at CPI-M+.5 and the other flavor was a per-capita block grant which would grow at CPI-M.  The initial allocations for both flavors would be based on trended forward historical data.  Historical data, by its definition, does not contain new shock information.  A block grant for Medicaid transfers shock risk from being split between the feds and the states to entirely the states.  Expensive, external shocks would quickly deplete the federal funds and force the state to either find additional state funds or cut back services dramatically.  CMS has said that in an emergency, the block grant could be altered for special circumstances:

Special Circumstances Adjustment

Recognizing the dynamic health care landscape in which state Medicaid programs are operating, CMS will provide states with the opportunity to propose updates to an approved HAO demonstration to account for any changes to projected expenditures or enrollment in the current demonstration year due to unforeseen circumstances out of the state’s control, such as
a public health crisis or major economic event. Under such circumstances, states will have the opportunity to submit new information and relevant data, describe the circumstances and
proposed amendment, and renegotiate relevant STCs. The data provided by the state will be validated by the CMS Office of the Actuary in consultation with other appropriate federal
entities.

There is a lag and an uncertainty on the part of a state as to whether or not a public health crisis will have additional federal funding under a proposed Medicaid block grant. Under current rules, the new, unexpected claims are submitted to CMS and the funds show up in the normal course of business. The uncertainty would cast a pall on decisionmakers if block grants had already been elected. That uncertainty would be much higher in the world where Cassidy-Graham passed and big chunks of Medicaid were block granted as those changes would require Congressional action which, as we have seen in Puerto Rico which does operate a block granted Medicaid program, is not guaranteed to be quick nor sufficient.

Moving a little wider in the field, I think that states which have Medicaid expansion for the working poor will be in better shape than states that have not expanded Medicaid, all else being equal. The coffee shop worker or the home health aide still can’t afford to take pre-emptive time off but in Medicaid expansion states, they can afford to get checked out which helps with surveillance, isolation and treatment efforts.

Finally, John Graves of Vanderbilt raised one hell of an interesting and important point yesterday; timing of a potential crisis is not good.

A 1st Quarter crisis looks very different than a 4th Quarter crisis as the number and characteristics of folks who have no remaining cost sharing as a barrier to care looks very different in the Q1 instead of Q4.

COVID-19, Medicaid block grants and other notesPost + Comments (8)

Playing to Win: Day 5 (Friday 2/28)

by | 17 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Note for the day:

The first Playing to Win went up just over a week ago.  Are you guys finding it inspiring to see what everyone is doing?  These threads are for you guys, so please speak up about what you want and what works for you.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE

Let’s try late mornings on Wednesday and Friday mornings and Sunday afternoons.

You asked for easy ways to find these threads:
·  there’s a link in the sidebar under Calling All Jackals (on computers & tablets in landscape mode)
·  there’s a link in the hamburger menu bar (on mobile)
·  click on the Playing to Win category that shows up just under the byline at the top of the post
·  if you’re super lazy worn out from all your work canvassing and calling and texting, click here

The resource page – with suggestions and resources from previous threads – can be found here and at Playing to Win.  Additional links will be added as you provide them in ongoing threads.

*****

A couple of our jackals requested a regular political “action” thread, which we are calling Playing to Win. We’ll keep this up for as long as there is interest.

The goal is a poll-free, spin-free, prognostication-free, media-free, what’s-wrong-with-the-other-candidate-free-zone – a political thread where the focus is on ACTION:  What can be done to help our candidates, and what are we doing to help them, every day?

The hope is that this will help provide inspiration, and encourage action, as an alternative to anger, frustration and despair.

Everyone is free to chime in about what they are doing for their their preferred candidate.  What actions are we taking at Balloon Juice, individually or collectively, to help candidates we believe in?

What might you like to do, if you weren’t stuck on not quite knowing how to go from thinking about doing something to actually doing something?

show full post on front page

Playing to Win: Day 5 (Friday 2/28)Post + Comments (17)

Friday Morning Open Thread: SHINE

by | 177 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


Nia Dennis, on her 21st birthday.

Black neighborhoods in key swing states hold enormous power to reshape politics in November and beyond. But in order to maximize this potential, progressives need to imagine and invest on an unprecedented scale…

What is a “new black voter”? In the 2016 presidential election, an estimated 3.3 million black people in six key swing states were unregistered, or registered but had never voted, or didn’t vote in that year, despite previously doing so. In those six states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia) the number of eligible but nonvoting black people was at least 2.8 times Hillary Clinton’s margin of loss. Five of these states also had Senate elections; Democrats lost all five.

In Pennsylvania, for example, Mrs. Clinton lost by about 44,000 votes, while Katie McGinty, the Democratic Senate candidate, lost by about 87,000 votes. But an estimated 350,000 eligible black people didn’t vote statewide. Combine this with the fact that half of Pennsylvania’s black population lives in Philadelphia, and it becomes clear where there is concentrated, untapped political power. This type of geographic concentration is not unique. Just 14 cities account for over half of the black population in these six crucial states. (There are also large concentrations of black nonvoters in Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando, Fla.; and in Fayetteville and Winston-Salem, N.C.)

And within these 14 cities, majority-black census blocks (areas usually much smaller than election precincts) account for a vastly disproportionate percentage of the black population. For example, majority-black census blocks account for 80 percent of Milwaukee county’s black population, which itself accounts for 70 percent of Wisconsin’s black population. The upshot is clear: Nonvoting black residents in key places have the potential to swing elections, from the presidency on down, in 2020 and beyond. Republicans have understood these dynamics for years; they long ago decided that they were better off trying to suppress black voters than to compete for their votes….

Research shows that the most effective voter-turnout technique is person-to-person contact from a trusted source like a family member, friend or neighbor; this is far more successful than impersonal paid communication like TV, digital or radio ads. But most nonvoters or infrequent voters don’t get this kind of outreach because campaigns and independent political groups generally ignore people with low “turnout scores.” And since these scores are developed based on voting history, nonvoters become less and less likely to be contacted. Even worse, people who have recently moved or are unregistered may not even show up in campaign databases. This problem is acute in areas with high transience, like urban, majority-black neighborhoods.

But the opportunity lies precisely with these people. To realize this potential, we must shed cynical assumptions about what is and isn’t possible…

Friday Morning Open Thread: SHINEPost + Comments (177)