Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Will this ever end? Am I paying for sins from a previous life? I’m gonna go to Blackwing Lair and forget about real life problems.
Here’s a picture of Steve smiling while I skritch him at bedtime:
I guess you can discuss the debate here.
Sweet Mercy Apparently There’s Another Fucking Debate TonightPost + Comments (373)
For the love of god UNMUTE THIS pic.twitter.com/MA48mit8MX
— Nerd Girl Says (@Rachael_Conrad) February 23, 2020
There’s another debate tonight — the tenth, according to Wired:
… Tonight’s debate takes place in Charleston, South Carolina, a few days before the state’s primary on Saturday. It’s also the last time candidates take the debate stage before Super Tuesday on March 3, when voters in 14 states and one territory head to the polls. CBS News is co-hosting the event with the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, and the festivities are scheduled to kick off at 8 pm EST (5 pm PST)…
The moderators for the evening will be Norah O’Donnell and Gayle King, CBS News announced, with Margaret Brennan, Major Garrett, and Bill Whitaker also posing questions at different points in the evening. Viewers could also submit questions for tonight via Twitter using the hashtag #DemDebate. There will be no opening or closing statements from the candidates, just the usual question-and-answer format. The whole thing is expected to last two hours.
The debate kicks off at 8 pm EST (5 pm PST) on CBS stations; check your local listings. If you’ve cut the cord, don’t worry—there are still plenty of options to watch:
– You can watch a free livestream of the debate on the CBS News website, on mobile devices via the CBS News app (for iOS and Android), and on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
– The debate will be available on CBSN, CBS News’ free streaming service, for smart TV devices like Roku(https://channelstore.roku.com/details/27536/cbs-news), Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV. (CBS News lists all the available devices here.)
– You can also watch the debate on CBS All Access, the network’s subscription streaming service.
– CBS is also available with a paid subscription to streaming services like FuboTV, YouTube TV, and Hulu.
Once again, I don’t plan to watch… but I’ll presumably catch up via twitter & you guys later.
I think we know that no matter whether COVID-19 is a massive epidemic, or a nothingburger (in terms of US mortality), the Republicans will politicize it. The trade disruption will, somehow, be Democrats’ fault for opposing TPP, or whatever other stupid reason they cook up. The deaths will be due to Obamacare impinging upon the robust function of the invisible hand.
The reality is that a COVID-19 pandemic will highlight one issue where Democrats can win: our fucked-up healthcare system. Sick people will avoid going to the doctor because they don’t have insurance (or good insurance), and they’ll infect others. Our overcrowded emergency departments, still the first point of contact for the sick working poor who don’t have a family physician, will grind to a standstill under the weight of infection precautions. The for-profit urgent care centers that dot the landscape around here will be relatively useless monuments to the greed of the hospital systems that overbuilt them to capture insurance money.
Every single Democratic candidate has a good healthcare plan that would be better than this. M4A is miles ahead of our common disaster.
And then there’s the incompetence, just the sheer stupidity that would lead the State Department to overrule the CDC. Expect more of this in the days and weeks to come.
We need to stick it to Trump on this one – it’s all on his watch and we need to make him own it before his media machine makes it Obama’s Katrina. We have the plans, and we have the competence. For once, that ought to be appreciated.
I’d rather discuss smart, delightful corvids than COVID-19, but there’s this headline at The Post:
Dow dives 900 points after CDC warns of coronavirus inevitability in U.S.
Health officials in the United States warned Tuesday that the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country appears inevitable, marking a significant change in tone as global travel disruptions continued to worsen, South Korea neared 1,000 cases and Iran reported at least 15 deaths.
Huh. Just yesterday, as the stock market plummeted 1,000 points, Trump told us this:
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!
Why, it’s almost like he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Trump hasn’t piped up on today’s selloff, but Wall Street is the only symptom of the outbreak that would be meaningful to him. He’s stupid, but even Trump knows that if a pandemic tanks the economy, he’ll get bounced out of the White House even if the Democrats raid Lenin’s Tomb and put the occupant at the top of the ticket.
Trump is on a state visit to India right now, and in news conferences, he has been bragging about his reception there while downplaying the coronavirus in a completely flailing way that demonstrates he doesn’t have a clue what’s happening or how to address it. Meanwhile:
Stop what you’re doing, watch this video & read about what’s happening in India.
As Trump and Modi parade across the country, mobs are openly attacking Muslims, looting their businesses & desecrating houses of worship just like you see in this video.pic.twitter.com/ouMXwXMsVg
— Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi81) February 25, 2020
Good people are trying to protect their neighbors:
In one part of Delhi, a gurdwara opens its doors to Muslims and anyone who needs shelter.
In Seelampur, Dalits blocked the roads against mobs, sheltered their Muslim neighbours.Police and politicians have forgotten their duty; but the people have courage and heart.#DelhiRiots
— Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) February 25, 2020
As we know, the good people don’t always win. But we damn well better try, here, there and everywhere. Things are getting ugly.
Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but here we are. Open thread.
Stupidity, hatred, love and courage in India…and everywhere elsePost + Comments (142)
Pennsylvania is moving towards running their own state based marketplace (SBM) for their individual market. They are launching this fall with coverage going live on 1/1/21.
ACA marketplaces can either be “clearinghouses” where the exchange just makes sure every plan offered meets minimum federal and local requirements or “active purchasers” where the exchange curates the choice list to achieve some state specific objectives. Healthcare.gov is a clearinghouse, while Covered California is a notable active purchaser. These two exchange models have very different objective functions and outcomes as shown by Krinn et al in a 2015 Health Affairs article. I reworked their Table 3 for clarity. The SBM-A(ctive purchasers) optimized for big spreads to benefit subsidized individuals.
The Pennsylvania marketplace will be an “active purchaser” model (slide 36).
Pennsylvania under Governor Wolf (D-PA) has been aggressive in optimizing Pennsylvania insurance markets to increase affordability for the subsidized population. Pennsylvania aggressively pushed for Silverloading and Silver Switching. However there are limits as to what the state can do when it was on Healthcare.gov. Some insurers, most notably my former employer, UPMC Health Plan, offered many mirror image silver plans that crushed the premium spreads in counties that could have supported a big gap strategy.
Healthcare.gov’s operational staff could not care about that strategy as long as the plans that got loaded met state and federal regulatory requirements. An active purchaser exchange may be able to care about that strategy in monopoly markets. The exchange wishes to maximize competition in order to drive down gross premiums even at the cost of driving up subsidized net premiums, but in regions where there is little to no competition, active management can improve the well being of everyone involved without trade-offs.
As more states move to their own exchanges, we should expect to see states to make different choices as to who they prioritize and how they do so. The choice to move to an active purchaser model opens up a continuum of possibilities and it will be up to Pennsylvania and other SBM states as to how they use the expanded toolbox.
“They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.” https://t.co/qq2HChKgzi
— Michael Bennet (@SenatorBennet) February 24, 2020
… As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts.”
For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers.
But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues — myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines — won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race.
“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”…
Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer.
From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky.
“I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.
But for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va.
In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University.
Mr. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world-renowned resort there.
Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. The next year she entered West Virginia State. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer.
Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her.
“You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his 17-year-old charge. “And I am going to prepare you for this career.”
“Where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.
“That,” he replied, “will be your problem.”…
Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians…
After a lifetime of reaching for the stars, today, Katherine Johnson landed among them. She spent decades as a hidden figure, breaking barriers behind the scenes. But by the end of her life, she had become a hero to millions—including Michelle and me. pic.twitter.com/isG29nwBiB
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 24, 2020
We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers: https://t.co/Tl3tsHAfYB pic.twitter.com/dGiGmEVvAW
— NASA (@NASA) February 24, 2020
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Let Her Example Be Our InspirationPost + Comments (152)
