Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

So very ready.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

This really is a full service blog.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

T R E 4 5 O N

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Election Year Open Thread: Mike Bloomberg – He Sees Things Differently Than Other People…

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“… He sees other people as things.”

Some of you will recognize that line as a paraphrase of Terry Pratchett, concerning a professional assassin whose idea of quiet recreation was working out how to eliminate a fantasy-world Santa Claus by kidnapping the Tooth Fairy.

But maybe we lesser beings can better grasp Technocrat Bloomberg’s vision by imagining that, to him, we are not actually people — just units. There are Competitor units, Customer units, Convenience units (a/k/a ‘women), and (when he is in governing mode) Citizen units.

Many of these (we) Citizen units are inherently sub-optimal — distinguishable by skin color or gender. In his professional capacity as someone who profits from cutting out unnecessary complications, it is surely efficient to remove as many sub-optimal units from the Citizen process as possible (stop & frisk, sexual harrassment), while simultaneously enacting rules that will prevent the slightly less susceptible Citizen units from costly self-destructive habits (soda bans). He doesn’t hate the sub-optimal units… he just hates the inefficiency we introduce to the smooth functioning of the system.

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Pardon our dust

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You can’t subvert justice without creating some rubble. Trump is on a pardon/clemency-granting spree today. Here’s the tally so far:

  • Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who tried to sell Obama’s senate seat and former Apprentice contestant
  • Crooked cop Bernie Kerik, former NYC police commissioner and frequent pro-Trump Fox News guest
  • 1980s-era insider trading crook Michael Milken
  • Edward DeBartolo Jr., former 49ers owner

I read somewhere that Kushner urged Trump to spring Blago months ago because he (Kushner) believed the move would build good will with Democrats. Don’t know if that account of Kushner’s thinking is true or not, but it sounds dumb enough to be something he would believe. Maybe Trump is flooding the zone to minimize he impact of his ongoing activities to corrupt the DOJ and tamper with the judge and jury in the Roger Stone case. The strategy of piling outrage upon outrage has served him well so far.

Open thread.

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Roger’s Gonna Get Sentenced

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A few minutes ago, Judge Amy Berman-Jackson denied a motion to delay Roger Stone’s sentencing hearing after he decided, after the fact, that having a black, female Democrat as the foreperson of his jury was bad and moved for a new trial. Trump has been stinking up Twitter all morning, decrying the unfairness of having a black, female Democrat on one’s jury. If only we could go back to the good old days when only white men could be on juries, because only white men could vote.

Trump should just pardon Stone and get it over with, but I guess he’s building a white resentment case for the forever-whining MAGA hat snowflakes whose special God-given privileges are always being taken away by people of color who have the temerity to expect the same rights, privileges and respect as a white person.

The answer to the question “Has Trump Gone Too Far?” has been a resounding “no” for the last three years, but this is interesting:

The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.

I think anyone who thinks that Barr will quit over this is living on the edge of reality, but I guess it could happen if the federal judiciary has a quiet revolt led by a GWB appointee.

According to the legal experts on Twitter (ha!), Stone has no case for a new trial since the juror disclosed that she had run for office as a Democrat in the past, and his crack(head) legal team didn’t bump her from the jury. But those same legal experts also say that Stone will probably be able to delay going into the hoosegow while his appeal is active. So, good news for Roger, I guess.

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Long Read: Rebecca Traister On Susan Collins

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The Immoderate Susan Collins: After a long career voting across the aisle, why did the Maine senator gamble her legacy on Trump?

Spoiler: The article doesn’t really answer that question. It’s one of those dealing with why people who might have been principled in another time, and who like to present themselves as principled, have bent the knee to our would-be king.

It’s a good article, though, with lots of material for thinking about that question. Some excerpts:

In the span of Trump’s administration, Collins has gone from being broadly beloved, understood as one of the more humane and thoughtful Republicans in her party, to being widely reviled, regarded by Democrats as a loyal foot soldier to her ever-more-extreme right-wing cohort and party leader and by some members of that cohort as an unreliable waffler.

It’s a recent thing, definitely since Trump was elected.

Multiple organizations that had previously endorsed or supported Collins have turned on her for the first time: NARAL. The League of Conservation Voters. Planned Parenthood, which gave the officially pro-choice Republican an award as recently as 2017, in January endorsed her leading Democratic opponent, Sara Gideon. In the final quarter of 2019, Gideon, the Speaker of the Maine House who has not even won the primary yet (she is running in a big field which includes Democratic Socialist Betsy Sweet, Bre Kidman, Tiffany Bond, and Ross LaJeunesse) raised $3.5 million — $1.2 million more than Collins. The race is expected to ultimately draw close to $50 million, the most expensive in the history of Maine.

Former senator Harry Reid recalled how during Obama’s first term, when he was majority leader, “one of the first things we had to do was get a stimulus bill passed.” Reid said he immediately went to Collins, who agreed to help. The stimulus bill that passed, Reid told me, “wasn’t as good as Obama wanted it to be” (in part because Collins worked to reduce its scope before she signed up), “but the reason I give you that example is to show you how she’s changed.”

Anyhow, read the whole thing.

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Ramsay’s Great-Great Grandson Has a Book

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We all know how a right-winger’s book becomes a bestseller – it’s just another form of wingnut welfare. Bolton clearly won’t get a handout this time, so he’s gonna need to raise the cash to buy his T-bones and flat screens the old-fashioned way, by shilling his book. Unfortunately for him, since our democracy hangs in the balance, I don’t think this act will work:

When asked if Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky was as “perfect” as Trump insists, Bolton merely responded, “You’ll love chapter 14.”

He gave a similar answer when the moderator asked him how he dealt with Trump’s bonkers press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018, during which Trump refused to condemn Russia’s election interference and instead attacked the U.S.’ own intelligence community.

“I could read a chapter from my book here and give you the answer to that question,” Bolton teased. […]

Bolton complained about Trump’s attacks on Monday night.

“He tweets, but I can’t talk about it,” he grumbled. “How fair is that?”

Go away and take your mustache of sadness and betrayal with you, you cowardly grifter.

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Competition and Out of Pocket spreads

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Yesterday, we looked at the variation in the minimal out of pocket limit for Gold plans on Healthcare.gov in 2020.

Very different alloys of Gold are available on Healthcare.gov.

There are low maximum out of pocket gold plans in North Jersey, Arkansas, central Atlantic coast Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin and a couple of other spots where the lowest out of pocket limit for a Gold plan is under $3,500. Structurally, most of the cost-sharing in these plans will be in the form of a deductible and there will be few exemptions from cost-sharing.

On the other hand, most of Texas and Oklahoma as well as big chunks of North Carolina and Virginia only offer Gold plans that have the maximum allowable out of pocket limit. These plans tend to have smaller deductibles and more services that are no cost-sharing.

A colleague of mine asked if there was anything going on with market characteristics. I ran two sets of analysis looking at the difference between the lowest gold out of pocket limit and the lowest bronze out of pocket limit. The first was whether or not a monopoly mattered? The second was a broader question if the number of insurers mattered more than 1 or not 1. I’ve included for this quick and dirty analysis, the benchmark premium for a single forty year old.

Market structures matter.

The Monopoly Analysis:And the non-monopoly, insurer count model is here:

Difference between MOOP Gold and Bronze plans 2020 on Healthcare.gov (Monopoly Analysis)
Coefficients Standard Error t Stat P-value
Intercept -2793.93 107.20 -26.06 0.00
Monopoly 780.20 61.15 12.76 0.00
Benchmark Premium EHB 3.32 0.20 16.88 0.00

Here is the number of insurers analysis:

Difference between MOOP Gold and Bronze plans 2020 on Healthcare.gov (Number of insurers)
Coefficients Standard Error t Stat P-value
Intercept -1630.52 142.86 -11.41 0.00
Insurer Count -324.89 24.05 -13.51 0.00
Benchmark Premium EHB 2.91 0.20 14.24 0.00

In both cases, adding more insurers makes the spread between the lowest gold out of pocket limit and the lowest bronze out of pocket limit increase.  Gold becomes noticeably different than bronze and attractive to different populations when there are more insurers in a county.

A full-on model would be adding in state fixed effects to pull out state wide policy (like in New Jersey and states with standardized plan options) and look at several years worth of data.  But competition is probably related to making Gold plans more pragmatically valuable to individuals with high expected medical costs compared to counties where there is little to no competition.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Keep Hope Alive

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Meanwhile:


(Yes, I too wish Harris was still in this race. We can dream… )

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