Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Their shamelessness is their super power.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

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

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

No one could have predicted…

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Not all heroes wear capes.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

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Repub Venality Open Thread: Money Changes Everything Memories

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Two weeks out from the 2016 elections, a first-time donor born in Ukraine lit up the map of the Republican Party with a $50,000 cash donation to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.

By cutting just one check to Trump Victory Committee — well before he became a central figure in the impeachment of the president he helped elect — Lev Parnas left an indelible mark on two national and 20 state Republican entities.

Trump Victory subdivided his contribution into $33,400 for the Republican National Committee and $2,700 to Trump, the then-maximum allowable donations. The remainder went to GOP entities crisscrossing the country from New York to California, each receiving a modest sum of $661.90.

Official paperwork from the donation lists Parnas an employee of the Fraud Guarantee, the same company Parnas used to hire Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani in a relationship that has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors.

Three years later, down to the same month, the Justice Department on Oct. 10 unsealed an indictment of Parnas for using a straw donor and laundering foreign money into U.S. elections. Federal prosecutors claim he and his Fraud Guarantee co-owner, Igor Fruman, used the shell company Global Energy Producers to funnel $325,000 in foreign cash into America First Action, a Trump super-PAC.

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Yes, And?

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The Post has been publishing excerpts from Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s A Very Stable Genius, and it’s about what you’d expect. The latest is Trump calling generals “dopes and babies”.

My response to that is more-or-less “so what”. We knew who he was before he ran, it became clearer as the campaign progressed, and now we have one more anecdote to add to the massive pile of evidence that Trump is spectacularly unfit for office. My basic understanding of Trump has not been enhanced one bit by the information published in the excerpt, and I don’t think I would learn much new from the book itself.

The Post has been one of the better (if not the best) of mainstream media outlets – “Democracy Dies in the Dark” was a clear signal that they recognized Trump as a serious threat, which is far beyond a lot of other outlets. But the Post still exists on a continuum of press attitudes. At one end of that continuum lies outlets like NPR, which are still trying to wedge Trump’s behavior into the template of what a normal President would do. At the other end is an outlet like the Post, which gets it that Trump is not normal, and are unafraid to report that.

But nowhere on that continuum of mainstream media attitudes is an outlet that regularly and frankly reports that Trump is what Republicans have become. Every lying Trump enabler in Congress, except the ones like Steve King who have been exiled by Republicans, gets a whopping benefit of the doubt about their attitude towards Trump. Look at the attention Mike Lee and Rand Paul got last week over some really garden variety bitching about the terrible briefing they got. Lee and Paul got that attention precisely because they are Republicans, and the stage directions that the press follow say that if a Republican complains about what another Republican does, then it’s a legitimate complaint. Otherwise, it’s noise.

Well, that little rule of thumb might work in an normal environment where both Republicans and Democrats are fighting about normal things. But this is not a normal environment, and we are not fighting about normal things. Democrats are literally fighting to save the country. Republicans are aiding and abetting someone trying to destroy it, because they could not figure out a way to stop being a party that caters mainly to white males. But saying “Democrats are the only party that cares about anyone but white males” or “Republicans would rather sacrifice the rule of law than lose political power” makes you sound like you’re off script, so instead we have two of the best reporters in the country writing this book.

It’s like being faced with a stinking manure pile that is poisoning the water supply, and spending your time examining it the pile instead of addressing the crisis. “Oh, that’s a horse apple.” “Hmm, just as I thought – another cow pie”.

Yes, it’s a fucking shit pile. We get it. Let’s talk about who put it there.

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Hospital mergers: what are they good for?

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Earlier this month, a powerhouse team of health economists looked at quality outcomes for hospital mergers. The results were impressive for policy purposes but quite depressing:

We could conceivably be willing to pay more if we, as a society and patients, get better quality services and outcomes.

We could be willing to pay more if we get a better experience for the same outcomes.

Those are plausible improvements that may be worth paying more for.

However this study is not finding those types of improvements.  So what is happening?  Are these mergers mostly about market power and building moats to enable the collection of rent?  That is one hell of a plausible interpretation that has not been disproven yet.

 

 

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Quinerly In New Mexico

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Valued commenter Quinerly will soon be on the road again, and she’d love to meet Juicers during her travels. Here’s her schedule:

  • 1/27 Arrive Santa Fe 1/27
  • 2/27 Arrive Gallup
  • 3/1 Arrive Farmington
  • 3/8 Leave Farmington

She also plans short trips to Las Vegas (NM), Albuquerque, Abiquiu, Taos, Bosque del Apache (and the Owl Bar in San Antonio), Los Alamos, Corrales, Moriarty, Belen, and Mountainair.

If you’re interested in meeting her at any of these times, reply in the comments or email me at “Contact us.”

We will probably do a meetup when she is in Santa Fe. You can also suggest dates in the comments. I’ll do another post when we get closer to the time.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Nevertheless…

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Yes, I can hear you rolling your eyes so hard. But this is *my* happy place!

… Warren launched her campaign at a relative low point. She was polling in the single digits nationally and still trying to overcome recriminations over her decision to release a DNA test in attempt to rebut attacks over her claims of Native American heritage. Despite this, top operatives still flocked to join her campaign.

Her team was able to sort and sift through résumés, making a concerted effort to make hires based on finding candidates the team thought would be suited for the positive, ego-free workplace culture it was trying to build. One model for this approach was “The Cubs Way,” a book about how the Chicago Cubs finally won a World Series, as a guide for how to build an organization. The result is a staff devoted to its candidate, disinclined toward drama, and very disciplined.

The team has also built out its presence in the states holding primary contests in March and planned ahead to be able to take advantage of any momentum from early states. In contrast with past campaigns, in which staffers in states like Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t know their next assignment until after votes had been cast, these staffers have already been told their next destination. Further, Warren’s campaign has also consistently avoided issues with the nitty-gritty of qualifying for ballots in every state, which can often trip up campaigns. She was one of only two candidates to file a full delegate slate in Illinois…

Warren spent much of the race as the policy candidate, turning “I’ve got a plan for that” into an applause line on the stump to emphasize her intellectual bona fides.

Ian Sams, a Democratic strategist who was a top aide on Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, told Insider that Warren “successfully demonstrated proficiency, skill, and knowledge through her policy agenda, which blotted out ability for media to scrutinize anything but policy” and “forced her rivals to focus almost exclusively on policy.” He added, “The thing about her policy is that it’s all pretty popular.”…

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On The Road – DaveInOz – Beautiful Tasmania

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Good morning everyone,

This is a submission from Dec 20, so a while back, before all the ghastly, horrible fires. The life that’s been extinguished in Australia provokes in me such a profound well of sadness and horror. And dread – dread for things worse to come, and soon.

All we can do is make today and tomorrow better, we cannot do a thing about yesterday, and so there is hope, action, progress, setback, and adaptation in our eternally-renewing daily tomorrows. We cannot lose ourselves to grief for what we’ve lost, me must harness that since we can not afford to lose more ecosystems and species, anywhere, of any type. Life is limited, glorious, and its diversity worth preserving.

We have no choice but to keep on, but maybe we can all find some ways to be better on energy – paying the premium for renewable energy, going solar where appropriate, using hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and BEV vehicles. Moving our investments out of the oil and coal industries and into solar, wind, tidal, and other renewables.

And changing our purchasing behavior: buying water from other continents is bad, as is buying firewood, and so many other basic resources that are pissed or burned away in a jiffy and so are not worth spending so much energy moving so far, even if someone can make a profit doing it by externalizing and diluting the apparent costs and effects over time and area. These are two minor examples of the market providing cheap products that make no sense if you step back and take another look. Since we are in a consumer-driven economy, the consumer has power. Use it!

Have a great day and weekend, we’ll recommence Monday, same bat-time, same bat-channel.

 

Living in Melbourne, a trip to Tasmania is not too taxing but we’ve always flown in the past and hired a car while there.

This time, we decided to take our own car on the ferry, the Spirit of Tasmania, so that we could stock up with the island’s famous food and drink for the Christmas holidays.

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On The Road - DaveInOz - Beautiful Tasmania 7
Boat Harbour, TasmaniaDecember 8, 2019

After a night in the delightfully named Penguin, a drive along the North-West coast of Tasmania, this is a view of the small town of Boat Harbour.