Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
And looking at the possibility of another Trump campaign the executives at all the networks swooned. https://t.co/c0ALLFWou0
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 12, 2020
Back during the Watergate hearings, there was a Doonesbury strip with Roland Headley solemnly reporting “Meanwhile, out in the streets, dancing bears & jugglers have become a common sight.” First time as tragedy…
Trumpery Open Thread: Dancing Bears & JugglersPost + Comments (194)
Timely!
There's a remastered 4k video of the infamous exploding whale incident that was just released for its 50th anniversary and there's no better way to spend 3 minutes of your day. https://t.co/mt4Y45PbMl
— Adrenochrome Harvester (@ClenchedFisk) November 12, 2020
Thursday Evening Open Thread: A Metaphor for 2020Post + Comments (131)
Energy freedom for everyone is at our fingertips. But why does it still seem so far away? Because there are some very powerful people preventing us from attaining it. In Power Trip, filmmaker Jonathan Scott (HGTV’s Property Brothers) travels the United States confronting those at the root of the issue and meets the everyday citizens fighting against a deeply entrenched, powerful system that’s waging war against the solar industry—and against the rights of the people who want to choose how they power their lives. Jonathan Scott’s Power Trip will infuriate, enrage, and compel you to take action to make solar energy a global reality.
I was able to preview about twenty minutes of this, I was actually invited to watch the full documentary through my local college, but a work-related issue interrupted my viewing.
I will say from what I saw, it’s worth taking a look at – it will be on PBS Independent Lens on Nov 16th (check for times).
When I have a moment, probably over the holiday, since we are pretty much on lockdown here and I’m not a #covidiot, I’ll take a good look at Biden’s climate plan and then I’ll write up a post on it.
Still on the list of topics: solar power and micro-grids are next up. But there are a lot of interesting and clever solutions out there, so I think I can keep this going for a while.
As always, if this is your actual bailiwick and want to contribute, please let me know, I’m sure we’d all like to hear from some experts.
x-posted Living Lightly TV
Climate Solutions: Power Trip DocumentaryPost + Comments (19)
Volume 1 of President Obama’s memoir is coming out soon. Excerpts indicate he doesn’t just call Trump out as a racist huckster — he reads the entire Republican Party for filth. Good. Someone with his stature needed to say it out loud. Via CNN:
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama writes. “Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
Obama discusses Palin’s rise in the 2008 race as sort of a preview of Trump:
“Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage.”
He generously speculates that if McCain had it to do over again, he wouldn’t elevate a kook who would drag his party (and country) down to that level. But alas, the genie was out of the bottle:
Trump’s antics were seen initially in the White House as a joke. But Obama writes he came to regard Trump’s media ubiquity and characteristic shamelessness as merely an exaggerated version of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to White Americans’ anxieties about the first Black president — a sentiment he said “had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center — an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology…
“In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true,” he writes, adding: “In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.”
Thwack! So true, and it applies equally to the timid Lil’ Marcos and screechy Matt Gaetz types. The whole bunch is rotten, and until there’s a reckoning, we’ll be fighting to keep the Orcs from the breeching the last wall full time.
Will there be a reckoning with our history, past and recent? Can America be saved? Obama is hopeful, but he doesn’t sound 100% sure. Here’s another excerpt via The Atlantic:
The country is in the grips of a global pandemic and an accompanying economic crisis, with more than 230,000 Americans dead, businesses shuttered, and millions of people out of work. Across the nation, people from all walks of life have poured into the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police. Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted…
The jury’s still out. I’m encouraged by the record-setting number of Americans who turned out to vote in last week’s election, and have an abiding trust in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in their character and capacity to do what is right. But I also know that no single election will settle the matter. Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting. If I remain hopeful about the future, it’s in large part because I’ve learned to place my faith in my fellow citizens, especially those of the next generation, whose conviction in the equal worth of all people seems to come as second nature, and who insist on making real those principles that their parents and teachers told them were true but that they perhaps never fully believed themselves…
To sum up, don’t boo — VOTE!
Really looking forward to this book, and I’m not usually a huge fan of the political memoir genre.
Open thread!
It’s 2020, and there really is a Binder Full of Women. For real!
I was delighted to learn about it on last night’s Lawfare podcast. About a year ago, Tammy Wittes founded the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS). They asked the presidential candidates to sign a pledge that if they were elected they would seek gender parity in their national security appointments.
Joe Biden signed that pledge, and now he is our President-Elect.
LCWINS produced a database of over 800 women qualified for senate-confirmable jobs in national security. Fully 1/3 of them were women of color. They provided the database to the Biden transition team, and yesterday the Biden transition team announced its Agency Review Teams.
There is an agency review team for each part of the executive branch. According to Tammy Wittes, 59% of Biden’s landing team personnel are women, and a large number of women of color, as well. I am not certain whether that 59% is specifically related to the national security agency review team or if that 59% references the percentage for all of the Agency Review Teams.
Either way, go Team Biden!
What else do we think Team Biden is getting right?
While political Twitter’s conversation about the 2020 election is about the disjuncture between the polling and the results, the offline conversation is more about the disjuncture between yard signs, rallies, and the results. https://t.co/KvHjb5le7S pic.twitter.com/VEEPIRuk9g
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 12, 2020
Did we not say all the incantations correctly? Did we not sacrifice the best fruits of our labors? How can we have been forsaken, oh Dark Lords of Death?
The Associated Press does not have the Grey Lady’s smarmy sympathy for the befuddled Trumpists. (I swear, just for a moment, I wondered if Betty Cracker was muscling into DougJ’s parody territory… )
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — When Joan Martin heard that Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the presidential election, the retired nurse and avowed supporter of President Donald Trump was deeply unsettled. To steel herself, she thought about how her household weathered Hurricane Katrina when it battered her hometown of Picayune, Mississippi, in 2005.
As the storm blew toward the town, Martin rushed out into her yard to carry her 85 show chickens to safety. Outside, howling winds lashed her family’s barn, lifting the edges of the roof off its moorings.
“The next day they (the chickens) were very concerned about the changes in the yard — we had trees down,” said Martin, 79. “They were very eyes-wide. But within two days, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can deal with this,’ and they did. So I have to follow their lead.”
Across the country, many of the 71.9 million people who voted for Trump — especially his loyal, passionate base — are working through turbulent emotions in the wake of his loss. Grief, anger and shock are among the feelings expressed by supporters who assumed he would score a rock-solid victory — by a slim margin, maybe easily, perhaps even by a landslide….
This morning I’m “attending” the virtual APPAM 2020 conference. My co-authors and I will be presenting three papers today at 11:00AM EST on the Affordable Care Act.
Paper 1: Zero-Price Effects in Health Insurance: Evidence from Colorado (Coleman Drake, Sih-Ting Cai, Dave Anderson, Dan Sacks –funded by NIHCM)
Paper 2: When All That Glitters is Gold: Dominated Plan Choice on Covered California for the 2018 Plan Year (Petra Rasmussen, Dave Anderson)
Paper 3: Changes in Marketplace Competition and Television Advertising by Insurers (Paul Shafer, Dave Anderson, Laura Baum, Erika Franklin-Fowler, Sarah Gollust)
These three papers have occupied a good chunk of my ACA related headspace for the past year. The first study is an extension of a study that Coleman and I published last January in Health Affairs where we had county level aggregate data for Healthcare.gov. This time we have household level data from Colorado to see what is actually happening at the actual choice level. We found interesting things.I’ll say more once we have the working paper out and about by the New Year.
We’ve talked a lot about dominated plan choice on the ACA marketplaces this year. I presented the initial version of the paper at Academy Health over the summer and we just sent back in a revised manuscript. I am hoping that the reviewers like what we did. We found a choice architecture problem that enabled inertia to place people in overly expensive plans. Individuals who bought plans in 2017 and did nothing in 2018 ended up spending a lot more in premiums for objectively worse plans. Individuals who had to make an active choice did a pretty good job but not a perfect job of avoiding objectively bad choices.
The third paper came out of a bullshitting session where we realized that this was an interesting, useful and answerable question. How do insurers change advertising when they become a monopolist? Do they increase advertising to scoop up marketshare? Do they decrease advertising because they are the only game in town? We used the Wesleyan Media Project’s data sets to poke at this question. I’ll say more once the reviewers get back to us on the recently resubmitted manuscript.
Most of my thinking this year on the ACA has been on the insurer/structural side of the marketplace and not too much on the consumer choice side. Even the dominated plan choice paper which has a consumer choice outcome (did you choose an objectively bad plan?) fundamentally engages with how the choice environment is set-up and regulated. Other work that I have cooking at the moment is mostly on the insurer or regulatory sides of the choice environment.
So we have an hour to talk about three papers I’m really happy to be a part of. Some of that happiness is that I think we are doing good, interesting , novel and policy relevant work. A lot is that these are co-authors are great co-authors. They are all wicked smart people who are also fundamentally kind people to work with. Writing with these folks makes going into work, or at least walking down to the spare bedroom/COVID office in the basement real easy.
So if you are at APPAM today, come and check our work out at 11:00AM EST.