Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Petty moves from a petty man.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Republicans do not trust women.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

How stupid are these people?

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

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

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Be a wild strawberry.

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

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Same As It Ever Was

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Saturday Morning Open Thread 37

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

Worried about Musk and Ramaswamy running amok at DOGE? Fear not, oversight will be supplied by Marjorie Taylor Greene as part of a deal to leave Mike Johnson alone. nymag.com/intelligence…

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— Ed Kilgore (@edkilgore.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 4:07 PM

It’ll be good for popcorn sales, I guess… Ed Kilgore, at NYMag, reports “Don’t Worry: MTG Will Supervise Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy”:

Nobody much knows how to deal with the Department of Government Efficiency, whose DOGE acronym is based on a cryptocurrency-adjacent meme. Donald Trump’s recently acquired buddy Elon Musk seems to have developed the idea of a sort of cartoon superhero agency designed to destroy the deep state — or maybe it was just a joke, suggests Decrypt’s Liz Napolitano. DOGE has no legal status, no public funding, no authority to do much of anything other than bloviate, headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two men with zero experience inside the federal government they promise to expose and largely blow up…

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed that laid out their vision for cheerfully blowing up the public sector, Musk and Ramaswamy suggested that Trump might be able to unilaterally implement their recommendations via the illegal means of presidential impoundment (i.e., cancellation) of congressionally appropriated spending, a trick that contributed to Richard Nixon’s downfall when he tried it. The dynamic duo also vaguely but alarmingly said they’d pursue reforms in government contracting via a “temporary suspension of payments,” which sounds a lot like abrogation of federal obligations.

Now, it’s possible that this is all just a fantasy exercise by two rich boys or even a way to keep them busy and out of the actual work of the Trump administration (though Musk and Ramaswamy have been assured the president’s Office of Management and Budget, which prepares Trump’s own fiscal recommendations, will be paying close attention to their findings).

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Late Night Open Thread: GOP, Party of Tiny… Mandates

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— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 4:59 PM

He’s also net -7m votes, which means that in the last 40 years only McCain & Dole were bigger losers.

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— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 4:00 PM

… [whispers] And minds:

We are going to hear a lot of “when I voted for Trump, I didn’t vote *for Trump,*” and please pray for me because I know we need every hand on deck and can’t afford to alienate potential defectors but it will take God’s power to stop me from saying “yes you did, that’s what VOTING FOR TRUMP means!”

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— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 8:23 PM

Trump's electoral juice comes from his outsized celebrity appeal to a segment of the voting public that is low enough in trust, engagement, and cognitively-reflective judgment in the domain of politics to not hear about, ignore, or actively disbelieve most of the truly alarming facts about him

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— Christopher M. Federico (@cmfederico.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 2:00 PM

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War for Ukraine Day 1,003: Putin’s Wetwork Program

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Three quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great. She’s currently lying with her chin on my foot, which tickles because she’s floofy. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations to help with her chemo.

Second, current status:

I got my flu, updated COVID, and pneumonia vaccinations this afternoon.

Third, so between it being a long week and the fact that my arms are now sorer, they were already sore from lifting weights, I’m just going to run through the basics tonight.

Russia unloaded on Sumy again overnight:

Russian Shahed-type drones that attacked Sumy overnight were equipped with shrapnel munitions, Regional Governor Volodymyr Artiukh reported on Nov. 22.
Russia struck a residential area in the city killing two people and injuring 12, according to local officials.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) November 22, 2024 at 5:42 AM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Russian Shahed-type drones that attacked Sumy overnight were equipped with shrapnel munitions, Regional Governor Volodymyr Artiukh reported on Nov. 22.

Russia struck a residential area in the city killing two people and injuring 12, according to local officials.

“These weapons are used to kill people. Not to destroy structures, just to kill more people,” Artiukh said in a video uploaded to the Sumy Regional Military Administration’s Telegram channel.

“Just as the previous missile strike [had] cluster munitions, today again drones [are] equipped with shrapnel,” he added.

“The same goes for other strikes, in other places where private homes were hit, people were injured and killed. This is pure genocide.”

The Sumy regional prosecutor’s office is conducting a pre-trial investigation into potential “war crimes resulting in the deaths of people.”

Sumy Oblast borders Russia’s Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod oblasts. Residents of the vulnerable border communities experience multiple attacks per day.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Friday Night Open Thread

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It’s Friday night, and Joelle and I decided that in order to watch our eating habits, we would have a dinner and date every Friday and then stick to the diet the rest of the time. Tonight we got a gut bomb pizza, and now we are getting ready to go to a comedy club. We both love standup, and I haven’t been in years because West Virginia, so we are going to start going pretty regularly.

Tonight we are seeing this hilariously bitchy gay guy named Matteo Lane. I know nothing about him other than a few clips I have seen here and there, so if he is canceled I don’t want to fucking hear about it. I am super excited to see Craig Ferguson in a couple months.

You guys unwind and snap out of the doom cycle a lot of us are in. You can’t be the loyal opposition if your head isn’t on straight, and taking some time to unwind and have fun is vital for that. Even the military gets that and does three day passes and hands out R&R.

So do something fun this weekend. You have your marching orders.

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Car Lots are Full

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I wasn’t posting today because we bought a new vehicle.  While looking, I visited a couple of car lots in the Denver area.

They are full to the brim, jam packed with mostly new vehicles. It’s hard to find a parking spot on the lots of almost every car dealer.

If there’s an expectation that the Trump tariffs will immediately jack up the price of everything, I don’t think that’s going to happen, for cars at least.  Unless I’m misunderstanding tariffs, they won’t be retroactive.  In other words, if the vehicle has some percentage of foreign parts, it’s only when those parts are shipped to the factory that the tariff will be applied.  So the current (to my eyes, heavy) inventory on dealers’ lots would have to be sold before the new prices would hit.

Even so-called “Japanese cars” are often built in the US or Mexico, and the percentage of non-North American parts in a couple we looked at was like 20%.  Unless Trump decides to defy USMCA (the new NAFTA), the percentage of foreign parts isn’t enough to make the price go up like a rocket.

In Denver, a couple of months ago you could lease a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle for $25/month with nothing down.  The cost has since risen a bit, since some tax credits have expired.  Still, even though you could get a decent electric car for the monthly cost of a fast food meal, at least one of the Nissan lots I visited had what looked like at least a hundred brand-new Leafs.  Presumably the economics of a tariff-driven spike in prices would lead to people grudgingly leasing those vehicles if they had to.

Anyway, this is anecdata, but the specter of tariffs didn’t push me to buy a vehicle, just need and a good deal on a 2024 model.

Open thread.

 

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Friday Evening Open Thread: MAGAts Get A Harsh Message From Their Favorite Store

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People who voted for Trump because they want lower prices are in for sticker shock.

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 11:33 PM

Trump’s True Believers, of course, are gonna fight this reality every inch of the way!

Sorry (not sorry), WalMart customers!

Walmart CFO to CNBC: Look, as we have said before, our goal is to be the low price leader…but increased tariffs will increase prices for our customers.

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 9:36 PM

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It is the prices….

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Hanson et al released a new ahead of print Health Affairs article that looks at the prices ACA regulated health insurance plans pay. They look at on-Exchange/subsidized individual market plans, off-exchange individual market plans and fully insured small group market plans. They find a substantial difference in prices paid by market segment. They then baseline these payment levels against standard Medicare rates.

Four group 3 column bar chart of % of Medicare prices paid by individual market on and off-Exchange insurance and Small group markets ... Overall subsidized individual is ~145% Medicare and Small group is ~180% Medicare

So what are the highlights?

We estimated Marketplace plan prices to be 26 percent lower than small-group plan prices for outpatient services compared with 7 percent lower for professional services. Another notable difference relative to professional services was that payment ratios for all segments were significantly higher for outpatient services, particularly for imaging services (representing 25.3 percent of outpatient spending within our sample), where Marketplace plans paid 2.76 times Medicare rates and small-group plans paid nearly 3.70 times Medicare rates….

Prices in Marketplace plans averaged 15 percent lower than prices in small-group plans, with larger price differences for outpatient hospital services (26 percent) and smaller differences for inpatient hospital (13 percent) and professional (7 percent) services.

Why is this the case?

We know in the individual subsidized market that there is a strong incentive for insurers to gain market share by pricing at or below benchmark. This creates downward price pressures that are typically achieved by narrowing networks. Small group plans don’t have that same market dynamic and the decision-maker is not an individual where a small network that is local to a household could be more than good enough. Instead the HR administrator is trying to balance a budget constraint with a power weighed scream minimization function so the networks may be broader.

On the policy front, if we assume that small group ACA looks somewhat like large group employer/ERISA regulated plans in provider pricing, the 15% pricing wedge for the individual market is where things like ICHRA could make a lot of sense.

It is the prices….Post + Comments (18)