Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

“woke” is the new caravan.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

He really is that stupid.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

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

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Let there be snark.

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

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

So many bastards, so little time.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

In my day, never was longer.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

You are here: Home / Archives for 2024

Archives for 2024

ACA Open Enrollment Starts Today

by | 31 Comments

This post is in: 

The ACA Open Enrollment Period (OEP) started this morning.  It will run through at least January 15th in almost every state (Idaho is weird).   Let me steal some notes from last year:

 

We are in open enrollment season for health insurance. The Medicare Annual Enrollment Period started last week. The Affordable Care Act Open Enrollment Period starts now. Many companies are offering their employees an open enrollment period sometime soon.

I just want to highlight a few things.

1) CHOICE IS TOUGH — we have a great deal of very good evidence that choice is really tough. People routinely make objectively bad, dominated choices. People are subject to known and predictable cognitive biases. Some new research by Brot-Goldberg et al that used automatic re-assignment in Medicare Part D to show that people have extremely short duration intense attention spikes when they get hit with the equivalent of a 2×4 across the nose; otherwise inertia wins.

2) Get help! Insurance is complex and complicated. Most people shockingly don’t spend 40+ hours a week thinking about health insurance for a decade or more and find it interesting enough to get a PhD on the subject. Navigators and assisters are helpful as we speak a weird language that is complex even within our jargon. Brokers who are interested in long term relationships have strong incentives to make decent enough to good enough choices. Let’s talk in comments!

3) Satifice — Good enough can be more than good enough. Unless you are a medical trainwreck with a diagnosis history longer than a CVS receipt (Hi Mom!), you’re operating in a world of uncertainty. You don’t know for sure what next year could look like. Make reasonable guesses that are defined by your capability to absorb losses and value on different criteria (network, doctor relationships, ease of use, costs, predictability etc). The goal is not to get a perfect retrospective choice but a good enough prospective choice. Let’s avoid the absolutely hideous and bad choices and call it a good win.

4) Give yourself grace — this is a tough decision.

ACA Open Enrollment Starts TodayPost + Comments (31)

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Four More Sleeps Till Victory Tuesday

by | 238 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

show full post on front page

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Four More Sleeps Till Victory TuesdayPost + Comments (238)

Wee Hours Open Thread

by | 170 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Figuring we’d get trick-or-treaters since our temporary headquarters are in town, I purchased some supplies.

Tootsie Pop and bag of M&Ms

We didn’t get a single door knock. I should have bought repellent items like Twizzlers and Sour Patch Kids. Because I’m definitely going to eat the M&Ms and Tootsie Pops.

***

Speaking of repellent items, here’s a headline you don’t want just days before the voting ends:

Video of Donald Trump ‘Struggling’ to Enter Garbage Truck Goes Viral

The GOP candidate is running around pretending to be a garbage man in a high-viz safety vest, which clashes hideously with his splotchy orange burnt umber face makeup.

Wee Hours Open Thread 2

Bitter experience prevents me from being super confident in the outcome of the election, but damn! I like our chances.

Open thread!

Wee Hours Open ThreadPost + Comments (170)

On The Road – swiftfox – Tanzania Safari Part 2 Tarangire National Park

by | 15 Comments

This post is in: ,

swiftfox

We spent the next day and a half at Tarangire National Park. Tarangire is unique in that it has a bit of everything – zebras, giraffes, baboons, elephants, various antelopes, the big cats and a large diversity of bird species. Our safari guide told us that safari companies are dropping Tarangire from their itinerary to focus on the “name” parks – Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. It’s our gain and their loss. Most of my pictures came from Tarangire.

On The Road – swiftfox – Tanzania Safari Part 2 Tarangire National ParkPost + Comments (15)

On The Road - swiftfox - Tanzania Safari Part 2 Tarangire National Park 8
Tarangire National ParkSeptember 8, 2024

Our first stop was for a group of zebras and elephants.  Our photo guide told us to temper our enthusiasm – there would be plenty more of both.

War for Ukraine Day 981: The Butcher’s Bill for the Glide Bombs Launched from Russian Safe Spaces

by | 39 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Quick housekeeping note: Rosie is doing great. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Last night in comments, way2blue asked:

If I’m following accurately—the U.S. announces with great fanfare all the weapon packages we’re sending to Ukraine, but slow-walks the actual delivery.  Yes?

Here’s President Zelenskyy providing the answer:

As someone who has held a GS15 appointment at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue (for Middle East Peace) assigned to US Army Europe (2014), please allow me to translate this from the official spokesperson weaselspeak:

We’ve been very publicly busy making it look like we’re doing a lot, but I’m going to throw my counterpart at the DOD under the bus to cover my exceedingly exposed tuchas.

Here’s the butcher’s bill from the glide bombs Russia launched against civilian targets in Kharkiv overnight. The glide bombs were launched from Belgorod, which is outside the range of Ukraine’s own weapons and within the range of the US made weapons, or the British and French weapons made with US components, which Ukraine is forbidden to launch into Russia.

Here lies a memory, shattered and scattered: a building where lives quietly unfurled, now fractured beneath the indifferent eye of the world. In Kharkiv, russia’s air strike took two lives – one, a twelve-year-old boy. 34 others suffered both physical and mental traumas, with doctors still fighting for some of those lives. Several people, including a child, remain trapped beneath the rubble. And here we are again, staring at yet another ruin, a fresh wound layered over hundreds of others, each one desperate to hold its own corner of our grief.

How deftly the world blinks, looks away, waiting for the shock to settle, for this scene to slip from sharp pain to dull ache, just as it has for all the others. But can we afford to let this one fade? This suffering – this cruelty, painted over and over upon the same scarred canvas – demands more than our passing horror. Each strike is not mere destruction but the desecration of life itself.

Hold this image, then – don’t let it fall to shadow. We cannot allow this sorrow to be buried under the next. Stand with Ukraine, in relentless remembrance, for as long as it takes for dawn to return.

📹place_kharkiv

President Zelenskyy sat for an interview with South Korean TV channel KSB. Here’s the video:

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 981: The Butcher’s Bill for the Glide Bombs Launched from Russian Safe SpacesPost + Comments (39)

Halloween Evening Open Thread: Never Go Full Hitler

by | 183 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

STOCKPILE - Never Go Full Hitler

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

We’ve never had a presidential election in which the closing week was spent with everyone — including the candidate himself — debating precisely how much he is or isn’t like Adolph Hitler.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) October 30, 2024 at 5:47 PM

The inimitable Dave Roth, at Defector — “They’re Saying It”:

… The rally on Sunday was nominally about Trump, and dutifully circled the spent and degrading bulk of the man that pins this rancid movement in orbit. But, as with so much contemporary conservative politics in its current amphetamized Influencer Era, it wound up being as much or more about the multiply aggrieved individuals in Trump’s orbit who took their turns onstage trying to do what Trump does. These were shitty roast comics and disgraced ex-mayors and disgraced ex-wrestlers and disgraced TV psychiatrists and radio hosts, disgraced scions of similarly disgraced American political families and Trump’s weedy sniffling adult sons and Tucker Carlson and the various free-riding kooks and replacement-level elected masochists and aspiring genocidaires aiming to sneak into power by hiding their hideous chittering forms behind Trump’s luxurious width. All of them aired their specific individual grievances—the people and institutions and various vulnerable minority populations they hated, the things they thought should happen to them—before asserting that only Donald Trump would make those offenses stop.

This is not really a group of people that do well with the concept of unison for reasons having to do with (sort of) ideology and (more urgently) their own appetites and issues and awful personalities. The main idea, all throughout, was that Trump would hurt and humiliate the people that the speakers wanted hurt. There was, as there always is, something uncanny about the performance of all of it, not in the standard stilted artifice of American politics—those fusty old norms were nowhere in evidence here—but in the ways that all these individuated and bespoke grievances had warped the people getting up there, one after another, to express and embody them. They looked and sounded wrong, unnatural; they leered and cackled and boomed, they were shiny or dusty or poreless, and they whistled like teapots full of boiling vinegar—not like a chorus, not at all, or not anymore than a bunch of blaring car alarms might be said to be harmonizing…

Trump remains at the center of all this, as he is that vengeance’s expediter and dumb scowling face, but there is also the sense of him receding. He’s receding because he has been degrading in plain sight for nearly a decade and can’t deliver the sort of performances that he used to, but also because the movement around him—that coalition of crabs in a barrel all posting and posturing and praying over him and busily trying to get over on each other, selling him and selling him and selling him to anyone they think might buy—has by now very nearly outgrown him. It still needs Trump because it hasn’t replaced him; none of these other vile washouts and goofs and TV casualties and clammy eliminationist tryhards are as famous or charismatic as Trump even in his current diminishment. But the fantasy shot through this otherwise incoherent closing argument was both plain enough to see and obviously, luridly metastatic.

That idea was, is, and will continue to be hurting people; the change, maybe, is that Trump is now the hammer doing the smashing, and no longer the strong hand swinging it. It is the dream of this movement, of all the people on stage and the people looking up at them, of the rich grotesques funding it and the servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads eager to do their dirty work, to drop the annihilating weight of Trump on their neighbors and coworkers and families, to push a button with Trump’s face on it and turn their own long rosters of enemies into mist. What binds all these people to Trump has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has; they believe that they’ll be able to do that so long as they stay behind him. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends upon that being true.

show full post on front page

Halloween Evening Open Thread: Never Go Full HitlerPost + Comments (183)