Fell asleep in my chair and went to bed, woke up and couldn’t sleep, so I checked the website and it has been unattended for hours. There is no chance in hell I am wading into those other threads, so here is a fresh one for you. I apologize for leaving you alone for so long:
Open Thread: Tailgunner Ted and the Chamber of Echoes
(Jeff Danziger’s website)
Alex Pareene, at Salon, explains “How Ted Cruz is coordinating the (incoherent) conservative shutdown strategy“:
… We sort of knew that while Ted Cruz was acting in defiance of Senate Republican leadership, he had a merry band of followers, consisting of a couple of other senators and a larger bloc of hard-liners in the House. Cruz is leading this unofficial new caucus along with his stalwart ally, Sen. Mike Lee, who is just as right-wing as Cruz but less telegenic. Cruz and Lee have been driving the entire GOP message on the shutdown even though they represent, and have been meeting with, only a fraction of congressional Republicans. The “let’s just fund veterans and parks” thing? That was them…
Allow me to make a point I’ve made before: The reason conservatives blew up about “Journolist,” the notorious liberal media email listserv, is because they assumed liberals coordinate their messaging the same way that conservatives traditionally have. So the fact that conservative media people are working directly with a Republican senator and activist conservative groups to develop and refine their shutdown related memery and arguments is also unsurprising. Spending yesterday fixating solely on veterans trying to visit a war memorial is not an idea that simply occurred spontaneously to everyone in the right-wing press.
What’s funny about all of this, though, is how much it just reinforces the insane bubble that all of these people — conservative members of Congress, conservative media people and professional conservative activists — live their entire lives in. They are all talking to each other, and only to each other. The fact that the conservative position is deeply unpopular, the fact that conservative strategy is incoherent and self-defeating, none of that is reaching them. John Boehner and Ross Douthat know what’s going on. Rep. Tim Huelskamp only knows what he reads at RedState and what he hears from people who only read RedState….
Republicans have no agreed-upon leader, their supposed policy agenda completely changes month to month, and they’re just making up their strategy on the fly. The one thing they’re good at is talking to each other, and that’s just making everything worse….
More details at the link.
ETA: Why people hate debate-team champions…
(H/t NYMag)
Open Thread: Tailgunner Ted and the Chamber of EchoesPost + Comments (188)
Open Thread: I {Heart} My Senator, Elizabeth Warren
Got an email from Senator Warren today:
… Government is real, and it has three basic functions:
*Provide for the national defense.
*Put rules in place rules, like traffic lights and bank regulations, that are fair and transparent.
*Build the things together that none of us can build alone – roads, schools, power grids – the things that give everyone a chance to succeed.These things did not appear by magic. In each instance, we made a choice as a people to come together. We made that choice because we wanted to be a country with a foundation that would allow anyone to have a chance to succeed.
The Food and Drug Administration makes sure that the white pills we take are antibiotics and not baking soda. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration oversees crash tests to make sure our new cars have functioning brakes. The Consumer Product Safety Commission makes sure that babies’ car seats don’t collapse in a crash and that toasters don’t explode.
We are alive, we are healthier, we are stronger because of government. Alive, healthier, stronger because of what we did together.
We are not a country of anarchists. We are not a country of pessimists and ideologues whose motto is, “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” We are not a country that tolerates dangerous drugs, unsafe meat, dirty air, or toxic mortgages.
We are not that nation. We have never been that nation. And we never will be that nation.
What’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
Open Thread: I {Heart} My Senator, Elizabeth WarrenPost + Comments (62)
A good kind of discharge
Maybe my discharge petition idea was nuts, but with Boehner paralyzed it really might be our one way out of this mess. Plus the Democrats have warmed up to it in a hurry. The key targets of this strategy have not changed so check this post to see if you live in an especially key district. However, regardless of where you live, every district matters. Tell your Rep to think of the country and help end this mess.
(Sorry for the formatting. On the road ATM and blogging with wordpress on an iPhone 4 is agony)
ETA: back home, fixd.
Deep thought
Will we start defaulting on October 17 if John Boehner does shoot the hostage? Maybe. Some very smart people figured out that date, but these guys are not gods. They just took current expense rates and extrapolated it forward. However, things happen. Maybe hurricane Karen hits Louisiana this week a little harder than expected, or the San Andreas fault drops a big surprise on LA. Maybe some terrorist yokels get lucky at an inconvenient time. The point is, bills get passed or renewed on a schedule. The government has its funding authorized or it shuts down on a schedule. When it comes to our spending authority, something unexpected happens and we will default with John Boehner still holding his jock. Or am I missing something?
Does this Qualify?
We’re in the biggest open enrollment period of my lifetime. Open Enrollment is when people who don’t have a plan can get a plan and those who have a plan can change plans without penalty. Open Enrollment is a common feature in any non-NHS system including the German, Dutch and Swiss as well as the American commercial and Exchange operations.
Open Enrollment is an attempt to manage adverse selection. Open Enrollment creates uncertainty which insurance companies can statistically price instead of certainty. For instance, in a buy at any point environment, the rational thing for me to do would be to carry a very cheap catastrophic policy in order to cover me in case I get hit by a bus. However, if I go to the doctor on Tuesday morning for some strange bruising in my legs, and Wednesday afternoon, I get the “Congratulations, you have cancer” phone call, under a buy at any time scenario, my rational response would be to go buy the super platinum insurance policy. A limited open enrollment period will see people who get the “Congratulations you have cancer” phone call during the enrollment plan select the highest benefit but it guards against someone policy jumping six months later. It will also see someone who got the cancer call four months ago select the highest benefit level possible.
It is not a perfect filtering device, there is no such thing besides universal enrollment with either single payer or significant back-end risk transfer payments between multiple payers. But it is a decent device that forces people to treat health insurance as insurance against future risks instead of a cost-sharing pool for known events.
However, life changes, and this creates the concept of qualifying events. Qualifying events are situations that allow people to buy or switch policies outside of normal enrollment periods and to do so without penalties. The basic idea behind a qualifying event is dramatic life and family changes. When Kid #2 was born, he was a qualifying event as well as a pooping machine. When I lost my job several years ago, that was a qualifying event. When I got married to the best woman in the world (for me at least), that was a qualifying event. When my family moved three states, that was a qualifying event.
PPACA/Obamacare also uses the open enrollment system for risk management. The first year has an open enrollment period of six months (Oct. 1 to March 31, 2014). Going forward, the open enrollment period for the Exchanges will be 56 days in late Fall. However PPACA will also have the qualifying event criteria for people to buy on the Exchange outside of open enrollment. The qualifying events are the regular ones such as changes in jobs, changes in family size through marriage, divorce, births, adoptions and deaths, changes in location although a move across the street won’t qualify, but a move out of the designated selling/service area of the previously bought policy will qualify. Additionally, changes in previous insurance status will matter; if an employer drops coverage in July for his employees, that is a qualifying event or if a person makes too much now for Medicaid, that is a qualifying event, or if a person ages into Medicare, that is a qualifying event for people to get rid of their Exchange plan.
Early Morning Open Thread: Red Meat
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Timothy Egan, in the NYTimes, condemns the Repubs to the “Wrong Side of History“:
Sarah Palin finally got her death panels — a direct blow from the Republican House. In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the National Institutes of Health.
And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a “slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying to say it’s not their fault.
It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting affordable health care…
You have to step back from the breathless tick-tock of the 24-hour news cycle to put this grim chapter in larger perspective. “Can you remember a time in your lifetime when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for America to fail?” So asked a perplexed Bill Clinton a few days ago.
The answer is no. What kind of failure are we talking about? Not just to equity markets, jobs, the mechanics of daily life in the world’s biggest economy. The shutdown stops research on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, cancer treatments. Two-thirds of the employees at the Centers for Disease Control were sent home. Many food inspectors, people who train air traffic controllers, anti-terrorism experts — all furloughed. And shed a tear for Yosemite National Park on its 123rd birthday Monday. America’s Best Idea — as the parks are called — couldn’t compete with America’s Worst Idea, the Tea Party Republicans….
Be sure to read the whole thing.
What’s on the agenda for the end of this Very Bad, No Good week?