Trump’s hair underscored by “Dream Weaver” #WeaveGotThis pic.twitter.com/oXo53AUR3J
— ElElegante101 (@skolanach) February 7, 2018
Pretty Please Let This Happen
OMG:
President Donald Trump’s lawyers have aimed to hit the brakes on a potential sit-down with Robert Mueller, but Trump remains eager to speak with the special counsel, according to his allies.
One person familiar with Trump’s thinking said — in addition to believing he is entirely innocent — part of what’s fueling the President’s willingness to participate is his belief that he has experience with lawsuits and testifying under oath from his time in the real estate business.
“He thinks he can work this,” this person said. “He doesn’t realize how high the stakes are.”
Once you’re there, there’s no turning back, this person said. “You can’t get up and walk away. It’s not that easy.”“He’s basically saying that I’m wide open as a book. I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and I’m willing to say so under oath,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday. “So again, I still think that that is on the table.”
This would be amazing.
BTW- I am stuffing these god damned calendar envelopes and I hate all of you. Also we have had rain, snow, freezing rain, more snow, and I am just sitting here waiting for tree limbs to start breaking and my cable and internet to go out. I’m salty as fuck today so maybe that is what I need. I had nightmares three times last night and then when I woke up this morning I stepped in a litter coated cat turd (aka kitty roca) that one of the dogs (fuck you Thurston) had eaten half of and then just left in the middle of my god damned bedroom floor.
The Senate Reaches A Two Year Budget Deal. Can They Jam The House?
The Senate has reached a two year budget deal. It includes:
The deal would raise the spending caps by about $300 billion over two years, according to a congressional aide. The limit on military and other defense spending would be increased by $80 billion in the current fiscal year and $85 billion in the next year, which begins Oct. 1, the aide said. The limit on nondefense spending would increase by $63 billion this year and $68 billion next year.
The deal also includes increased funding for dealing with the opioid crisis, disaster relief, extends CHIP coverage out another four years in addition to the six year funding in the last CR for a total of ten years of funding, and a debt limit increase. It is also includes two years of funding for community health centers, as well as funding for child care. If this passes the House and is signed into law, the Congressional appropriators will have six weeks to appropriate against this years increased funding caps.* The deal does not include a DACA fix. This will, provided the government actually stays open past late Thursday night/early Friday morning, be dealt with under a separate process beginning in the Senate next week.
The Senate appears to be trying to jam the House with this. As in: we passed this, now it is up to you. The Senate didn’t even consider bringing up the narrow deal that the House had passed yesterday. As a result, the House side is where this is going to be much harder to pass. Speaker Ryan will have a difficult time holding his caucus together to pass the Senate bill. The Freedom Caucus members will all vote no. A significant chunk of the Republican Study Group members are likely to vote no as well. And they’ll do so under the war cry of exploding budget deficits, seemingly unaware of the $1.5 trillion increase in the deficit that is the result of the GOP only, partisan tax cut bill passed in December 2017. This means that Speaker Ryan either has to abandon the Hastert Rule and ask Congresswoman Pelosi for the votes to pass this or he maintains obeisance to the Hastert Rule and refuses to bring this to a vote. If it is the former, this gives Congresswoman Pelosi leverage to extract a promise to bring up a clean bill to resolve the problem created when the President rescinded the DACA executive order; similar to what Senator Schumer negotiated in the Senate. If it is the latter, then the government will likely shutdown tomorrow night.
All the action, stress, and flop sweat will now be in the House of Representative. At this point the President is largely irrelevant until such time as he either has to sign or veto a budget bill. Whether we reach that point is now all on Speaker Ryan. Senators McConnell and Schumer have left him holding the hand grenade and they’ve handed Congresswoman Pelosi the pin.
Stay frosty!
Open thread.
* Just a quick note: the DOD, the Services, and their subordinate commands, offices, departments, and bureaus function under what is known as the 80/20 Rule. This means that 80% of their annual budgets must be spent before the end of the 3rd quarter of the fiscal year. Even if this passes and the appropriators work as efficiently as possible, it is going to be very hard for the DOD and the Services to comply with the 80/20 Rule. And that is going to make for a very uncomfortable spring, summer, and fall for the US military.
The Senate Reaches A Two Year Budget Deal. Can They Jam The House?Post + Comments (127)
Tweet, tweet, tweet
First, the bird kind. It’s windy as heck here today, and this little palm warbler (I think) was clinging to a swaying bamboo stalk about 35 feet up, surveying the scene:
This was right after sunrise today. A little while later, same bamboo stand, a blue jay occupied a high perch and considered breakfast options, settling on the bird feeder once the pink monkey with the camera vacated the scene:
Of course, as soon as I turned the camera off and replaced the lens cap, a squadron of Sandhill cranes flew overhead. They fly overhead every morning and evening, like they’re clocking in at the golf course down the road for a day’s bug patrol work. I’ll get a photo of them on the wing one day.
In other yard news, one of the white squirrels (I’m now convinced there are at least two) has lost most of its fur from the midsection up. I hope it’s just a temporary embarrassment and the fur returns. Its appetite seems unaffected. But it looks like a rat wearing white MC Hammer pants now and so is unintentionally comical. Poor thing!
Last and certainly least, the fraudulent orange fart cloud finally addressed the record-breaking stock market plunge that occurred earlier this week. (Was that really this week, not 10 fresh hells ago? I had to check. Yes!) Guess what — someone not named Donald Trump is to blame!
In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up. Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2018
He really has no idea how any of this shit works.
Open thread!
Network thoughts from NHPC
I was at the Academy Health National Health Policy Conference this week and it was wonderful. I learned a lot, I nerded out a lot, I saw a bunch of people that I mainly see on Twitter. I also am in the middle of a really good rethink on network choice structures.
Katherine Ho of Columbia made a very good, economist lens point that I want to paraphrase and then extend on.
Individual market products which are not just the ACA but also Medicaid Managed Care, Medicare and Medicare Advantage have a single decision maker and either a single individual reacting to the network quality or at most a single family group. If there is a sufficient network as defined by the single decision maker, the person screaming about a bad network is the decision maker. There is heterogeneity in defining what a “good” network looks like. For a lot of people a “good” network can be a very small network. Janet Weiner of Penn made the point that for most prospectively healthy people with ex ante good risk a “good network” can be what ever network that has their PCP and a local urgent care in network and everything else is almost irrelevant. This is the space for individual insurance market narrow networks that can lead to significant price per unit reductions.
On the other hand, group insurance products for large firms have the HR department being the decision maker. They face a budget constraint and a “keep most employees reasonably happy” sub-constraint. If there is a geographic dispersion of employees, knocking out one hospital in Town X and making all employees travel 15 miles to Town Y’s much cheaper and equally good hospital will produce a lot of screaming from employees. Smaller employer groups may be facing a much stronger budget constraint than large groups but this dynamic makes forcing large group insurers into narrower networks much harder. And if narrower networks are less plausible, then the negotiating leverage shifts to the providers which means higher rates for the providers.
I have no idea how to systemically measure or define a “good” network as the summary statistics wave away a lot of detail but this is forcing me to think really hard right now.
On the Road and In Your Backyard
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
So, that SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch was something else. Can you imagine – it all worked, and this electric car, space suit, and David Bowie music, will be speeding around the Sun, intersecting Mars’s orbit, and otherwise being around for millions-to-billions of years. It beggars the mind.
This is real, folks – this really did happen, and this is a real picture from space. Just…wow – a piece of our current reality is now practically timeless, for our descendants or aliens to discover. Tears streamed down from my face as I watched the launch, separation, return, and payload, all with my wife on the phone as she watched on her work computer. We cheered and gasped and ooh’d and ah’d.
Mid-event, I remembered that when the Moon landing happened (before I was conceived), my dad was working on the North Slope in Alaska, and had planned months ahead to have the time off. He was in a hotel in Anchorage, and my mom was visiting her folks in Oklahoma and they spent many hours over the days and, mostly, nights: on the phone, each watching those amazing events on their small screens in low-res, flickering, rounded-screen B&W television. It was nice to experience my own take on that, though a bit less exciting because people weren’t involved, but it was amazing in HD and available through Wi-Fi or mobile data. I hope we get more footage from the Tesla and Starman as they travel.
Charlie Pierce was right, it is magic that we can hold something in our hand, at home or office or out and about, on top of a mountain or on the water or waiting for someone, and see live video and images from space or elsewhere on this planet. We truly live in amazing times.
I remember first feeling that way while I watched the Hong Kong turnover on a handheld portable TV my mom bought me in Japan earlier that year. It wasn’t awesome, but I sat outside for my planned lunch break in Arlington, Virginia, smoking my Dunhills and watching history unfold, live, while I was outdoors and with birds wandering around the grounds near me and with the sun shining bright. Seeing the Falcon Heavy launch was like that – on my tablet. It really was exciting, nice to see something I’ve been getting excited about for months succeed. It feels like things are different now in the “space game”, some trajectories have been changed, and that’s exciting!
No matter who succeeds, I hope we soon see a day when we again point up at the another planetary body in the sky with people on it, even if they’re just visiting. It looks like that might be sorta soon – China’s exciting efforts to the Moon, our renewed national program looking at the Moon and Mars, Europe, Russia, India, and numerous private initiatives – there’s a bunch of neat, exciting things happening. There’s even a space mining syndicate – no joke – that’s planning on sending robotic mining ships to nearby asteroids to mine huge amounts of high-grade ores. That kind of resource creation – outside of Earth’s gravity – would mean other planets could be colonized much easier than if we had to lift all that metal and stuff off the planet!
And don’t get me started with Elon Musk with his space launch, solar power, power storage, electric tech, electric vehicles, crewed space tech, mining/tunnel boring tech, etc. companies and initiatives, it’s not like they all go together to make for making an off-world colony in a decade or two or anything.
Really, it’s been too long and we need to renew our optimistic vision of the future to get through this nastiness and inspire us to grow through our new challenges of climate change, resource depletion, and falling into terrible, comfortable tribalism.
I will post more on Space as so many exciting and interesting things are happening, and good news is in need. I’m thankful Adam was here to post Tuesday’s landmark event. If you get a chance, do watch the Falcon Heavy launch and separations and returning to launch pad of the twin rockets (their synchronized landing was amaze-balls). It sounds like the central rocket ran out of fuel and so missed the autonomous drone ship and pancaked into the water 100m away. It showered the ship with shrapnel, so we’ll find out more details about what happened and if there’s footage of the whole event, as soon as they can share that information.
SpaceX is well known for embracing failure and learning what went wrong, and then improving, so this is actually good, not bad. Their footage of explosions and other failures are amusing, and encouraging – failure is part of the plan and they measure everything so well that they almost learn more from failure than from success. They are not afraid to show failure because it improves them.
My theory is that they’ll figure out that it was a fuel issue – as in, Falcon-9/Heavy engines get their extra oomph from super-cold fuel, and the longer the fuel sits in the rocket before takeoff, the warmer it gets and the less dense it is. I think some is even vented, so there’s less in the tanks the longer they sit before takeoff. Since the launch was near the end of the launch window, the fuel was comparatively warm, and the center core had an extra minute or so of burn after the first two disengaged. Ergo, not enough fuel for the last 5-10 seconds of landing and so it missed the drone ship and hit the water HARD.
It seemed to me that, after landing, the two successful cores vented fuel/fuel vapor once they were settled and so, since they had enough fuel to power just a small puff, it’s quite possible that the central core didn’t have quite enough fuel to stick the landing. I’m thankful they use drone ships for these landings and nothing manned, let me tell you!
In light of this amazing progress, something fun and celebratory is in need. Again, apologies for running this so late, but it always errored out previously. Majorx4’s fix works well, so many thanks to him.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: “Treasonous”
Trump says Democrats who didn't clap for him at the State of the Union are "un-American" and "treasonous." pic.twitter.com/lKUx0m3KKK
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) February 5, 2018
He’s just a tummler at heart, a white-bread Rodney Dangerfield, working the Suburban Racist circuit. Getting the reliable cheers by promoting time-worn tropes of Us vs. Them — honor and patriotism be damned. Kudos to Tammy Duckworth for her response, as reported in the Washington Post:
… “We don’t live in a dictatorship or monarchy. I swore an oath — in the military and in the Senate — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap,” Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote in a tweet. She used a nickname she has given Trump, who has said he was granted a medical deferment during the Vietnam War after he was diagnosed with bone spurs in his feet.
Duckworth, who lost her legs in 2004 while serving in Iraq as an Army helicopter pilot, then shared this quote from Theodore Roosevelt, lifted from an opinion piece the former president wrote during World War I: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”…
In a Senate floor speech last month, Duckworth called Trump a “five-deferment draft dodger” who had no business accusing Democrats — such as herself — of not caring for the military.
“Does he even know that there are service members who are in harm’s way right now, watching him, looking for their commander in chief to show leadership, rather than to try to deflect blame?” Duckworth said…
Trump supporters: I love Trump because he speaks plainly and says what he means!
Trump: If you don't cheer me, that's treason.
Trump supporters: Ok, see, he didn't mean that like it sounds
— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) February 7, 2018
You know what country would view people as traitors for not clapping for their leader?
North Korea. https://t.co/frxvOXfPDE
— mieke eoyang (@MiekeEoyang) February 5, 2018
Every American should be alarmed by how @realDonaldTrump is working to make loyalty to him synonymous with loyalty to our country. That is not how democracy works.
— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 5, 2018
.@realDonaldTrump: “Treasonous” means betraying your country – like, say, if someone colluded with Russia to influence American elections. The freedom not to clap for ideas you disagree with is called the 1st Amendment. https://t.co/0wQaifeiph
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) February 5, 2018
Useful guide
Not clapping = treason
Welcoming clandestine offer of stolen information from a hostile foreign government to your presidential campaign? “That’s politics!” https://t.co/R48x9JxWno
— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 5, 2018
It takes real effort to make the headline of your tax-cut-celebration speech at an Ohio factory be "Democrats are treasonous, president says."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 5, 2018
The president often answers criticism by accusing others of doing what he’s accused of (“No puppet- you’re the puppet;” those calling him racist are denounced for “hatred”). Remarkable, then, for the president to talk of “treason.”
https://t.co/5TwPDKB1Wk— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) February 5, 2018
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: “Treasonous”Post + Comments (235)