Only in the House and Senate is it big news when an 83 year-old man retires.
Is it too much to hope that Mitt will get clobbered by a drooling MAGAturd in the primaries? A boy can hope.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 149 Comments
This post is in: Election 2018
Only in the House and Senate is it big news when an 83 year-old man retires.
Is it too much to hope that Mitt will get clobbered by a drooling MAGAturd in the primaries? A boy can hope.
by Betty Cracker| 178 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity
The “president” is back at “work” today after an extended golf outing / unconstitutional personal business enrichment exercise at his Disgraceland estate in Florida. Trump has resumed his arduous schedule of live-tweeting Fox & Friends and is busily disgorging a backlog of delusions, self-congratulations and undemocratic demands on Twitter. A sample:
Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
This “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents” description makes it sound like Abedin personally handed over passwords to spies, but you’ll be unsurprised to learn it’s bullshit. Abedin used a Yahoo email account at home and sometimes forwarded work emails to herself at home, as we’ve known for years thanks to the most exhaustive inquiry into email usage ever conducted. Years after Abedin forwarded emails that were retroactively classified, Yahoo experienced an enormous data breach that compromised hundreds of millions of Yahoo email accounts.
There’s no evidence that “foreign agents” accessed Abedin’s emails or found anything sensitive there. Trump is calling for the DoJ to prosecute and jail a private citizen because of a Daily Caller hit piece mentioned by one of the sofa squatters on Fox & Friends. That’s it.
Benjamin Wittes published an interesting piece at Lawfare yesterday detailing the “deep state’s” surprising resilience in the face of Trump’s autocratic demands to turn the DoJ and federal law enforcement agencies into his personal protection instruments. May it continue to hold!
In other news, Trump took credit for the lack of commercial aviation disasters in 2017:
Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
The Post’s Philip Bump debunked this nonsense barely an hour after Trump made the claim:
“I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,” Trump says of his first year in office, a claim that is not only hard to back up but fairly easy to debunk. A check of Factba.se, a database of Trump’s comments, shows only a handful of mentions of air travel as president. One of the primary moments during which he did so was when he unveiled a short-lived effort to reform the air-traffic control system last June.
“If we adopt these changes, Americans can look forward to cheaper, faster, and safer travel,” Trump said, “a future where 20 percent of a ticket price doesn’t go to the government, and where you don’t have to sit on a tarmac or circle for hours and hours over an airport — which is very dangerous also — before you land.”
That’s Trump saying that the existing system is dangerous. That system didn’t change, but 2017 was indeed the safest year in history for commercial air travel. So how does Trump get credit for this again?
Especially given two complicating aspects to that statistic. The first is that this was a global statistic. One reason 2017 saw fewer fatalities among commercial flights is that 2016 saw a fatal accident in Colombia in November — the last time there had been a fatal passenger jet airliner accident. Did Trump spend his first year quietly bolstering the safety of airlines in Colombia, Lithuania, Tanzania and Indonesia?
The other complication is that the number of deaths on American commercial airlines didn’t change in 2017 relative to 2016 — because it’s hard to go lower than “zero.” The last time someone died in the crash of an American commercial flight was in February 2009 — less than a month after Barack Obama first took office. Yet apparently we are supposed to believe that Trump’s eventual election reached its grip back eight years in time to ensure that flights would be safer moving forward.
And then there’s this:
Democrats are doing nothing for DACA – just interested in politics. DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against Dems, will start “falling in love” with Republicans and their President! We are about RESULTS.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
Yeah, that’s totally gonna happen.
Fellow citizens, I think we can safely conclude that “lie less often,” and “develop a rudimentary understanding of constitutional boundaries” and “be more humble and realistic” did not make the cut on Trump’s list of New Year’s resolutions.
by David Anderson| 41 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Rare Sincerity
Now that I’m back from vacation, I should stop procrastinating and do a quick year in review.
My biggest miss
The first week after the 2016 election, I was convinced that the entirety of the ACA minus the Medicare Advantage cuts was dead. Medicaid expansion gone. Pre-existing conditions gone. Essential Health Benefits gone. Subsidies gone.
I was wrong. The individual mandate is gone and Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR)subsidies are a mangled mess of ineffective sabotage.
My most important post
I argued that the threat to terminate payments for CSR subsidies was limited in scope and duration.
The CSR threat loses its ability to blow up the market by sometime in the fall.
This post led me to believe that CSR payments required Republican concessions and not the conventional wisdom of Democratic concessions. From there, it led me to believe and argue that there will never by an appropriation for CSR again.
Proudest moment
Every time every one of you picked up the phone and called. Every time that we stood for our values. Every time that we looked at our world and tried to figure out how to make it better and not worse.
End Notes
2017 was a huge transition year for me.
I started it as Richard Mayhew and I end it as Dave Anderson. My wife was 150% supportive of us taking a massive leap into the unknown as we moved to North Carolina and Duke instead of staying in the comfortable and familiar of Pittsburgh. I can not tell her often enough how much I love her, I can only show her that but I am incredibly lucky to share my life with her. She encourages me to be my best me, and I try to do that for her as well.
I will miss Richard, he was a fascinating character that had lived with me for the first three years I was here at Balloon Juice. I always envisioned him as Leslie Knope’s second ex-boyfriend from college where they split because he was slightly too cynical and brash for her but they remain Facebook friends who can give Leslie a smile when they run into each other. Speaking as Richard gave me a tremendous amount of space to be wrong or at least incomplete and thus continue to learn and explore.
However he limited what I could do. Richard Mayhew could not write in the Des Moines Register last week that Iowa should Silver Gap their individual market for 2019. Richard Mayhew would not argue in the Times that the non-funding of CSR would lead to a quasi-stable equilibrium where almost everyone could proclaim victory. Richard Mayhew could not sit and participate in the twice a month Friday research seminars that the Margolis Center puts on and have his mind twisted and stretched. Richard Mayhew could not grab a couple of beers with his fellow jackals.
Dave Anderson is able to do all that, and I love it.
by David Anderson| 17 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
President Trump spoke at length with the New York Times last week. In Adam’s post he finished up with this task and charge:
There’s a lot more at the link, including some stuff about health care associations that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Perhaps Dave will eventually try to make sense of it for us.
So let’s find this particular piece of word salad:
TRUMP: Wait, wait, let me just tell you. … Also, beyond the individual mandate, but also [inaudible] associations. You understand what the associations are. …
[Cross talk.]TRUMP: So now I have associations, I have private insurance companies coming and will sell private health care plans to people through associations. That’s gonna be millions and millions of people. People have no idea how big that is. And by the way, and for that, we’ve ended across state lines. So we have competition. You know for that I’m allowed to [inaudible] state lines. So that’s all done.
Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care…….
I’ll tell you something [inaudible]. … Put me on the defense, I was a great student and all this stuff. Oh, he doesn’t know the details, these are sick people.
There is a charitable read and there is the read one has after going through It’s A Small World four times in a forty eight hour period.
The charitable read is the president is overclaiming credit for actions that have not yet occurred but are in the pipeline to occur.
The October executive order on healthcare has the federal government making rules redefining what an association must be in order for that association to be able to buy insurance for its members as a self-contained pool. Association health plans are common already for small business and certain clusters of self-employed individuals. The executive order has the Department of Labor looking at how to rewrite rules to expand the definition of an association.
Association health plans are able to save money in three ways over the ACA. First, they are regulated by the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). ERISA has much lighter regulations on required benefits than the ACA. Secondly, association plans are allowed to control and underwrite their membership. They can kick out the family with a trio of hemophiliac sons who have had multiple million dollar years. Finally, they are far more lightly regulated on financial reserves and the capacity to absorb actuarial risk so when they get hit with big claims, they can easily fold and leave people in the lurch.
From this background, the claim that the President could be making is that more people who are subsidy ineligible will be able to get underwritten insurance at a lower price. And that claim is true, the bottom 50% of the spending distribution drives 3% of the total claims costs. So if an association can cherry pick the cheapest and most likely to be healthy individuals and families, those people will have dirt cheap premiums.
The people who make too much for ACA subsidies and who have any significant medical history are screwed.
That is the most charitable reading of the statement.
The less charitable reading is that the President sounded a lot like my three year old niece as we waited in line to see Elsa and she was two hours overdue for a nap.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 28 Comments
This post is in: Albatrossity, On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
There are issues with the form; I’ll work on them later this week.
I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Day. I made my first post-mom souffle and it turned out extremely well. This is good as it’s a family tradition and she was a master. So that was a nice way to start the new year, good, but with lots to improve upon.
This morning, just a brief offering, but…birds!
I’m still getting myself technically re-organized; I had to move all my computer stuff to my family home (mom’s house) and getting all my tech working smoothly has eluded me. Today should hopefully be the final steps and I can then focus on more normal things like the site, form, servers, etc.
Where it was taken: Palo Duro State Park, Texas
When: Thursday Dec. 28, 2017
Commenter screenname: Albatrossity
Other notes or info about the picture: Greater Roadrunner, with patriotic eye coloration.
#2 Taken in Big Bend National Park, Texas
When: Christmas Day, 2017
Male Pyrrhuloxia, in the pre-dawn high desert light
Wow! As always, thank you so much. I’ve not been there since I was a young one, and then only in warmer months!
Thanks, and I hope you travel safely and send more!
One again, to submit pictures: the form is broken so Send an Email
This post is in: Don't Agonize - Organize, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Daydream Believers
Professor Krugman, “America Is Not Yet Lost”:
… I’m ending this year with a feeling of hope, because tens of millions of Americans have risen to the occasion. The U.S. may yet become another Turkey or Hungary — a state that preserves the forms of democracy but has become an authoritarian regime in practice. But it won’t happen as easily or as quickly as many of us had feared.
Early this year the commentator David Frum warned that the slide into authoritarianism would be unstoppable “if people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic.” But so far that hasn’t happened.
What we’ve seen instead is the emergence of a highly energized resistance. That resistance made itself visible literally the day after Trump took office, with the huge women’s marches that took place on Jan. 21, dwarfing the thin crowds at the inauguration. If American democracy survives this terrible episode, I vote that we make pink pussy hats the symbol of our delivery from evil.
The resistance continued with the town hall crowds that confronted Republican legislators as they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And in case anyone wondered whether the vocal anti-Trump crowds and Trump’s hugely negative polling would translate into political action, a string of special elections — capped by a giant Democratic wave in Virginia and a stunning upset in Alabama — has put such doubts to rest.
Let’s be clear: America as we know it is still in mortal danger. Republicans still control all the levers of federal power, and never in the course of our nation’s history have we been ruled by people less trustworthy.
This obviously goes for Trump himself, who is clearly a dictator wannabe, with no respect whatsoever for democratic norms. But it also goes for Republicans in Congress, who have demonstrated again and again that they will do nothing to limit his actions. They have backed him up as he uses his office to enrich himself and his cronies, as he foments racial hatred, as he attempts a slow-motion purge of the Justice Department and the F.B.I…
So it’s going to be up to the American people. They may once again have to make themselves heard in the streets. They’ll certainly have to make their weight felt at the ballot box.
It’s going to be hard, because the game is definitely rigged. Remember, Trump lost the popular vote but ended up in the White House anyway, and the midterm elections will be anything but fair. Gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic-leaning voters in urban districts have created a situation in which Democrats could win a large majority of votes yet still fail to take the House of Representatives…
Even at best, in other words, it’s going to take a long struggle to turn ourselves back into the nation we were supposed to be. Yet I am, as I said, far more hopeful than I was a year ago. America is not yet lost.
***********
What’s on the agenda as we buckle down for another year?
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Here’s for A Quiet YearPost + Comments (75)
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Decline and Fall, Our Failed Media Experiment
what the fuck. pic.twitter.com/0iD9NBgTkl
— sean. ?? (@SeanMcElwee) December 31, 2017
President Trump has brought a reality-show accessibility to a once-aloof presidency, invigorating voters who felt alienated by the establishment https://t.co/arNi1F2bNr
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 31, 2017
The Night King has brought a winter wonderland to once temperate Westeros, invigorating a once dead army
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) December 31, 2017
The Grey Lady will not be intimidated by a bunch of bloggers and comedians! Like the Republican Party, the more we mock them, the harder they shall burnish Lord Smallgloves’… credentials!!!
The New York Times has brought a tabloid tv complicity to a once-admired newspaper, invigorating readers to seek out the Washington Post. https://t.co/rPTMOh8CrA
— Steve Marmel (@Marmel) January 1, 2018
After all the heated criticism of that last interview with Trump, it's as if they're saying, "You think THAT was groveling? Here, hold my beer."
— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) January 1, 2018
There is no evidence in this piece of these "many" people being "electrified"; his poll numbers stink and not even safari reporting says it. pic.twitter.com/AXRQGNZ2nl
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) December 31, 2017
Not holding Trump to the same standard as every other president is a choice. It’s being made every day by Congressional Republicans and by well-fed editors and tv producers and executives who’ve decided it’s uncouth to truly make a stink about it.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 31, 2017
I suspect this is about stroking his ego so he'll keep on talking to NYT reporters.
— manu saadia ? (@trekonomics) January 1, 2018
Yeah, this source greaser is such a hot take you’re about to start a grease fire. https://t.co/GlnF3rV26M
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 1, 2018
"It reinvented what it means to be entertainment!"
— Schooley (@Rschooley) December 31, 2017
The NYTimes is still too “dignified” to run cartoons, but ya gotta admit, they’re keeping us entertained… after their own hapless fashion.
Open Thread: <em>NYTimes</em>: Our Sucking-Up Will Continue!Post + Comments (89)