Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Please don’t feed the bears.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

The lights are all blinking red.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

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

Annals of Strategic Communication: The Carl Vinson Task Force Miscommunication

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Joint Publication 5-0/Joint Operation Planning defines strategic communication as:

Focused United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.

The misstatements and miscommunications regarding where the USS Carl Vinson Task Force is and what it is doing have made US strategic communication, both in general and in regard to the DPRK, much, much harder and much more problematic.

I think, however, that the Occam’s Razor explanation for what happened is the most likely one. Here’s what I think happened:

  1. Admiral Harris, Commander US Pacific Command (USPACOM), informed Secretary of Defense Mattis that he had issued a Fragmentary Order cancelling the Carl Vinson Task Force’s port call in Australia and redirecting the strike group to the Sea of Japan to show the colors.
  2. The DOD notified the White House – most likely either through the Liaison Officer or through the National Security Staff.
  3. A copy of the Fragmentary Order was filed.
  4. Secretary Mattis misspoke on 11 April, because he hadn’t actually seen the FRAGORD, that the Carl Vinson Task Force was headed immediately to the Sea of Japan.
  5. The President was briefed, without any specific details, because no one on the National Security Staff had them, that the Carl Vinson Task Force was headed to the Sea of Japan.
  6. The President stated the Carl Vinson Task Force was headed to the Sea of Japan in his Fox Business News interview.
  7. The Carl Vinson Task Force steamed south from Singapore, as ordered, to take part in a scheduled exercise with the Australian Navy.
  8. As is often the case, the US Navy, through the Public Affairs Office, released pictures of the Carl Vinson Task Force passing through the Sunda Strait – 3,500 miles from the Sea of Japan off of the Korean peninsula.

Talking Points Memo has a full timeline at this link.

How did all this miscommunication happen? Simply put – there are almost no political appointees at the Pentagon (or anywhere else in the US government) right now. Secretary of Defense is, essentially, working without a team. He has no deputy, under, assistant deputy, and deputy assistant secretaries, nor does he have any directors, deputy directors, and/or special assistants at the Department of Defense – though several designees have been named for some of these positions. He also does not have any Service Secretaries in place  – though we have have three designated nominees. And none of the deputy, under, assistant deputy, and deputy assistant secretaries, nor does he have any directors, deputy directors, and/or special assistants at each of the Services. All the Secretary of Defense has is whichever Trump campaign and transition personnel are on the DOD and Service Beachhead Teams – none of whom have been chosen by Secretary Mattis. Right now you have a DOD Secretary, the DOD and Service Beachhead Teams from the transition, and then the career civil servants (both Senior Executives and General Schedule) and uniformed military personnel. Basically the entire layer of politically appointed managers, senior to junior, are completely missing. As a result, things are going to fall between the cracks, such as the exact nature of Admiral Harris’s FRAGORD to reposition the Carl Vinson Task Force.

Aside from the bog standard embarrassment of having the President, the Secretary of Defense (a retired USMC 4 Star), and the White House Press Secretary (a US Navy Reserve Commander) not knowing where a carrier strike group is, this is also a significant strategic communication problem. This morning the Associated Press reported (h/t and via: Talking Points Memo) that both our Asian-Pacific partners and competitors are disconcerted and wary given the President and the Administration’s seeming inability to communicate accurate information.

By KIM TONG-HYUNG
Published APRIL 19, 2017, 8:58 AM EDT
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Unpredictable. Unhinged. Dangerous.

Many South Koreans are using those words to describe the president of their most important ally, rather than the leader of their archrival to the North. They worry that President Donald Trump’s tough, unorthodox talk about North Korea’s nuclear program is boosting already-high animosity between the rival Koreas.

The Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper said recently that Trump is playing a “dangerous card” with his verbal threats, risking a miscalculation by Pyongyang and a war on the peninsula.

What the US is currently strategically communicating in regard to the ongoing DPRK nuclear weapon and missile development programs is not exactly inspiring confidence on the Korean Peninsula.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Where Are the Patriots?

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The class clown showed up, though!…

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Shows for Bros

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You know who I wouldn’t want to trade jobs with right now? DNC chair Tom Perez. The first big test of his leadership is apparently gonna be how successfully he channels the Bern. Will he succeed? Does it make sense to pursue this strategy out of the gate? Fuckifino.

Perez and Sanders are doing a roadshow in red and purple states to gin up enthusiasm for rebuilding the party and taking on Trump. It’s officially called the “Come Together and Fight Back” tour. There’s an account of the first rally in Maine in the Portland Herald Press. A couple of quotes:

Perez: “The mission of the new DNC is not simply to elect the president of the United States. It is to elect Democrats from the school board to the Senate.”

Sanders: “Our job is to radically transform the Democratic Party . . . into a 50-state party and a party that does not continue to ignore half of the states in our country. Our job is to create a democratic party, a grassroots party where decisions are made up from the bottom on up, not from the top on down.”

As a neoliberal shill in the pocket of Big Democrat, I am immune to Sanders’ appeal. But I’m not the roadshow’s intended audience. The Democrats don’t have to coddle me to ensure I turn up to vote, but the Sandersites are more loosely affiliated. I’m trying to temper my reaction to the aspects of the roadshow I find irritating accordingly.

In that spirit, I will note that we’ve complained for years about the party’s too-narrow focus on federal offices (though we’ve quibbled over what the DNC’s proper role is in state party affairs). I agree with what Perez says above, and Sanders’ statement basically amounts to the same thing, with extra finger-wagging and pointing.

I’m going to trust that Perez knows what he’s doing and have faith that this roadshow is just the opening salvo, with different forms of outreach targeting women, minorities, etc., and robust voter suppression countermeasures to follow. Because dog knows, we can’t afford to fuck this up by fighting the last war.

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There’s a very strange vibration piercing me right through the core

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Score another one for the liberal fascists and their campaign against free speech:

The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end.

I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of this asshole.

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Chaffetz Is Done

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Well, this is an interesting development! Via WaPo:

House Oversight chairman Jason Chaffetz says he will not seek reelection in 2018

The Republican congressman from Utah, who became chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2015, has been criticized for a lack of action in investigating the Trump administration and President Trump’s potential conflicts of interest. He reversed his position on Trump’s candidacy several times in 2016, and recently faced an angry crowd at a town-hall meeting that criticized his tenure as Oversight chairman.

“For those that would speculate otherwise, let me be clear that I have no ulterior motives. I am healthy. I am confident I would continue to be re-elected by large margins. I have the full support of Speaker Ryan to continue as Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That said, I have made a personal decision to return to the private sector,” Chaffetz said in a statement on Facebook.

During the Obama administration, Chaffetz undertook probes of the 2012 Benghazi attack and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

I don’t believe for a second there are no ulterior motives. So let’s indulge in rampant speculation about why the pig-faced prick is declining to stand for reelection, shall we?

Did Chaffetz get wind of a looming Trump bombshell? Has he seen poll numbers that foretell electoral doom? Is a 19-year-old Piggly-Wiggly cashier about to hire Gloria Allred and announce that Chaffetz fathered her pig-faced baby?

As the saying goes, it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate!

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Open Thread: Who’s Going to A Science March?

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Note from commentor Quinerly, whose Travels with Poco enlivened many early-morning threads:

It would be cool if a Front Pager would throw up a dedicated Meet Up thread maybe on a Wednesday before these marches. People could pipe in with their areas, pick places for Juicers to meet, if they wanted to….no pressure, no planning clusterfucks. Just a suggestion.

Look forward to meeting you [St. Louis, Missouri]. I just put up an invite on my Book of Faces page to generate some interest. My neighborhood peeps pretty much hang at Howards on Saturday and Sunday anyway. Soulard is a neighborhood of misfits, hippies, and derelicts….we like our music and cocktails…Ozark will attest to it from his days in the area.

I know various commentors from a number of cities/states have expressed their intentions over the past several weeks. If you’d like to meet up with other Balloon Juicers, or have questions, leave a comment below. (Or you can email me at annelaurie dot verizon dot net, but don’t expect to hear back until late afternoon or early evening.)

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More churn than a butter factory

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Two conservative health policy wonks are outlining an auto-enrollment option that is philosophically aligned with what is in the Collins-Cassidy draft bill state option. I don’t have an intrinsic problem with auto-enrollment with an opt-out. I have a major pragmatic problem with their proposal. But let’s look at the core of their program:

Congress should also help policyholders avoid breaks in coverage. Lawmakers could require insurers to offer products whose premiums match the value of the federal tax credits. If the basic, age-adjusted federal tax credit for a 40-year-old man in a given state is, say, $3,000, then every insurer in the state would have to make a policy available for such customers with a $3,000 premium.

Insurers would adjust the upfront deductibles in these plans as necessary to ensure that the premium equals the credit….

As with other benefit programs, many Americans wouldn’t use the credits for which they are eligible, out of inertia or lack of information. To solve that problem, the states could automatically place eligible households into the no-premium option, randomly assigning them to one of several competing insurance plans and then notifying policyholders of their coverage.

They are identifying a real problem with a reasonable way of minimizing the problem. Recent estimates have the Medicaid Woodwork effect contributing to 30% of the total decline in uninsurance i 2015. The Woodwork Effect is when people who were eligible but not signed up for Legacy Medicaid hit the Exchanges as health insurance enrollment became a major topic of public discussion and found out that they were always Medicaid eligible. This happened in Expansion states, it happened in non-Expansion states, it happened in Red states, it happened in Blue states.

I have a major pragmatic objection to their program design.

How do we figure out who is not otherwise covered in any given month?

The entire non-employer sponsored insured, non-government sponsored insured group can be roughly divided into four groups. The first is non-documented immigrants, this plan most likely will exclude this cluster for political reasons. This would not be a major change.

The other three groups are the problem.

The first group are people who will be in good health but need insurance on the individual market for a long time period. This group are the artists,the consultants, the very small business owners, the people who are fairly reliable buyers. If they were healthy, this class was in the individual market in 2009. They may switch carriers for cost and network purposes but they actively participate in the market year over year.

The second group is also a group that was in the individual market in 2009. It is people who just need some coverage until something better came along. When I was laid off in 2009, my wife and I bought a catastrophic policy that covered us for a few months until we were able to get back onto employer sponsored coverage. My daughter was on that policy for two months until we got her on CHIP (best insurance I’ve ever had, great network, low premium, no stress). These are the policies which function as holding areas until something better comes along.

The final group in the ACA individual market are people with significant health conditions who were previously underwritten or priced out of the market. As a cohort, these individuals are also very stable in participation. A hemophiliac or an individual with MS will make sure that they sign up for coverage as they burn through any deductible by the third week of the policy year.

The first and third groups aren’t a major source of my pragmatic objection. The second group is a major source.

For relatively healthy people who are mainly insuring against catastrophic expense (hit by a meteor coverage) they are likely to churn. With an auto-enrollment system some level of government will need to track eligibility of every single potential covered life on a day to day basis. If someone is laid off on the 14th and their employer has a coverage cut-off on the 15th of the month, are they covered if they have a heart attack on the 16th? They probably would be on a retrospective claims basis but coverage churn is a major concern unless there are either massive back ends claims reconciliation for retrospective eligibility, states absorb the first sixty days of costs of a patient who is not part of a prospective assignment, or some other churn identification.

There are work-arounds but the pragmatic challenge of churn is real and it is big.

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