Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

We still have time to mess this up!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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

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

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

No one could have predicted…

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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Em Ess En Be Seeing Ya, Ed

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MSNBC’s entire late afternoon lineup is apparently getting the axe.

A well-placed source tells me MSNBC will announce today major changes to its afternoon lineup…arguably the most significant revamp the network has made at one time in its 19-year history.

Out:The Cycle at 3:00 PM. Now with Alex Wagner at 4:00 PM. The Ed Show with Ed Schultz at 5:00 PM (all times eastern).

Guess who’s baaaaaaack?

In:Chuck Todd at 5:00 PM. Similar to Jake Tapper at CNN doing both weekday afternoons (hosting The Lead) and anchoring Sunday morning’s State of the Union, Todd will also continue to work weekends as moderator of Sunday’s Meet the Press. Todd’s MSNBC show will likely take on its old name The Daily Rundown, but that is not a guarantee.

More interesting: Andrea Mitchell will keep her program at noon (Andrea Mitchell Reports). Thomas Roberts will continue to anchor his midday news program from 1:00-3:00 PM. The programs being cancelled at 3:00 PM (The Cycle) and 4:00 PM (Now with Alex Wagner) will be replaced by a straight news program (similar to Roberts’ two-hour newscast preceding it). Whether that 3:00-5:00 PM slot goes to Brian Williams is not known at this time, but it would certainly make the most sense to put Williams directly up against Fox’s Shepard Smith (Shepard Smith Reporting) and CNN’s Brooke Baldwin (CNN Newsroom) for the first hour in a similar format.

Yeah, because MSNBC’s problem is that it needs more Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Brian Williams.

Jeebus wept.  They actually found the one person I’m willing to watch less than Ed “boycott the midterms” Schultz.

And yes, the bullseye is now squarely on the backs of Al Sharpton and Chris Hayes. Maybe you guys can bring in three hours of Tweety while you’re at it.  That’ll get the kids running in from miles around.

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GOP Outreach Plan GO!

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Oklahoma Republicans are leading the way for the rest of the party in Big Tent theory.

The Oklahoma Republican Party compared Americans receiving food stamp benefits to park animals feed by the public in a Facebook post Monday evening.

In the since-deleted post, the Oklahoma GOP offered a so-called “lesson in irony” by comparing the distribution of food stamps to 46 million Americans to a policy of the National Park Service to discourage the public from feeding animals “because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves”

Party Chairman Randy Brogdon offered a sort-of apology in another Facebook post today: “I offer my apologies for those who were offended – that was not my intention”:

This post was supposed to be an analogy that compared two situations illustrating the cycle of government dependency in America, not humans as animals. However I do think that it’s important to have conversations about government welfare programs since our dependency on government is at its highest level ever.

Yep, that explanation (I’m sorry you people aren’t so bright and clearly misunderstood us when we compared poor people to zoo animals) will make the perception of Republicans as mean-spirited dog-whistle racist assholes vanish completely by November 2016.

Please, promote Mr. Brogdon to the RNC. Give him the keys to your social media presence, immediately. Put him on TV as much as possible.  Give him a white, conical hood to keep cool under those hot lights, too.

That’ll help. Trust me.

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Prepare the Ice Floes

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The New York Times reports on the next great cost saving measure in the US:

Medicare, the federal program that insures 55 million older and disabled Americans, announced plans on Wednesday to reimburse doctors for conversations with patients about whether and how they would want to be kept alive if they became too sick to speak for themselves.

Time to prepare the ice floes for Grandma before global warming forces us to use more expensive methods…

Or this is a simple, minor technocratic fix that enables people to make more fully informed decisions about their lives, their families and their expectations while they are not under pressure of contradictory information and values?

show full post on front page

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The Rough Beast Perambulates

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The funny thing about making monsters is that they have this nasty historical habit of turning upon those they know best.

The founder of the Oath Keepers, a loose-knit group of current and former law enforcement officials and military who pledge to defend the Constitution, called for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to be “hung by the neck until dead” for treason last week as the president of the Arizona Senate looked on.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, state Senate President Andy Biggs (R) and “constitutional sheriff” movement leader Richard Mack were all on hand at an event on May 5 in Tempe, Arizona. The stated topic of discussion at the event, which was hosted by a group called the Arizona Liberty Caucus, was the “Dangers of an Article V / Constitutional Convention.”

Rhodes recalled serving as a Nevada delegate for former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) during the 2008 presidential campaign. He accused McCain and the “GOP machine” of manipulating the convention to sabotage Paul’s chances of winning the state’s delegates, according to a video of his speech posted by Right Wing Watch.

“John Cain (sic) is a traitor to the Constitution,” Rhodes later said, misstating the senator’s last name. “He should be tried for treason before a jury of his peers — which he would deny you.”

“He would deny you the right for trial to jury, but we would give him a trial by jury,” Rhodes added. “Then after we convict him he should be hung by the neck until dead. But that was their candidate!”

All that wacky fun “destroy the government” right wing nonsense is all fun and games until somebody reminds the monster that Republicans are part of that government, and that they haven’t exactly delivered on their promises to the fever-bright beast.

The monster is still necessary, representing a healthy chunk of Republican primary voters as it does, so it will get invited to parties and functions and generally treated well, rather than taken down.  But at this point that monster is well and fully in charge of the Republican party, and with more than a score of GOP hopefuls looking for 2016 glory, there is no shortage of red meat being thrown at it in order to feed it and make it stronger.

And so it will continue to rampage around, and the Villagers will pretend like one of our major political parties isn’t controlled by the kind of bloodlust that wants to see open conflict in this country, the kind that ends with lots of ropes, lots of bullets, and lots of bodies.

What rough beast, indeed.

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Bridgegate Over The River Cryin’

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Chris Christie finishing his term as Governor? Fageddaboutit!

Bringing to a head a 16-month federal investigation into the George Washington Bridge lane closings scandal, a judge in New Jersey was expected to unseal indictments of two people close to Gov. Chris Christie at a court hearing Friday, according to people with knowledge of the case.

Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, were expected to be indicted.

The news comes as David Wildstein, another former Port Authority official and a high-school friend of Mr. Christie, pleaded guilty at the United States District Court in Newark to conspiracy to commit fraud and “conspiracy against civil rights.”

This is gonna be fun.

Judge Susan D. Wigenton, who presided over the case, laid out the scheme by detailing Mr. Wildstein’s criminal acts. She asked a laundry list of questions, all of which he answered with a soft “yes,” while standing at the defense table.

She asked if he conspired with Mr. Baroni and Ms. Kelly to shut down lanes to punish Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee for not endorsing Mr. Christie in his 2013 re-election campaign.

“Did you agree with Mr. Baroni and Ms. Kelly to punish Mayor Sokolich by causing significant lane access problems,” the judge asked, staring down from the bench at Mr. Wildstein.

“Yes,” Mr. Wildstein answered.

It’s not like there was anything left of Christie’s 2016 White House ambitions anyway, but now the guy has this hanging over his head. He was toast for the clown car race, now the race is to see if he can stay one step ahead of substandard federal housing.

Just keep in mind all the Village Idiots who thought Mr. Tough Love here was the savior of the GOP, and why they need to be sharing a cell with him.

[UPDATE] Life comes at you fast.

[UPDATE THE SECOND] Oh well this is getting good.

Alan Zegas, David Wildstein’s lawyer, said outside the courtroom that his client was still being questioned by government investigators and was “prepared to testify.”

“There is a lot more that will come out,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am not in a position to talk about the matter in detail.”

He repeated that Gov. Chris Christie “knew of the lane closures as they occurred” and that “evidence exists” that proves it.

Current mood:

starbow

 

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It’s Both Who He Is And What He Wants

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I wasn’t aware that Max Boot was still in the game (and writing for Time Magazine no less) until Zandardad emailed me Boot’s article this morning asking for my opinion.

Guess what Max Boot wants?

Back in 2007–08, when al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s precursor, was pushed out of the Sunni-dominated northwest of Iraq, it was by Sunni tribal fighters working in conjunction with American troops. To inflict serious setbacks on ISIS today will require resurrecting that successful coalition rather than flatly refusing, as Obama has done, to put any “boots on the ground.”

It is in America’s interest to send as few troops as possible into harm’s way and to get our allies to do as much of the fighting as possible. But sending only 3,000 troops and essentially prohibiting them from leaving base, as Obama has done, is a recipe for ineffectiveness. If we’re going to have any impact on the fight against ISIS, we need to take off our self-imposed shackles.

It’s hard to know now what commitment may be necessary, which is why it’s vital not to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” It is folly to tell ISIS in advance that it has nothing to fear from the best ground troops on the planet.

Credible estimates of how many troops we should send range from 10,000 to 25,000. Just as important as the troop numbers are the rules of engagement under which they operate. It is imperative that U.S. advisers and joint tactical air controllers be able to operate on the front lines with the local troops they support. This was the formula that made possible the rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.

“But Zandar,” you may ask, “isn’t Max Boot one of the leading voices that pushed for all-out ground war in Iraq while writing op-eds for the NY Times and helped paved the way for the decade plus and trillion plus we spent there?  Why is he still writing articles for Time Magazine, and why is he advocating the same, open-ended Permawar strategy from 2002?”

Good questions.  The answer of course is neocons can’t be discredited, just the wars they want the rest of us to fight.  And it’s always the rest of us who pay the price.  This time won’t be any different either, is my guess.

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Costs and value

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Ezra Klein is pushing back against the Healthcare Reform 2.0 talk with an interesting and I think wrong post at Vox.

both parties agree that the biggest problem in American health care is cost. The closest thing Republicans have to a health-care plan — Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget — is focused on cutting costs. Now leading Democrats tell Sarah Kliff that now that Obamacare is up-and-running they’re going to turn their attention to cost. It’s as if the point of having a health-care system is to spend less on it.

But both parties are wrong. Cost is not the biggest problem in America’s health-care system. Value is….

take Obamacare’s surprising success holding down premiums in its private insurance offerings. The innovation there is “narrower networks“: insurers are regulating where people can go for care more tightly. That cuts costs by cutting access to expensive providers. But while I think narrower networks are a good idea, there’s no evidence that they improve quality….

Value is defined as stuff divided by price of that stuff.  In the framework that Klein is using, value is health divided by the cost of achieving that health.  I think he is missing two very big things in his argument.

Reducing the denominator, in this case the cost of services by increasingly using narrow networks to exclude very high cost providers reduces costs.  He is arguing that narrow networks for them to improve value have to also increase the numerator.  That is a quick sleight of hand.  So far all of the evidence has shown that narrow networks have the same value.  As a basic matter of math, holding the numerator constant while shrinking the denominator makes the dividend bigger.

My six year is trying to teach herself long division and this basic concept is blowing her mind.

Secondly, and this is the more disappointing thing as I know Ezra knows better (given how much he was in love with Quality Health Partners at WonkBlog)  but PPACA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have plenty of experiments that are seeking to improve total health at either budget neutral or budget positive terms.  I know on the ACO models are aggressively trying to increase health while also decreasing costs.  Some are succeeding at both counts while plenty more are succeeding at holding quality constant at lower costs.  I know the Medicare penalities for re-admissions have been driving better health and lower costs.  I know other care coordination efforts are ongoing; some will work, some will muddle through and others will be failures, but there are plenty of attempts to move both the end product (better health) and cost needles in oppositive and improving directions.

Will they all work?  No, but there is a consensus that the value proposition for American medicine sucks, and plenty of ideas to change that value proposition so value increases by either better health, lower costs or both.

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