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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

I really should read my own blog.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Consistently wrong since 2002

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

This really is a full service blog.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

How does anyone do Gilligan’s Island as trump world and not cast Jared as Gilligan?

This is how realignments happen…

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Not all heroes wear capes.

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Recipe Open Thread: Foolproof English Muffin Toasting Bread

by TaMara (HFG)|  April 16, 20218:00 pm| 27 Comments

This post is in: Food, Food & Recipes

This is a NO-Knead recipe. Simple and quick.

Recipe Open Thread: Fool-Proof English Muffin Toasting Bread 1

 

I decided I wanted to make English Muffin Bread and my first stop was King Arthur Flour’s recipe site. Their recipes have never let me down. Including awesome Bagels and JeffreyW’s Perfect Buns.

I used this recipe for the bread: English Muffin Toasting Bread _ King Arthur Baking

Recipe Open Thread: Fool-Proof English Muffin Toasting Bread 3

 

And it was so simple and darn near perfect. If you’re looking for a yeast bread that’s foolproof, this is it. No kneading, just mix up, add to a loaf pan and let rise. Bake, cool and eat!

 

Recipe Open Thread: Fool-Proof English Muffin Toasting Bread

Even better toasted with a good cup of coffee.  This one will be made again. And probably often.

Open thread

Recipe Open Thread: Foolproof English Muffin Toasting BreadPost + Comments (27)

Friday Evening Open Thread: The Peasants, They Are REVOLTING!

by Anne Laurie|  April 16, 20216:25 pm| 115 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., GOP Death Cult, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment

Alternative headline:

Local business shutters after 10-year run of paying poverty-level wages comes to an end. https://t.co/PjQXGWVGZB

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) April 15, 2021

Or so the ‘small bidniz owner’ and his right-wing media accomplices would like you to believe…

Baffling. No one wants to be exposed to COVID hundreds of times a day in red counties where no gets vaccinated. Not even for that sweet $11 an hour.

— JustPassingThrough (@coloradonelly) April 15, 2021



But wait — there’s (so much) more!

frankly I do not understand why no one wants eleven bucks an hour to clean grease traps for a guy who says covid deaths are fake pic.twitter.com/MTSFSvdvXa

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 15, 2021

so about two weeks ago, bill anderson, owner of dale’s diner in waterville, ohio, gets a micro-burst of stories in the news on his diner’s pending closure; three different headline variants through the same outlet pic.twitter.com/8GZSGDbj6f

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

now bill anderson is not just “a dude”. he’s an ex-corporate executive from a family in a long line of ohio agriculture & industry magnates. pic.twitter.com/Sq5MyPbF2H

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

because in addition to not revealing that bill anderson is not just some random dude who got hammered by covid, what they don’t tell you is bill enjoyed turning his restaurants into covid petri dishes pic.twitter.com/1nlmQizB36

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

yet again, the “who is bill anderson and what has he done to get here” element of bill’s story is mysteriously absent. bill blames stimulus payments for his downfall and not, you know, paying $11 an hour to bus tables inside a virus arboretum.

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

TA-DAAAAAA! (you totally guessed this, didn’t you, you jerk) pic.twitter.com/VsMV1cNb45

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

and that’s how a dude who spent the last year trying to poison his woefully underpaid workers with a virus by purposefully violating basic safety measures turns “no one will work for me because I’m a crazy entitled dickhead” into “joe biden ruined my teeny tiny poor business”

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

wrapping up here, it took me maybe ten minutes of googling yesterday to unwind this whole thing. ten minutes. at any point along the way, any node of the right wing media system that adopted bill as their new pet cause could’ve just googled the guy. but that would ruin the fun.

— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021

We need an American equivalent term for ‘poujadist’. Other than just ‘Republican’, I mean.

Friday Evening Open Thread: The Peasants, They Are REVOLTING!Post + Comments (115)

So It Begins

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  April 16, 20212:37 pm| 186 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Founding member of Oath Keepers enters first guilty plea in Jan. 6 Capitol breach:

The plea comes exactly 100 days after Jon Ryan Schaffer and hundreds of other supporters of former president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, allegedly in an effort to prevent Joe Biden from being confirmed as the next president. Prosecutors hope Schaffer’s plea spurs others to provide additional evidence in hopes of avoiding long prison sentences. […]

The agreement spells out that Schaffer is cooperating, which means his sentence could be cut further if he proves valuable to the ongoing investigation of any other rioters or conspirators. Prosecutors offered to recommend leniency for his full and substantial cooperation, but also made clear Schaffer could be charged with other crimes of violence if they learn of them.

It’s telling, at least to me, that they were able to get what appears to be the guy at the top to flip. I guess the Gravy Seals in Y’all Qaeda lack a bit of loyalty to each other. Color me unsurprised.

So It BeginsPost + Comments (186)

‘Childish’

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  April 16, 202111:50 am| 117 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

One of the things that’s often said about vaccine avoiders and maskholes is that they’re being “childish”, but really, it’s worse. The kids in my neighborhood, where the schools have been safely in session almost full-time (elementary) and part time (“hybrid”) in middle and high school, are perhaps the most diligent mask wearers around.

My wife and I were taking a walk on a warm day and there was a ~5 year-old kid doing chalk art in his driveway, by himself, wearing a mask. We see kids walking to school with masks on, and walking home with masks on. It’s just not a big deal.

Granted, my neighborhood is affluent by most standards, but it’s still middle-class. That said, people moved here for the schools, so they’re extremely motivated to have them open — not in a “mah freedum open up now” way, but a “let’s all work together to get the kids to school” way. The closest elementary school to my house, which is huge (643 students, 252 teachers and staff on-site) has had 14 cases among students and staff since New York started COVID reporting last Fall. That is an amazing achievement considering schools were open during the start of the Thanksgiving/Christmas spike, and also during the current spike. (Note that teachers and staff had the option to be online, and 108 students and 4 teachers took that option.)

(Unfortunately, the city schools were not able to open, in part because they were already struggling with prior gross incompetence. So, once again, suburban, mostly white kids have another huge advantage.)

Anyway, my point is that calling maskholes “childish” diminishes children. Just call them “assholes” and be done with it.

‘Childish’Post + Comments (117)

Trump 2.0

by Betty Cracker|  April 16, 202110:53 am| 85 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

We’ve complained about it in this space before, but it bears repeating: National political gossip rags like Politico seem absolutely determined to fluff Florida’s terrible governor all the way to the fucking White House. Steve M. of No More Mr. Nice Blog summed it up on Twitter this morning in response to the latest egregious puff piece:

You’re going to publish this article every fucking week until he’s president, aren’t you, @politico? pic.twitter.com/onyOLvuFCX

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) April 16, 2021

Steve was not exaggerating. Here’s a summary of Politco’s DeSantis hagiography just in the last month:

show full post on front page

DeSantis: Trump 2.0

That’s just one outlet, and while Politico is the most obvious “DeSantis for President” operative, they aren’t alone. To quote Beto O’Rourke: “Members of the press, what the fuck?”

I do want to note that the major Florida dailies have done a wonderful job of puncturing the DeSantis bubble. They’re the ones who exposed the governor’s vaccines for wealthy donors scheme, raised questions about how Florida is cooking the books on the pandemic, documented the utter failure of the state’s unemployment benefits system and the culpability of Rick Scott and DeSantis, etc.

That said, it is the gossip rags like Politico, which seems to have inherited the Drudge Report’s role as the publication that rules the Beltway hackdom world, that create the environment in which toxic creeps like Trump and DeSantis thrive.

Our best chance to short-circuit the gathering DeSantis juggernaut will come next year. This Parkland survivor gets it:

The most important race in 2022 is the one that few people are talking about.

If we do not beat the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis in 2022 he is going to run for president and has a sizable chance of winning.

We need a strong Dem to beat him.
Before we get Trump 2.0

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) April 15, 2021

Alas, that plan relies in part on the state party getting its shit together, and those of us who live here have been trying to make that happen since the 1990s without success. Absent that, maybe we’ll get lucky in one of two ways:

1) Trump keeps seeing himself compared to DeSantis unfavorably, and, in a fit of pique, he decides to take his protégé down a peg or ten. He’s certainly petty enough to think and act that way. I’m pretty sure I care more about the long-term prospects of the GOP than Trump does, and I hate that party with the white hot heat of ten thousand exploding supernovas. But one of the joys of 2021 — Trump’s spectacular fall from the absolute center of attention to relative obscurity — might hinder his ability to damage DeSantis.

2) DeSantis becomes the next presidential election cycle’s Pawlenty, a guy who looked “good” on paper and was met with Beltway hosannas only to melt under the klieg lights of national media exposure because he has the charisma of a bowl of stale, unseasoned instant grits. That’s a possibility, but DeSantis has a mean streak where his personality should be, and he has reflexive hostility toward reporters. Republicans find those qualities compelling, even if DeSantis comes off as a snarling asshole to normal people.

I don’t know how it will shake out, but DeSantis bears watching, and so does the Beltway press. The attempt to foist DeSantis off as a “nicer” or “more competent” Trump, as if the worst president in American history sets a meaningful standard, is a symbol of how broken everything still is.

Open thread.

Trump 2.0Post + Comments (85)

Administrative friction and administrative lubrication — Health insurance edition

by David Anderson|  April 16, 20218:00 am| 10 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance

In yesterday’s post, Brachiator asked an awesome question:

What can be done to encourage younger and healthier people to get health insurance? Even a small cost might seem to be too much?

There are two basic approaches that can be taken with this question. I think both will be in effect. The first is to improve the value proposition of the deal on offer. This means lowering net premiums and improving the experienced value of the plans being sold. This approach fundamentally assumes that people are making rational calculations and the current value proposition is just not quite good enough. There may be informational frictions involved where advertising and navigation support is useful to make it clear that there are great deals available.

This very micro-econ approach to the buy/no buy decision partially motivates the drop in applicable percentage for the benchmark silver plans in the ARA. It also motivates a significant portion of the logic behind a proposal to technocratically tinker with the subsidy formula to account for the difference between gross and net of subsidy premiums due to age. Better value propositions will move marginal buyers who are paying enough attention to know that they are getting a better deal now or in the future than they had in the past.

show full post on front page

I think that these value proposition strategies are limited in two ways. First they are expensive. Increasing premium subsidies either directly like in the ARA or indirectly by increasing the actual AV of plans means most of the benefits go to people who already would have signed up. We see this in Silverloading. Secondly, they fundamentally require significant attention. The work that Coleman Drake, Sih Ting Cai, Dan Sacks and I have done on zero-premium plans shows no notable differences in plan selection for people who just were exposed to zero premium plans and people who were not exposed to zero premiums plans by only a few bucks. If we want to discount that work, we can also look at Medicaid where the coverage is by default zero premium but there are large swarthes of people who are eligible but not enrolled in all states. Zero premium and coverage dominates zero premium and no coverage. Yet we have observed massive empirical evidence of millions of people in a dominated choice state. This is weird.

The other approach that can plausibly increase enrollment is a behavioral economics and public administration concept of ordeals and administrative burdens. Coleman, Sih-Ting, Dan and I found that the act of not having to pay a premium to initiate coverage led to a 30-60 day gain in days covered the following year compared to folks who just had to pay a nominal premium. These gains were concentrated in new buyers and individuals earning under 200% Federal Poverty Level. A new paper using Covered California data by Domurat, Monashe and Yin found that sending customized letters to individuals who were likely to be eligible for low cost plans but who had not signed up was worth the equivilent bumping up subsidies by $25-$53 per member per month. The people who signed up in response to these letters tended to be both young and relatively low cost to cover which lowered overall premiums. Goldin, Lurie and McCubbin in a soon to be seminal health economics paper found that an IRS notification letter to families that had paid the mandate penalty outlining affordable options led to both significant enrollment and significant detectable lower death rates for people who received the letters. Cheap letters overwhelmingly performed better than massive theoretical outlays.

In a just released working paper, Shepard and Wagner looked at the impact of automatic enrollment policies in Massachusetts. The set up was that to enroll in a policy, people had to complete a two-step process. The first was to fill out a demographic and financial information form. After that was accepted, the individual would need to pick a plan. There was significant drop-off between the number of people who filled out the information form and the much smaller number of people who picked a plan. Massachusetts had a variety of policies that at times placed people who had filled out the form but did not choose a plan into plans and at other times, the Commonwealth left these people adrift.

We find a 32.6% decline in new enrollment when auto-enrollment ends in 2010….
we see no evidence of an uptick in active enrollment after the policy change – something we would expect if passive enrollees were deliberately choosing passivity because they know they will be auto-enrolled. Based on this evidence, auto-enrollment does not appear to crowd out active choice; instead, under a non-enrollment default, passive individuals simply fail to take up health insurance. Using a simple model of the dynamics of participation, we estimate that the 48% persistent increase in the flow of new enrollees translates to 32% higher enrollment in steady state…

On the one hand, we find that passive enrollees do have characteristics consistent with lower demand for (i.e., expected value of) health insurance. Demographically, they are younger (by 4 years on average) and healthier (e.g., 34% less likely to be chronically ill), with a particularly large share of young men age 19-34 (a group sometimes called “young invincibles”)… Consistent with their better health, passive enrollees incur 44% lower average medical spending per month enrolled. Similarly, their shorter durations imply fewer months of state-funded subsidies.

So Shepherd/Wagner find that automatic enrollment of people who have indicated interest in getting covered because they had filled out the first stage form but failed to complete the enrollment process picks up a lot of very cheap to insure individuals. These folks get real insurance value as this population has a disproroprtionate share of healthcare spending that is predicated on the phrase “Hold my beer and watch this….”

More importantly, we have a growing body of evidence in healthcare and other fields where seemingly small frictions accumulate non-cash costs that keep people from being able to access benefits and programs that they objectively qualify for.

Finding ways to lower administrative frictions and burdens by smoothing out rough edges and applying lubrication to the squeaky parts of application processes will be a significant policy pathway for state and federal entities that are seeking to enroll more people in health coverage. I think that this pathway, at this time, is likely to be far more productive and efficient use of taxpayer dollars than throwing money at the problem to improve the value proposition as improving the administrative experience by allowing individuals to pay premiums through their tax refunds or request automatic enrollment in a zero premium plan if they qualify by linkages to state or federal tax information spends subsidy only on the marginal enrollees who otherwise would not have enrolled while making the process less painful for people who had already shown a willingness to jump through hoops to get and stay enrolled.

Administrative friction and administrative lubrication — Health insurance editionPost + Comments (10)

Friday Morning Open Thread: TGIF

by Anne Laurie|  April 16, 20217:26 am| 152 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., GOP Death Cult, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat

Friday Morning Open Thread:  TGIF

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

This week’s been quite the month, yes?

MANCHIN isn't buying the $800 billion infrastructure price tag Sen. Capito floated y'day: "There's no number that should be set on at all."

"We're going to do whatever it takes. If it takes $4 trillion, I’d do $4 trillion but we have to pay for it,” he tells @alexanderbolton.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 15, 2021

show full post on front page

I wrote about why D's are unlikely to go for a moderate R offer on infrastructure.

Short answer: They're not only offering less money, but likely a much less popular way to pay for it that their own colleagues can't wait to run against in 2022. https://t.co/EpiFzzAz2E pic.twitter.com/5qusj7O8XX

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) April 15, 2021

Friday Morning Open Thread:  TGIF 1

(Jeff Danziger via GoComics.com)

Friday Morning Open Thread: TGIFPost + Comments (152)

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