Here is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Election 2018, Open Threads
Here is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.
by TaMara| 88 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had all the “real” news I can handle for the near future.
Here’s Mabel and Maddie for a bit of a break. Mabel spent two hours this morning hanging with that ball – didn’t even head over for breakfast when I brought it out. I have no idea why, unless she thinks it’s some kind of super egg. Her eggs are really big, just not that big. LOL She moved on finally and now they are dealing with sideways grapple. Snuggled down by the lilac bushes.
How is your day progressing?
Open thread.
ETA: Scout is 5 months old today, so I’m going to get photos together if the day cooperates. If you need to get caught up, here are most of her photos to date.
This post is in: Russiagate, "Lock Her Up!!", Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell
Back in 2010, a couple of things seemed strange to me about the Ukrainian election. Yulia Tymoshenko came across as much more corrupt and autocratic than I had recalled. At the same time, Victor Yanukovych had greatly upgraded his image from unimaginative apparatchik.
I don’t follow Ukraine as closely as I do the Baltic states, so I figured that I had missed some things about Tymoshenko and that maybe Yanukovych was transcending his origins. This week I learned that those impressions were a result of Paul Manafort’s work with Yanukovych’s campaign.
Manafort’s campaign against Tymoshenko was intended to discredit her beyond Ukraine. Through Breitbart and by other means, the negative information reached US media. The US media is often taken in by pro-Russian propaganda. For years, American media have repeated Russian claims of unfair practices of language requirements in the Baltic states. In fact, another storm on that issue is brewing in Latvia. If American media cover it at all, look for a lean toward the idea that Latvia is persecuting Russian speakers. So it probably was easy for Manafort to get his material into the mainstream media.
Yanukovych won the election. Immediately after that, he prosecuted Tymoshenko for corruption and put her in prison. Compare that with Donald Trump’s encouragement of “Lock her up” chants. Similarity of election tactics, to be sure, is not a prosecutable offense, but other Trump connections to Manafort’s activities may be.
As president of Ukraine, Yanukovych was notably corrupt and willing to do Russia’s bidding. The response to this was the demonstrations in the Maidan, a major square in Kyiv. Yanukovych’s government eventually responded to those demonstrations by shooting protesters. If Tymoshenko had been president, things might have gone differently. Without the Maidan protests, there would have been less pretext for Vladimir Putin to move his “little green men” into the Donbas.
Manafort has a lot to answer for. We may not yet know the full extent of it.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.
Paul Manafort in Ukraine’s 2010 ElectionPost + Comments (76)
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Susannah Luthi at Modern Healthcare (subscription only) raises a very good point about Silver Loading; it will make risk adjustment in some states completely unpredictable.
“If told that enrollees are now lower-risk than in the past, which is now the case, plans with a higher number of gold members may get too much compensation under risk adjustment,” Dorn said.
If higher-risk enrollees opt for bronze because they have free or very cheap premiums thanks to the increased subsidies, the carriers insuring those plans could lose money in the risk-adjustment payments. This could impact companies like Security Health Plan, which has seen a shift to bronze plans even though its population, which skews older, does need to use their coverage.
The ACA risk adjustment process is a zero sum game within each state. The formula assigns weights to demographic characteristics and some diagnosis and prescription information. The weights vary by metal bands. Two identical people will produce a different total score if one buys Silver and the other buys Gold.
This is not a problem if the state is a single insurer state.
This is a minor problem if all of the market(s) in the state showed very similar shifts in metal band market share.
This is a minor problem if the changes in metal band composition were a reasonably efficient sorting by health status. If the new Gold buyers who normally would have bought Silver are sicker than average and the new Bronze buyers are healthier, then things wash out.
It is potentially a significant problem in states where there is significant variance in metal share distribution. Pennsylvania and Georgia have a lot of variance happening in their Gold uptake.
In Pennsylvania, every county except Philadelphia and the four county Mainline suburbs had at least 20% of the on-Exchange buyers purchase a Gold plan. There is significant variation by county and insurer. Central Pennsylvania counties in one rating region had over half the buyers go Gold because of pricing advantages. All else being equal, risk adjustment would over score the rest of Pennsylvania and under score Greater Philadelphia. This is counter-balanced to some degree by Greater Philadelphia have a lower Bronze percentage than most of the state. But on first pass, the significant variation and overweighing of Gold plans will pull net risk adjustment out of Greater Philadelphia and Independence Blue Cross and Blue Shield and send that money to everyone else in the state.
Georgia is even more complex of a story. One insurer, Alliant, aggressively Silver gapped and Silver loaded. Most of their service area was heavy on Gold and Platinum plans (Platinum also gets a risk adjustment bump) and light on Silver and Bronze. Other insurers in the state are very heavy on Silver compared to both national averages and Alliant’s share.
The challenge in risk adjustment for the ACA is that the actuaries for a single insurer have to project both their own marketshare and covered population characteristics and all other insurers’ market share and covered population characteristics in the state. Projections of company owned data with a known strategy has inherent variance. Trying to project risk adjustment due to the actions and enrollment of other companies several months before open enrollment starts is a Sisyphian task.
We should expect to see some companies take mid-year charges as variable strategies lead to significant changes in the underlying risk adjustment flows. Real money won’t change hands until the summer of 2019 but capital cushions will expand and contract this summer.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 15 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
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 great weekend everyone, enjoy the pictures!
Today, pictures from valued commenter marv.
Sending in these four photos from the March in DC because I didn’t see any posted by Juicers when I returned. Another reason is I think Cole’s near-legendary analogy about the futility of modern political “dialogue” between the right and left – one side proposing Italian for dinner, the other tire rims and anthrax – is why this movement of young people exploded on the scene. After 20 years of idiocy, which inevitably drew us in as well as the other side, it took the children who felt it to wake people up.
The main reason I drove 700 miles to be there is simply I was a public school teacher for 20 years. It’s a humble position, but I’m pretty sure there are teachers in the background for these kids. I just wanted to show up.
The most moving part of the whole thing for me was it became increasingly clear, speaker after speaker, that it was just going to be young people talking. I hadn’t really expected anything about that one way or another, but just being there I became really grateful that no politician, no adult, strode out to proclaim unity, co-opt, congratulate, etc.
Photo No. 1: The crowd. Exactly to my left is the “J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building”. It was strange looking at his name on the front of it, which I did often. It was a comfort to think a person he tried so hard to destroy (MLK) now has an astonishing, powerful memorial just a few blocks away. Hoover’s name is still on FBI headquarters, but aside from that I think he has largely, and justly, been consigned to the dustbin of history. Maybe the moral arc really does…
Maybe I’ve been living in the country too long, but it was some kind of overload to be in the nation’s capital with hundreds of thousands of others on an historic day and then on the way out see this notice of an upcoming Cezanne exhibit.
I was surprised how moving it was for me to be back in DC, partly I’m sure because it was an historic day. But also because the last time I was there was over 50 years ago with my mother, a high school American history teacher, shortly before her untimely death. So I liked seeing the Washington Monument in the background as we left. My mom and I walked to the top of it back in the day
Enough said. As I grew up in DC, I spent a lot of time around the monuments (for example, the morning of my last high school exam, I took a long bike ride, past the White House, Capitol, the mall and its assorted monuments, etc). The good friend of our middle school art teacher sculpted the Vietnam Vet statue, so I’ve always felt a personal connection to the memorial. Whenever friends or family came to town, I would always take them for a walk along the wall. It still makes tears well up in my eyes, remembering the thousands of vets I’ve seen there at all times of the day and night, in any weather, crying, never forgetting, reaching out to a brother.
Thank you so much marv, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Clown Shoes, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
people ask what i like to do in my free time as if keeping up with the day's news cycle and meme cycle leaves any wiggle room
— Astead (@AsteadWesley) April 5, 2018
.
Okay, fair warning…
I am only milliseconds away from living up to my nickname. pic.twitter.com/sboQ1aoUnU
— Shenanigans The Cat (@ShenanigansCat) March 30, 2018
Apparently Ed Meese’s ridiculously comprehensive Pornography Report back during the Reagan years gave some professional Republicans a taste for voyeurism that hasn’t been adequately slacked since Ken Starr spent all those millions of taxpayer dollars in pursuit of The Clenis. Cuz they seem to be desperate for a fresh fix…
Reporter: "Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?"
President Trump: "No." pic.twitter.com/wHTR7o5lqB
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 5, 2018
Gentle reminder that the @GOP impeached Bill Clinton for telling a lie about the circumstances surrounding his infidelity. https://t.co/GtbcbWGNSU
— Propane Jane™ (@docrocktex26) April 5, 2018
[Warning: NSFW. Seriously. You have been warned.]
Donald Trump just fucked Michael Cohen so badly that Michael Cohen gave Michael Cohen $130,000 to be quiet about it.
— YS (@NYinLA2121) April 5, 2018
"Tell me about the president's hard cock, you coward" is a take I was honestly unprepared for pic.twitter.com/nhPZAgOrIl
— Chase Mitchell (@ChaseMit) April 5, 2018
Mueller sighs and pulls both hands over his face for what seems like eternity. Finally, with a perceptible sag, he rasps, “I guess we’re talking to Stormy Daniels.”
— Schooley (@Rschooley) April 5, 2018
Friday Morning Open Thread: Repubs Just Want the Dirty DetailsPost + Comments (167)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Sanders Campaign, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Assholes, OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUDS
Here's Bernie Sanders photo bombing a group of civil rights activists. pic.twitter.com/KM1Tb8UPmp
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) April 5, 2018
Sanders, as predicted, has gone full-metal Ron Paul: Now his Travelling WWC Economic Anxiety Tour is solely a tool for separating his cultists from their money. Unfortunately, the Media Village Idiots hate Democrats almost as much as they love Republicans, so they’re a lot more interested in megaphoning St. Bernie’s attacks on our party than they ever were in helping Dr. Ron (or his idiot son Rand) abuse “his” party-of-convenience.
If there was one day this year when the red-rose-in-their-twitter-profiles “Socialist Progressive” manbabies and the women who love them could’ve profited from not insisting that every political statement or action should revolve around them, you’d think the commemoration of MLK Jr’s assassination (by an economically-anxious WWC guy) would’ve been that day.
"He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, brilliant guy. But beyond that reality," Sen. Sanders says, Democrats have lost a record no. of legislative seats.
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) April 5, 2018
Barack Obama is a two term president. Bernie Sanders is a career politician that needed Russia's help to compete in the primaries and still lost by over 4 million votes.
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) April 5, 2018
Bernie Sanders dismissing Barack Obama as nothing more than a "charismatic leader" on the 50th anniversary of King's assassination is perhaps the most Bernie Sanders thing Bernie Sanders has ever said.
— Annissa (@IDreamOnDemand) April 5, 2018
And if Senator Sanders couldn’t find a single commemoration in his home state (there are certainly civil rights supporters in Vermont, many of them presumably Sanders voters), surely he could’ve found an appropriate event in the Washington DC area. But the national media attention was in Selma — so to Selma, Bernie rushed!…
Dems have been doing well recently. Just won a SC seat in WI. Does Sanders not listen to the news? https://t.co/hjHrb6XVIn
— Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) April 5, 2018
Obama and Holder out here fighting gerrymandering which results in distortions between popular vote and representation, while Sanders and the Red Rose brigade use legislative seats lost to bludgeon the establishment.
— D Frederick Sparks (@dfsparks) April 5, 2018
For the record, Barack Obama is quite a bit more than just a charismatic leader. And the past decade saw genuine progress, particularly on healthcare and LGBT rights. The fierce backlash against the Obama era doesn't negate it. And MLK died to make that progress possible.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) April 5, 2018
The Day After: When challengd, always double down!
It's unfortunate that some have so degraded our discourse that my recognition of the historical significance of the Obama presidency is attacked. https://t.co/rRc2KVl8Cl
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 5, 2018
He continues to show amazing political instincts. https://t.co/NhBV85XQ4y
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 5, 2018
Y’all can defend Bernie all you want. On #MLK50 his lack of self awareness and arrogance in dismissing #44, is wild.
Bernie 2020 died 4/4/18. https://t.co/W6gKZ9dUO4
— Bakari Sellers (@Bakari_Sellers) April 5, 2018
Bernie's team says Bakari Sellers (who represents the mainstream Black opinion on Sanders' comments last night) is "sowing racial division." They sound like Brietbart! pic.twitter.com/ZjBTd5Fs4K
— Marcus H. Johnson (@marcushjohnson) April 6, 2018
The thing about Bernie Sanders' problems with black audiences is that they've been apparent for about three years now and he's shown little ability — or desire — to improve https://t.co/BRMmiEToHG
— Astead (@AsteadWesley) April 6, 2018
Judging from this quote after the town hall in Jackson, MS, the answer to the headline question is still no. https://t.co/99Rp9k94Od pic.twitter.com/yVHw7jnf91
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) April 6, 2018
He’s not selling to Black audiences; he’s selling to a self-selecting group of white too-pure-for-politics poseurs. And they LIKE it!
Late Night Crankypants Grifters Open Thread: STFU, Sen. SandersPost + Comments (86)