Here’s the live feed for former FBI Director Comey’s testimony.
Update at 10:34 AM EDT
I switched the live stream below to PBS’s.
by Adam L Silverman| 370 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
Here’s the live feed for former FBI Director Comey’s testimony.
Update at 10:34 AM EDT
I switched the live stream below to PBS’s.
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Politics, Russiagate, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes, General Stupidity, Seriously
While gathering kettle corn and assembling beer bingo supplies for the Comey Show, let’s keep in mind that the spectacle means jack and shit, aside from its entertainment value. Trump essentially confessed to Lester Holt that he shit-canned Comey because of the RussiaGate investigation. At least one Republican operative has admitted he used information from Russian hackers to tailor campaign outreach to win a tight House race — and said he’d do it again.
On the strength of what are acknowledged facts right now, Republicans in congress who wanted to act in the interests of the American people rather than their donors could work with Democrats to rid us of the manifestly incompetent and embarrassing buffoon in the Oval Office. They could work with Democrats to get to the bottom of Putin’s meddling in our election and force the resignation of anyone who benefited from collusion with a hostile foreign power (looking at you, Brian Mast [R-FL]). But they aren’t, and they won’t.
Valued commenter Ruemara eloquently described this reality in a thread yesterday:
Let’s get honest. There isn’t a damned thing that would get the GOP to impeach this American fascist regime. They could (and are) very much implicated in colluding with a foreign power, they’ve already been shown to be undermining fair & free elections in America and every newspaper could have bombshell testimony that Trump gave the nuclear codes, and the NSA wifi password to Russia and Saudi Arabia and all the GOP would do is justify it. Not to mention that fuckheaded base of craven peasants that are key.
They are going to crack down on voting in the black, latino and young communities. Meanwhile, Dems and progressives are still humping Wilmer’s leg. We need your help to get us our votes. There is no savior coming out of these hearings. We need to know, but the work is not about knowing this. It was obvious from last May. Systemic voter suppression is why Clinton lost. Illegal voter tampering aided, but it wouldn’t have worked without the blind eye to local seats endemic to liberal & progressive voters and failure to act with full force on getting people registered, and out to vote.
If I sound angry, you’re goddamned right. Watching yet another person of color get choked to near death on video because the husband(!) of an off-duty sheriff felt he had a right to chokehold him until he stopped moving, while white people blocked access to the pair and tried to block them from taping the assault, it fucking makes me all the more aware of how the results of the 2016 election are affecting my communities. We pay first in our blood while everyone else gets to be “tired” and waiting for someone to say just the right goddamned thing to move people who’ve been proven to have the ethics of a worm.
Nothing coming out of this week will save this country from a party in control who have abandoned the principles of democracy. They’ve been showing that’s who they are for years. Yes, pay attention to what’s going on in the hearing, but don’t look for some grand denouement of criminality brought to justice. That’s movies and tv. This is real life and the people in charge will glad break this country down to its evil roots of terror, disease and poverty for everyone except a bare few. And enough voters are stupid enough to believe that they’re part of the few.
Ruemara is right; the Republicans aren’t going to do the right thing — they’re corrupt shitweasels who will countenance any attack on democracy, any loss of national credibility, any destruction of our institutions to hang onto power. The brain-dead morons who are sticking with Trump even as he schemes to take away their healthcare so he can give himself and the billionaires in his cabinet tax cuts aren’t going to suddenly gain 50 IQ points, lose their racism/sexism/xenophobia and stop punching themselves in the nuts.
So it’s up to us to turn the collaborators out of congress, and one of the best ways to do that is to counter voter suppression and gerrymandering efforts. Ruemara mentioned voteriders.org and flippable.org. Those organizations focus on getting IDs to folks the GOP deliberately disenfranchises and swinging state-level races so that statehouses reflect the political will of the voters rather than the Koch Bros.
Got any other ideas about how to make this happen? Here’s mine: Go to your local Democratic Party meetings and advocate for this approach. Volunteer to register voters, and when there’s an election — any election — volunteer to get out the vote. Donate to organizations that are taking on the vote thieves and gerrymanderers.
Meanwhile, enjoy the show.
by David Anderson| 14 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
It’s hard to be an insurer. Integrated Delivery Networks (IDN) have waves of popularity where hospital systems usually try to become an insurer. Occasionally insurers try to become hospital systems. We hear about Kaiser, Geissenger and a few other case examples on a regular basis as they should be able to align payer-provider incentives in a more coherent fashion as well as building deep, rich data sets which should power useful but non-obvious insights. I worked at UPMC Health Plan, part of a profitable IDN, before I came to Duke.
The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation recently released a review of the IDN’s that were created in the first half of the decade.
provider systems established 37 new health insurance companies and acquired five existing health plans….
it is not unusual for a startup health plan to lose money in its first years, only four of the new plans were profitable in 2015. Some
reported significant losses, and five have gone out of business. It has generally been a difficult time for health plan startups, as demonstrated by the demise of most of the health insurance cooperatives formed under the ACA and the large losses posted by companies like Oscar and Harken Health…..
Being an insurer is hard. Being both an insurer and a provider is even harder. The National Academy of Social Insurance looked at IDN’s in 2015 and made the following point:
There is scant evidence in the literature of either societal benefits or advantage accruing to providers from IDN formation. From the societal perspective, there is little evidence that integrating hospital and physician care has helped to promote quality or reduce costs….
From the provider perspective, the available evidence suggests that the more providers invest in IDN development, the lower their operating margins and return on capital…..
Moreover, there are few or no scope economies within health plans, hospitals, or physician groups —let alone between these lines of business contained within IDNs. Provider-sponsored insurance plans face similar problems regardless of whether they were formed by hospitals or physician groups: poor capitalization, lack of actuarial and underwriting expertise, limited marketing capability both to
employers and consumers, adverse selection risk, and an inability to reach minimum sufficient scale of enrollment.
To be a successful insurer, there is a chicken and an egg problem for open to the public IDN systems.
In order to gain good rates from providers, an insurer has to be able to promise a large and steady stream of patients. In order to build membership, the rates paid to the providers must be low enough to be reasonable for a competitive break even premium. A health plan needs members to get good rates, and it needs good rates to attract healthy members. Or it needs to be able to lose significant sums of money on bad contracts to buy significantly large membership for better contracts in the first renegotiation cycle. IDN’s can get around this to some degree if they price their own services at a significant discount to the rest of the market.
If they are selling commercial plans where they pay non-owned providers standard commercial rates but they only pay their owned providers Medicare like rates, this is a massive opportunity cost but not an explicit cash cost. This only works if the providers have both spare capacity and the ability to attract membership on their own. UPMC could do this as the hospital side of the system has a positive regional brand. A small community hospital chain in a quasi competitive region may not be able to do this.
Finally, the mindset needed to be a good insurer is very different than the management mindset of being a good hospital. The insurance side of the business will want to do as much as they can to keep people out of a hospital. Insurers want patients to avoid inpatient stays, they want patients to avoid hospital based testing, they want patients to avoid any service that comes within 1,000 feet of the hospital parking lot. Hospitals are expensive. Hospital executives, in most states, have strong financial incentives to find ways to get people to come to the hospital.
Managing this inherent tension between keeping people out of the hospital and putting heads in beds is a tough swing. Furthermore, the technical skills of being an insurer with good actuaries, good pricing, an aggressive knowledge of risk adjustment and pharmacy benefit management and a dozen other unique to insurance skill sets are not skills that many hospitals use. There is a significant learning by doing curve needed to build up a minimally capable skillset.
Being a new insurer, and especially being a new, small insurer that is attempting to bridge two worlds of being a provider and a payer, is tough. It’s a rough business model.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
News that doesn’t suck, from faithful commentor Tissue-Thin Pseudonym:
It has been requested that I provide information on the new feline overlord at Chez TTTP: Finncik Neal. I got him at the St Paul Humane Society last Friday. I went intending to get a feisty little girl, since Dirk still misses Monster bossing him around, but that only lasted until I met Finnick. He stayed under the chairs in the visiting room for the whole half hour I was there, but he didn’t shy away when I reached under to pet him, and by the end he was at the edge of the chair I was sitting on, letting me scritch his head.
I thought that was very brave for 10-month old cat only a couple of weeks out of surgery to remove his left hind leg. He was found as a stray, and had multiple torn ligaments and other damage in the knee and they decided that amputation was the best option. He’s still working to master running on three legs, and it can be entertaining to watch him try on the mix of hardwood and linoleum floors in my house.
The integration with the rest of the household is going well. Harry is still perturbed, which was unexpected given how laid back he is about everything else. We made it through the whole day with all of us sleeping on my bed. I left the door to Finnick’s room open while I’m at work tonight for the first time. Hopefully there’s no blood on the floor when I get home.
***********
Apart from cheering on feline overlords — and prepping for Drama King Comey’s latest all-networks appearance — what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Welcome, FinnickPost + Comments (151)
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 19 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Balloon Juicers who are on the road, travelling, etc. and wish to share notes, links, pictures, stories, etc. from their escapades. As the US mainland begins the end of the Earth day as we measure it, many of us rise to read about our friends and their transient locales.
So, please, speak up and share some of your adventures, observations, and sights as you explore, no matter where you are. By concentrating travel updates here, it’s easier for all to keep up-to-date on the adventures of our fellow Commentariat. And it makes finding some travel tips or ideas from 6 months ago so much easier to find…
Have at ’em, and have a safe day of travels!
Should you have any pictures (tasteful, relevant, etc….) you can email them to [email protected] or just use this nifty link to start an email: Start an Email to send a Picture to Post on Balloon Juice
A Colorado columbine. Gorgeous flowers. Many neat lizards used the rocks behind it to escape the heat of the day and to ambush bug prey. It was so neat observing their hunter behavior.
First up, from Original Lee
These photos are from Ujue, Navarre, Spain. The church here, Santa Maria de Ujue, is from the 12th century and stands at the highest point in town. They call it a fortified church, which in this case means they built a fort that completely encases the church. The streets are very steep and narrow – some of them have handrails embedded in the walls of the houses. The view was amazing.
The church door at Santa Maria la Real in Olite, Navarre, Spain, and the Royal Palace in Olite. The palace is a pocket castle, very well preserved and scarily like being inside a model.
Last of our Basque Country photos from April 2017. We hiked a mountain along the France-Spain border near Pamplona (Iruna).
Nothing better than hiking a mountain in remote country, hopefully finished with a good glass or three of local wine!
Next up, from way2blue
Where it was taken: Parking lot of Naturpark Puez Geisler, Sṻdtirol
When: 17 May 2017
Other notes or info about the picture: Fun photo of parking labels
Where it was taken: Just above GeislerAlm up close to Geisler Gruppe,
Sṻdtirol
When: 17 May 2017
Other notes or info about the picture: Amazing vista of my favorite
Dolomite range (~1.5 hr hike up from parking lot)
Yeah, really, that’s in my genes. Just heaven.
Thank you.
Where they were taken: Castle ruin above the village of Lichtenberg, Sṻdtirol
When: 13 May 2017
Other notes or info about the picture: Explored this ruin on a random hike from Glurns
I love that there are ruins throughout France, Italy, and Austria that you can just hike or drive up to, explore, and there’s often no fee, no owner, no signs. Just ruins of former power.
Have a great day of travels; I expect today will go down in history, so let’s start it out hopeful and in awe of the neat world all around us.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads
There has been some rearranging of schedules in the house lately. Ric (on the left) usually owns this top shelf in the morning, Zooey (on the right) in the evening. But Ric was getting into it earlier in the evening than Zooey does, presenting Zooey with a difficult decision. He finally just decided to jump up there and let the chips fall where they may. Ric made an effort of comity, recorded here, but space limitations and Zooey’s persistence won out.
by Adam L Silverman| 206 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election 2017, Election 2018, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the editor in chief of Lawfare. He is also a friend of James Comey. Earlier this evening he shared his initial thoughts after reading the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s release of former FBI Director Comey’s prepared opening statement tomorrow. While I highly recommend the whole thing, here are the final three paragraphs that tie Wittes’ thoughts together.
But I will make three general observations based on this document alone.
First, Comey is describing here conduct that a society committed to the rule of law simply cannot accept in a president. We have spent a lot of time on this site over seven years now debating the marginal exertions of presidential power and their capacity for abuse. Should the president have the authority to detain people at Guantanamo? Incinerate suspected terrorists with flying robots? Use robust intelligence authorities directed at overseas non-citizens? These questions are all important, but this document is about a far more important question to the preservation of liberty in a society based on legal norms and rules: the abuse of the core functions of the presidency. It’s about whether we can trust the President—not the President in the abstract, but the particular embodiment of the presidency in the person of Donald J. Trump—to supervise the law enforcement apparatus of the United States in fashion consistent with his oath of office. I challenge anyone to read this document and come away with a confidently affirmative answer to that question.
Second, we are about to see a full-court press against Comey. I don’t know what it will look like. But the attack instinct always kicks in when a presidency is under siege. And Trump has the attack instinct in spades even when he’s not under siege. It is important to remember what the stakes are here. They are not about whether Comey was treated fairly. They are not about whether you like him. They are not about whether he handled the Clinton email investigation in the highest traditions of the FBI or the Justice Department. They are not about leaks. The stakes here are about whether what Comey is reporting in this document are true facts and, if so, what we need as a political society to do about the reality that we have a president who behaves this way and seeks to use the FBI in this fashion. It is critical, in other words, that people not change the subject or get distracted when others try to do so.
Finally, it is also critical—though probably fruitless to say—that we eschew partisanship in the conversation. Tomorrow, this document will be the discussion text when Comey faces a committee that, warts and all, has handled the Russia matter to date in a respectable and honorably bipartisan fashion. It is not too much to ask that members put aside party and respond as patriots to the fact that the former FBI director will swear an oath that these facts are true—and was fired after these interactions allegedly took place by a man who then told Lester Holt that “when I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself … this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story,” and boasted to the Russians the day after dismissing Comey that “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
An Informed Expert’s Initial Views on James Comey’s Testimony TomorrowPost + Comments (206)