From the man who gave us Sarah Palin:
I can’t argue with most of his assessment.
Open thread
Midnight. Baseball Bats And Boogeymen. Beautiful.Post + Comments (68)
by TaMara| 68 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
From the man who gave us Sarah Palin:
I can’t argue with most of his assessment.
Open thread
Midnight. Baseball Bats And Boogeymen. Beautiful.Post + Comments (68)
by Tim F| 149 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
I ran twelve seasons in high school (we had winter track). I also competed in college, if briefly and not well. In my experience locker room chat generally goes like this, roughly in order of frequency:
* Getting our shit together so we can get to practice or get home. Most people don’t want to linger all day in a smelly room in their underwear.
* Talking about practice, or the meet coming up, or who needs a ride home
* School business. Who is busting kids’ balls this year, upcoming exams etc
* What is going on this weekend
* Who is dating whom, who got SO drunk, etc
* Girls you plan to ask out and what are you going to do if she says no (try a John Cusack routine? ask someone else?)
Generally sexual matters were a bit private to throw around in a locker room with half the school around you. When that stuff did come up everyone seemed well schooled in the idea of consent. If anyone had bragged about violating women like that I am confident someone would have called the cops. Of course we were a crappy school athletics-wise so we never had untouchable superstar athletes. Maybe things were different in Steubenville. All I can say is Trump’s nonsense does not sound like any locker room that I know or would want to be in. Apparently a whole lot of pro athletes feel the same.
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Women's Rights Are Human Rights, Assholes, Sociopaths
Thought experiment: A hypothetical demagogue — let’s call him “Candidate T” — has trailed in polling averages for pretty much the entire election season. He develops a catastrophic PR problem just a month out from election day when a video surfaces that shows Candidate T skull-fucking a kitten.
Candidate T assembles his brain trust in his comically clichéd super-villain lair, and they decide they must change the subject from the kitten skull-fucking at all costs. So they send Candidate T out at a high-stakes event watched by tens of millions of voters, and he skull-fucks a puppy on stage.
After the event concludes, all anyone talks about is the puppy skull-fucking, so mission accomplished, right? Nope — not if the goal is to get people to stop talking about the kitten AND win the election. The first part of that objective has been temporarily met, but now Candidate T has disgusted even more voters.
I suspect PussyGate isn’t over, not by a long shot. Soon, women in addition to Miss Utah will speak up about being forced to endure Trump’s unwanted, Tic Tac-scented advances. Other contestants besides Miss New Hampshire will describe what it was like to be ogled by Trump in the dressing room at pageants.
What we saw last night was desperate flailing by a candidate who is going to lose bigly. That he attempted to turn a presidential debate into a Jerry Springer spectacle is a measure of his desperation. He lied and lurked and smirked and stalked, and he threw the contents of Ken Starr’s 1990s recycling bin at his opponent, who remained cool. It didn’t work 20 years ago. It won’t work now.
I also suspect I’m not the only woman who is angry and disgusted this morning. I’m pissed off that a malignant, gross predator like Trump has jack-hammered through the gutter to drag our already dysfunctional politics into the fucking sewer. I find it revolting that an accomplished woman like Hillary Clinton is required to be in the same ZIP code with a tawdry creep like Donald Trump, let alone in his physical proximity.
But one thing I’m NOT this morning is worried. We can’t let up. We should use this opportunity to demoralize and heap derision on all the gutless elected Republican cowards who won’t stand up to Trump, and we should lift up their opponents in any way we can. We should continue to donate, phone-bank, canvass, etc.
But she’s got this. And I so look forward to watching that grotesque buffoon Trump get an indelible “LOSER” stamp on his forehead, family name and brand. It will be exquisite to watch the sanctimonious hypocrites, bigots and bagmen in the Republican Party brawl over who is responsible.
Eyes on the prize, pedal to the metal, and a correction: WE’VE got this.
ETA:
Ha!
This post is in: Clown Shoes
by David Anderson| 20 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Just a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times over the past week or so. The first is a good write-up about the revamping of the US food bank logistics chain:
A task force at Feeding America — which included Professor Prendergast, Ms. Morgan and others — adopted this approach. They embraced a bidding system using a virtual currency. Crucially, food banks with the greatest need received the most currency and so could place the highest bids, harnessing the benefits of a free market with fairness in the distribution of the underlying wealth.
The new system started in 2005 and quickly proved successful, sometimes in unexpected ways….
In the seven months after the new, more efficient system went into action, food donations increased by 50 million pounds, Professor Prendergast’s data indicates. Cause and effect is difficult to demonstrate, but the greater efficiency in making use of donations may have led to more donations….
This is an important point: Many economics textbooks separate efficiency from equity, but perceptions of the two are intertwined. The efficiency of the Feeding America market was intimately tied to its equity.
The other article is about Medicare Advantage and how it seems to have spill-off effects on local modes of practice that lead to lower Medicare FFS spending
The mysteries may be connected by something that appears, at first, to be unrelated: Doctors and hospitals tend to treat insured patients the same way, regardless of what kind of coverage they have. A traditional Medicare patient admitted to the hospital with, say, pneumonia will receive the same standard of care as a similar but privately insured pneumonia patient.
From this, an idea emerges that links the two mysteries. As enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans grows, so too do the plans’ influence over how doctors and hospitals provide care. Unlike the traditional program, Medicare Advantage plans establish networks, covering care provided only by certain doctors and specific hospitals. Often those are the ones with lower cost growth. As doctors and hospitals reduce their cost growth to gain access to Medicare Advantage networks and the increasing number of patients enrolled in the plans, they do so for traditional Medicare patients as well.
So, as Medicare Advantage enrollment swells, the growth in the cost of care for traditional Medicare falls — a spillover effect. That’s the theory, anyway. Does it hold water?
A few studies have examined the question, and all support the spillover theory. The first study, examining the period from 1994 through 2001, found that when the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare H.M.O.s grew by an additional percentage point, per enrollee spending in traditional Medicare fell by one percentage point. Another study, focused on the period from 1999 to 2009, found that a 10-percentage-point increase in Medicare Advantage market share was associated with a 4.5 percent decrease in per enrollee traditional Medicare hospital costs and a commensurate reduction in duration of hospital stays.
Are the same factors at play here?
This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!
I guess Clinton won, if only because Trump did well enough not to drop out and be replaced by someone competent.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 10, 2016
Good thing this is a federal holiday, because I suspect it’s not just the hardcore political junkies who stayed up late screaming & twitching after last night’s debate. Even the ‘principled’ Repubs, such as they are, have stopped muttering about SCOTUS and started asking each other if one short-fingered would-be caudillo can actually destroy a whole political party — and that’s if he doesn’t get the chance to destroy the whole country.
Apart from waiting for the next shoe to drop (the Trump campaign is a veritable human centipede), what’s on the agenda as we start the week?
63 percent of debate-watchers said Trump did better than they expected and still lost to Clinton, 57-34, in CNN poll.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) October 10, 2016
Let's be clear: a candidate for president promised to put his opponent in jail if he wins. Everything else is secondary.
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 10, 2016
So @realDonaldTrump will ORDER his AG to take certain actions-When Nixon tried that his AG courageously resigned. Trump is dangerous/unfit
— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) October 10, 2016
"If I was president Captain Khan would have been alive today” – This could be the most offensive thing Trump has ever said #debate
— Nathan Guttman (@nathanguttman) October 10, 2016
Khans on Trump's comments about Cpt. Khan during #debate: "The only thing that Donald Trump sacrifices is the truth." pic.twitter.com/PDbj9ThJzL
— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) October 10, 2016
DONALD TRUMP JUST ADMITTED THAT HE "OF COURSE" DIDN'T PAY TAXES.
I repeat: DONALD TRUMP JUST ADMITTED THAT HE "OF COURSE" DIDN'T PAY TAXES.
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) October 10, 2016
This is the first time I've seen a presidential candidate self-immolate. It's quite something
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) October 10, 2016
DEAR REST OF THE WORLD:
We know. We're sorry. We're sorry. We're trying to fix it. We know.
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) October 10, 2016
Trump has made life more miserable for swing state GOPers who want to bolt on him. His base is going to LOVE this performance tonight
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 10, 2016
Ohio moves all the way from Lean R to Lean D https://t.co/WRALlz2ZQl pic.twitter.com/ZAF5CTb20J
— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) October 10, 2016
Monday Morning Open Thread: Children Will ListenPost + Comments (154)
This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!, Flash Mob of Hate
She has a deep understanding of the thought processes among America’s dumbest spite voters:
The electoral strategy of Trump supporters has always been more coherent if you imagine him running for dictator.
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2016
Trump supporters now saying “Unite with us to defeat Clinton, or we’ll take away these symbolic lower offices only insiders care about"
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2016
2) Supporting Trump at this point will cost them swing seats, which will only make Clinton’s victory bigger and enhance her power
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2016
…or that the congressional seats matter, apart from something you can use as a bargaining chip to punish “Washington”.
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2016
Because they’re only looking at the Oval Office. So they’re demanding a very, very costly show of loyalty from the GOP leadership.
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2016
GOP elites have sold them out so many times they won't accept iou's https://t.co/l6o8D4AuYL
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 9, 2016