Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Verified, but limited!

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

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

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

This blog goes to 11…

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

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

We still have time to mess this up!

Let there be snark.

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

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I really should read my own blog.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

The revolution will be supervised.

Shocking, but not surprising

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

This is how realignments happen…

“Open Games” in Moscow

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Johnny Weir will be serving as a figure skating analyst for NBC at the Sochi Olympics, but he’s disappointed some people:

… Despite his sexual orientation, despite his marriage to a man in 2011, despite his long track record of (not always wisely) saying what is on his mind, Weir said Wednesday that he planned to hold his tongue in Sochi, at least when it comes to speaking out against the Russian law.

“I risk jail time just going there, but the Olympics are not the place to make a political statement,” he said. “I’m not a politician and I don’t really talk about politics. You don’t have to agree with the politics, but you have to respect the culture of a country you are visiting.”…

“Self-proclaimed Russophile” Weir may be taking his cues from …

MOSCOW — Viktor Romanov smiles slyly as he explains his plans to hold gay-friendly Olympics in Moscow just three days after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. These “Open Games” will be for athletes of any orientation and will consist of eight events, including basketball, badminton, swimming and indoor soccer.

“I’m not afraid,” Mr. Romanov said, weathered hands wiping tea from his salt-and-pepper stubble. “I’m apprehensive. We don’t know how the government will take this.”

The passage in June of a federal law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships to minors” set off a sustained international outcry and calls to boycott the Sochi Olympics, prompting President Vladimir V. Putin to claim that, “In Russia there are no laws which punish sexual minorities.” Nevertheless, nobody has a clear sense of how the newest statute, specifically the term “propaganda,” will be interpreted.

Sport, Mr. Romanov believes, will be the perfect cover for gay men and lesbians to gather.

Mr. Romanov, a retired investigator for the Soviet and Russian security services, cuts a fatherly figure, wearing faded jeans, a brown leather jacket and worn white sneakers. It remains unclear whether Mr. Romanov’s Olympic intentions will make him a criminal.

So far, the Russian L.G.B.T. Sport Federation, of which Mr. Romanov is chairman of the board, has managed to skirt the ire of the state. The organization is officially registered with the Russian Ministry of Sport but not supported. The Kremlin recently rejected the federation’s application for financing of the Open Games, despite pouring an estimated $50 billion into the Sochi Games.

Instead, the Open Games will be financed through participation fees, individual online donations and, the organizers hope, grants from international supporters. They have invited athletes from across Russia, as well as from abroad.

“Sport is a universal instrument to solve many different problems,” Konstantin Yablotskiy, a figure skater and president of the organization, said. “For some, like me, it makes it possible to forget about everything. When I skate, I only think about music and movement, and that’s wonderful, especially now.”…

No one, as yet, has been convicted under the federal homosexual propaganda law, though propaganda charges have been filed against an activist who held a one-man protest for gay rights in Kazan, the 2018 World Cup host city. Four Dutch filmmakers working on a documentary about Russian gays were arrested in Murmansk in July, but the case was quickly dropped.

“No one knows where the lines are now,” Mr. Yablotskiy said. “In 2012, after these laws were passed in St. Petersburg, we held a sports festival there. We all painted rainbows on our cheeks, walked around the city and rode the metro. Children saw us, but no one said anything. Was that ‘propaganda?’ ”…

“It’s somewhat good that there’s a place where people can be themselves,” Igor Kochetkov, the chairman of the Russian L.G.B.T. Network, a human rights group, said. “But it’s a ghetto.”

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The Cheney Political Bumbling Continues

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I did not fish with that man:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday was frank about his relationship with Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi (R), who faces a primary challenge from Cheney’s daughter Liz.

“Well, Mike also said he and I are fishing buddies, which is simply not true. Never happened,” Cheney said on ABC’s “This Week.”

In the 40+ years that both Enzi and Cheney have been in Wyoming politics, there’s probably some event where both of them fished in the same river at the same time, and I’ll bet the Enzi campaign is looking for that picture at this very moment, if they don’t have it already. That said, can a set of human beings be any more petty and dishonest than the Cheneys have been in Liz’s campaign?  Liz has already tried to throw the clerk who sold her a fishing license under the bus, Mary and Liz have been in a Facebook fight about gay marriage, and Lynn told Alan Simpson to shut up in front of witnesses. With Dick’s contribution, every single one of them has said something stupid and damaging almost a year before the primary.

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What she said:

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I’m in between OMG got to get things done deadlines right now, so I just want to refer to a great post by Adriana McIntyre:

I’ve argued in the past that delaying the individual mandate for a year wouldn’t provoke a full death spiral; it would be an uncomfortable hiccup, but it’s not enough time for the whole market to unravel. More importantly, there are deep-in-the-weeds protections baked into the Affordable Care Act: risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridors.

These programs—collectively called the “three Rs”—aid insurers if they wind up enrolling a population that is sicker and more expensive than projected. They do a crucial bit of policy work: we want plans competing on efficiency and quality, not their ability to attract the healthiest patients.

The programs have related functions, but risk corridors will play the biggest role if the individual mandate does get delayed. Their entire purpose is to stabilize premiums during the first three years of Obamacare, when it’s especially difficult for insurers to price plans.

Here’s how it works: exchange plans (QHPs) projected how much their risk pool would cost overall in 2014, their “target” cost. If they’ve significantly miscalculated—or, say, if a mandate delay causes adverse selection that they couldn’t have predicted—HHS will take action:

The risk corridor mechanism compares the total allowable medical costs for each QHP (excluding non-medical or administrative costs) to those projected or targeted by the QHP. If the actual allowable costs are less than 97 percent of the QHP’s target amount, a percentage of these savings will be remitted to HHS (limiting gain). Similarly if the actual allowable cost is more than 103 percent of the QHP’s target amount, a percentage of the difference will be paid back to the QHP (limiting loss).

There are transfer systems in place to compensate health plans that have very sick populations with funds from both health plans that have very healthy populations and the general fund (this was one of the taxes batted around but not changed during the debt default end game). This will keep health plans in business if the mandate does not work too well the first year. There are some loopholes that create perverse incentives for health plans that I’ll outline in a later post.

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Judge Posner recants the recant on voter ID

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Says it was out of context. Read his explanation yourself and see what you think.

Here’s the reporter’s reaction:

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Mike SacksVerified account‏@MikeSacksHP
Aw Judge , no @huffpostlive #LegaleseIt link? Richard Posner: I Did Not Recant My Opinion on Voter ID @tnr http://feedly.com/k/1dfgdHG

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Mike SacksVerified account‏@MikeSacksHP
Let’s go to the tape. Cut to 9:04: http://huff.lv/GJHJS0 via @HuffPostLive #LegaleseIt!

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Depends on where you’re standing

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This is from commenter Phoenix Rising :

My wife had cancer in 1994. The small business where she worked at the time lost their insurance over it. She hasn’t been insured for 19 years. The only bright spot: the indications that your leukemia is back include full-body bruising and blood coming out your ears when you floss. At least we haven’t spent the decades wondering if something was lurking that regular followups might have found.
In January 2005 her mammogram showed a mass. We knew that we were going to lose everything, as the best-case outcome. My wife went outside after listening to the voicemail (left at 4:55pm on a Friday asking her to come back in Monday morning but not saying why…) and smoked her last cigarette.
By Monday we’d found the baseline film, by Wed. the radiologist that Planned Parenthood referred her to (paid by the YWCA program for uninsured women) had matched them up. The lump was scar tissue from a bee sting in childhood. She still hasn’t smoked again, but that was the longest weekend of my life.
This is what it means to be uninsured: the news that your 5 year old may lose a parent in elementary school takes a backseat to ‘we’re going to lose the house…unless my wife dies quickly’.
I have melanoma, the cancer that lurks. I’m now on a followup schedule that continues until I die of something else, or the lurking semi-solid cells that are statistically likely to be somewhere in my body hit a switch and start to multiply again.
Our business has never been big enough to offer insurance. We knew from 1994 that plans to cover fewer than 50 people wouldn’t pay out or would take the premiums and run if we ever made a claim, so we didn’t bother to offer the option to make Blue Cross richer in order to feel insured. Obviously this has affected recruiting at our company.
Two critical points:
-In the past 4 weeks, I have received 5 resumes from exactly the kind of people we would like to hire more of. All say they’ll be available around the 1st of the year. Demographically they’re very different from the resumes I’ve seen over 15 years in this business. They’re younger and looking for fewer hours doing something they already know is hard in ways they enjoy. They can afford to leave Big Ugly Death Star Corp. because they can buy health insurance.
-I was diagnosed in Sept. 2011. Because my state had already implemented the part of the ACA that requires insurance companies to continue policies at similar rates EVEN IF the individuals on them make claims–not something we expected, after our earlier experience–I’m still insured.
We’re going to buy an exchange plan that puts our family on one deductible and OOP max, for the first time ever, next week.
The technical issue we discovered with the web site was after applying: whoever coded the ‘citizenship for adopted people’ section of the eligibility database chose the wrong field type for the only way our government has to verify my kid lives here legally. So we have to talk to a manager with superpowers before we can choose among the 57 (!) options to get our family covered.
We can afford any of these plans. Fifty-seven choices. Sure, some of them aren’t appropriate for our family’s health profile (rare cancer=must have some out of network coverage; hearing aids for kid must be covered, etc.). Some of them cost more than I’d prefer to spend, once we add up the premium and deductible–which we anticipate meeting sometime in Feb. 2014, with the backlog of preventive and screening that Mrs Phoenix hasn’t had access to since before PET scans were invented.
But we get to buy insurance, in a market that has to take our money and has to pay for the health care we may need.
As a parent, a spouse and a small business owner, I would carry the Congresscritters and President who got us these solutions across a river of acid on my back to keep them.

I feel like this about community health centers, because I relied on one once for pregnancy care so I get Phoenix Rising’s devotion.

Speaking of community health centers, oh look! Here’s a GOP supporter of community health center funding under Obamacare, but only when he’s in Kansas, not when he’s in DC:

moran

(Moran breaking ground at an Obamacare-funded clinic in Kansas. Photo credit: Moran’s Facebook page)

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Working Poverty Gets No Coverage

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Wegman’s, a grocery story chain, is a big deal around here. They’re regularly on the “Top 100 places to work” lists compiled by business magazines, because they pay well for a grocery store, offer benefits, and have a history of promoting from within. But this is ridiculous:

Some 10,000 people applied for 500 positions at a Wegmans slated to open next month.

About 500 new employees were hired from the applicant pool — a 5 percent acceptance rate.

By comparison, Harvard had an undergraduate acceptance rate of 5.8 percent in the most recent year.

This is from a story in the Philadelphia Business Journal about a Wegmans opening in Montgomery, PA. The story isn’t that Wegmans is as grand as Harvard and therefore is attracting applicants the way Harvard does. The story is that 10,000 people in Montgomery, PA are unemployed or underemployed, and even if they do get an entry-level job at Wegmans, they’ll still be working poor if they have a family.

And if they are working poor, they’re going to face another dilemma:

So the options we’ve been left with are this: both of us to work as much as possible, put the kids in daycare and lose healthcare, or keep our income at a level that at once facilitates a stay at home parent, ensures BadgerCare [Wisconsin Medicaid] and excludes our true earning potential, just for the sake of insurance of some kind. All in the name of if something should go wrong. Because if something big goes wrong or something bad happens, it’s not going to eat the savings — there isn’t any. We’ll go bankrupt and lose what little we have.

Obamacare will (hopefully) fix this problem by giving this family the option of insurance with premium support based on income. But someone got a 404 once on a page on healthcare.gov, so let’s be sure to focus on that instead.

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Open Thread: The Biter Bit

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Steve Coll, in the New Yorker, on Mitch McConnell and “The Tea Party’s Revenge“:

… Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opinion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already enshrined in law a portion of the movement’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical thinking among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the others systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.

This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street analysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an actual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confederate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today…

As recently as 2007… it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaservice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.

McConnell’s would-be usurper is Matt Bevin, a businessman who owns a bell company; his campaign slogan is “Let Freedom Ring.” He told Glenn Beck recently, “We have got to wean people from this idea of free lunches.” (He might start with fellow Kentuckians; their state pays sixty-six cents in federal taxes for every dollar of federal spending it takes in.) Bevin pleaded, “What we need to tell the American people is that the party’s over.” Presumably, he didn’t mean the Grand Old Party, but the American people may be forgiven for thinking that he did.

***********
What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?

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