Saturday, July 27, 2019
Rat-Infested Shitholes
If a Democrat ever talked about rural (I mean REAL) America the way that Republicans talk about urban America pretty much daily, it would be a 24/7 cable news story.
Saturday Morning
APPLICATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, FOR AN ORDER AUTHORIZING THE RELEASE OF CERTAIN GRAND JURY MATERIALS
Just in case anyone needs something to read with their morning coffee.
Just in case anyone needs something to read with their morning coffee.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Thursday, July 25, 2019
But I Have A Party To Go To
Elizabeth Spiers:
This has not, of course, stopped her from fundraising off of it. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee donor inboxes are littered with appeals signed by the speaker to, all caps, stop Trump, as if the critical brake mechanisms are being controlled by donors and not by the officials whose elections they support. It’s like watching a person drown while the lifeguard sits in her tower, performatively noting with alarm that someone is sinking into the sea and surely someone—someone!—must save the swimmer.Read the whole thing, as the kids say.
All You Gotta Do
Is give us the House, a supermajority in the Senate, and the presidency.
Okay, sorry, we admit that supermajority in the Senate will include Manchin and Sinema and a few others as needed to obstruct our agenda, so maybe a supermajority plus? plus plus plus?
Mystery why people keep chucking out the party in power, whichever it is.
Okay, sorry, we admit that supermajority in the Senate will include Manchin and Sinema and a few others as needed to obstruct our agenda, so maybe a supermajority plus? plus plus plus?
Mystery why people keep chucking out the party in power, whichever it is.
"We" Voted "You" Into Office
And I saw what happened last time Pelosi was Speaker and the last Republican president had 26% approval ratings and...
50% polling for impeachment? 70%? 90%? What's it going to take?
You guys have the power. I'm just a dumb guy with a dumb blog.
Elijah Cummings called y'all out.
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 24, 2019
"I'm begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on...if you want to have a democracy intact for your children and your children's children ... we have to guard this moment. This is on our watch."
50% polling for impeachment? 70%? 90%? What's it going to take?
You guys have the power. I'm just a dumb guy with a dumb blog.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Wow So Many Crimes
Guess we better signal as loudly as possible that it's okay to do more crimes.
Love crimes.
Love crimes.
They Didn't Get Their Sorkin Moment
All the reporters are bored now.
To be fair, even the pee tape wouldn't have qualified as a Sorkin Moment because nothing does.
Journalism, how the fuck does it work?
By "people" Maggie means "her and her friends" because the New York Times does not have brain implants in the population signalling back to them what you care about.
NYT colleagues reax to Mueller:@adamgoldmanNYT:
— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) July 24, 2019
So far, this hearing is not revealing new ground...By tomorrow it could be forgotten in this frenetic news cycle.@maggieNYT:
Adam, I think you’re being generous with “by tomorrow.”
On the one hand, Mueller stated incredibly damning things under oath, on the other he didn't sing them in a rich, deep vibrato. https://t.co/BXkwzY4QC8
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 24, 2019
To be fair, even the pee tape wouldn't have qualified as a Sorkin Moment because nothing does.
Journalism, how the fuck does it work?
The perennial belief that we can dictate what people should care about instead of reporting on the news... https://t.co/uvNzO8ryt8
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 24, 2019
By "people" Maggie means "her and her friends" because the New York Times does not have brain implants in the population signalling back to them what you care about.
More Thread
A hearing like this can be good and important and also ultimately pointless if everyone is waiting for some sort of Aaron Sorkin moment (and even if there is one there can never really be one because they will keep lifting the bar). There is nothing that can be said which will change Mitch's mind, or get Republicans on board, or get any of the editorial boards who called for Clinton's resignation to call for Trump's resignation, or anything else which frees Democrats from doing the one thing Mueller keeps telling them to do. Other people aren't going to solve this problem for them.
Mueller Day
The day that everything changes.
In case I haven't been clear... the Dems have to lead if they want something to happen. The Celestial Hall Monitor will not do it for them. They seem to be unwilling to do so. Happy to be wrong!
In case I haven't been clear... the Dems have to lead if they want something to happen. The Celestial Hall Monitor will not do it for them. They seem to be unwilling to do so. Happy to be wrong!
Morning Thread
I guess I was misinformed. Damnit!
I feel like I need to be out of my pajamas and fully dressed for the outside world for this.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Tuesday Night
Everything's gonna change on Mueller day. At least if he says "Trump did all the crimes and he is guilty and you have to impeach him now and the only reason that the Marshall of the Supreme Court has not put him on death row already is because he is the president so you have to do it."
Bending The Cost Curve
Too often lost in all the discussion of ACA is that its prime architects were just fundamentally wrong. This is not an argument that ACA should not have been passed, it's an argument that the wonks who had all those wonky wonk wonk profiles written about them as they were getting rich on grifting in various ways were wrong about what they saw as the fundamental problems - and solutions to - our private insurance system. Obviously my solution is just burn the whole thing to the ground, but if that is not your position - if for whatever reason, you think this is a system that is either worth preserving or politically necessary to preserve - then following the ACA leaders was a tragic mistake.
All the talk about "bending the cost curve" and "skin in the game" was all about making employers (for group plans) and individuals (for... I dunno, your ambulance, or something) better shoppers. This was going to be the big cost cutting benefit of ACA. Cutting costs for who? Well, overall costs. Make that trend line a bit less steep. Success! Pop the wonk champagne corks. This was obviously dumb to anybody not corrupt or stupid, but alas.
All the talk about "bending the cost curve" and "skin in the game" was all about making employers (for group plans) and individuals (for... I dunno, your ambulance, or something) better shoppers. This was going to be the big cost cutting benefit of ACA. Cutting costs for who? Well, overall costs. Make that trend line a bit less steep. Success! Pop the wonk champagne corks. This was obviously dumb to anybody not corrupt or stupid, but alas.
One of the general theories to the ACA was that health care is too expensive in America because people paying for care aren't trying hard enough to get a good deal. The Obama administration's main plan to control costs was to make health-care buyers better shoppers. The Cadillac tax was designed to encourage employers to try to shop for cheaper insurance plans and to increase deductibles for their workers. The idea was that forcing people to have more "skin in the game" would result in them becoming smarter health-care consumers and not buying care they don't need.Imagine being in the hospital waiting for your chemo treatment and hearing the president telling you that the problem with our health care system is that people don't have enough "skin in the game." The thing about health care is that you do, by definition, have skin in the game. Your fucking skin.
The Cadillac tax was one of the main ways the ACA applied this payer-focused theory to the large employer market, while the law's new exchanges did the same for the individual and small business market. The exchanges were designed to be a central hub to make comparing plans easier, thus helping individuals be better shoppers. People on the exchanges were nudged toward high-deductible "silver" plans, and subsidies were capped so middle-class people would need to pay the full price of whatever plans they chose.
But this strategy didn't work, because the problem isn't that businesses or individuals have never thought to try to negotiate for lower premiums. Similarly, regular people can't shop smartly for care because they don't have the training to know which treatments they actually need or can skip. There is after all a reason it takes so long to become a doctor. The problem is that dominant hospital networks and drug makers with patent-protected monopolies have all the leverage to set prices as high as they can. Since the passage of ObamaCare, the average premium for an individual coverage by private employer insurance has gone from $5,049 in 2010 to $6,896 in 2018, even as the average deductible for employer coverage increased from $646 to $1,350. Since 2014, the ACA exchanges' first year, average benchmark premiums have gone from $3,276 to $5,724.
There Is Only One Way
As I suggested at the end, the point of this post was not really to talk about children, but to point out how many adults are like this too. It isn't just an American thing, or a supposedly unsophisticated thing either (sophistication is a concept which, like "authenticity," is mostly bullshit, but some things are branded as such). Try cooking green beans with some Parisians differently than the way they are used to. Mon Dieu!
Which is why minor lifestyle impingements, like banning plastic straws or bags, drive conservatives insane. Anything which deviates from narrow expectations is extremely frustrating.
Which is why minor lifestyle impingements, like banning plastic straws or bags, drive conservatives insane. Anything which deviates from narrow expectations is extremely frustrating.
Oh Well
This didn't happen.
The last generation of kids who will need to learn to drive has already been born, as far as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is concerned.Give it another 18 months.
He’s incredibly bullish on self-driving cars and expects Uber to begin putting them into service within 18 months. Khosrowshahi shared his ambitions in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at The Year Ahead 2018 conference.
“We will have autonomous cars on the road, I believe, within the next 18 months,” Khosrowshahi said. “Not as a test case but as a real case out there.” Though he noted, “true autonomy for every single use case is some ways away.”
What If We Use The Oversight Powers We Have?
No let's pass legislation that will never become law instead.
WASHINGTON —And by "do something" we mean "do nothing."
Although some Democrats want to use former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony Wednesday to spark impeachment hearings, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hopes to lay the groundwork for legislation to address issues raised by the Russia investigation.
Her team is preparing a wave of measures that would likely be introduced after the August recess that starts Friday.
“We hope that hearing from Mueller will spark a sense of urgency to do something,” said a senior Democratic leadership aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the caucus’ plans.
Monday, July 22, 2019
Bad Men And The Bad Men Who Protect Them
I'm not going to argue that everyone who was aware of, for example, Charlie Rose's behavior had an obligation to come forward with it. I think we understand that not everyone who tried would even be heard, and attempting would be a career-destroying move. Some people have the luxury of taking such risks. Other people gotta eat and put food on their families.
But of course Charlie Rose wasn't just untouchable because people below him weren't going to risk their careers and reputations to try to take him down. He was untouchable because he was protected by his peers and bosses. People - mostly men, but probably not just - who didn't have to protect him. Who didn't have to create a safe space for him to abuse in. Who didn't have to sign his absurdly large checks.
You get that stuff when it's like Hollywood's Most Bankable Star who brings in the megabucks. That doesn't make it right but okay at least "it's all about the money" is an argument. But Charlie Rose? Matt Fucking Lauer? Lauer was a thing maybe in 1995 but we know there's no way he was actually pulling in his salary in added ratings and advertising bucks. Old, bald, and creepy is no way to bring in the ratings, I say as someone increasingly old, bald, and hopefully not as creepy.
But of course Charlie Rose wasn't just untouchable because people below him weren't going to risk their careers and reputations to try to take him down. He was untouchable because he was protected by his peers and bosses. People - mostly men, but probably not just - who didn't have to protect him. Who didn't have to create a safe space for him to abuse in. Who didn't have to sign his absurdly large checks.
You get that stuff when it's like Hollywood's Most Bankable Star who brings in the megabucks. That doesn't make it right but okay at least "it's all about the money" is an argument. But Charlie Rose? Matt Fucking Lauer? Lauer was a thing maybe in 1995 but we know there's no way he was actually pulling in his salary in added ratings and advertising bucks. Old, bald, and creepy is no way to bring in the ratings, I say as someone increasingly old, bald, and hopefully not as creepy.
The Discourse Rulers
Elite media is so awesome. Only the best people.
Rose, Charlie: Television journalist."The rest of the staff" and, of course, his bosses.
Name found in Epstein’s black book.
You learn things answering phones, and in the spring of 2005, answering Charlie Rose’s phone at his PBS show, you would learn that his friend Jeffrey Epstein had some recommendations to make for whom Rose ought to hire as his next assistant. Written call logs from 2005 and 2006 show Epstein and his own assistant calling dozens of times, making plans for lunch and tea in Manhattan or to try to meet up in Paris. Epstein also called with a total of five women’s names and phone numbers. One woman was described as “world’s most perfect assistant she used to work for Harvey Weinstein he’s lucky if he can get her.” Another entry reads, “Jeffrey Epstein wants to talk to you before you call these two girls.” A fourth woman shows up on the manifests of Epstein’s jet, including on Bill Clinton’s trip across Africa, and wound up working at the Clinton Foundation. Two former staffers remember another Epstein referral, a young woman not mentioned in the logs, who interned at the show. In all, Rose hired three (“Jeffrey Epstein from time to time recommended various candidates for open positions at the Charlie Rose Show,” Rose’s representative said in a statement, but said the ex-host only learned about Epstein’s alleged abuse years later, when he pleaded guilty in Florida). When I called one of these women recently, she was stunned to learn she was one of many women Epstein recommended for the job. “I was being offered up for abuse,” said the woman, who was 22 at the time she worked for Rose. It helped her understand not only how her boss Rose — whom in 2017 she would accuse, along with 34 other adult women, of sexual harassment — had treated her, but also how the rest of the staff had seen her. And it helped her understand a grim version of networking among powerful men.
Waiting for Mueller
We already did that (correctly, both in terms of letting it play out and waiting until the House Dems actually had some power). Now...one more thing! The explosive outrage is coming! The Celestial Hall Monitor will step in and take care of things, or maybe the Marshall of the Supreme Court.
“The dam is holding back the floodwaters,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.). “But we are one explosive testimony, one new consequential outrage, from that dam being breached.”
— Natalie Andrews (@nataliewsj) July 22, 2019
Dems hope Mueller will turn the tide on impeachment https://t.co/hdLWne8hRk https://t.co/nAub4WTSCS
Turns Out Tunneling Is Hard
Elon probably gets stoned, gets mad about being stuck in traffic, decides he can do tunnels better than anyone, has some Jetsons visions of an underground transportation network, calls his engineers and says "build some tunnels! cheap!" They say, sure, Elon, and go out and buy a used Chinese sewer boring machine, bore one tunnel, for years keep promising that they were going to make their own tunneling machines which would be the very best tunneling machines ever, almost con Chicago (Rahm, of course) into letting them build a dumb project which would be dumb even if it worked, and then... wow tunneling is hard and it turns out some rich weirdo who had never thought about the problem before doesn't actually have the solution.
“I think a tunnelling thing would be pretty exciting,” Musk said later in response to a follow-up question by one of the student team members on site. “Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively – it’s harder than it seems.”Nobody could have predicted.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Fix The Insulin Problem
I'm not one who is ever especially optimistic that our political system is up to the task of fixing things, but the insulin problem seems like pretty low hanging fruit with ways to solve it (some bad! but still) that don't even harm stakeholders. Type 1 diabetics are relatively common in that we all probably know somebody with it, they exist in all race/class categories, there is no "lifestyle" to blame (even incorrectly) for their illness so that they can somehow be faulted for their condition, insulin is incredibly cheap to make, and the the history of it makes clear that those who are profiting off of it obscenely are basically just criminals exploiting a bad system.
Laverty has Type 1 diabetes, and as of that day in 2017, he was no longer eligible for coverage under his parents’ health insurance. He found himself needing medication to live that he could not afford.
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