This Would Have Helped

I was trying to explain to my Comp Gov students who was being hurt or helped by ACA and the being "dropped" from plans.

This chart helps:

Today's Moment Of Assholery

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-threatens-mass-blockade-of-top-obama-judges

But you know, both sides are to blame...

The Terrorists Have Won

The Taliban have won the World Series....

THANKS, OBAMA!

Because I Was Busy

I will outsource the blog again:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/republican-health-care-plan-repeal-and-cackle.html

The conclusion?

This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.

And nothing that has happened since has fundamentally changed that. Republicans in red states have tools at their disposal to block insurance subsidies for the poorest Americans. They have political tools to embarrass Obama and his allies. They lack the votes to repeal Obamacare, and will continue to lack them for at least three more years. And by that point, a large number of the people whose interests they have so intently ignored — the uninsured — will be within the system, and will have joined the ranks of those benefiting from the status quo and resisting change to it.

The GOP is always working for overreach.  This should be no different.

And the important thing to note about Americans is that they are temperamentally conservative in that they are averse to change, especially change by the government.  And a lot of the fear is compounded by some of the glitches with the website.

But a lot of the people freaking out over their "cancellations" will be pretty pleased by what they wind up with. 

Just Get Me To Friday

Will "Being an American" be considered a pre-existing condition?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-it-sort-of.html

It appears we will be lurching from Obamacare scandal to Obamacare scandal until everyone sort of runs out of ink pixels.

The current iteration of this is the revelation that Obamacare will - surprise - roil the individual insurance market.

As Chait notes in the piece above, ACA was supposed to roil the individual insurance markets.  Those markets are pretty much broken.  Insurance companies cherry picked the healthy and denied the poor schmucks who actually - you know - needed health insurance.

So the whole point of the mandate was to get EVERYONE into the individual market (who wasn't covered by employer-based insurance or Medicare/Medicaid) and to regulate that market more effectively.

And one thing that happened - again, on purpose - was to make those individual plans more comprehensive and fair than they were before.

It should be noted that this was the primary appeal of the public option: getting these individual buyers access to something like Medicare.

Chait and others tend to come down hard on Obama for saying "Your current plan won't change."  For the vast majority of Americans, this is true.  Employer based insurance and Medicare won't change much at all, except maybe having more benefits and less overhead.

But there are some people who will be moved off old crappy plans and on to better plans.

And yet this is somehow a problem.

Alternately, I like what Josh Marshall is doing.  He's compiling stories of people who either have no insurance or have to buy through the individual markets.

It's a bracing reminder for everyone who has the luxury of good employer-based health insurance.

A nurse who has to buy private insurance at huge costs.

A guy with a good plan, but who will save thousands of dollars a year.

A farmer in Wisconsin who had to choose between working more and losing his kids health insurance.

I know anecdotes are not data, but what's good for the goose...

Emo Progs Haz A Sad

http://www.ianwelsh.net/a-brief-note-on-why-the-progressive-blog-movement-failed/comment-page-1/#comment-51542

Fascinating bit of navel gazing sadness, especially the comments.

Basically, the leftist bloggers (I'd call them that, more than progressives) were all stoked in 2005 when everyone was reading them and saying, "F%ck yeah! Right on!"  But then Democrats came to power and had to, like, govern and everything.  And the leftist bloggers were all confused that Democrats didn't do things like shut down the government over Iraq or impeach Bush over Katrina.

In other words, the leftist bloggers were upset that the Democrats didn't behave like the Tea Party.

And this makes them sad.  Marginalized.  Abandoned.

The single greatest strength of the Democratic Party right now is that it listens to its base, but doesn't cater to it.  It will draw from the left and the center (and even center right) in order to hold on to power.  This is a lesson the Left never learned in the '70s and the Tea Party hasn't learned today.  It's something the party of Reagan understood really well (Reagan's Eleventh Commandment).

A few decades in the wilderness have taught Democrats that being in power beats the shit out of being out of power.

Yes, there are the inevitable intramural squabbles on the Democratic side, but they pale in comparison to what the party was like in the '80s or the GOP is today.

I will let TBogg take it away:

Let me see if I can explain it this way:

Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.

You don’t live there.

Grow the fuck up.

Twenty Newtowns A Year

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/study-u-s-hospitals-admit-7-500-kids-with-gunshot-wounds-each-year

Sickening.

I Want To Reprint This In Full

Yes, the website is glitchy.

But all the people wringing their hands are either disingenuous, in that they want the ACA to fail anyway, or they are attacking this from a place of privilege they can't even see.

So here is the letter to TPM:

I'd like to add my two cents to this discussion because I feel like my family's situation is something that often gets missed.

My wife and I have two children, ages 4 and almost 2. I'm an educator not working under contract and my wife works in agriculture. We're very, very grateful that we are currently insured via BadgerCare, Wisconsin's Medicaid program for low income families. We don't use it much, save the shots and check-ups for the kiddos. But it's a godsend, a just-in-case sort of comfort.

But here's the thing for us: we don't make that much money. We pay the bills, we live within our means and our family is happy. We don't buy much stuff, and we don't do vacations. We have cut expenses to the bone: no cell phones, clothes get made our bought second hand, we make our own detergent, we preserve a lot of food when it's cheapest, our car totally sucks, and we simply do not eat out. But we're happy and we feel blessed. One person is always working and the other is at home with the children. And we do just okay enough to get by, unless something goes big-time wrong. And that's how it's likely to be until the kids are in school. But the thing is that if we both worked full time plus, it would all go to cover childcare and our income would dictate that we'd loose BadgerCare. Essentially, we'd make just enough to not be able to afford insurance. That's absurd.

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 loose healthcare, or keep our income at a level that at once facilitates a stay at home parent, ensures BadgerCare 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 loose what little we have.

With ACA, at least when we get our children into school, (gettin' there), and our income essentially doubles, enough to, 1) loose BadgerCare, 2) gain some economic stability and, 3) generate some savings, it won't all get eaten by health insurance costs because we will be able to access the ACA. We didn't set out looking for this set of options, but like a lot of other people, we were young, uninsured, and in love. We got married, had children and then realized just what we were up against..

I think any discussion of ACA needs to address the fact that a lot of families out there, (I know many), have been forced to earn less to prevent the worst. My hope is that since the ACA addresses this dilemma it might be the bedrock of it's success.

Millions of Americans fall into this category.  They are called the working class in most countries, but we pretend they don't exist when it comes to discussing policy.

The Final Word

The Final Word on last night's infield fly rule defensive interference fiasco belongs to Old Hoss Radbourn.

Money Quote On NSA Snooping

"The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us," former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview. "Let's be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don't have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous."

I don't understand why we need to do all this.  Some of it clearly traces itself back to Total Information Awareness under Bush.  And a power once claimed is hard to give up.  Hopefully, we eventually force the NSA back under some sort of control.

But spare me the outrage that we are spying on our allies.  All we are doing is spying on them better than they are spying on us.

Whereas This Is Facinating

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/inquiring-minds-jonathan-haidt-tea-party

This Is Hilarious

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/09/how-terry-mcauliffe-and-the-dems-lost-virginia.html

3-0

The Fam Damily went 3-0 today, including an overtime thriller from Coach of the Year.

Spite

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/gop-immigration-must-die-because-of-shutdown.html

Just read it.  Anyone with an ounce of sense can unpack anything the modern GOP says with a little effort and explore how spiteful and petty it is.

Is The Tea Party Racist?

Is rice white?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/tea-party-racist_n_4158262.html?1382647526