Sorry, we left Kathleen Sebelius in charge of the morning open thread today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:31 AM | Comments (284)
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Other people are already jumping on the $500/gal payments made for diesel fuel, but as bad as that is, it was only a $300k rip off; mere pocket change as overcharging goes.

OK, that ripoff was newsworthy in its own right and the $500/gal figure certainly makes for good headlines and great one-liner standup jokes.

However, the most outrageous part of the Gardez hospital debacle is going largely unmentioned. You have to read a bit further into the IG's report to find it.

...The new 100-bed Gardez hospital is being built to replace an existing 70-bed hospital in the town of Gardez, Paktiya province. In an April 2013 audit report on health services in Afghanistan, we noted that the Afghan government may not be able to sustain the new Gardez hospital once it is completed.

We also found that the new hospitalÂ’s annual operation and maintenance costs could exceed five times the annual operating costs for the hospital that it will be replacing. For example, the existing Gardez hospital has annual operating costs, including generator fuel costs, of about $611,000, and USAID estimated that the annual generator fuel costs alone for the new hospital could be as much as $3.2 million...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:12 AM | Comments (118)
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There's all the usual things of course, toxic mold, bad plumbing, aging rickety electrical systems, leaky roofs, bad furnaces, cracked foundations, termites, squirrel infestations, getting a neighbor from hell, sinkholes, etc. These are all 98mph heaters coming right over the plate though. You kind of expect them.

Then once in a while you get thrown a completely unexpected perfect 12-6 curve, and it just leaves you standing there with the bat on your shoulder slack-jawed shaking your head.

... A French man opened the door to his recently purchased apartment on Friday to find the mummified body of a previous owner hanging in his new home.

According to AFP, the corpse had been hanging in the Bussy-Saint-Georges apartment undisturbed for eight years...

I imagine all manner of similar "prizes" are going to be discovered in the hundreds of thousands of boarded up foreclosed joints here if that backlog ever gets worked through.

The local sheriff deputies I've talked with say the local vacant homes are already being used as burglary booty stash areas so perps aren't caught with the stolen stuff at home. How much of a stretch is it for them to start collecting bodies too?

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:21 AM | Comments (139)
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It begins with a reported 6 week delay in the deadline to buy Obamasurance (why not?).

But it was not immediately clear Wednesday whether the adjustment to a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act would need to be approved by Congress or could be done by the Department of Health and Human Services administratively.

As the law stands now, individuals are expected to begin the application process via HealthCare.gov by Feb. 15 to avoid a financial penalty. But under the prospective change, individuals will be expected to have started enrollment by March to avoid incurring the penalty.

Last week only extremists who probably should be charged with sedition believed in delaying anything about the ACA, now it's going to be official Obama administration policy.

The reaction from the GOP should be interesting. Will they support this (rhetorically, no way Obama goes to Congress for this) or will they insist that Obama live by his words of the last few months.

Here's the administration's veto statement on the employer and individual mandate bills the House passed (pdf).

. House passage of
H.R. 2667 and H.R. 2668 will undermine this security for tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.

H.R. 2667 is unnecessary, and H.R. 2668 would raise health insurance premiums and increase the number of uninsured Americans. Enacting this legislation would undermine key elements of the health law, facilitating further efforts to repeal a law that is already helping millions of Americans stay on their parents' plans until age 26, millions more who are getting free preventive care that catches illness early on, and thousands of children with pre-existing conditions who are now covered.

Now, a little more than a week after the end of the shutdown over delaying these very provisions, Obama is going to do it himself.

The reaction of the GOP will be interesting. Will they use this as a chance to show the American people that the federal government simply can not do everything for them or will they simply say give them power so they can deliver goodies in a more effective way?

Yeah.

Update:

NBC is wrong again. Individual mandate timing hasnt changed. Deadline for having insurance is March 31. Was true this am. Is true tonight.

— Josh Earnest (@jearnest44) October 23, 2013

What seems to have happened is that while the open enrollment period runs through the end of March, you had to buy insurance by the middle of February to avoid the tax/penalty. So you could have purchased insurance during the designated time period and still not have complied with the law.

Believe it or not, no one realized how stupid this was until a week or so ago. So what the administration is saying is as long as you buy a policy before the end of the first open enrollment period (Oct 1, 2012-March 31, 2014) you won't be penalized.

It's not so much a delay as confirmation that this bill was poorly drafted and no one really understands what's in it.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:40 PM | Comments (326)
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There lots of talk out there about how Hillary Clinton is going to walk away with the Democrat nomination for President in 2016 and then sweep into over the charred remains of whatever sacrificial lamb the GOP offers up.

My response to that idea: Nuts. In fact, I don't think she'll run, and if she does she won't be the nominee, and if she is, she'll lose the general.

But assuming she does run for the nomination letÂ’s remember a few things about Hillary:

For starters, she’s not a very good candidate. After spending much of the 2008 cycle as the “inevitable” nominee it turned out she was quite evitable (fun fact, that’s actually a word).

A disorganized and bloated campaign team, her accent of the week depending on the crowd she was talking to and her earthy every woman drinking habits, Hillary annoyed a lot of people. She may have been “likable enough” as Barack Obama famously put it but not enough to win over Democrats. Remember her big breakthrough in terms of connecting with voters was when she cried on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. Had she not done that, the nomination race between her and Obama might not have lasted as long as it did.

Democrats in general don’t like re-run candidates. The GOP is the party of “next in line” while the Democrats are the party “Ohhhhh….Shiny!”. Maybe the chance to elect the first woman President will be enough to overcome the Democrats historic resistance to giving losers a second look. Since the birth of the modern primary contest in 1968, the Democrats have only nominated someone for President who ran for the nomination before once…Al Gore ran in 1988 and won the nomination in 2000. Of course he was the siting Vice President at the time so it was a unique situation (Walter Mondale was the nominee in 84, having lost with Jimmy Carter in 80 but he never ran on his own prior to 84).

more...

Posted by: DrewM at 08:00 AM | Comments (426)
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Ars Technica recently published a book review under the foreboding title Are partisan news sources polarizing Americans? in which they review a book by two academics whose bread and butter is studying political persuasion in general and mediaÂ’s role in particular. The book, which I havenÂ’t read incidentally, is called Changing Minds or Changing Channels.

Ars TechnicaÂ’s review begins:

People love to get mad about news coverage in the media—or, at least, it’s hard not to. Thinking about your least favorite cable news channel or newspaper might make you feel as if you’ve been playing a whack-a-mole game where all the moles evade your mallet perfectly while hurling shockingly effective personal insults. Those writers and TV personalities probably aren’t the only people you think of as liars or jerks, but the fact that they can broadcast (literally or metaphorically) their opinions to such large audiences might make you bristle.

(Yes, it really makes me bristle that Faux News can actually broadcast conservative opinions to a large audience.)

There are real demographic and ideological differences between the audiences of Fox News, MSNBC, and the evening broadcast news. Viewers of partisan cable news networks are considerably more polarized. It’s obvious that more conservatives than liberals watch Fox News, but does watching Fox News make people more conservative? This is the oft-voiced concern about the modern news environment—that echo chambers drive people further apart.

(Oh, I see. TheyÂ’re not bristling with anger, theyÂ’re concerned about Faux News driving people apart. That makes it better!)

The review is not the most over-the-top example of letting oneÂ’s bias show (as I'm doing here, btw, but shut up that's why), but it does continue along that vein. Feel free to read it (itÂ’s short).

Upshot of the research presented in the book they reviewed is this:
more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:09 PM | Comments (108)
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A conspiracy of beer, brauten, buses, and busyness has brought the ONT to this lowly state. I blame society and the French.

Redskins - The New Gay Marriage

How an issue no one even talked about suddenly became the new PC litmus test.

I checked our archives to see when our own blogging about the anti-”Redskins” movement began. Could be that this subject, which has been percolating for ages, reached full boil on the left a long time ago, but if it did, we missed it. The first notice we took of it was Erika’s post in March about a small group of congressional Democrats trying to do something legislatively about it. (They’re still trying, by the way.) A few weeks later there was something about the D.C. City Council wanting to do something about it. Then Redskins owner Dan Snyder made his big blunder: He told USA Today, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.” That was him essentially daring the left to try to force him by engineering new “enlightened” ground rules on “Redskins” usage for the media and political class. A few months later, “Slate” dropped the word; Rachel Maddow followed suit and then, inevitably, Obama was asked about it and tepidly endorsed changing the name. And so now, with record speed, here’s O’D in the highest self-righteous dudgeon towards people who hold a position that virtually no one gave a wet fart about six months ago. To me, that’s the worst part of the whole anti-Redskins phenomenon. It’s not opposing the term itself that’s annoying; that’s defensible. It’s not even getting indignant with people who don’t see a problem with using it. It’s the sanctimony coupled with the faddishness of the whole thing. How dare Dan Snyder disagree with something that the left didn’t care about five minutes ago? How dare he?

Also The Soft Bigotry of High Cheekbones

For Geeks Only

Open a command window and type in ‘tracert 216.81.59.173’. Give it about 20 seconds.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:01 PM | Comments (668)
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. . . can do wonders for the soul. And if you have a camera to carry with you, it can be a rewarding pursuit -- though, not necessarily in the pecuniary sense. That's not to say you can't make a buck or two in nature photography; you most certainly can. But, if that's the reason you decide to take it up as a pursuit, well, you're kind of a dumbass. Odds are, you're going to be a few thousand bucks lighter in the pocket before you ever see the first proverbial thin dime in recompense for your efforts.

No, you go into nature photography (and any other kind for that matter) simply because enjoy it and want to become good at it. That's pretty much how it happened to me, anyway. I was bitten by the bug while attempting, with some degree of frustration, to take photos of drag racers launching off the starting line with a borrowed Canon point-and-shoot. It only took a couple of trips to the drag strip to convince me that what I needed was a better camera. And from there, well, it's been one glorious expense after another.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:09 PM | Comments (157)
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Dick Durbin (D-IL) is technically the number 2 Democrat in the US Senate and he's acting like a whiny high school kid whose trying to get someone in trouble.

Durbin said in an October 20 Facebook post, “In a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you.’”

That's a pretty serious charge. Say what you want about Obama but congressional leaders should be professional and respectful of the office of the president. Naturally, all the GOP leaders who were there denied it but of course they would, right?

How bad is this lie? This bad.

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Wednesday flatly denied that a House Republican told President Obama “I cannot even stand to look at you” during negotiations over the government shutdown.
"It did not happen," Carney said, saying he discussed the incident with a "participant in the meeting."

There you have it. The Obama White House calls Dick Durbin a liar. If you're a Democrat you have to be a pretty smarmy piece of crap to have the White House call you out.

Naturally Durbin's debunked smear will be the lead story on MSNBC for days because while it might not be actually true, it tells a greater truth. Or something.

Added: Joan Walsh isn't a bright woman.

Until Sen. Durban retracts his claim, I'll be believing him #standwithdurbin

— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) October 23, 2013

Now there are Durbin Truthers. Just what the world needs.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:05 AM | Comments (444)
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Ezra Klein has a new interview with Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. Laszewski really drops a bomb on the federal exchange based on his behind the scenes contacts with insurers:

BL: I almost have the sense that HealthCare.gov is in de facto shutdown. HereÂ’s why: Government has to fix the back end before the front end. The demand here is real. I donÂ’t think anyone can dispute that millions of people want to sign up. So if they fix the front end for consumers and thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people being enrolled before they fix the back end, weÂ’ll have a catastrophic mess.

When insurers are getting 10 or 20 or 50 enrollments a day they can clean the errors up manually. But they canÂ’t do that for thousands of enrollments a day. They have to automate at some point. So I think the Obama administration doesnÂ’t want to cross the red line to shut the system down, but I think this is effectively a shutdown in which they donÂ’t say theyÂ’ve shut it down but it basically is shut down.

Laszewski goes on to say that the phone line "isnÂ’t any good either." Why not? Because ultimately the information gathered has to be transferred over the same computer system, i.e. the one that he says is in super secret shut down.

The President and his spokespeople continue to urge people to go to the website and call the help line. But if, in fact, the site is unofficially/partly/quietly being held back to allow needed repairs then they are intentionally wasting people's time. That's a question the administration has yet to be asked: Are you wasting people's time so as not to have to admit this should be shut down?

The rest of Laszewski's assessment is equally grim. You can read it all here.

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 01:21 PM | Comments (232)
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