lambert's blog

Shocker, I know.

Interesting twitter profile. Read below the fold...

KatieBird and I, with assists from Hipparchia and Rainbow Girl, are starting a new series, whose title is as you see:

PPACA is, of course, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" which, being none of those things (except a big Act), is informally known as ObamaCare.

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions (origin on USENET; example from the IRS).

So, our concept is to pose and then answer questions about the PPACA (ObamaCare), for two reasons:

• People need help, and AFAIK only conservatives are offering it.
• People should also understand that ObamaCare's complexity just doesn't have to be, and that single payer is a real and better alternative.

So this is the plan: Read below the fold...

So, I ripped out all the thistles in the front garden -- hat tip, jawbone -- and replanted with some flowers. However, since the thistles are rhizomic, they're going to try to come back. So, as usual, the answer is sheet mulch, since the newspaper payer prevents light from reaching the soil, depriving the thistles (one hopes) of the energy they need to grow (unless they're like those creatures in Alien, or something, and they're suddenly going to burst up from underground twenty feet away. Except I think I'd rather use leaf mulch. Read below the fold...

Balloon Juice:

No, you want to see the villain, look in the mirror. It’s the pants-wetting populace of the United States, who votes for these assholes who pass bad laws in moments of crisis, because we have to do something and because Americans, unlike every other nation in the world, have a god given right to be safe at all times from all things.

Fuck you all. The only thing that might save this country from a couple more weeks of this partisan bullshit obscuring important issues is maybe we’ll get lucky and a cute young blonde girl will get kidnapped and we can move on to something else.

The "cute young blonde girl" is the world weary cynicism -- once they are realists, but that rotted -- that seems to be the most powerful defensive mechanism left in the Obama supporter's arsenal. Not with a bang, but a collective shrug, as it were. Read below the fold...

After all, it's not like Obama hasn't had "reprehensible" US citizens killed already, just because he work up one morning and thought that would be a good idea.* Anyhow, although Booman is clearly the stupidest, TBogg is clearly the ugliest:

Read below the fold...

It turns out there's a standard, of sorts, for the online applications:

Enroll UX 2014 provides a road map for every state and the federal government to create a state-of-the-art, online process for application, eligibility determination, enrollment, and health plan selection. It can be customized by states to be the public face of the insurance exchanges required by the federal health reform law.

The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) was the managing partner for this unprecedented private-public collaboration. IDEO, a global design and innovations firm, led the Enroll UX 2014 consumer research and design effort. State-based teams, staff from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and designers met frequently to understand requirements and develop and review designs that were evaluated by consumers and accessibility experts. Read below the fold...

Failure to empathize. Riverdaughter:

[Digby is] cautiously optimistic about how things are going to go. Both [Digby and Krugman] seem to think [or are told to say*] that the increase in premiums are only going to affect a small subset of people and everybody knew this from the start, had they been paying attention. They seem to think the people most irked are going to be relatively well off younger people, like entrepreneurs who work for themselves.

But that’s not really true. I’m not surprised that neither Digby or Krugman are seeing who are going to get slammed by Obamacare most severely because it has become almost a habit not to talk about them. I’m referring to the millions of long term unemployed, many of whom are over 50, who are now forced to cobble together some kind of living as self-employed. That affects just about everyone I know who was laid off since 2008. To these people, the premiums are not just a nuisance. They are extremely burdensome. And if Lambert has been reading the tea leaves correctly, lumping these people into the Medicaid pot puts whatever estate they have left at risk. So, to recap, Obamacare is putting an extra burden on these people who are now forced to a.) work for themselves, b.) pay all of the payroll tax by themselves and c.) pay for their own retirements. ... Read below the fold...

Here, here, especially here, and here. Just open 'em all up in tabs. Read below the fold...

[Readers, if Booman has challengers for the title, do feel free to post their talking points on #PRISM in comments. --lambert]

Maybe Less Than Meets the Eye:

The basic outlines of the program were already understood on Capitol Hill. Related capabilities have been reported on for years.

In other words... Read below the fold...

Thistles of doom!

I liked the effect here: The glossy green thistles with their (soon-to-come) lovely purple flowers, with pansies and violets peeking out from their feet. Also, they were prickly and hence a living fence, like the raspberries. Read below the fold...

Greenwald's source:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Oh, and Snowden was in Hong Kong, which explains Greenwald's trip there. Read below the fold...

CJR's Trudy Lieberman has an excellent summing up of the media coverage on the CA rate hike story:

Last week the advocacy group Health Care for America Now [HCAN't, die-hard single payer opponents] listed 33 news outlets, mostly marquee brands, that had picked up the exchange’s “important announcement.” California is a bellwether, headlines from around the country suggested, as news outlets from CNNMoney to The Hill signaled that rates in the state’s insurance exchange would be cheaper than expected [The expectations game is an old PR trick. Notice that "cheaper than expected" is not the same is either "cheap" or "good."]. “California Insurance Exchange Rates: Not Too High, Not Too Low,” read the headline on the piece from Kaiser Health News, which quoted the executive director of California’s exchange, Peter Lee: “We’ve hit a home run for consumers. We held insurers’ feet to the fire.” ... No shock had materialized.

But the story the media told was a flawed one, characterized by gee-whiz reporting, a willingness to accept official spin, and failure to ask basic questions. “I don’t see rates going down anywhere I look,” says Robert Laszewski, an industry consultant whose blog was required reading for reporters covering the health reform debate four years ago. “Rates are consistent with what the Society of Actuaries forecasted. The fight emerging is over how to compare rates.” ... Read below the fold...

Rolling Stone:

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Admirably concise. Read below the fold...

Go read (leaked slideshow here). So far as I can tell, this is a heat map of metadata data records. So we are not yet at the point where random, arbitrary individuals can be tracked with a mouseclick (which the name of the program suggests!). Read below the fold...