Late Night Open Thread: Go, Canada!

 Posted by at 12:41 am
Oct 202015
 

I won’t pretend to understand Canadian politics, but it seems that you guys have done well. Here’s the Raw Story report:

Canada’s Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau, the son of a popular former prime minister, won the general election, television networks CBC and CTV projected — a victory that ends nine years of Conservative rule.

The 43-year-old Trudeau — the eldest son of Pierre Trudeau, considered the father of modern Canada — is expected to succeed the conservative Stephen Harper as prime minister.

Early results showed the Liberals swept all 32 seats in the country’s Atlantic provinces, doubling their popular support in the region, and scored well in key Ontario and Quebec provinces.

The Liberals came from behind late in the campaign, with Trudeau in a last stump speech promising “not just a change in government but a better government.”

Trudeau was elected Liberal leader only two years ago, coming after two past leaders failed to unseat Harper in 2008 and 2011 and subsequently resigned…

He pledged to raise taxes on the richest and lower rates for middle-income Canadians, while spending billions on new infrastructure in order to give the struggling economy a boost.

National Post liveblogging here:

The Liberal Party cut a dominating swath through the Atlantic region, then stormed into Ontario, Quebec and the Prairies as the first two waves of federal election results flooded in Monday, the beginning of the end of a historic, drawn-out campaign that saw political fortunes fluctuate dramatically.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority government Monday, beating out Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and Thomas Mulcair’s NDP by a wide margin.

As up about 11:45 p.m. ET Monday, the Liberals were elected or leading in 189 ridings — up massively from the 36 seats they held at the start of the campaign. The Conservatives led or were elected in 105 ridings, down 54. The NDP was on track to win 36, which would be a 59-seat drop…

May your good example foreshadow similar progressive triumphs down here in 2016!

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Open Thread: Joe Biden’s Tender Hooks

 Posted by at 9:48 pm
Oct 192015
 

biden hat ring reporter luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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… have the DC media waiting on tenterhooks. And even they are beginning to find the whole thing a bit of a joke!

… Since the beginning of the year, there has been a wide array of reported and speculated rumors about when a Biden announcement would be coming. In February, Biden said “end of summer,” which of course has come and gone. Since then, the window has narrowed and moved and expanded repeatedly — not always thanks to direct comments from Biden or his aides, but in the reporting of the media. Continue reading »

Long Read: “Walking Through Texas with a Gun and a Mission”

 Posted by at 8:23 pm
Oct 192015
 

Another excellent piece of genuine journalism from John H. Richardson in Esquire. I’ll never agree with C.J. ChiversGrisham, subject of this profile, but Richardson takes it past ‘four legs, two legs baaaad’ sloganeering to explore “[W]ith the Second Amendment never more secure, the sudden mania for open carry“:

… On the sidewalk stand thirteen heavily armed Texans, a six-year-old boy, and a baby in a stroller. They’ve got AR-15’s on their shoulders, Glocks on their hips, cute little 9mms in ankle holsters. One of the women has a pink tactical weapon that looks like it might deliver lethal valentines. They’re from a group called Open Carry Texas, and they’re out on this hot summer night in the small town of Temple, an hour north of Austin, to exercise their constitutional right to carry firearms…

A calm and confident man steps forward. This is C. J. Grisham, the leader of the group, a forty-one-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who is just five feet five but blessed with twice his share of command presence…

We have always loved our guns. Guns freed us, fed us, protected us from the dangers of the frontier, and served us in war. In an unsettled land where every man was on his own, they became the ultimate talisman of personal security. The result today is more than three hundred million guns in private hands and individual gun rights—despite thirty thousand deaths a year and the ceaseless run of mass shootings in schools, theaters, and churches—steadily affirmed and expanded by legislatures and courts. This might seem like a good time for gun lovers to celebrate. Instead, thousands of Americans like C. J. Grisham are marching with tactical weapons in the streets, pressing their demand for even fewer regulations in the most intimidating way possible, and many say they won’t be satisfied until there are no gun regulations at all. But we’ve become so used to the argument over guns that we might just shrug off Grisham’s stand as the same old thing.

It’s not. Something very strange is happening in the American mind. Because the more complicated truth is that we’ve always feared our guns, too. Continue reading »

Adapt Or Die

 Posted by at 12:32 pm
Oct 192015
 

The Benghazi strain is dying in the wild:

Hillary Clinton will be testifying before the Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday, and by the time she walks out of that hearing room, chances are that all the Republicans’ hopes of using this issue to bring Clinton down will be officially gone.

The timing of Clinton’s testimony couldn’t have worked out better for her, coming as it is after a string of revelations and embarrassments for the committee. First, then-presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News that the committee’s purpose was to bring down Clinton’s poll numbers, a “gaffe” that had an extraordinary impact, especially when you consider that he was only acknowledging what everyone in Washington already knew. Then we learned that the Select Committee has all but abandoned investigating Benghazi to focus on Clinton’s emails (and that committee staffers are so busy they’ve formed a wine club and a gun-buying club).

Then we learned that a former staffer for the committee is suing them, alleging that he was fired because he wanted to keep investigating Benghazi and not Clinton. Over the weekend, we learned that Democrats are questioning committee chair Trey Gowdy’s accusation that Clinton recklessly used the name of a secret CIA source in an email. According to Democrats, the CIA says the information isn’t sensitive. “I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life,” Gowdy told Politico. No wonder.

So it will just have to mutate and adapt to the new climate:

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) recently spoke with talk radio host Matt Murphy and said the real issue with Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state is “how many lives she put at risk by violating all rules of law that are designed to protect America’s top-secret and classified information from falling into the hands of our geopolitical foes who then might use that information to result in the deaths of Americans.”

Brooks added Republicans are going to make sure this issue follows Clinton into office, should she be elected president in 2016.

“And in my judgement, with respect to Hillary Clinton, she will be a unique president if she is elected by the public next November, because the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.

At least Republicans in 2008 waited until the day after President Obama’s inauguration before plotting to sabotage the country.  You have to admire their efficiency in attempting to impeach someone years before she’s even nominated for the White House, let alone elected, but here we are.

That Old Time Corruption

 Posted by at 10:46 am
Oct 192015
 

This is so blatant it’s kind of breathtaking:

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has hired a veteran political strategist from Walla Walla, Washington, and put him on the state payroll.

Lance James Henderson, 51, who last worked for Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s re-election campaign in 2014, was hired last month as Morrisey’s deputy chief of staff, a newly created position at the Attorney General’s Office.

Morrisey eliminated an investigator’s job in his Consumer Protection Division to make way for Henderson’s job, personnel records show. Half of Henderson’s $99,500 salary will be paid with monies from the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Recovery Fund, which finances consumer protection activities.

Henderson has never practiced law. He’s been a campaign consultant to politicians for the past 25 years, specializing in field operations and building voter databases. Politicians and their campaign operatives use the voter files to track vote habits and urge likely voters to support specific candidates and go to the polls.

On his resume posted on his LinkedIn.com page, Henderson lists these areas of expertise: “strategy, message and branding, management and organization, media relations, direct and digital marketing, fundraising, research and targeting.”

On Friday, Henderson took part in a West Virginia Republican Party conference call to discuss a possible protest of President Barack Obama’s planned visit to Charleston Wednesday, according to two GOP officials who were on the call.

Morrisey never advertised the deputy chief of staff position on the attorney general’s website or on conservativejobs.com — two places where Morrisey’s office typically posts job openings. The office doesn’t have a chief of staff.

“Hiring a political operative at a huge salary on the public’s nickel is an inexcusable breach of trust and ethics,” said Chris Regan, vice chairman of the state Democratic Party. “Patrick Morrisey has hit a new low in diverting $100,000 in taxpayer money directly to his political campaign.”

This isn’t Morrisey’s first transgression, as the Vice Chair of the Democratic Party, Chris Regan, points out at his excellent blog that you should be reading.

Spousal fees for Employer Sponsored Coverage

 Posted by at 8:09 am
Oct 192015
 

Bob S asked about something that is becoming increasingly common:

an old friend of mine (and his wife) get their health insurance through his employer — as I understand it, the cost is charged to his gross income and he pays somewhat more to have both he and his wife covered than if it were just him. However, because his wife is offered (and declines) coverage by her employer, his employer charges him an additional fee. Apparently this policy was begun soon after implementation of the ACA and consequently he blames ObamaCare for the extra $120/month he’s being charged after already paying for spousal coverage. Is this in fact a stipulation of the ACA, or is his employer just taking advantage of the timing to gouge him for a few dollars more?

This is not ACA related. It is employers seeking to minimize their costs by covering as few people as possible while taking advantage of an extremely weak labor market to change the terms of the social contract.

Speaking behind the veil of ignorance, tying health coverage to employment is just odd, and the ACA is slowly dissolving those bonds.  Employers offer health insurance becuase they can offer their employees a better deal if the insurance is purchased as a group than if they buy it on the individual market. This better deal is due to tax treatment, statistical variance control, a healthier population than the general population, and bulk purchasing.  Employers really don’t want to pay to cover an entire family but the social contract has been that they have to offer family coverage if they want to attract and retain middle class workers.

That implied social contract was formed when it was typical that a married family had one person (usually the husband) working at a job with good benefits and the other person (usually the wife) was either not working or working at a low wage/low benefit position.

That reality has changed dramatically.

And employers are trying to not pay to cover people that they don’t have to while still offering at least the patina of offering family coverage.  The goal of the scheme is to divert people (usually spouses, sometimes adult children) away from the best insurance deal to lower coverage values by increasing the relative cost of the best insurance deal.

My wife’s company does this.  She could cover our family for $193 a month for a Gold plan if I was not working at a job with health insurance available to me.  Since I do have an ACA qualified plan offered to me, I am ineligible to get on her family plan unless I pay a $200 a month surcharge over and above the family rate.  For us, this is not a problem, as Mayhew Insurance allows my wife to come onto my plan, and our monthly premium deduction for a Gold Plus plan is less than half of my wife’s company’s charge.

If I did not work for Mayhew Insurance but worked at MegaEvilBank that offers a Bronze plan only to its employees, $300/month might be worthwhile for me to go to the much better plan with a $1500 out of pocket max instead of the $6,500 deductible.  But my wife’s employer is trying to minimize the number of people they actually have to cover and pay for.  The covered spouse surcharge does that by first diverting spouses who are covered under shitty insurance to jump to good insurance and secondly getting some of their employees to go on the spouse’s coverage that does not have a surcharge.

Monday Morning Open Thread: Not the Onion

 Posted by at 5:29 am
Oct 192015
 

From the CNN article:

… “We’re not trying to get Larry onto ‘Saturday Night Live,’ of course — we just want to protect his equal right to speak to viewers,” Lessig campaign counsel Adam Bonin said in a statement to CNNMoney…

Clinton’s cameo on “SNL” lasted 3 minutes and 12 seconds, according to the memo. So Lessig would like the same amount of time, perhaps for informative ads about his campaign, which is focused on fixing what he says are the corrupting effects of money in politics…

On Saturday, Lessig reversed course on a pledge he had made to resign immediately after passing campaign finance reform if he were elected. He now says he would serve a full term, saying he decided his pledge had undermined his campaign.

His equal time request was sent October 10 to NBC’s top 35 affiliates plus those in states with early primaries. NBC responded on October 12 and asked for proof that both Lessig and Clinton are “legally qualified” candidates. The law calls for proof before equal air time is granted…

There is video (six-plus minutes, since we’re counting), but I can’t be that cruel to you guys this early in the morning.
*************
Apart from hopeless clowns with big dreams, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?

Open Thread: What’s the Level Below ‘Farce’?

 Posted by at 6:58 pm
Oct 182015
 

benghazi no giggling luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Per the Washington Post, Trey Gowdey is not gonna give up easily, just because his prize committee has become almost as big a joke as Chris Christie’s presidential ambitions, and for approximately the same reasons:

… Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he has told Republican colleagues to “shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about. And unless you’re on the committee, you have no idea what we have done, why we have done it and what new facts we have found.”

Clinton is slated to testify before the committee on Thursday. She called the panel “a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee” and said she did not know what to expect from Thursday’s hearing.

“I already testified about Benghazi. I testified to the best of my ability before the Senate and the House. I don’t know that I have very much to add,” Clinton said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I will do my best to answer their questions, but I don’t really know what their objective is right now.”…

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested in a recent Fox News interview that the committee was formed to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) and Bradley F. Podliska, a former Republican staffer on the committee, also called the investigation politically motivated.

Gowdy said McCarthy, Hanna and Podliska are “three people who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.”…

Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, remained skeptical of Gowdy’s comments.

“It’s interesting that after 17 months, $4.7 million and counting of taxpayer money, that Chairman Gowdy is now saying he has another two dozen witnesses to interview. It’s very interesting,” Cummings said on “Face the Nation.” “I do believe that what he has tried to do — I listened to him very carefully — he’s now trying to shift back to where we should have been all along. That is looking at the Benghazi incident. And it’s clear to me.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a committee member, accused Republicans on the panel of leaking information to the media to embarrass Clinton. Cummings addressed the issue in a memo released Sunday, saying the committee has attempted to attack Clinton repeatedly over her use of a private e-mail server while at the State Department. Gowdy disputed the allegation in a memo and said he cares about Clinton’s e-mails “only to the extent that they relate to Libya and Benghazi.”…

Dueling memos! Dude, you figured beating up on That Woman Everyone Mistrusts would make your bones as an effective thug for your quasi-criminal organization. But even if your associates had managed to keep their big yaps shut, wasting all that time and money just to inconvenience a great many innocent people was never gonna win you any popularity contests. And you’ve done a great job of convincing everyone who wasn’t paying much attention before your cronies blew the gaff that your “serious, hard-charging, effective prosecutor” rep was self-promotion by a cheap bully with a badge.

ETA:

Desperation

 Posted by at 5:25 pm
Oct 182015
 


Tomorrow is election day in Canada, and Stephen Harper is obviously desperate to get Conservatives to the polls in the key Greater Toronto Area. According to the Canadian version of 538, Justin Trudeau and the liberals have a solid lead but probably won’t have the votes to form a government on their own. There’s only been one coalition government in Canada’s history, and Trudeau has said repeatedly that he won’t entertain a coalition with the NDP as long as Mulcair is their leader, so things could get interesting.

Speaking of Mulcair and the NDP, who looked much stronger earlier this year, apparently Mulcair’s inability to come out strongly  poor communcation of his opposition to Harper’s desire to ban the niqab (face covering) in Quebec is one small factor in the race.  In contrast, Trudeau essentially called Harper a racist over the issue.

Perhaps our Canadian readers would like to weigh in on why the NDP is doing so poorly. Is it Mulcaire’s comments, the view that the Liberals are the best bet to beat Harper, or is Canada embracing Trudeau the way this woman did at a pride parade in BC earlier this year?

justin
For those of you who don’t give a shit about Canadian politics, I hope you can at least enjoy the exercise of wondering who will end up having to tweet a picture of them kissing Donald Trump’s ass the weekend before our election next year.

NFL Open Thread

 Posted by at 12:45 pm
Oct 182015
 

Here are my picks for the week:

  
As usual, I really hope I’m wrong about some of them. I’d LOVE to see Lucky Luck and the Colts beat the Patriots, but that’s almost certainly not going to happen, not with the way the Colts have been playing. 

I’d also like to see the Dolphins prevail over the Titans, but I don’t see that happening either. Feel free to tell me how full of crap I am in comments!

Answer to a Trivia Question

 Posted by at 11:07 am
Oct 182015
 

French Horn FTW

I saw this band (the Hummingbirds) at a local bar last night. I told the woman playing the french horn that she was like an answer to a trivia question (“Which rock band featured a french horn?”).  She said that Creedence Clearwater Revival sometimes had a french horn. Does anyone have another example?

Dumbghazi

 Posted by at 10:37 am
Oct 182015
 

Well, it turns out that Hillary’s emails do contain some scandalous info.   The Daily Mail:

A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by Tony Blair and George Bush over the Iraq War.

The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started.

It flies in the face of the Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ – in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals.

[…]

The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.

Breathless tabloid prose aside, it’s still pretty funny that perhaps the most important discovery from a committee that has held almost as many hearings as the 9/11 committee concerns one of W’s fuckups.

Update: Nice to see that Trump reads the papers (thanks to srv in the comments):

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