She Has Hair Like Tortured Midnight

by 1:31 am. It has 13 Comments.

I have never seen a dog with such glamorous lashes. I am so jealous.

bailey-lashes

Things are going as well as can be expected with a 10 month old Great Dane puppy and a still puppy-like two year old Dane. Utter chaos peppered with bouts of sleeping, lots of drool and many, many games of tug. All Bixby ever wanted was a tug partner and he has met his match.

In other news, seems we might have company:

Strange Messages Coming From The Stars

A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence.

Preliminary, but fascinating all the same.

Open thread.





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Open Thread: Bill Explains It

by 10:59 pm. It has 195 Comments.

Y’know, Bill’s the one with the raw political talent (aka ‘charisma’), but I can see that he might actually think the woman he’s loved so long is not only smarter than he is, but liable to end up in the history books as the better President, too.


Let’s Go, Cubbies!

by 8:08 pm. It has 236 Comments.

img_0869

That is all.





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Open Thread: Trump’s Dropping All Pretense

by 6:16 pm. It has 181 Comments.

And you didn’t even know he had pretense! From the Washington Post article:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has effectively shut down his high-dollar fundraising operation for the rest of the campaign, a highly unusual move that deals another serious blow to the GOP’s effort to finance its get-out-the-vote operation before Election Day.

Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s national finance chairman, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday that Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between the party and the campaign, held its last formal fundraiser on Oct. 19. The luncheon was in Las Vegas on the day of the final presidential debate.

While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is headlining her last fundraiser Tuesday night in Miami, her campaign has scheduled 41 other events between now and Nov. 3 featuring high-profile surrogates such as her daughter, Chelsea, running mate Tim Kaine and the entertainer Cher, according to a schedule sent to donors this weekend.

Mnuchin said the Trump campaign decided to keep the candidate’s final weeks focused on taking his message to the voters in person rather than on raising money. There may be a handful of events in coming days featuring Trump surrogates, including his son Donald Jr., according to people familiar with the internal discussions. But Mnuchin said “there is virtually nothing planned.”

… Trump’s decision effectively turns off one of the main spigots to the Republican National Committee, which collected $40 million through Trump Victory as of Sept. 30. The party has devoted a large share of the funds to pay for its national voter mobilization program to benefit the entire Republican ticket.

RNC officials said that party leaders, including chairman Reince Priebus, are continuing to bring in resources for the party. “The RNC continue to fundraise for the entire GOP ticket,” said spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.

Mnuchin said Trump does not need high-dollar fundraisers because his campaign is being buoyed by online donations, which he said are on track to hit a new record in October…. But the RNC gets only 20 percent of the money that Trump raises online in conjunction with the party, while the vast majority of the big checks contributed to Trump Victory are routed to the party…

Trump has no respectable surrogates, and he’s lost interest in doing fundraisers now that it’s clear the party hopes to salvage other peoples’ campaigns rather than pumping up his. Sucks to be you, RNC!


Tuesday Early Evening Open Thread

by 4:32 pm. It has 91 Comments.

On the way home from running some errands I stopped by the Barn With Inn and spent some quality time with Chatman and the animals:

Such a good place.





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Tuesday Afternoon Open Thread

by 2:53 pm. It has 107 Comments.

Have we seen this one before?

Vet tech is trying to restrain a large dog (possibly a mastiff?) to trim its nails, and the dog bolts with the vet tech hanging on like a bronco buster. I love the woman who collapses with laughter after her colleague is carried off by the runaway beast.

My dogs are somewhat unruly at home but good as gold at the vet’s office. Go figure.

Open thread!





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336 Hours

by 10:46 am. It has 323 Comments.

You know that handful of folks who show up at this here blog to taunt Clinton supporters when there’s a bad run of polling? Do not expect them today. Even this cycle’s outlier polls that Trump loves to tweet — Rasmussen, LAT/USC and IBD/TIPP — are showing Clinton leads.

Like Trump, I have my favorite polls, though unlike Trump, I don’t put too much stock in the snapshots but rather pay heed to averages. But as far as today’s crop goes, I like ABC’s daily tracking poll, which shows Clinton up by 12. I think this is my favorite part:

2016-10-25

If it holds, that gap signifies a stunning repudiation of the Angry Circus Peanut from a group the GOP cannot write off if they ever hope to be competitive in a national election again.

circus-peanutsOn average, there’s an 8-point gender gap in US presidential elections that favors Democrats. Most of the credit goes to nonwhite women, who vote for Democrats by overwhelming percentages.

White women vote Democrat in larger numbers than white men do, but Republicans typically get the majority of their votes too. Doesn’t look like that’ll be the case this year.

Thanks for getting a clue, fellow college-educated white women! Now go talk some sense into the white dudes in your lives. (Though to their credit, even white dudes are abandoning Trump — the poll shows Trump 4 points behind Clinton with college-educated white men and losing altitude with non-college white men.)

Another interesting thing to note about the above chart, as someone on Twitter pointed out: Jill Stein has essentially ZERO support with this group, which means she’s sewn up the hardcore Dudebro bloc and pretty much nothing else.

And another thing: the Cook Report predicts that Team Donkey will pick up 5-7 seats to secure a majority in the US Senate. Life might be about to get more interesting for Judge Garland.

Just 14 days to go before our long national nightmare is over, my friends. A mere fortnight. Vote. Phonebank. Knock on doors. We can do this.


Healthcare.gov Silver Spreads for 2017

by 7:08 am. It has 27 Comments.

Using the 2017 QHP Landscape PUF file , I was able to build a map of the Silver Gap and Silver Spams regions of that are served by Healthcare.gov

silver-gap-2017-with-single-carrier-counties

Dark red is a small gap and dark green is a large gap.  The smallest gap is $.03 while the largest gap is in western Tennessee at about $97.

The intermediate processed data is available on a Google Sheet. The grayed out counties in HC.gov are the counties with only a single Silver plan. Given the way I set up my map, they were not showing anything. If I was not doing this as I was relaxing after putting the kids to bed, I would do this right, but for quick and dirty, a single Silver county is effectively a Silver Spam county. updated to show single Silver counties.

On first glance, the spreads are massive. The smallest spread in a multiple Silver county is three cents. The largest spread is just under $100. In non-HC.gov states, there are larger spreads in California.

Tennessee, Montana and, central Illinois, southeast Pennsylvania, north Texas  and a few other slots seem to benefit from significant Silver Gaps of at least $40.  I am very curious as to what is happening in Tennessee as almost the entire state is a massive Silver Gap strategy.

Kansas, Utah, South Carolina, Maine, New Hampshire are entirely Silver Spammed.  Significant chunks of South Carolina (and south Jersey) have counties where the spread is under $1.00 between the benchmark and the least expensive Silver plans.

If anyone wants the data, please grab it and see what fun things you can do with it.

Definition update:  Silver Gap is when the price spread between the cheapest Silver in a county and the benchmark, second lowest priced Silver is wide.  This gives the subsidized buyers a great deal on the #1 Silver.

Silver spam is when the price spread between the #1 and #2 is tiny. The buyers of the #1 Silver do not get a meaningfully better deal.





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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Never Kiss A Trump Toad on the Lips

by 5:17 am. It has 190 Comments.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
.

Hugh Laurie is a very funny fella — even off the cuff:

Apart from working towards a Democratic landslide, what’s on the agenda for the day?


Late Night Steve Open Thread

by 12:03 am. It has 80 Comments.

“None of this stuff is important, right? You don’t mind that I jumped up here to lie down on all your shit, right?”

latenightsteve2

“Oh, good. Then I’ll just stay right here and stretch out. BTW, running low on tuna, fatty.”

latenightsteve

Rough life.





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Open Thread: Affirmatively Pro-HRC

by 10:44 pm. It has 161 Comments.

Yeah, just because Hillary voters weren’t seeking out chances to yell LOCK HIM UP on camera, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. From Politico, ten days ago, “Revenge of the White Working-Class Woman“:

… The first polls to emerge since the release of the “Access Hollwood” videotape now show a historic gender gap splitting what might be the GOP’s most important constituency. The fracture was already apparent back in August, when a four-way poll showed Trump’s lead over Clinton among white men without a college degree was 40 percent, but only 12 percent among women without a college degree. This week, after the 2005 videotape was released, that number stayed roughly the same for blue-collar men—Trump is still up in that group by 43 percentage points—but it tanked for women, to a low that hasn’t been seen since the 1960s, with the exception of Bill Clinton in 1996. According to the first post-videotape poll, among white women without a college degree, Hillary Clinton had pulled even.

It might be easy to write off blue-collar women as a special interest group, like the 18-25 demographic of some slice of suburbia. But the situation is almost exactly the opposite: If you look at the white working class—Americans without a college degree—the majority, 53 percent, are women. Right now, the numbers suggest that within that group, women’s interests appear to be diverging so quickly from their male counterparts they could stop whatever momentum Trump has left. “The rationale for [Trump’s] candidacy is that he is the champion of the hardworking Americans that the elitists have left behind. But many of those hardworking Americans are women,” says John J. Pitney Jr., an American politics professor at Claremont McKenna College…


Monday Evening Open Thread: Vladimir’s Men Are Very Disappointed

by 8:28 pm. It has 338 Comments.

Their choice of catspaws just aren’t doing the job of relitigating the Cold War. But the gentlemen at Foreign Affairs permit themselves a small frosty smile concerning “Russia’s October Surprise“:

The month of October is never a quiet one in a U.S. presidential election year. But this time, the run-up to the vote has been marked by a series of high-stakes cyber-skirmishes between Washington and Moscow. Over the summer, intent on derailing the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Russia released damning emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), leading to the resignation of chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Hoping to create yet another stir, Russia then handed over a batch of Clinton’s e-mails to WikiLeaks on October 7. But much to Moscow’s chagrin, Washington was able to rob Moscow of the element of surprise, and Russia’s “October surprise” fizzled.

Just before the WikiLeaks dump, the White House released a statement in which it directly accused Russia for the first time of hacking the e-mails of DNC and Democratic Party members. The unexpected and unprecedented announcement dominated the headlines, leaving Russia’s and WikiLeaks’ attempts to show Clinton as shifty and close to Wall Street as a sideshow….

The failure of Russia’s long-planned October surprise to tip the election appears to have angered Moscow, which had planned this operation well in advance in hopes of destroying Clinton’s chance of winning the presidency. While news of the DNC hacks first surfaced in June, it was widely reported that they had taken place months earlier, and the e-mails were purposely released in July just before the Democratic National Convention. On July 27, Trump explicitly welcomed Russia’s release of the hacked e-mails, stating, “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. . . . I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” When the leaked e-mails failed to get sufficient attention, Trump supporters were deeply disappointed. Trump associate Roger Stone tweeted on October 1, “@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” There is every reason to believe that Russian hackers and their sponsors felt the same way and were disappointed when Hillary’s support surged after the release, while Donald Trump’s campaign hit the shoals…

Trump’s continued decline in the polls throughout October suggests that Russia’s saber rattling has not had any clear electoral impact. International affairs are simply not central to most voters in this election. This is a fact that is hard for average Russians to understand, as their television propaganda keeps them on high alert to the possibility of a Western invasion. As a result, they tend to believe that Americans are also centrally focused on Russia, which is clearly not the case…

On October 17, a British bank announced that it was shutting down the United Kingdom­–based bank accounts of Russia Today, a pro-Kremlin media channel. Although the measure will not take Russia Today off the air in Europe, it will most likely make it extremely difficult for the Russian state propaganda network to operate in the United Kingdom. This is the first time that a Western government apparently intervened directly in the media to curb Russian English-language propaganda stations. The move comes just before France and Germany face vitally important elections in the next year. Russian hackers are also suspected of stealing the e-mails of Germany’s Christian Democrat Union parliamentarians, who face a challenge from pro-Russia right-wing extremists. There will probably be selective releases of e-mails from the incumbents there, too, as the election approaches.

Ecuador’s decision to deny WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Internet access should probably be read in the same light. Although the circumstances of Ecuador’s decision remain unknown, there is every reason to suspect that it capitulated to Western government pressure, given the sensitive timing of Assange’s involvement in the U.S. presidential campaign. After all, external efforts to covertly undermine democratic elections have an unfortunate resonance in Latin America…

***********

Once having acknowledged that the 1960s are never coming back, thankfully, what’s on the agenda for the evening?


Obama Ices Issa

by 4:16 pm. It has 251 Comments.

Some of y’all mentioned this in earlier threads, but additional details about the Obama-on-Issa smack-down make it all the more delicious. Via Jezebel:

California Rep. and wheezing obstructionist Rep. Darrell Issa (R), locked in the closest race of his congressional career thanks to the half-melted pile of candy corn from Halloween ‘83 that he endorsed for president, has proven himself rather immune to irony; most recently, Issa tried to praise President Obama, the man he’s spent 8 years demonizing, in a campaign mailer. Unfortunately for Issa, Obama is about to leave office and has nothing to lose.

Last week, Issa sent out a mailer that included, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a nice photo of Obama at his desk” and a quote from Issa saying he was “very pleased” that Obama signed the Survivors Bill of Rights into law. At a fundraiser on Sunday night for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Obama praised Issa’s opponent, retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate, and called Issa “shameless.”

“Let me just point out that as far as I can tell, Issa’s primary contribution to the United States Congress has been to obstruct and to waste taxpayer dollars on trumped up investigations that have led nowhere,” Obama said, referring to Issa’s use of his image as “the definition of chutzpah.”

THWACK! I hadn’t realized the smarmy car thief was trying to hide behind PBO’s coattails. Yeah, “chutzpah” is the word, alright.

Issa was reduced to bleating about Benghazi in a follow-up statement, a sure sign that President Obama’s haymaker floored the slimy congressman. It would be great to see that sanctimonious, hypocritical prick Issa hit the bricks. C’mon California!


You’ve been so kind and generous

by 12:24 pm. It has 130 Comments.

We blew way past our 50K goal, and now past our 75K goal. Let’s keep it going.

Goal Thermometer





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NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED

by 10:30 am. It has 173 Comments.

This is hilarious:

The Trump campaign built a large policy shop in Washington that has now largely melted away because of neglect, mismanagement and promises of pay that were never honored. Many of the team’s former members say the campaign leadership never took the Washington office seriously and let it wither away after squeezing it dry.

Donald Trump often brags about having experts and senior former officials advising him. Wednesday night in a forum on national security, he said, “We have admirals, we have generals, we have colonels. We have a lot of people that I respect.” It’s true that Trump is getting high-level policy advice on a regular basis from senior experts such as Rudy Giuliani and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. But Trump has never acknowledged the policy shop based in Washington that has been doing huge amounts of grunt work for months without recognition or compensation.

Since April, advisers never named in campaign press releases have been working in an Alexandria-based office, writing policy memos, organizing briefings, managing surrogates and placing op-eds. They put in long hours before and during the Republican National Convention to help the campaign look like a professional operation.

But in August, shortly after the convention, most of the policy shop’s most active staffers quit. Although they signed non-disclosure agreements, several of them told me on background that the Trump policy effort has been a mess from start to finish.

“It’s a complete disaster,” one disgruntled former adviser told me. “They use and abuse people. The policy office fell apart in August when the promised checks weren’t delivered.”

Awesome.





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