For Senate this year, Dems nominated two weed opponents (NV, NH), corp lobbyists (PA, IN), & a trust fund kid former Republican (FL)— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 2, 2016
And people wonder why the Democrats are often perceived as inauthentic.
Month: November 2016
How Convenient
The exchanges opened up yesterday for next year’s insurance.
In Minnesota, the voice lines were shut down by a massive influx robocalls:
The health insurance shopping season got off to a rough start Tuesday with technical difficulties at the MNsure website, complaints over long waits at the health exchange call center and a claim from DFL Gov. Mark Dayton that MNsure had been targeted by robocallers trying to tie up phone lines.
The troubles came on a day when MNsure hoped to dismiss any lingering doubts about an IT system that outraged many consumers during its balky launch in 2013.
With health insurance premiums jumping by more than 50 percent on average next year, MNsure is the only source in Minnesota for federal tax credits that could blunt the impact of rate spikes. State officials told shoppers to buy early, because caps on enrollment in most health plans mean that most insurance options could disappear altogether.
Many MNsure users successfully enrolled in coverage, but others complained of error messages, locked accounts and uncertainty about whether they’d successfully enrolled in a plan. By late morning, a key section of the MNsure website was down for about 30 minutes, along with portions of websites at nearly 70 other state agencies.
The MNsure call center opened at 8 a.m., and shoppers were complaining within a few hours about long wait times. DFL Gov. Mark Dayton told reporters that the state’s IT division found the waits were being ballooned by automated call systems.
“Somebody’s trying to jam the call center, and making robocalls to try to snafu the thing — which is deplorable,” Dayton said. “They’ve identified that culprit, and are acting … to exclude them from the system.”
The term for this is ratf%$#ing, a term originated often used by Nixon’s dirty trick squad, of which Roger Stone, ratf%$#er for Trump, was a prominent member.
This is no innocent technical error.
Glenda Jackson is Your Bucket Full of Awesome Today
Two time Oscar winning actress Glenda Jackson took a 25-year hiatus from acting.
She decided to engage in a side career as a member of parliament.
Now, at age 80, she is returning to acting ……… playing Lear ……… at the Old Vic.
If anyone wants to make me happy, send me to London to see this:
It’s one of the most demanding roles in theater, but Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, will open a new production of “King Lear” on Friday having not stepped onstage for 25 years. In the interim, she worked to keep a realm together as a member of the British Parliament; her first act in her return to the theater will be to play a monarch who breaks one up.
Many major actors take a run at the role in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a part so daunting that it’s nicknamed Mount Lear. It would seem especially so for Ms. Jackson, whose last performance came in 1991, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Glasgow Citizens Theater. Her return, after such a long hiatus, is highly unusual and, at 80, she is older than all but one of Britain’s last 10 Lears in major productions.
What’s more, she’s playing him at the Old Vic — a 198-year-old, 1,000-seat theater with an imposing history. Laurence Olivier was Othello there; Judi Dench was Juliet. “She’s part of that tradition now,” its artistic director, Matthew Warchus, said.
Before starting his job, Mr. Warchus invited Ms. Jackson for a meeting. He had tried to tempt her back into acting while she was still in Parliament, to no avail, and he arrived with “very, very low expectations.”
Her reply took him by surprise, as did her suggestion that she play King Lear.
Please ……… Send me to London.
Linkage
- Evaluating Germany’s Success in Regulating High-Frequency Trading (RegBlog) Regulate the algorithms, because trying to follow individual trades is like drinking from a firehose.
- The Story of the Self Destruction of Deutsche Bank (Der Spiegel) So much for German probity and virtue.
- West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize With ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’ (Bloomberg) Anthropogenic climate change hits keep on coming.
- Clinton Foundation: Inurement (Bullsh%$ ist)
- A $72-million apartment project. Top politicians. Unlikely donors. Who wrote the checks to elected officials weighing approval? (Los Angeles Times) Our broken campaign finance system.
- Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run (The Guardian) Thomas Franks notes the venality and arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership.
The funniest western movie since Blazing Saddles:
Nope and Change
In response to a spate of for profit college failures and scandals, the Obama Administration has moved to make it harder for defrauded students to get released from their student loans:
A new rule finalized Friday by the Obama administration will cost student debtors who say their colleges defrauded them some longstanding rights to get their federal loans canceled, while colleges on shaky financial footing dodged a government crackdown.
Those regulations, proposed in June, mark the administration’s response to the spate of closures of for-profit colleges, following state and federal investigations and lawsuits that have so far led more than 80,000 Americans to seek debt relief, alleging fraud, according to new figures the U.S. Department of Education also released Friday.
According to a summary of the rule the agency provided late Thursday1, borrowers who receive federal student loans starting next July and who subsequently accuse their colleges of misleading them into enrolling will face a narrower path to debt relief than today’s borrowers.
If the rule is upheld, defrauded student debtors no longer will be able to get their loans canceled by alleging their schools violated state laws, unless they first successfully sue. Instead, they’ll be subject to a new federal standard—one officials say is more efficient but consumer advocates say limits borrowers’ ability to file claims.
Notwithstanding that the new regulations prevent binding arbitration, this is a classic Obama administration rule: In the face of problems created by bad actors, we see an accommodation of those miscreants, with the rest of us bearing the cost.
Our Broken Pharmaceutical System
Insulin has been around for 95 years, but the price keeps increasing more than twice as fast as inflation:
At first, the researchers who discovered insulin agonized about whether to patent the drug at all. It was 1921, and the team of biochemists and physicians based in Toronto was troubled by the idea of profiting from a medicine that had such widespread human value, one that could transform diabetes from a death sentence into a manageable disease.
Ultimately, they decided to file for a patent — and promptly sold it to the University of Toronto for $3, or $1 for each person listed. It was the best way, they believed, to ensure that no company would have a monopoly and patients would have affordable access to a safe, effective drug.
“Above all, these were discoverers who were trying to do a great humanitarian thing,” said historian Michael Bliss, “and they hoped their discovery was a kind of gift to humanity.”
But the drug also has become a gift to the pharmaceutical industry. A version of insulin that carried a list price of $17 a vial in 1997 is priced at $138 today. Another that launched two decades ago with a sticker price of $21 a vial has been increased to $255.
The magic of the market is a myth when it comes to drugs.
We need to stop evergreening minor changes in drugs, and we need to adopt the price controls used by the national health systems of other industrialized nations.
This is insane.
Worst ……… The Daily Show ……… Ever
I saw The Daily Show last night, and I was profoundly unimpressed.
I’ve generally been supportive of Trevor Noah in his (rather thankless) job replacing Jon Stewart, but their (for lack of a better term) Halloween special missed the mark.
It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, it ain’t.
I found it boring, pedantic, and profoundly unfunny.
Half way through, I gave up, and watched Alton Brown doing Good Eats on the Cooking Channel.
Truly awful: