Okay, so I don't really fish (NTTAWWT), but I am traveling today. So you are free to associate with abandon. No holds barred. No topics off limits. Okay, one limit - keep it clean and kind of family-friendly. No, most definitely "family-friendly".
If you are lost for a topic, here are a couple of "conversation-starters":
1. Equal-pay legislation - It died in Congress, but is there really a pay disparity? I read article after article that opines "yes! of course, women are victims" and "No! if you compare apples to apples, there is virtually no pay disparity". I have no opinion (yeah, right! If you believe that, I have a bridge that needs sellin'!), but what do think?
2. Obamacare - That's always fun. The Rand Corporation just published their findings in regards to Obamacare. Now I have a great deal of respect for Rand Corporation. In their reports that I have read on a variety of subject, they always have balanced, well-researched analysis. And this one is no different. But I need your opinion on the report - Changes in Health Insurance Enrollment Since 2013: Evidence from the RAND Health Reform Opinion Study.
So, this was the screaming headline on HuffPo, "9.3 MILLION MORE INSURED!!!***"! But, contrary to HuffPo's "analysis" that 9.3 million now have insurance that they otherwise would not have, the Rand analysis gives a much different take. It is almost as if the writer at HuffPo didn't really read the report. Now I have to admit, I cherry picked too, but I found two key statements in the Rand report that are interesting, but I would like your opinion:
On the opening "summary - "We also found that 3.9 million people are now covered through state and federal marketplace - the so-called insurance exchanges - and less than 1 million people who previously had individual-market insurance became uninsured to the period in question..."
And on page 6: "...Our estimates suggest that only about one-third of new marketplace enrollees were previously uninsured. While this seems relatively low, it is slightly higher than findings reported earlier..."
Any comments?
***Huffpo changed the original screaming headline and buried the story after its original posting. Someone probably read the Rand report and realized that the analysis wasn't really in their favor. I posted a comment on HuffPo that pretty much said that it was apparent that the writer had not really read the report. And amazingly, my posted comment was did not make it passed the censors...
If you are lost for a topic, here are a couple of "conversation-starters":
1. Equal-pay legislation - It died in Congress, but is there really a pay disparity? I read article after article that opines "yes! of course, women are victims" and "No! if you compare apples to apples, there is virtually no pay disparity". I have no opinion (yeah, right! If you believe that, I have a bridge that needs sellin'!), but what do think?
2. Obamacare - That's always fun. The Rand Corporation just published their findings in regards to Obamacare. Now I have a great deal of respect for Rand Corporation. In their reports that I have read on a variety of subject, they always have balanced, well-researched analysis. And this one is no different. But I need your opinion on the report - Changes in Health Insurance Enrollment Since 2013: Evidence from the RAND Health Reform Opinion Study.
So, this was the screaming headline on HuffPo, "9.3 MILLION MORE INSURED!!!***"! But, contrary to HuffPo's "analysis" that 9.3 million now have insurance that they otherwise would not have, the Rand analysis gives a much different take. It is almost as if the writer at HuffPo didn't really read the report. Now I have to admit, I cherry picked too, but I found two key statements in the Rand report that are interesting, but I would like your opinion:
On the opening "summary - "We also found that 3.9 million people are now covered through state and federal marketplace - the so-called insurance exchanges - and less than 1 million people who previously had individual-market insurance became uninsured to the period in question..."
And on page 6: "...Our estimates suggest that only about one-third of new marketplace enrollees were previously uninsured. While this seems relatively low, it is slightly higher than findings reported earlier..."
Any comments?
***Huffpo changed the original screaming headline and buried the story after its original posting. Someone probably read the Rand report and realized that the analysis wasn't really in their favor. I posted a comment on HuffPo that pretty much said that it was apparent that the writer had not really read the report. And amazingly, my posted comment was did not make it passed the censors...
41 comments:
Bev, There's a lot more in the Rand report too. I'll probably talk about that on Monday.
The equal pay thing is funny because it's yet another Democratic fraud. They don't push it unless they are sure the Republicans will stop them and they don't even act according to it in the way they pay their own staff. And this time, the MSM is actually pointing that out!
Yep, the equal pay drive is just a fraud, like going after the Koch Brothers to get the masses all excited. The Dims are masters of getting the natives all riled up and then throwing them a bone and they calm down...they act pretty much like my beagles...I personally can't get over the treason being exhibited by so many Dims, and that's what it is, when Holder and many other people in the administration are caught in lies and crimes and yet the president, the Democrat party, the other Democrat members of congress just turn away and make snarky comment about it. Lois Lerner, Holder and so many more should be in jail...
and on another note, someone is lying about the Russkies warning us about the two brothers that set off those bombs in Boston and I have a feeling it's either our Federales, the Boston Police or both..the Russians had nothing to gain by lying, but the police agencies are squirming. The Russians may not have given explicit warnings about the brothers, but I bet they gave enough to get a warrant.
The "equal pay" issue is proof that you can only beat a dead horse for so long. I don't know that Republicans and conservatives have been especially effective in spreading the news that, hey! pay discrimination is illegal and life-choices effect income. Still, they have been sounding that drum long enough that a tipping point has picked up the beat.
Bill Bennett's show is about the only conservative talk-show that doesn't make me mad. If there were more on-air like him, well... unicorns and leprechauns, I suppose. Anyway, he and his female guest were discussing this issue and they were doing it right. A very straightforward, NPR-esque (without the tribal bumper music) conversation about what I said in the above paragraph. They also described where the phony numbers come from in a very tangible way--it's not that the numbers are wrong, per se, but they are the answer to the wrong question. Then they turned to the wholly agreeable idea that it is better for women to choose their own career paths than to try forcing gender parity in every field b/c, frankly, it's not going to happen. In other words, they made a case that was rationally impossible to disagree with.
Granted, this is more in-depth than a soundbite would allow, but I make the NPR comparison for that reason. And a lot of what I hear on NPR I encounter being distilled for other, short-attention-span outlets. Not so with conservative talk.
I do still long for a news organization with the wherewithal to say, "Huh, it seems we already have equal pay laws on the books. What could Washington possibly be hoping to achieve with another one?"
That last comment was long, so I decided to separate my thoughts on Obamacare. Someone's going to have to help me with this math. The RAND report says 9.3 million more have health coverage. Employer sponsored plans increased by 8.2 million and Medicaid enrollment increased by 5.9 million while less than 1 million lost coverage. Do employer plans and Medicaid overlap?
Healthcare isn't an issue I'm real knowledgeable about or interested in, but recently there have been a lot of articles on (liberal) black oriented websites talking about how terrible Obamacare is.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/obamacare-patients-without-doctors_n_5044270.html?utm_hp_ref=black-voices&ir=Black%20Voices
Iorio has not been able to find a urologist for her son or an ob-gyn who is both covered by her insurance and practicing in a hospital that is covered. She's called over a dozen doctors who are covered by her insurance, and each has told her that if she or her son needs an operation in the hospitals the doctor contracts with, it won't be covered.
"My insurance is pretty useless. And I'm not fussy about what doctor I see," Iorio said. "I don't know what to do. I may just drop it for myself and keep my son on it. It's really depressing."
Before joining Covered California, Iorio had an individual Blue Shield plan that was cheaper than what she now pays and that gave her wider access to doctors and hospitals.
Nice share, Anthony. I expect there will be more and more of these articles, which means Republicans need to come up with an answer that beats the inevitable Democrat answer: force Obamacare doctors to work with Obamacare hospitals. The other likely response is to just force every doctor and hospital to take Obamacare.
tryanmax, As far as I can tell, the 9 million number appeared either from Huffpo or Puffpo, i.e. the White House, and the MSM has run with it. I can't recreate that number out of the Rand report.
Anthony, That's interesting. I think that blacks are going to find Obamacare to be a real mess for them. And I suspect that the moment Obama is out of office, all the black groups will go on the offensive.
Interesting to see Marco Rubio talk about fixing college costs in an article at CNBC. His initial proposal is an Obama "me too" about stretching out payments based on income. //shrugs shoulders If it didn't catch on for Obama, why try this again?
His second ideas is... uh. Well, what do you make about this statement about how to reduce the cost of college:
To do this, we should embrace innovative financing tools that would better serve students and bring market forces to bear on the higher education system. One promising idea, originally proposed by Milton Friedman and discussed in a recent report published by the American Enterprise Institute, would have investors provide students with money for school in exchange for a percentage of their income for a set period of time after graduation.
This is the point where students collectively tell him to f*ck off. This sound complex. It sounds like you need to know rich people to go to school. It does nothing to lower the cost of college, it just changes who you owe the money too. And it sounds like indentured servitude.
Horrible idea.
Yeah, that's a ridiculous idea. How is that not indentured servitude?
What someone needs to propose is a mechanism to tap into endowments. Liberals all seem to think that the wealthy only hoard their money. Endowments are probably where that idea originated.
Yeah, honestly, this is the kind of thinking that really shows the very lack of savvy and humanity we've been talking about: "go sell yourself to rich people."
I mean, seriously, if I were working at SNL, this would be a dream plan to mock. I would go with some sort of Dickensian theme:
Poor kid: "Please sir, may I go to college?"
Rubio: "Why don't you sell yourself to someone rich?"
In walks Dick Cheney with a whip.
>>And it sounds like indentured servitude.
Horrible idea. >>
Maybe I've been immersed in the entertainment world too long, but the concept doesn't sound far off from a semi-paid internship, with the respective companies picking up part of the tab for business-specific training. With some tinkering from Team GOP, notably in the presentation, I might actually raise its grade to a B+.
Breaking News: Kathleen Sebelius will be resigning to celebrate the success that is Obamacare. She's not sure when though or what she's resigning from or how many people were involved in the decision or if she has ever resigned before.. she doesn't track that kind of information, but she assures us that she is resigning.
Eric, There's no way to sell this to the public. You want to go to college? Fine, Warren Buffett will pay the bill and then he'll own you for the next 20 years, during which time he'll be taking a percentage of your income.
No chance.
Eric, there's a burgeoning movement toward fixing the internship system. The ire is mostly directed at unpaid gigs that have become downright exploitative, but you can bet that low-paid internships will be next. So far, companies seem to be reforming on their own. (They should; some programs are downright illegal. They're potentially facing more than just civil suits.) At this juncture, the last thing the GOP needs to be seen as doing is devising a replacement for the flawed internship system that is possibly on it's way out. It would just serve as more "evidence" of their being in Big Business' pocket.
Darn it, Andrew! I thought I could finally beat you to the breaking news around here! Ah, well. Maybe next time...
That being said, let's look at another angle for this story: could someone explain to me how on earth Sebelius managed to keep her job as long as she did? Washington culture? The necessary fall guy, er, lady? The complete incompetence of the administration? (Of which, other than Obama, she's probably the best example?) The horrifying possibility that maybe she WAS the best this administration could cough up for the job? How, I ask you, how?!
So, Sebelius is resigning. You know, I never thought it would actually happen.
If the internship's already going the way of the dodo, I'll gladly stand corrected. Told ya my Hell A potato been bakin' too long.
"I thank Secretary Sebelius for her service. She had an impossible task: nobody can make Obamacare work." —Eric Cantor
Eric, don't misquote me. It makes me rip my hair out. I never said internships are on their way out, but the current way of doing them (i.e. brewing coffee and running copies for no pay) is facing serious legal challenges. Basically, in order for an unpaid internship to be in compliance with labor laws, there needs to be actual on-the-job training, but many companies have turned interns into gophers.
Since this has come to light, many of the companies who have been playing by the rules have stepped up their game and are paying (or in some cases, upping the pay) of their legitimate interns. This, in turn, is pressuring the bad actors to either clean up their act or stop offering internships altogether. (A few have tried to raise lamentations over this last fact, but I don't see much buy-in.)
No one wants to see internships go away. They just want to make them operate by the rules. Interns are akin to trainees, not personal assistants. If someone is working for no pay, they deserve to learn a skill; management can load the cup into their own Keurig machine.
As I said before, this is resolving itself mostly without government intervention. I've heard tell of a few class-action suits, but it doesn't seem to be spawning a trend. Companies want the government out of their hair on this. But things like what Rubio is proposing will sound to young people like he's offering companies a replacement to the sweet intern racket they are losing.
P.S. I don't expect anything to fix entertainment internships. That industry seems to get away with everything. It's mostly in the business world that this is happening.
tyranmax,
re Entertainment Industry
One of the first lawsuits over internships was against Fox Searchlight over their treatment of interns. Of course, lawsuits haven't stopped studios from engaging in clever accounting to avoid paying royalties so...
Kit, huh! I didn't realize any studios had been drug in, let alone early on. Thanks.
On internships, there have been a ton of lawsuits lately claiming that interns need to be paid. It sounds like the tech industry pays them now. The legal industry is starting. I'm not sure about the rest.
But to me, the bigger issue isn't the internship, it's the problem that the GOP proposal reads like: "We aren't going to cut your costs, we're just going to put you at the mercy of rich people who will now get a portion of your income." That's just horrible politics!
Kit, I wouldn't even have been gracious. That's something the GOP needs to learn. "It's about time, after the mess she made about Obamacare. It couldn't have been more incompetently put together. Of course, that said, this thing is such a mess that no one can make it work. So while she was admitting horrible in her mishandling of this, she's ultimately just a scapegoat for a miserable failure of a program."
Well, tryanmax, you want to get technical, I didn't misquote you, I merely didn't fully quote you. Silly me for assuming your "internship as we know it" original thought process was being followed. Still, the "ass" is me, not you, but since you didn't use "please" when asking me not to misquote you, let's call us even -- except maybe in the hair department, which is merely a guess, not an assumption, as I don't know how much you pulled out in comparison to how my gradually receding hairline continues its march further up my forehead.
"The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads."
-Ray Bradbury
Just found this quote of his and couldn't pass up posting it.
Kind of interesting how the federal government backed down in a face-off with a bunch of militias over some guy who says (among other things) he doesn't have to pay taxes.
Wesley Snipes could have used that guy's PR agent.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/12/federal-agency-pulls-back-in-nevada-ranch-standoff-but-legal-fight-remains/
It's probably eventual that American, especially leftist, distaste for violence will come to the service of right wing separatists.
Layoffs at Al-Jazeera. Who knew that being the network for commentators too nutty for MSNBC wouldn't translate into millions of viewers?
http://nypost.com/2014/04/11/al-jazeera-americas-ratings-struggle-leads-to-layoffs/
Cable channel Al Jazeera America, which launched less than a year ago, is slashing expenses and laying off staff as it struggles to gain a foothold in the US.
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Al Jazeera America is averaging just 15,000 total viewers, roughly half those who tuned in to its predecessor, Current TV, according to Nielsen figures.
"Kind of interesting how the federal government backed down in a face-off with a bunch of militias over some guy who says (among other things) he doesn't have to pay taxes."
Kinda interesting that you don't have the full story. For one thing, this isn't about grazing rights. It is about a Harry Reid relative selling land he does not own to the Chinese who want to create a solar panel power station.
On the grazing rights, Bundy's family has been using that particular plot of land for over 140 years. BLM came after. Bundy had been paying the county, now BLM is demanding the money?
On the "endanged desert tortoise", it was introduced into the area to get the EPA involved. The new problem is the tortoise work well with cattle and have grown in population where the government is exterminating them.
"It's probably eventual that American, especially leftist, distaste for violence will come to the service of right wing separatists."
Flawed thinking. Separatists want to separate so they don't have to kill their fellow man. The left along with communists have no problem with violence or killing people, provided the people are disarmed or helpless like a baby in the womb.
Joel, I suggest you re-read my last comment for comprehension w/o introducing extraneous concepts and apply some critical thinking.
Joel,
Who are your sources? My first thought was Alex Jones, but some of what you said on this matter goes beyond anything he has said (no small feat).
FYI, I'm writing about this tonight actually. Bundy is a squatter.
From what I can gather about Bundy this began in 1993 when he stopped paying the fee for right to graze on public land. The Feds spent the next 20 years trying get him to pay. Then last year they gave him two orders giving him 45 days him to stop grazing on that land or face impoundment of the cattle.
He ignored them and so it has come to this.
Bundy is a squatter. A family that had the grazing rights of that particular piece of land since the 1870's stopped paying 20 years ago because of the onerous regulations and refused to recognize the BLM. So, I guess that makes him in the wrong. Do you want to kill his cattle and shoot?
The militias showed up because they believe the US government and particularly the Bureau of Land Management is in the wrong. The government stepped back because the Marshals probably didn't want to be the first to die. Only an insane man would start shooting when confronted with an armed mob. The military put a no-fly zone over the disputed property because they are flying drones in the area. No doubt to stop those crazy right wing militias.
Did you happen to catch the two women, one pregnant and the other a cancer victim, being shoved around? Did you also capture a Nevada county commissioner stating that Bundy supporters better have funeral plans? It does come from Infowars but it is a public statement.
This reminds me a little about the Delta smelt with a smattering of Waco, except we get video and live feeds from on the ground.
The only real question now is, What will Obama do? He backed down from Putin. Now his administration is made to back down from Bundy.
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