Friday, May 2, 2014

Cheap shots and sex-on-the-desk

Via Portland State College.
Forced by reality to admit that soon-to-be-former L.A. Clippers owner and all-round racist scumbag Donald Sterling is a Republican, conservatives have been somewhat at a loss, but Reihan Salam has thought of a brilliant ploy:
My basic point is that Sterling, a notorious slumlord, has profited enormously from the tendency of liberal cities in California to limit housing permits. These limits help constrain the supply of low-rent housing, which in turn forces low-income renters to spend a high (and rising) proportion of their incomes on rent.
See that? He ought to be a Democrat. Assuming that this crazy scenario is true and city governments constantly calling for affordable housing are actually working against it on purpose. The man's a natural liberal!

Except for the part about making his living squeezing rent out of poor people and regarding himself as a maker among takers, a job creator whose employees are helpless dependents:
V: Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?
DS: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?
You've heard of Barack Obama with his feet on the desk, right? How about George W. Bush with his ass on the desk?  And his parents letting him get away with it! Kids these days! Photo by Eric Draper.
Meanwhile,

Glenn Beck: Hillary Clinton Will Have Sex With A Woman On White House Desk To Get Elected


Well, gosh, who wouldn't? Though I'm not quite seeing how that works, strategically.


Annals of Derp: Concern Trolling the Affordable Care Act

Patrick Brennan in the NRO Corner reannouncing the failure of Obamacare:
The Department of Health and Human Services had projected that 40 percent of enrollees in the Affordable Care Act’s health-care exchanges would be between the ages of 18 and 34, but following the open-enrollment deadline, just 28 percent of enrollees are in that age group, according to Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner.
Did you remember it that way? I remembered it a little different: that they'd targeted 40% as the number they'd need to reach to make it work actuarially, and nobody thought they'd get there this year. In fact, that was being too generous to the trolls. There was even less going on than that; it wasn't even HHS that came up with the number but the Kaiser Foundation, and they didn't make such a big deal of it either:
a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded that if only a quarter of enrollees are young invincibles, it will only raise premiums by 2.4 percent, hardly a death spiral.  (I can find no evidence, by the way, to support the oft-made claim that HHS projected at some point that 40 percent of enrollees in the exchanges would be young invincibles. The KFF study concludes that 40 percent young adult enrollment would be optimal based on their share of the uninsured population, apparently taking into account that many young adults qualify for Medicaid or are on their parents’ plans.) (Timothy Jost at Health Affairs, in Mid-January)
Since that 28% beats the 25% that KFF gave as the floor for the program working reasonably well, and the 25% that was actually being projected back in February by anybody who was projecting, it's pretty clear that youth enrollment is better than expected, not worse. And you don't have to read the rest of Brennan's stupid post, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Via The Political Carnival (January 2013).
39%
According to Politico, the percentage of White House correspondents (N = 61) at whom a White House staffer has ever sworn. Coincidentally, also the number that has been 1-5 years on the beat. Or is it a coincidence?

I guess it's really incompetent upon all of us, huh? And with great semicolons comes great responsibility.

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