President Obama will nominate Jeh Johnson, formerly the Pentagon's top lawyer and a key figure in the administration's debate over the legality of drone use, to head the Department of Homeland Security, according to White House officials.

The official announcement will take place Friday at the White House. Johnson, if confirmed by the Senate, would succeed Janet Napolitano, who announced she was leaving the Cabinet post in July.

As the former Defense Department general counsel, Johnson was responsible for the legal work at the nation's largest bureaucracy. His job placed him at the center of some of Obama's most important national security decisions, from the practice of targeted killings beyond America's defined battlefields to the intervention in Libya.

"The president is selecting Johnson because he is one the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the nomination before its announcement. "During his tenure at the Department of Defense, he was known for his sound judgment and counsel."

The official added that Johnson was "responsible for the prior legal review and approval of every military operation approved by the president and secretary of defense" during Obama's first term.

BART strike here in SF, so I have to get my wife into the city. Hopefully CalTrain won't be too crazy, or I have to play limo driver. Where's some telecommuting when we need it? Oy.

Labor puts Dems on notice: Don't touch Medicare and Social Security benefits

In an interview, Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO, laid down a hard line, putting Dems on notice that any agreement that cuts entitlement benefits -- even in a deal that includes GOP concessions on tax hikes -- is a nonstarter. Silvers strongly suggested labor would withhold support in 2014 from any Dem lawmaker who supports such a deal.

"We are opposed to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits cuts. Period," Silvers told me. "There will be no cover for members of either party who vote for such a thing."
...
"Chained CPI is like the vampire of American politics," Silvers said. "It keeps being shot through the heart and it keeps reviving. The reason it keeps coming back is because it has billionaires behind it."

Silvers was referring to individuals and groups like Pete Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire whose lavishly-funded foundation has been pushing for cuts to these programs for years, Fix the Debt, which is pushing for deficit reduction, and GOP-aligned groups that have in recent years promoted the Paul Ryan budget. All of these are expected to spring into action when this fall's fiscal fight -- and talk of a "grand bargain" -- heats up.

Obamacare Rollout: Will Insurers Be Hoist on the Enrollment Petard?

An excerpt:

Let's turn finally to the additional potential huge can of worms that the Journal tripped over but apparently did not probe. And credit to Lambert for catching it. Here's the key sentence from the top of the second paragraph, emphasis ours:

   Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans.

[snip]

But it could be that there is something more seriously wrong with the enrollment engine. It has to be fairly pronounced for the insurers to pick it up. How would insurers detect a "suspect eligibility determination"? Are they seeing enrollee' estimated incomes? Why should that even be something the insurer is even aware of? You would assume the path is: Customer enters income and other eligibility information. HHS system slots individual/family into appropriate subsidy bucket. Consumer then pokes around among various plans and gets prices adjusted for his subsidy level. Customer ALSO gets to see whether he is eligible for "Advance Tax Credits" which means all he pays his insurer is that net price. When he files his tax return for the year, if his income on his tax return differs enough from what went in the enrollment form to put him in another bucket, he will have gotten too much or too little subsidy. That difference is applied to his taxes.

That's a bit long-winded, but you can see where this is going. First, for insurers to detect eligibility issues, it would seem likely that they are getting the entire enrollment file, including the income information. I don't like the idea of that from a privacy and security standpoint. Bad enough the NSA knows everything, now your insurer is in that loop too? Second, the errors have to be both pretty gross and reasonably frequent for the insurer to notice and be concerned about them (after all, in theory if the customer does not pay the rack rate, the Administration picks up the rest of the tab, so you would not expect them to be looking at this information all that closely).

There's also discussion about what it means for the success of this rollout if insurance companies are going to have to manually straighten out the problems they're encountering, some of which are detailed here:

Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.

The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

[snip]

Scott & White Health Plan in Temple, Texas, has received 25 enrollees from the federally run exchange so far. "There are some missing data elements that are requiring a lot of research on our part," said Allan Einboden, the health plan's chief executive. "If we'd received 5,000 and they all had to be worked, that's a lot of extra administrative costs," said Mr. Einboden, who said he expects the problems to be fixed...

At Priority Health in Michigan, health-plan staff are calling new customers to confirm each of their "couple of dozen" enrollees accurately picked the plan, said Joan Budden, chief marketing officer, after realizing some had enrolled in multiple health plans, likely owing to user error linked to slow healthcare.gov response times. "Sometimes they pushed the [submit] button three times," Ms. Budden said.

Yeesh.

No, sj. Rather, my suggestion is (none / 0) (#203)
by christinep on Fri Oct 18, 2013 at 11:54:32 AM MDT

that the process agreed to when sequestration went into effect (1) resulted from a difficult position that Democrats found ourselves in after the 2010 loss and (2) contained a device--the bigger bite out of Defense budget next year--that Harry Reid notes will shift the leverage in the coming negotiations.  One can argue whether that second point was accidental or planned.  And, one can argue whether someone is always lucky or, in fact, smart.  At the very least, Senator Reid is showing himself as an excellent strategist ... in the best sense of the practical word.

When track stars in the US retire, they could be your next door neighbor and 99.9% of the population would have no idea.

Just 2 weeks ago, Zola won a 5k cross country race at the 2013 Great American CC Festival against members of college teams ...not her age group but overall for women at age 47.

On a side note, Zola - and her daughter - now wear shoes when racing.

Great pitching all 'round the post season...love it.

Like the Dodgers too...don't know if they will survive.

"For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, the Holy Spirit has been waking me up in the middle of the night and preparing me to deliver a message in the House Chamber. That is what I did... "

Her husband's response: "My wife is a sweet, level-headed wonderful woman of God. I am proud of her."

Link

The one on the screen when I clicked on the link was:

Cowardly Benghazi-denying RINO traitor

"The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it."
-- Doris Day

In September, we expected 3% annualized growth in the fourth quarter because we thought politicians would have learned from 2011 and taken steps to avoid things like a government shutdown and the possibility of a sovereign default. Since our forecast didn't hold, we now have to lower our fourth-quarter growth estimate to closer to 2%.

China reports rebound in economic growth

China's economic growth has rebounded to 7.8 percent in the latest quarter after a boost in government spending to reverse a sharp downturn.

The data reported on Friday should ease pressure on communist leaders for new stimulus measures to prevent politically dangerous job losses.

That would allow them to focus on what they say is their priority of longer-term reforms aimed at making China's economy more efficient and productive.

Growth of the world's second-largest economy accelerated from the previous quarter's two-decade low of 7.5 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.