Friday Open Thread [11.1.13]

I have pre-ordered the book Double Down: Game Change 2012, and it is supposed to arrive next week, but damnit, stories are already leaking out, like this gem:

Current and former White House officials were scrambling Friday to respond to a new report that President Barack Obama considered dropping Vice President Joe Biden from the ticket before the 2012 campaign to replace him with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Revealed in the book Double Down: Game Change 2012 and first reported by the New York Times, former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley was reportedly the biggest proponent of exploring the Biden-Clinton swap.

“When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write, according to the Times. Halperin is a TIME political editor.

In an interview with CBS’s This Morning on Friday, Daley acknowledged that he had pushed to consider dropping Biden, but discounted that it was ever very serious.

“I think one of the jobs of Chief of Staff is to recommend lots of things out of the box, but not for a moment was there a serious discussion or a belief that Joe Biden should be replaced, period,” Daley said. “That doesn’t mean issues were not looked it.”

Ryan Lizza talks to Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of Romneycare and Obamacare, about who is really winning or losing in the implementation of Affordable Care Act:

Gruber broke down the A.C.A. “winners” and “losers” for me. About eighty per cent of Americans are more or less left alone by the health-care act—largely people who have health insurance through their employers. About fourteen per cent of Americans are clear winners: they are currently uninsured and will have access to an affordable insurance policy under the A.C.A.

But much of the current controversy involves the six per cent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, which the A.C.A. has dramatically reformed. Gruber argued that half of these people (three per cent of all Americans) will have little change to their polices. “They have to buy new plans, but they will be pretty similar to what they had before,” he said. “It will essentially be relabeling.”

The other half, however, also three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.’s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay. The primary reason for the increased cost is that the A.C.A. bans any plan that would require a people who get sick to pay medical fees greater than six thousand dollars per year. In other words, this was a deliberate policy decision that the White House and Congress made to raise the quality—and thus the premiums—of insurance policies at the bottom end of the individual market.

Looks like we will be going Nuclear next week, if not today:

“Just minutes after the swearing-in of the newest senator, New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker, the Senate dove headfirst back into a standoff over executive and judicial branch nominations.”

“Democrats failed to overcome, 56-42, a filibuster against the choice of Rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC) to become the top housing finance regulator, with Republicans also looking to block Patricia Ann Millett’s nomination to fill one of three vacant seats on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Connor Simpson has some bad news for Fox News and Rupert Murdoch:

Fox News has fallen out of favor with Republicans after two years of untouched supremacy as the party’s brand of choice across any and every medium, according to a recent YouGov survey. YouGov measures which brands are preferred by each party (Republicans, Democrats, Independents) by adding and subtracting negative feedback on a 100 to -100 scale. In 2011, Fox News led all brands [among Republicans] with 68 support points, a full 5 points ahead of the rest. In 2012, Fox News led with 64.5 support points, 1.7 points above the rest. This year? In 2013, Fox News didn’t even make the top 10. […]

A Public Policy Poll released in January showed a serious decline in trust during the months after the election. Only 52 percent of those who identify as “somewhat conservative,” said they trust Fox News, down from 65 percent last year. Hardline conservatives trust Fox News less, too: 13 percent said they don’t trust Fox News anymore, compared to 6 percent last year.

LOL. You know what happened, right? Fox News dared to inform its viewers that President Obama won the election. THAT FACT IS CLEARLY UNTRUE!!!!! By reporting the President was reelected, Fox News revealed its horrible evil liberal bias, and no true conservative can watch it anymore.