“Women want to make their own decisions when it comes to their health care, with the support of their families and their doctors. It’s preposterous to suggest the government would do a better job at deciding what is best for us and our loved ones.”
Now if you heard that quote and knew nothing else, you would probably think this is someone who is arguing that abortion should be legal. But no it’s:
Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative, anti-abortion women’s advocacy group.
I was worried, but the Supreme Court has ruled that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. President Obama should now make this one the central themes of his campaign, noting that Romney wants to get rid of it and has nothing to replace it with. Romney wants to go back to the old financial regulations that led to the current recession, he wants to go back to the old broken healthcare system, he wants to make enemies (of Russia and China among others), and he wants to back to President Bush’s agenda. Democrats should look at the bill now that it has been upheld and work to make it better.
Rand Paul says he’s for small government. He’s not:
One Paul amendment would require the District to allow residents to obtain concealed weapon permits for handguns, and would require the city to honor permits issued to residents of other states. Another amendment would make the District “establish an office for the purpose of facilitating the purchase and registration of firearms by DC residents,” in response to reports that there is only one licensed gun dealer in the city.
Paul has also submitted an amendment to codify the city-funded abortion ban. The prohibition — a continuing source of frustration for local leaders that is strongly supported by anti-abortion groups — has been extended via appropriations bills every year that Republicans have controlled one or both chambers of Congress since the mid-1990s.
Paul proposed another amendment saying “membership in a labor organization may not be applied as a precondition for employment” in the District, and protecting employees “from discrimination on the basis of their membership status” in a union.
This is in the context of a bill giving Washington, DC more autonomy from the Congress. These amendments will kill this bill, Paul obviously doesn’t think much of the citizens of DC anyway:
“I think it’s a good way to call attention to some issues that have national implications,” Paul said in an interview Tuesday. “We don’t have [control] over the states but we do for D.C.”
Asked his view on the District’s lack of voting representation in Congress, Paul said: “I don’t know what the answer to that is. It’s an anomaly, but it’s an anomaly that we’ve lived with for a long time and I don’t see it changing.”
He also is trying to kill a bill for flood insurance:
Among the many things Congress has on its to-do list this week is a flood-insurance bill, which is being pushed fairly aggressively by the leadership in both parties. It reauthorizes the National Flood Insurance for five years, before it expires next month, and it’s been widely expected that the bill would pass fairly easily.
It has, however, run into a little trouble. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is demanding an amendment to the flood-insurance bill: the Life at Conception Act, which would define life as beginning at conception. Paul’s language states that “Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being.”
Notice he has the federal government deciding when human life starts and he’s willing to kill an important bill to get his way.
In an article for Time, Rich Lowry goes after President Obama’s statement that the private sector is fine he says this:
From the beginning of the recession in December 2007 until today, federal, state, and local governments altogether have lost 400,000 jobs—-in an economy that employs 130 million people. About 85% of people work in the private sector. The public sector can be doing “dandy,” and if the private sector is still only doing “fine,” the vast majority of Americans will be in a weak and perilous job market.
State and local workers perform important functions. Never before, though, have they been considered engines of short-term economic growth. Teachers aren’t entrepreneurs. Cops and firefighters don’t hire people. Lacking the discipline of the market, the public sector is woefully inefficient. As a purely economic matter, you’d much rather add private rather than government workers.
If you think about it for a minute, you’ll realize that some of this applies to most of the people in the private work force also–I’m not going to be hiring anybody any time soon and neither are most private sector workers. Thus he’s saying that all that really matters are the rich. The thing is most of the gains from the depth of the recession have gone to the rich and yet we’re still in pretty bad shape. What he’s leaving out is demand–customers are needed to buy the products. And customers buy products if they have money and it doesn’t matter if the money comes from a public or private sector job.
Also, you should always beware of statistics. For example, if you go to the link that Lowry provides as a basis for his number you’ll see that the loss of 400,000 public sector jobs starts in December 2007; if you instead look from when Obama was elected it’s 600,000 and:
Since Obama was elected, the public sector has lost about 600,000 jobs. If you put those jobs back, the unemployment rate would be 7.8 percent.
But what if we did more than that? At this point in George W. Bush’s administration, public-sector employment had grown by 3.7 percent. That would be equal to a bit over 800,000 jobs today. If you add those hypothetical jobs, the unemployment rate falls to 7.3 percent.
Both of those numbers, it should be said, are holding all else equal: If more workers had reentered the labor force, the unemployment rate could be higher. And if there were 1.4 million more Americans with jobs, they’d be spending money and creating jobs for other people. So private-sector employment could be higher, too.
Go here for the statistics in context. He, of course, throws in a crack about how inefficient the public sector is. I guess he doesn’t think healthcare matters:
Mitt Romney wants private insurers to compete with Medicare. I’m actually OK with that in principle: as Austin reminded me last week, there’s evidence that competitive bidding for Medicare contracts could lower costs by around 8% in urban areas that have lots of providers. That won’t save the republic, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either.
At the same time, private insurers already compete with Medicare. It’s called Medicare Advantage, and so MA has mostly fallen flat: it costs more than traditional Medicare and provides only slightly better benefits. Romney hasn’t yet explained how his version of MA is going to be better than the current version of MA, and until he does I don’t see much reason to be interested in his proposal as anything more than boilerplate rhetoric to demonstrate that he’s a free market kind of guy.
And Social Security has administrative costs of about .6% (about 2.3% for disability), that’s a lot lower than private pensions.
The Boston Globe has an editorial against an increase in the pensions of retired Boston workers. That’s not unusual, the Globe is a big basher of public unions. What’s interesting is that the editorial has changed. Here’s the current first paragraph (by the way, this 3% increase on the first $12,000 of their pension means the average increase will be about 1%–wow, that’s an unconscioucible):
Retired employees of the city of Boston have been relatively lucky in the recent downturn, receiving 3 percent cost-of-living increases on the first $12,000 of their pensions even in years when Social Security benefits — the prime source of income for many private retirees — have been flat. Now, however, some political leaders want to bump up the cost-of-living raise for retired city workers even further. Mayor Menino wants to raise the annual increase from $360 to $390, while City Council President Steve Murphy is pushing a much larger $90 hike. In better economic times, giving an extra boost to city retirees would be honorable; this year, however, it’s too much of a stretch.
It’s always tempting for politicians seeking to attract or solidify support to promise bigger cost-of-living adjustments for retirees. That’s now happening in Boston. Mayor Menino wants to bump the annual adjustment from $360 to $390, while City Council President Steve Murphy is pushing a $90 increase. It’s easy to say, well, that seems like short money, so why not? Actually, there are any number of reasons why this is bad idea.
The second paragraph (which is in the paper copy I received) starts:
For starters, the public sector should not offer a demonstrably better benefit structure than the private sector.
That’s a pretty stunning statement, which might be why it was dropped from the rewrite. It’s a sort of reverse communism–workers can only make what the least makes, a cut by one business should mean a cut to everyone’s wages I guess.
Today is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, one of the great minds of the twentieth century–a leader in both math and computers. Despite the fact that he helped win WWII by being one of the leading code-crackers for England (cracking the German code, meant the Allies often knew what the Germans were planning, while the Germans weren’t able to crack the Allies’ code), the fact that he was gay was deemed more important. In 1952 he was given the choice of prison or chemical castration, he chose the latter and committed suicide two years later. Letters of Note has a letter by him around the time of the trial which ends with this:
I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think
One of the reasons Larry Summers said he didn’t believe there was discrimination against women at universities was that it would put a university at a competitive disadvantage, that didn’t seem to stop England going against Alan Turing.
As I noted a few days ago, Republicans are aching to impeach somebody and President Obama has decided to help them along:
A House committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt Wednesday for not releasing documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-tracking operation in which federal agents permitted Mexican drug smugglers to buy thousands of firearms that were eventually used in crimes.
The invocation of executive privilege or state secrets is often used to hide something embarrassing or incriminating, so it should be used only in rare situations and this is not one of them.
As you think about the operation Fast and Furious (the ideas behind it originated under President Bush), remember the reasons behind it. There is a huge drug war going on in Mexico being fueled by the US in two ways: most of the drugs go to the US; many of the guns come from the US. Given that, there is a lot of pressure from Mexico to do something about US guns making their way into Mexico. The sensible thing to do would be to crack down on the ability to buy guns in the US, but imagine what the NRA or Republicans would say about that. So instead we got Fast and Furious.
As Harvard economist Ken Rogoff puts it, “Europe is like a couple that wasn’t sure they wanted to get married, so instead they decided to just open a joint checking account and see how things went.” They went badly. Germany, the thrifty partner, is wringing its hands about how to handle the fact that its Mediterranean lover has drained the account and doesn’t want to go on a budget. The southern European attitude is pretty well summed up in Gaga’s lyric “I want your everything as long as it’s free.”
…
The Germans are also taking heat for insisting that debtor nations like Greece submit to backbreaking austerity budgets. But you can understand the German point of view–why give a blank check to spendthrift nations like Greece when you have no political control over how they spend it?
It’s never explicitly mentioned, but implied that Spain, Italy, and the other countries are having problems because they spent too much. It’s not true (if you search through Paul Krugman’s blog you’ll find much more evidence, but since I’m lazy I’ll just put in this one):
For this is really, really not about fiscal irresponsibility. Just as a reminder, on the eve of the crisis Spain seemed to be a fiscal paragon:
What happened to Spain was a housing bubble — fueled, to an important degree, by lending from German banks — that burst, taking the economy down with it. Now the country has 23.6 percent unemployment, 50.5 percent among the young.
It would be nice if reporters actually reported what was true.
The CFPB is up and running and has now compiled a list of consumer complaints. There is now a part of the federal government whose purpose is to protect consumers from unscrupulous business practices, which is why Republicans and banks are so much against it. They also put out a report talking about the complaints received. They include a few stories, such as:
Nelda, a 67-year-old data entry clerk from California, received a $2,000 charge on her credit card for purchases she never made. She says she contacted the card issuer to report the mistake and found out the charges were systematically accrued on one day by someone withdrawing $200 at a time. She told the issuer it was fraud. But she says the issuer said she was still on the hook for the money because it was her card. The charges set off a cascade of bad events for Nelda that lasted nearly a year. Eventually, the debt was sold to a collection agency that took Nelda to court. After the CFPB got involved, the card issuer accepted that the charges were fraudulent and agreed that Nelda was not responsible.
Mitt Romney, of course, wants to get rid of Dodd-Frank which created the CFPB (and regulates the financial industry–you know, the guys who crashed the world economy).
Today is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of Watergate. As Charles Pierce notes, the lessons learned from Watergate were the wrong ones. For example, President Obama has learned that people who leak government secrets need to be severely punished (also look here, Abramson’s speech is here):
Abramson, who took over as executive editor last September, said several reporters who have covered national security for decades have told her that “the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge. One Times reporter told me, ‘The environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting,’ ’’ she said.
…
Abramson pointed out that the Obama administration has mounted six prosecutions involving leaks under the 1917 Espionage Act, double the number under all previous administrations combined.
“The United States has never had an official secrets act,’’ she said. “This would be antithetical to our democratic values. But it seems time to me to ask whether a once obscure espionage law from long ago is now being used to substitute for one.’’
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
At the same time, legal scholar Geoffrey Stone has concluded that there has not been any instance when the media’s publication of “a legitimate but newsworthy government secret has gravely harmed the national interest,’’ she said.
Republicans think Obama is using the links to make himself look good (gee, no other President has done that) and think his administration has been too open. It’s a surreal atmosphere for the anniversary of Watergate.
Obama’s new policy, outlined in a memo by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, applies to illegal immigrants under 30 years old who arrived in the United States before they turned 16 and who have lived in the country for at least the last five years. Napolitano said the changes – which are not an executive order but merely the exercise of enforcement discretion by the Department of Homeland Security – were necessary because young illegal immigrants without criminal records are not the people the immigration removal process was designed to focus on. Expending resources on such deportations, she said, conflicts with the economic needs of the country.
Scott Brown’s response:
he opposes the change, suggesting it would set off a new wave of illegal immigration. He said he would be open to allowing young people who have chosen military service to obtain citizenship in recognition of their sacrifice. “Rather than sidestepping Congress on this major policy shift, the president should work with us toward a bipartisan, long-term solution,’’ Brown said.
This would be one of the Senator’s that filibustered the Dream Act, it had majority support, and says nothing about what he would do on his website. And Republicans have been blocking the Dream Act for six years and many of them demagogue on the issue. If Senator Brown actually put out a proposal then he could talk about a bipartisan solution, but at this point Democrats are the only ones who are working on immigration reform.
I should note that President Obama hasn’t had the best record on this issue:
In a 2011 Pew Hispanic Center poll, most Latinos – by a margin of 59 percent to 27 percent – opposed the deportation policies of the Obama administration, which has annually expelled a higher number of undocumented immigrants than the Bush administration did.
It’s Saturday, so here’s a picture of the shuttle Enterprise on its way to the Intrepid museum (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls):
and here’s a pretty picture of the Veil Nebula (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)):
So, I’ve now been doing this for five years. I think I’m destined to pick up my farm share today (including garlic scapes) which means there are going to be many a stir-fry in my near future. Anyways, stats:
Year 1: 888 posts, 10910 hits
Year 2: 362 posts, 39835 hits
Year 3: 194 posts, 38291 hits
Year 4: 176 posts, 51295 hits
Year 5: 257 posts, 31030 hits
Total: 1877 posts, 171361 hits
Averages: 1.03 posts per day, 93.79 hits per day, 91.3 hits per post in total;
.7 posts per day, 85 hits per day in the last year.
The bishops’ public relations campaign is still in the early stages but tentative plans include appointing a high-profile, always-on-call spokesman and creating a more active presence on Twitter and Facebook. Bishop John Wester of Salt Lake City also announced the launch of a private social network for bishops only – a sort of Facebook of the magisterium.
O’Malley said the nun dispute is about the specific activities of the Leadership Conference, not about US nuns at large.
“I feel terrible that these difficulties between the [Leadership Conference] and the Holy See have come across as being any kind of indictment of women religious in this country,’’ he said. “That’s not true. I think we have nothing but affection for them.’’
And, he said, it is unfair to link any of the recent clashes between the church hierarchy and individual women or women’s groups: The Vatican’s rebuke of the Leadership Conference; the condemnation of a sexual ethics book written by Sister Margaret Farley, a retired Yale Divinity School theologian; or the US bishops’ decision to investigate the Girl Scouts of America.
Ok, they have to work on their public relations. They have been criticized for not treating women respectfully and one of the solutions is to have a private social network only for bishops–who are all men, of course. O’Malley does know how to spin though. All of the things he mentions are related, they’re examples of the Church trying to reimpose their power. The last couple popes have been trying to make the Church more conservative and to regain its old influence which means respecting the lines of authority from the Pope down. Women are not near the top of the power structure in the Church so they’re going to be hit more and it’s also why you see the Church pushing against governments more forcefully (such as with the contraception silliness and their high-profile campaign against gay marriage in England).
Republicans seem to be aching to impeach Obama. First there’s the Fast and Furious (an amazingly stupid program started under Bush) where Republicans want to either hold Attorney General Holder in contempt or make him resign. Then there’s the demand for a special counsel to investigate security leaks:
Graham, at a Tuesday hearing into the leaks, repeatedly invoked Obama and Biden’s support, when senators, for independent investigations of both the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s possible ties to the George W. Bush administration and Bush White House leaks surrounding CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Graham said Obama and Biden’s altered positions constituted “the biggest double standard in recent times.”
…
Graham pressed Holder at the hearing Tuesday to explain why he didn’t think a special counsel was necessary when it was used for the Plame case, and called for in the Abramoff case, under the Bush administration.
Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) stopped Graham when his time expired and argued there was a difference between the Bush administration cases and the new leaks, but Graham quickly fired back at Leahy.
“There is no doubt in my mind that if the shoe were on the other foot, you and everybody on that side would be screaming to high heaven to appoint a special prosecutor that all of us could buy into,” Graham said.
Wow, the Democrats sure are hypocrites not like those Republicans:
Graham’s accusations of hypocrisy stem from letters that then-Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) had signed onto regarding the Plame and Abramoff investigations. Obama signed a 2006 Democratic letter with 36 senators calling for a special counsel to investigate the Abramoff corruption scandal, and was one of two dozen senators who joined a 2005 letter that pushed for an independent congressional investigation into the Plame case.
Neither McCain nor Graham was a signatory of the letters.
I’m shocked that McCain and Graham are also hypocrites. Shocked I tell ya. And of course the lawyers that the Justice Department have appointed are Democrat hacks:
Machen and Rosenstein were appointed to oversee investigations into who leaked information about US involvement in cyberattacks on Iran and an Al Qaeda plot to place an explosive device aboard a US-bound flight.
Holder pointed out that Rosenstein was appointed by a Republican president, George W. Bush. Rosenstein also worked for Ken Starr, independent counsel in the investigation and prosecution of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s real estate partners, helping to win convictions of both.
Former governor Mitt Romney’s administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state antibullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms “bisexual’’ and “transgender’’ in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.
Romney aides said publicly at the time that publication of the guide had been delayed because it was a lengthy document that required further review. But an e-mail authored in May of that year by a high-ranking Department of Public Health official – and obtained last week by the Globe through a public records request – reflected a different reason.
“Because this is using the terms ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgendered,’ DPH’s name may not be used in this publication,’’ wrote the official, Alda Rego-Weathers, then the deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
Because the Department of Public Health was the primary sponsor and funding source of the guide, the move effectively blocked its publication. Rego-Weathers said in the e-mail that she had been consulting with Romney’s office on the issue.
It was one of the many ways that he changed course as he prepared to run for President (when he was running against Kennnedy for the Senate, he claimed he would be more effective getting gay rights). It also shows his political cowardice. If this had gone through it might have hurt his chances for becoming President and if he publicly said why it was being blocked that would have caused another outcry in Massachusetts:
In a highly publicized incident in May 2006, Romney threatened to shut down the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth because it issued a press release with his name on it promoting a parade to celebrate gay, bisexual, and transgender teens. He quickly backed off the threat. In July 2006, Romney vetoed a $158,000 budget line item that was earmarked for counseling violence victims in the “LGBT community.’’ The appropriation was intended to prevent sexual violence and rape, and also for suicide prevention.
Digby notes the same thing that I have in the past (such as here):
This fellow has a genuine gripe, no doubt about it. Many jobs suck and it sounds as though he is working harder for less money and isn’t happy about it. I feel for him. But considering all the reasons why that is, why does he resent those who have secured better working conditions through the unions?
He didn’t say explicitly that he’s mad because they are paid through taxes and are therefore doing well at his expense, but I’d guess that when you drill down that’s part of it. Still, he describes himself as a man of the left so I don’t know that this is about government and taxes nd the usual constellation of right wing concerns. More likely, and from the tone of his note, he seems to feel that it’s just generally unfair that some people have these secure, humane, well paid jobs and he doesn’t. And he’s right! Everyone should have them. (And there are quite a few places in the world where they do. Just not here.) So why not see it from that perspective instead of feeling resentment toward those who have managed a better deal? That’s the big question everyone’s asking themselves, I guess.
Companies hate unions because they give workers more power, which should be why the rest of us like them (not all the time in all things, but in general). It’s always amazed me that companies have been able to get so many people to take their side when they fight unions, but they have as unions at private companies have been decimated. And now they have moved on to public unions and say, with a straight face,:
Daniels said private-sector unions, while in decline in America, remain “necessary.” But he suggested the public-sector unions have hobbled governments by gobbling up taxpayer resources with generous benefits and salaries and “bulletproof” job protections.
Yup, that’s Indiana Governor Daniels implying that he supports private-sector unions. It’s just more class warfare, try to divide public-sector and private-sector unions. I wouldn’t be surprised if this works also. After all, we have to curb public-sector unions because their pensions are bankrupting us:
The court battles are playing out as lawmakers across the United States grapple with ballooning pension obligations that increasingly threaten schools, police, health clinics, and other basic services.
State and local governments may have $3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities, and seven states and six large cities will be unable to cover their obligations beyond 2020, Northwestern University finance professor Joshua Rauh estimated last year.
Of course it’s not really true and at times the cuts lead to almost completely getting rid of the worker’s retirement fund, but it’s a sacrifice that has to be made. Somehow, the rich never seem to have to sacrifice.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve seen in quite some time:
Perhaps it would be more constructive for the court to decide cases by majority vote and issue a single opinion in the name of the court without publishing the votes or opinions of individual justices.
By eliminating dissenting opinions, which are sometimes longer than the majority opinion, the justices could focus more on crafting one clear opinion than on framing contentious responses. Any loss of egocentric exposition or subjective satisfaction caused by ending separate opinions would be more than compensated for by the added force, weight, and dignity unified Supreme Court decisions could command. The focus would be upon the rule of law, not upon judicial personalities.
The problem is that the Supreme Court is no longer seen as unbiased and their favorability ratings are way down. The reason is pretty obvious:
Frequent fractured opinions — especially in controversial and politically charged cases, like election challenges, campaign financing, or strip search practices — create the impression that those decisions may be politically motivated or agenda-driven and do not deserve the same respect and vitality given decisions rendered by greater majorities. They lead to charges of judicial activism and result in increasing partisan intrusion into the judicial process. Too often significant decisions are determined by one swing justice, giving the impression that Supreme Court precedent can be influenced merely by filling a vacancy with the right judge.
If you change ‘create the impression’ to ‘show’ in the above passage (and make other, similar changes) then you see the problems. Most of the Supreme Court justices are now just as partisan as any other politician (and they are now politicians). This editorial does a better job of acknowledging the problem:
Protected by lifetime tenure, many have chosen to enter the political fray rather than insulate themselves from it. Their involvement with politically motivated organizations reflects a shocking lack of concern for the court’s image. All other federal judges are bound by the Judicial Conference’s Code of Conduct, which says they can’t engage in political activity and shouldn’t undermine their impartiality. But as a self-administering branch of the government, the nine justices have exempted themselves. They should reverse course, endorse the Code of Conduct, and forgo politics — for their own integrity, and that of the court.
This is the first of a series of editorials so I won’t pass judgement on it yet, but the article by Joseph Nadeau basically wants to deal with the problem by ignoring it. That won’t solve the problem, because some of the decisions (such as Bush v. Gore and Citizens United) are obviously due to partisan politics. Pretending that they’re not won’t change that.
