Trump’s lips move, which means he lying

So, Donald Trump gave a speech in Portland, Maine:

In his remarks on terrorism, Trump paid particular attention to Maine’s Somali refugees.

“We’ve just seen many, many crimes getting worse all the time, and as Maine knows — a major destination for Somali refugees — right, am I right? Well, they’re all talking about it. Maine. Somali refugees. We admit hundreds of thousands — you admit, into Maine, and to other places in the United States — hundreds of thousands of refugees,” Trump said.

Let’s see how things really are:

In Lewiston, where an estimated 7,000 Somalis live, police said Friday that crime is going down, not up.

“The Somalis have not caused any increase in crime. They’re integrated here in our city,” the acting police chief, Brian O’Malley, said Friday. “The Somalis come here because they want somewhere safe and good schools to raise their kids, and that’s what Lewiston has.”

Crime in the city fell 17 percent in 2015 compared with the year before, continuing a steady, downward trend, O’Malley said.

So an ignorant lie, typical of Trump. You might notice another lie in that short bit by Trump: crime in general is going down. He also through this in:

“If we keep going the way it is, our whole country is becoming different,” he said. “They’re shooting our police at record levels.”

The article doesn’t even bother to note that police are not being shot at record levels. Trump lies so often, it’s impossible to correct all his lies.

Tea Party sympathy

Governor LePage of Maine is a Tea Party politician. This is what the Tea Party wants to happen with Obamacare

Shields is one of a handful of counselors in rural Washington County charged with finding people who will benefit from the insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act and helping them sign up. There are many. Eighteen percent of people here, more than in any other county in New England, lacked health insurance in 2011, according to the most recent census analysis. Yet, the rollout of the federal program here has been slow.

Outreach workers have a lot of ground to cover in a county of about 32,500 people that is more than two times the size of Rhode Island and where some families have limited Internet access. For weeks, they have been holding community meetings in libraries and at health centers, sometimes drawing just one or two people.

Even among the few who have come to her Eastport Health Center office for one-on-one help, Shields has not signed up a single person. She has been thwarted by the near-failure of the federal insurance website. On Tuesday morning, she and a client tried five times to log in to the site before giving up.

…

Maine was one of 34 states that chose not to create a state-run insurance program under the law. (Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, also vetoed a bill to expand the state’s Medicaid program with federal funding.) Residents who qualify for the new subsidized plans must purchase them through the federal program.

Without state coordination, a network of social service agencies, health centers, and statewide nonprofits are using federal grants to lead the outreach campaign. Enroll207.com, created by Maine Health Access Foundation, serves as a clearinghouse for information on how to get help.

…

Denbow said later that she passed information to her daughter, who is uninsured. Before she spoke with Shields, Denbow said, she knew that the law required people to buy health insurance but she didn’t know it offered subsidies for those who couldn’t afford it.

“I don’t think there was enough education onto it,” she said.

LePage doesn’t like Obamacare and so does everything he can to block it: Maine didn’t create its own insurance program; it didn’t expand Medicaid; it doesn’t work to get information out to the people of Maine. That’s why you get people in Maine who don’t even know that Obamacare has subsidies for the poor. I would think that a governor of a state would want to help his citizens, but I guess that’s not true for LePage.

Cuts to Medicaid

Governor LePage is going to cut Medicaid in Maine. Here is what some LePage and some of his supporters say:

LePage has likened Medicaid to welfare and criticized able-bodied adults who receive taxpayer funded health care. His spokeswoman said he would not be interviewed. But LePage has defended his decision.

In a Jan. 28 letter to the US Department of Health and Human Services, he argued that Maine’s previous Medicaid expansion prompted people to “drop their private insurance in favor of free coverage at the expense of Maine taxpayers,” leading to an “addictive-like dependence on federal dollars.” The state’s credit outlook was downgraded recently in part because of the added burden of its Medicaid costs.

…

But LePage does have the backing of a number of constituents as well as conservative groups. William Gyorfi, a 65-year-old regular at the Governor’s Diner in Lewiston, supports LePage’s decision to cut back the Medicaid rolls. People need to take more responsibility with their finances because Maine has too many people depending upon government handouts, he said.

“This state has become a welfare state, and Medicaid is part of the problem,” said Gyorfi, a sales associate in the sporting goods department at Kmart. “You have those people who rely on Medicaid for a long time and they become addicted to it. They need to be weaned off the system.”

Joel Allumbaugh, director of the Center for Health Reform Initiatives at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative research organization, agreed, saying, “When you create these avenues for people to have free health care, where is the incentive to go out and advance yourself through your own initiative?”

The Globe helpfully provides a bit of background on a few of these layabouts:

Louis Bourgoin seems an unlikely symbol of the latest battle over health care spending. The 68-year-old retired shipyard worker is undergoing chemotherapy for liver cancer. He lives in a state once renowned for its efforts to insure the poor, and Mainers stood to benefit even more under President Obama’s health care plan.

Then the letter from the administration of Governor Paul LePage arrived. Bourgoin and his wife were told last month they were about to lose thousands of dollars in annual Medicaid benefits starting March.

He’s become addicted to living, what a leach.

“People don’t wake up and choose to be poor,” said Ramon Badillo Perez, a 35-year-old father of four who relies on Medicaid for the knee and foot problems he has developed from his two-mile walk each day to his $10.80-an-hour job managing the cafeteria at Sam’s Club in Augusta. “You work to try to get ahead, and you can’t.”

Now there’s someone who’s gaming the system because he’s just a lazy bum.

Donna Garnett, a 45-year-old living in a Portland shelter for homeless women, is among 10,000 adults without dependent children who are scheduled to be dropped next year. Her last job was as a gas station attendant in 2007, but she can no longer work because of a slew of health problems that require her to take 18 medications each day.

Garnett lives off $227 a month from her father’s life insurance. Her medications cost her $30 a month, but without Medicaid, the price will skyrocket to more than $815 a month for pills to control her asthma, diabetes, thyroid, back pain, and depression.

If she just had some initiative, she wouldn’t have asthma or her other problems.

Jennifer Webb, a 35-year-old mother of three who is at risk of losing her Medicaid benefits in March, just had ankle surgery and will require physical therapy when she is able to walk again in four weeks. By then, she does not expect to have coverage.

Her husband, a former Army sergeant, has traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of two tours in Iraq. He had a job installing metal roofing in hopes of building enough savings to buy the home in Pittston the family is now renting, but he was laid off last week.

Obviously they have become dependent on government, first he was a government worker and now they expect government help. That’s just not American.

Gay marriage loses in Maine

The recall vote on gay marriage won yesterday in Maine (53% voted for the repeal with 83% counted). This is a little discouraging but somewhat expected: polls were showing it would be close. And there is the usual line in the article:

It is currently legal in five states, but only by virtue of politicians or judges.

The US is not a direct democracy, so most of our laws are passed by politicians. It’s the way a representative democracy works. In some ways I’d like a vote in Massachusetts just to shut up all the people calling for a vote. There hasn’t been a vote, because there weren’t enough votes in the legislature, in fact in a vote only 45 out of 196 voted to have a popular vote–if you were logical you might realize that this means people in MA are ok with gay marriage, but I guess some people aren’t logical.

In any case, time is on the side of gay marriage. Let me put up these two graphs again (from here):

The first one shows the percent of people who support civil unions or gay marriage (you’ll see that it has Maine at 49%, so it’s pretty close there) and the second compares the support in 1994-6,  2003-4, and 2008-9. Using the numbers from MA is instructive: in 1994-6 the support was about 34%, in 2003-4 it was about 46%, and in 2008-9 it’s about 56% (in Maine the percents are: about 29%, 40%, and 49%). There was an increase in support in all the states, so things look good for the future.

Also, looking at the percents, I wonder why there hasn’t been a vote in Rhode Island which has the second highest support in the country (about 53%).

Gay marriage news

There are three developments in gay marriage:

• A law recognizing same sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions went into effect yesterday in Washington DC. It passed the DC council in May, but the US Congress had 30 days to rule on it and have not. DC does not allow same sex marriages.
• Same sex marriage foes in Maine say they have enough signatures to stop the recently signed bill from going into effect and forcing a statewide vote in November.
• Massachusetts Attorney General Coakley is suing the US to try to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I’m not sure how this will turn out, but perhaps it will prod President Obama to act more quickly (he has said he wants to get rid of DOMA).

Let me also put up a couple of graphs on the support for gay marriage and civil unions in the states (from a paper by Lax and Phillips):

which shows a weighted average of support (click on it to see it better), and:

which shows how the support has changed over time. Support for gay marriage in Maine is at 49%, so the vote should be close. Support for gay mariage in Massachusetts is now at 56%, up from about 33% in 1994-6–it’s easy to see why MA is the state suing over DOMA.

I also find it interesting that Rhode Island is the only state in New England without gay marriage (either now or set to start in the future) and yet it seems to have the second highest support (with 53% supporting it).

Gay marriage in Maine (and NH?)

Wow, things are moving fast. The governor of Maine has now signed a law to allow gay marriage. This makes Maine the first state where the governor signed a bill to allow gay marriage (in VT the governor’s veto  was overridden and in CT the state passed legislation to legalize all the parts of gay marriage only after the courts mandated it). This might not be final as a referendum is expected in the fall.

Yesterday the DC council voted to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere.

The NH House votes today on the revised bill that passed the Senate (the House passed a slightly different version).

Update: The NH Legislature has passed a gay marriage bill and has sent it to the governor. He has said in the past that he’s against gay marriage but so had the Maine governor. The question is if he will go against the majority in the legislature (he could sign, veto, or do nothing which would also allow it to become law–the margin was not nearly enough to override a veto).

NH to add gay marriage?

The NH Senate has joined the House in voting for gay marriage. The Senate and House bills are different, so now it goes back to the House. This shouldn’t be a problem, but there is a problem with Governor Lynch who has said in the past that he’s against gay marriage–the bills passed 13-11 and 186-179 so no override here.

A similar bill has passed the Senate judiciary committee and now heads to the general legislature (it’s likely this will end up as a referendum if it passes so this probably won’t be over before the fall).

The governors of both New York (who has introduced a bill to legalize same sex marriage)  and New Jersey(where a plurality support it according to a recent poll).

Wow, who would have thought things could change this quickly?