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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

by AudryN6748784 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Samantha Barbas, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, commenting on the $115 million verdict Hulk Hogan won against Gawker in an invasion-of-privacy case:

For a jury to say that…a celebrity sex tape is not newsworthy, represents a real shift in American free press law.

Ain’t that the truth? It’s hard to believe that a red-blooded American jury concluded that sex tapes aren’t a vital part of our media ecosystem. Maybe our nation really is going down the drain after seven years of Obummer’s leadership.

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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

by NatishaRoney Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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From House Speaker Paul Ryan, talking about his view of tax reform:

I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables.

“These distributional tables” are the ones that show Republican tax plans giving enormous cuts to the wealthy and nothing much at all to the middle class. Ryan calls them ridiculous because once you account for the economic boom of Republican tax cuts for the rich, everyone is going to be rolling in dough. Besides which, Ryan insists, “I think most people don’t think, ‘John’s success comes at my expense.'” Bottom line: distributional tables are for losers. “Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”

On a more amusing note, Ryan says he’s not looking at how to fund a border wall. “Remember, we’re not going to pay for that, recall?” So true.

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Quote of the Day: The Middle Class Doesn’t Care If We Cut Taxes on the Rich

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

by MelissaEOLV Posted on March 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I was musing over a tweet from a guy who said that his daughter’s friends all loathed Hillary Clinton. Just really, really couldn’t stand her. This is obviously a fairly common sentiment. Bernie Sanders didn’t win 80 percent of the millennial vote in Michigan just because he’s an idealistic liberal. The only way you get to a number like that is against an opponent who’s pretty seriously disliked.

But why? The most obvious reason millennials dislike Hillary so strongly is that they think she’s too slippery. “I feel like Clinton lies a lot,” a college student told PBS a few weeks ago. “She changes her views for every group she speaks to. I can’t trust her.” Quotes like that litter the internet, and in tonight’s debate Karen Tumulty asked about it yet again. “Is there anything in your own actions and the decisions that you yourself have made that would foster this kind of mistrust?”

People of my age find all this a little peculiar. After all, we’re the ones who experienced the full storm of the 90s. There was a new Hillary “scandal” on practically a monthly basis back then, and even if you later learned there was virtually nothing to any of them, that kind of nonstop mudslinging leaves a mark. It’s hard to hear this stuff over and over and not think that maybe there’s something there. Smoke and fire, you know. But millennials went through none of that. So why do they distrust her?

Unfortunately, Hillary has fostered a lot of this mistrust herself. I’m going to be wildly unfair here and cherry pick a bunch of quotes from Hillary and Bernie Sanders. First up, here’s Bernie:

On whether he supports fracking: “My answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking.”
On reforming Wall Street: “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist….Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy.”
On whether there’s even a “single circumstance” in which abortion should be illegal: “That is a decision to be made by the woman, her physician and her family. That’s my view.”
On prison reform: “I promise at the end of my first term we won’t have more people in jail than in any other country.”

There’s no nuance here, no shading. Bernie has simple, crowd-pleasing answers to every question. He’s for X, full stop. He’s against Y, end of story.

At this point I should compare these answers to the more gray-shaded responses Hillary gives on policy questions. But I’m not being fair, so instead you get this:

On whether she lied to the Benghazi families (from tonight’s debate): “You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi….”
On releasing transcripts of her speeches: “Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time.”
On her private email server: “Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
On getting money from big Wall Street donors: “I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”
On her super PAC: “You’re referring to a super PAC that we don’t coordinate with….It’s not my PAC.”

These are terrible answers. Tonight, Jorge Ramos brought up allegations by the Benghazi families that Hillary had deceived them, and asked, “Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?” The only answer to this question is “Of course not.” But Hillary started by expressing her sympathy for the Benghazi families and only then said of her accuser, “She’s wrong.” Maybe this seems like nitpicking, but it’s not. Unless the very first words out of her mouth are “Of course not,” she’s going to leave an immediate impression that she’s about to tap dance around the whole thing. I like Hillary, and even I sighed when she began delivering that answer.

The other quotes are similar. It doesn’t even matter if they’re the truth. They don’t sound like the truth. People my age might forgive Hillary a bit of this lawyerlyness because we remember the 90s and understand the damage that even a slightly misplaced word can cause. But millennials don’t. They just see another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything.

Life isn’t fair. Politics isn’t fair. I think Hillary Clinton is careful, a little bit paranoid, and, ironically, congenitally honest on policy issues. She just can’t bring herself to give simple-minded answers when she knows perfectly well the truth is more complicated. But especially this year, when her competition is a guy like Bernie Sanders, this just makes her look evasive and insincere.

After 40 years in the public eye, I don’t know why Hillary is still so bad at this. But she is. For a long time, liberals mostly forgave her wary speaking style because they were keenly aware of the Republican smear campaign that birthed it. Now, for the first time, there’s a generation of liberals who don’t care about any of that. And an awful lot of them loathe her.

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

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Medicare Wants to Try a New Way of Paying for Expensive Drugs

by ChristoMighell Posted on March 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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For drugs administered in clinics and hospitals, Medicare reimburses doctors a flat 6 percent of the price of the drug. This has never really made much sense, since it doesn’t cost any more to attach a $1,000 vial to an IV line than a $100 vial. So now the Obama administration is proposing a five-year test of a new system that pays a flat fee plus a smaller percentage of the cost of the drug. Here’s what it looks like:

The current rule is an update of an older rule that was even stupider than reimbursing based on price. But it’s still pretty stupid. If two drugs are about the same, and you can make $6 from one and $60 from the other, then you might as well prescribe the more expensive one. That’s exactly the wrong incentive. Not everyone sees it this way, of course:

The test program is also likely to meet stiff opposition from the pharmaceutical industry and some providers—especially cancer centers where many high-price specialty drugs are used—because of the drop in reimbursement….Providers may also feel they are being pressured by the federal government into selecting cheaper drugs they don’t feel are as effective.

This makes no sense. No one is being pressured into selecting cheaper drugs. You just won’t get paid an artificial bonus for avoiding them in favor of more lucrative options that don’t work any better. If that’s your idea of “pressure,” I’d recommend you go into a less demanding field.

The new system, I assume, is designed to recognize that administering a drug is mostly—but not entirely—a flat cost operation. The reason the cost isn’t completely flat is that clinics and hospitals have to pay for the drugs up front and keep them in stock. There’s a carrying cost involved in that, which means that expensive drugs really do cost a little more to administer than cheaper ones.

But not that much more. The new system seems well worth a try.

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Medicare Wants to Try a New Way of Paying for Expensive Drugs

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Here’s Yet Another Penny-Ante Shill From Donald Trump

by AzucenaPickerin Posted on March 8, 2016

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The list of Donald Trump’s penny-ante shills seems endless. Trump steaks, Trump mortgages, Trump university, Trump vodka, Trump travel, etc. All of them were going to be the biggest thing ever, and all of them were basically either failures or scams. But it turns out there’s another Trump failure that no one seems to have heard about until now. Here’s Ian Tuttle with the details:

In November 2009, Trump, boasting a Midas-gold tie, took the stage in front of several thousand fans at Miami’s Hyatt Regency to debut his latest venture: The Trump Network™, a multi-level marketing operation focused on nutritional supplements.

A pyramid scheme based on nutritional supplements? That has Donald Trump written all over it! Please continue:

In early 2009, Trump purchased Ideal Health, Inc., founded in 1997 outside Boston by Lou DeCaprio and brothers Todd and Scott Stanwood, who became Trump Network executives….The centerpiece of the program was the PrivaTest….Customers would purchase the PrivaTest kit, collect a urine sample, and ship the sample to a lab, which would analyze it and develop a “Custom Essentials” kit of nutritional supplements “calibrated . . . to reflect your unique nutrient needs.”

….The PrivaTest and a month’s supply of Custom Essentials cost $139.95, an additional month’s supply cost $69.95, and to keep one’s “unsurpassed individual nutritional support” up to date, the Trump Network recommended repeating the PrivaTest every nine months — at a price of $99.95, plus shipping and handling.

….Network marketing has had its successes: Avon and Mary Kay, for example….Trump and his devotees maintain that, because there was an actual product involved, the Trump Network was no scam, and in early 2011, Trump told New York Magazine that he expected the Trump Network to become larger than Amway, then an $8.4 billion operation. Unsurprisingly, that never happened. “The Trump Network had gotten in trouble financially,” Bonnie Futrell, a former Network marketer, told Stat News. “They weren’t being able to pay the lab. They weren’t paying vendors. They weren’t paying us.” In early 2012, just over two years after it started, the Trump Network was sold to network-marketing company Bioceutica.

I assume no one is surprised to hear this, so there’s not much point in dreaming up snarky comments about it. It’s pure Trump.

But here’s what I don’t get: how is it that we’re hearing about this for the first time? It only happened seven years ago. It was announced with all the usual Trump fanfare. But it seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. How many more of these things are out there just waiting to be discovered?

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Here’s Yet Another Penny-Ante Shill From Donald Trump

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Black Voters Are Going to Be Pissed When They Hear About This

by BeatricNevarez Posted on March 7, 2016

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Well, crap. Dinesh D’Souza has somehow uncovered the secret history of the Democratic Party: Not only were we once the party of slavery, but racism among prominent Democrats continued “well into the 20th century.” Can you imagine? But we’ve been working feverishly for decades to keep our shameful past swept under the rug, so virtually nobody knows this anymore.

Well, some of us knew it. It so happens that I’m part of the inner circle, so I knew it. But the rest of you sheeple didn’t, and that’s the way we intended to keep it. Unfortunately, someone ratted us out. I guess we should have kept D’Souza locked up longer on that bogus campaign finance violation. The foreign oligarchs who have been funding our propaganda efforts are not going to be pleased.

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Black Voters Are Going to Be Pissed When They Hear About This

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on October 17, 2015

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Warning: Lotsa numbers ahead. Sorry about that. If you’re not interested, you can skip down to the last two paragraphs for the bottom line.

A couple of days ago, HHS projected that Obamacare exchange enrollment would reach 10 million by the end of 2016. That’s not much higher than the 9.1 million who are expected to be enrolled at the end of 2015. Has Obamacare enrollment stalled?

Maybe. But keep two things in mind:

This is probably a lowball figure. HHS would rather set a low bar and beat it than set a higher bar and have to explain why they missed it.
Charles Gaba, who has a pretty good track record with this stuff, estimates that 14.7 million people will sign up and 12.2 million will remain by the end of the year.

If Gaba is right, that’s an increase of about one-third from 2015. Not too bad. Still, it’s considerably less than the CBO’s original estimate of 21 million enrollees by 2016. Again, though, keep a couple of things in mind:

The CBO figure is for “average annual enrollment.” Since people drop out as the year progresses, this is probably equivalent to about 19 million by year-end.
CBO had estimated a drop of 8 million people from employer and other insurance plans. However, those numbers appear to have turned out lower than CBO’s estimates. This is a good thing—we’d prefer that people stay on their current coverage instead of being kicked off—but it obviously reduces the market for Obamacare enrollment. We should probably reduce CBO’s estimate by 3 million or so to account for this.

In other words, on an apples-to-apples basis, a best guess suggests that we’ll end up 2016 at 12 million compared to a CBO projection of 16 million. It’s still lower than CBO’s original estimates, but not by a huge amount. This could be due to (a) an overestimate by CBO, (b) weak performance by Obamacare, (c) an improving economy, or (d) nothing more than a difference in how fast Obamacare ramps up.

Bottom line: Because of all this, a more reliable metric of success is to skip all the details of who’s insured via what, and simply count the total number of uninsured. CBO originally estimated that the uninsured population would drop to 8 percent by 2016. That estimate changed after the Supreme Court made Medicare expansion voluntary, and CBO now figures that in 2016 the total number of uninsured will come to about 11 percent. The CDC estimates that in the most recent quarter the number of uninsured dropped to 10.7 percent. If Gaba’s numbers are correct, that will decline to about 10 percent or so by the end of 2016.

In other words, once you clear away all the underbrush it looks like Obamacare is meeting or beating its goals. Some of this might be due to an improving economy, but who cares? If the economy is doing well enough that more people are getting employer coverage and fewer are being forced onto the exchanges, that’s a good thing, not a knock on Obamacare.

POSTSCRIPT: Surveys consistently show that about half of the uninsured say they’re not on Obamacare because it’s too expensive. So for anyone who’s truly concerned that Obamacare isn’t hitting its enrollment targets, there’s an easy answer: increase the federal subsidies for the working poor so that more of them can afford coverage.

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

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Medicare Premiums Set to Soar for Small Group of Unlucky Seniors

by AndrewWaggoner0 Posted on October 15, 2015

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The New York Times reports today that Medicare premiums may soar next year even though inflation is low and medical costs have been relatively tame.

Why? Well, Medicare actuaries predict that Part B spending is expected to go up a bit more than they initially projected, and premiums are supposed to cover one-fourth of spending. However, for 70 percent of Medicare recipients premiums are linked to Social Security benefits, which are not expected to rise at all thanks to low inflation. This means that the entire burden of paying for the increased spending will fall on the other 30 percent of Medicare recipients. For these people, premiums will rise $648 in 2016.

That’s a lot of money for someone living on $15,000 per year. So what are we going to do about it?

The cost of avoiding such big premium increases, $7.5 billion by some estimates, could be a problem for conservative Republicans. Aides to Mr. Boehner have told Ms. Pelosi’s staff members that the cost would have to be offset by savings elsewhere in the federal budget….Republicans worry that Democrats will depict them as waging a “war on seniors” if they do not go along with legislation to soften the effect of any premium increase, perhaps by using general revenue to plug the gap. A struggle over Medicare would add to fights expected this fall over legislation to raise the federal debt ceiling, prevent a government shutdown and keep money flowing for highway projects.

In other words, the usual: we’ll squabble over it like small children and then eventually patch together some kind of half-assed solution after Republicans threaten to hold their collective breaths until their faces turn blue. That’s American exceptionalism, baby.

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Medicare Premiums Set to Soar for Small Group of Unlucky Seniors

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

by CortezKiddle197 Posted on October 14, 2015

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Ed Kilgore notes this morning that “the media appetite for naming a clear winner has fed a post-debate trend towards labeling HRC as a gigantic, titanic, overwhelming cham-peen.” True enough, and you can blame that on a sort of self-feeding bandwagon loop among the campaign press. Still, in this case I think it’s probably justified. Sure, O’Malley did OK, and so did Sanders, but let’s face it: Nobody cares much about O’Malley, and Sanders probably didn’t change the dynamics of the race in his favor despite a decent performance. What’s more, my own personal reaction is that Sanders made it even clearer than ever that he doesn’t really want to be president. He just wants to move the race to the left.

But the fact that Hillary did well really does matter. She showed Democrats why they’ve always liked her in the past. She showed off her debating skills. She put to rest all the Benghazi/email nonsense. She almost certainly halted her slide in the polls. She basically made herself the inevitable winner yet again. Plus this:

And that leads to the aspect of the debate that struck me apparently more than most observers: the exceptional hostility of the questioning from moderator Anderson Cooper, who seemed to be trying to defy expectations that he’d be less savage than Jake Tapper was in CNN’s GOP debate. Pretty quickly, Cooper became a stand-in for all the media folk trying to make the Democratic contest about emails and Benghazi! and “socialism,” and you got the sense the candidates and the immediate audience united in disdain for the superficiality of where the hosts wanted the discussion to go. The feral roar that greeted Bernie Sanders’ statement that Americans were tired of “hearing about Clinton’s damn emails”—followed by HRC shaking Bernie’s hand—was the signature moment of the night. And this wasn’t just some “gift” from Sanders to Clinton, as it was called by several talking heads last night. It was a party-wide rebuke to the MSM for how they are covering this campaign.

I didn’t get the sense that Cooper was especially hostile. But Kilgore is right that debate moderators generally try to focus on superficial “toughness” instead of asking either genuinely tough questions or genuinely interesting policy questions. In a way, this is justified: you don’t want candidates to get away with just making stump speeches. You want to challenge them. You want to see how they perform under pressure. Unfortunately, when you take this too far it becomes obvious that you’re just desperately trying to gin up controversy for its own sake. Debate moderators need to understand that the show isn’t about them. It’s about genuinely digging out answers from candidates on subjects they might prefer to fudge. That’s genuine toughness. But that takes a deep knowledge of policy and the willingness to engage with it. That’s too often missing from these events.

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

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Abortion Is Not Murder

by LizzieAppel Posted on August 3, 2015

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Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal tissue from the abortions it performs:

A recent Sarah Silverman tweet distilled one argument many liberals are making about the Planned Parenthood videos into a few characters: ”Abortion is still legal in the great U.S of A. It would be insane not to use fetal tissue 4 science & education in such cases. #StandwithPP.”

The death penalty is also still legal in our great country. Should we employ methods of execution so as to yield the highest number of usable organs?….

Whenever I write about abortion, I usually get a bunch of tweets or emails asking if I even understand the conservative position. Answer: of course I do. Most conservatives say that abortion is murder. Given that premise, their opposition to funding abortion, legalizing abortion, using some day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

So I’m going to ask the mirror image question here: does Ponnuru understand the liberal position on abortion? Most of us don’t think of fetuses as persons, which means abortion doesn’t involve killing a human being in any meaningful sense. Given that premise, our support of funding abortion, legalizing abortion, promoting day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

To us lefties, the death penalty involves killing a human being. Abortion doesn’t. So it’s perfectly reasonable to have different views about how the remains are treated in each case.

POSTSCRIPT: There are, of course, nuances in these positions regarding abortion on both sides. We’re all familiar enough with them that it seems unnecessary to repeat them here. That said, at its most basic, liberals don’t generally consider aborting a fetus to involve killing a human being. Obviously the rest of our views follow from that.

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Abortion Is Not Murder

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