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Republicans Need to Abandon Angry White Guys

by JonathoMcCants Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

What’s going to happen to the Republican Party after November 8? I’ve raised the possibility that if Trump loses massively, the party establishment might get serious about marginalizing the tea party caucus in Congress instead of being held endlessly hostage to them. Most of the responses to that suggestion have been skeptical. The more likely possibility is that tea partiers will increase their influence and the GOP will become even crazier and more obstructionist than ever.

That’s pretty much what apostate Republican Max Boot thinks:

Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan may hope that after Trump’s inevitable defeat the party will return to their brand of conservatism — in favor of free trade and American leadership abroad, cutting government spending and taxes, a balanced approach to immigration, and making deals where possible with centrist Democrats. But that’s not a safe assumption anymore.

….Perhaps Trump will fade away after the election and the Republican Party will return to its Reaganite roots. But…survey findings suggest a strong possibility that instead the GOP, or at least a substantial portion of it, could continue veering toward the fringe, muttering darkly about how Trump was robbed of his rightful victory. If that is the case, then the Republican Party may not survive the Trump takeover.

I want to make this easy. There’s basically only one thing that matters for the GOP: whether they double down on being the white men’s party, or whether they take the painful but necessary steps necessary to broaden their appeal. That’s it. Everything else pales in comparison.

If they continue on their current course, the presidency is going to get further and further out of reach. Eventually they won’t be able to hold on to the Senate or the House either. They’ve simply run out of ways to increase the white vote and suppress the non-white vote, and the demographics of America just flatly don’t support a party that’s increasingly loathed by women and minorities.

Lindsey Graham’s critique of four years ago is famous: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Republicans need to print this on a hat and start wearing it at all times. The Southern Strategy worked great for half a century, but nothing lasts forever. It’s time to abandon it.

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Republicans Need to Abandon Angry White Guys

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Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

by pwbqczv Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Sam Wang’s meta-margin hasn’t changed much in the past week. He now has Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 4.4 percentage points:

Wang’s current prediction is that Clinton has a 99 percent chance of winning and will rack up 339 electoral votes. He still has the Senate tied, 50-50, but the Democratic meta-margin is up to 1.7 percent and the probability of Democratic control is 79 percent. On the House side, he has Democrats up by about 5 percent, which is not enough for them to win back control. Here’s Pollster:

Clinton has dropped a point and is now 7.3 percentage points ahead of Trump. For what it’s worth, if you look only at high-quality live phone polls, they have Clinton up by a whopping 9.5 percentage points. In the generic House polling, Pollster has Democrats ahead by 5.2 points, down a bit from last week.

If you add to all this the fact that Clinton almost certainly has a far superior GOTV operation compared to Trump, she could win the election by anywhere from 6 to 10 points depending on what happens over the next couple of weeks. Republicans appear to have resigned themselves to this, and are now putting all their energy into downballot races. This means the Senate is likely to be very close, and the House will probably stay in Republican hands—though only by a dozen seats or so.

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Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

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This Is Why Your Drug Prescriptions Cost So Damn Much

by JonasStpierre Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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When the Republican-controlled Congress approved a landmark program in 2003 to help seniors buy prescription drugs, it slapped on an unusual restriction: The federal government was barred from negotiating cheaper prices for those medicines. Instead, the job of holding down costs was outsourced to the insurance companies delivering the subsidized new coverage, known as Medicare Part D.

The ban on government price bargaining, justified by supporters on free-market grounds, has been derided by critics as a giant gift to the drug industry. Democratic lawmakers began introducing bills to free the government to use its vast purchasing power to negotiate better deals even before former President George W. Bush signed the Part D law, known as the Medicare Modernization Act.

All those measures over the last 13 years have failed, almost always without ever even getting a hearing, much less being brought up for a vote. That’s happened even though surveys have shown broad public support for the idea. For example, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found last year that 93 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans favor letting the government negotiate Part D prescription drug prices.

It seems an anomaly in a democracy that an idea that is immensely popular—and calculated to save money for seniors, people with disabilities, and taxpayers—gets no traction. But critics say it’s no mystery, given the enormous financial influence of the drug industry, which rivals the insurance industry as the top-spending lobbying machine in Washington. It has funneled $1.96 billion into lobbying in the nation’s capital since the beginning of 2003 and, in just 2015 and the first half of 2016, has spent the equivalent of $468,108 per member of Congress. The industry also is a major contributor to House and Senate campaigns.

“It’s Exhibit A in how crony capitalism works,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who has sponsored or co-sponsored at least six bills since 2007 to allow Part D drug price negotiations. “I mean,” he added, “how in the world can one explain that the government actually passed a law saying that you can’t negotiate prices? Well, campaign contributions and lobbying obviously had a big part in making that upside-down outcome occur.”

Wendell Potter, co-author of a book about the influence of money in politics, Nation on the Take, likened the drug industry’s defiance of public opinion to the gun lobby’s success in fending off tougher federal firearms controls and the big banks’ ability to escape stronger regulation despite their role in the Great Recession.

“They are able to pretty much call the shots,” Potter said, referring to the drug industry along with its allies in the insurance industry. “It doesn’t matter what the public will is or what public opinion polls are showing. As long as we have a system that enables industries, big corporations, to spend pretty much whatever it takes to influence the elections and public policy, we’re going to wind up with this situation.”

While Part D is only one of the issues the drug industry pushes in Washington, it is a blockbuster program. According to a report from the trustees of the Medicare system, this year Part D is expected to spend $103 billion to serve an estimated 43 million Americans.

A paper released in August by Harvard Medical School researchers cited the size of the program and its lack of government negotiating clout as among the reasons why Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. A co-author of that paper, Ameet Sarpatwari, estimates that Part D accounts for nearly 30 percent of the nation’s spending on prescription drugs.

What’s more, Part D often pays far more for drugs than do Medicaid or the Veterans Health Administration—which, unlike Part D, mandate government measures to hold down prices. One report found that Part D pays 80 percent more for medicines than the VHA and 73 percent more than Medicaid. While researchers aren’t unanimous in their views, an array of experts have concluded that federal negotiating power—if backed up by other cost controls—would bring Part D drug costs more in line.

Center for Responsive Politics/FairWarning

The drug industry and its allies acknowledge that, at least in the short term, federal intervention in the marketplace could bring lower drug prices. Yet the industry says such a step would also kill incentives to develop new medicines.

In addition, industry officials and many analysts say substantial cost reductions will come only if the Part D program refuses to pay for drugs that it considers overpriced, possibly reducing seniors’ access to some medicines. They point to the way the VHA strengthens its negotiating leverage by rejecting some expensive medicines. Instead, the veterans’ health care system limits its purchases to a list of approved drugs known as a formulary.

“If you want to have lower prices, you’re going to have fewer medicines,” said Kirsten Axelsen, a vice president at Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant that leads all drug companies in spending on lobbying and political campaigns at the federal level.

It took intense maneuvering by the Bush White House and GOP leaders to get Part D through Congress in November 2003, when the House and the Senate were under Republican control. The measure came up for a vote in the House at 3 a.m. on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, as lawmakers were trying to finish business before the holiday. But when the bill appeared headed to a narrow defeat after the normal 15 minutes allowed for voting, Republican leaders kept the vote open for an extraordinary stretch of nearly three hours, described in a 2004 scholarly paper as by far the longest known roll-call vote in the history of the House.

With the help of pre-dawn phone calls from Bush and a custom-defying visit to the House floor by Tommy Thompson, then secretary of health and human services, enough members were coaxed to switch their votes to pass the bill, 220-215, shortly before 6 a.m.

Part D was conceived at a time when rapidly rising US drug costs were alarming seniors, prompting some to head to Canada and Mexico to buy medicines at dramatically lower prices. With the 2004 presidential election campaign coming up, Republican leaders saw “an opportunity to steal a long-standing issue from the Democrats,” said Thomas R. Oliver, a health policy expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead author of the 2004 paper about the adoption of Part D.

A key aim of Part D proponents, Oliver said, was to cover seniors “in a Republican, pro-market kind of way.” That meant including “as much private sector involvement as possible,” which led to insurance companies managing the program. At the same time, it excluded federal price controls, which were anathema to the drug industry.

Today, the program remains subject to the pervasive influence of the drug industry. An analysis by FairWarning, based on spending data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group, has found:

— There are far more lobbyists in Washington working for drug manufacturers and wholesalers than there are members of Congress. Last year the industry retained 894 lobbyists to influence the 535 members of Congress, along with staffers and regulators. From 2007 through 2009, there were more than two drug industry lobbyists for every member of Congress.

— For each of the last 13 years, more than 60 percent of the industry’s drug lobbyists have been “revolvers”—that is, lobbyists who previously served in Congress or who worked as congressional aides or in other government jobs. That raises suspicions that lawmakers and regulators will go easy on the industry to avoid jeopardizing their chances of landing lucrative lobbying work after they leave office.

Center for Responsive Politics/Fair Warning

Probably the most notorious example was the Louisiana Republican Billy Tauzin. He helped shape the Part D legislation while serving as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In January 2005, just days after he retired from the House, he became the drug industry’s top lobbyist as president of a powerful trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA. He remained in that job—which reportedly paid him $2 million a year—until 2010.

“It was pretty blatant but an accurate reflection of the way pharma plays the game, through campaign contributions and, in Billy’s case, way more than that,” said US Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who has been a leading proponent of government price negotiations.

— Since January 2003, drug manufacturers and wholesalers have given $147.5 million in federal political contributions to presidential and congressional candidates, party committees, leadership PACs and other political advocacy groups. Of the total, 62 percent has gone to Republican or conservative causes.

Over the period, four Republican lawmakers from the 2015-16 Congress received more than $1 million in contributions from drug companies. (One of them, former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, resigned last October.) In all, 518 members of the current Congress—every member of the Senate and more than 95 percent of the House—have received drug industry money since 2003.

Pfizer said that since the beginning of 2003 through the middle of this year it has spent, at the federal level, $145.9 million on lobbying as well as $12.2 million on political contributions through its PACs. In a written statement, the company said, “Our political contributions are led by two guiding principles—preserve and further the incentives for innovation, and protect and expand access for the patients we serve.”

— The big money goes to top congressional leaders as well as chairs and other members of key committees and subcommittees.

The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, repeatedly a graveyard for Part D price negotiation bills, underscores the pattern. The 16 Republican members have received an average of $340,219 since the beginning of 2003.

The drug industry “knows that you really only need, in many cases, just a small number of influential members to do their bidding. That’s why you see contributions flowing to committee chairs, regardless of who is in power. They flow to Democrats as well as Republicans,” Potter said.

Proponents of negotiations say some economic and political currents may turn the tide in their favor. The main factor: After years of relatively modest price rises for prescription drugs, cost increases have begun to escalate. That’s partly because of expensive new treatments for illnesses such as hepatitis C.

According to Medicare officials, Part D payments are expected to rise 6 percent annually over the coming decade per enrollee, up from only 2.5 percent annually over the last nine years. Already, cost increases are “putting wicked pressure on our hospitals, on our seniors, and on our state governments,” Welch said.

Center for Responsive Politics/Fair Warning

At the same time, both major presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have called for Medicare drug price negotiation. So have doctor groups such as the American College of Physicians and an alliance of more than 100 oncologists, many nationally known, who last year garnered headlines with their plea for Medicare negotiations and other measures to fight skyrocketing costs for cancer drugs.

PhRMA, the trade group, wouldn’t comment for this story on lobbying or campaign spending. In a written statement, however, PhRMA spokeswoman Allyson Funk said, “There is significant price negotiation that already occurs within the Medicare prescription drug program.” Pointing to the private companies that run the program, Funk added, “Large, powerful purchasers negotiate discounts and rebates directly with manufacturers, saving money for both beneficiaries and taxpayers.”

Funk also pointed to skeptical assessments by the Congressional Budget Office about the potential additional savings from federal negotiations. Repeatedly—including in letters in 2004 and 2007—the CBO has said government officials likely could extract only modest savings, at best. The office’s reasoning is that costs already would be held down by bargaining pressure from insurance firms and by drug manufacturers’ fear of bad publicity if they are viewed as jacking up prices too high.

But many analysts, particularly amid recent controversies over skyrocketing costs for essential drugs and EpiPen injection devices, scoff at those CBO conclusions. They fault the CBO for not taking into account other price controls, such as those used by Medicaid and the VHA, that likely would be coupled with price negotiation.

What CBO officials “seem to be assuming is that Congress would change the law in a really foolish way,” said Dean Baker, a liberal think tank economist who has studied the Part D program. “It seems to me that if you got Congress to change the law, you would want Medicare to have the option to say, ‘Okay, this is our price, and you’re going to take it. And if you don’t take it, we’re not buying it.”

In fact, related bills proposed during the current Congress by two Illinois Democrats—Schakowsky and Richard J. Durbin, the Senate minority whip—go beyond requiring drug price negotiations. They both provide for federal officials to adopt “strategies similar to those used by other Federal purchasers of prescription drugs, and other strategies…to reduce the purchase cost of covered part D drugs.”

The potential to reduce prices is underscored by a 2015 paper by Carleton University of Ottawa, Canada, and the US advocacy group Public Citizen. It found that Medicare Part D on average pays 73 percent more than Medicaid and 80 percent more than the VHA for the same brand-name drugs. The VHA’s success in holding down costs helped inspire a measure on California’s November ballot, Proposition 61, that would restrict most state-run health programs from paying any more for prescription drugs than the veterans agency does.

Two studies by the inspector general of health and human services that compared drug expenditures under the Part D and Medicaid programs also concluded that Part D pays far more for the same medicines. The more recent inspector general study, released in April 2015, examined spending and rebates on 200 brand-name drugs. It found that, after taking rebates into account, Medicaid, which provides health care for low-income families with children, paid less than half of what Part D did for 110 of the drugs. Part D, on the other hand, paid less than Medicaid for only 5 of 200 drugs.

Those findings provide evidence that “the current reliance on private insurers that negotiate drug prices isn’t working that well,” said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank.

Five Democrats who are leading opponents of the status quo—US Representatives Welch, Schakowsky, and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, along with Sens. Durbin and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota—each have introduced price negotiation bills (HR 3061, HR 3261, HR 3513, S 31 and S 1884) during the current, 114th Congress. All the measures have stalled in committee.

Schakowsky, a House Democratic chief deputy whip, said under Republican control in her chamber, “I think it is virtually impossible for this to ever go to hearings and markups.”

Take, for example, the bill that Welch introduced in the House on July 14, 2015. Within a week, it was referred to two health subcommittees, where it has sat ever since.

The closest Welch ever came to success was in 2007. He was among 198 co-sponsors—all but one, Democrats—of a bill introduced by then-US Rep. John D. Dingell of Michigan. It was approved by the House but then blocked by Republicans from being taken up in the Senate.

Lawmakers on committees where Part D bills ordinarily go—the Finance Committee in the Senate, and the Energy and Commerce Committee as well as the Ways and Means Committee in the House—tend to be well funded by the drug industry.

For instance, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who sits on the Finance Committee, has received more money from the industry since 2003 than anyone else currently in Congress, $1.3 million. Close behind is Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah), who has gotten $1.18 million. (The other members of the million-dollar club are Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), House Energy and Commerce chairman, at $1 million, and former House Speaker Boehner, at $1.21 million.)

Burr also is the Senate leader so far in the 2015-16 political cycle, collecting $229,710 from the drug industry. In the House in the current cycle, John Shimkus (R-Ill.), a member of the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, has snagged $189,000, trailing only Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy ($292,550) and House Speaker Paul Ryan ($273,195). A Burr spokeswoman declined to comment. Hatch and Shimkus did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Amid the EpiPen controversy and growing concerns about prescription drug prices, Park sees signs that more lawmakers are willing to buck industry opposition to government price negotiation. “There’s a lot of industry opposition. This would affect their bottom line,” Park said. “It doesn’t mean, however, that industry is all-powerful.”

But Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, was skeptical about the prospects for reform. “I think it’s pretty clear what you’re seeing is, there’s an industry group that stands to lose a lot of money, and they’re basically using all of the political power they can to make sure that it doesn’t happen.”

This story was reported by FairWarning, a California nonprofit news organization that focuses on public health, safety, and environmental issues. Additional reporting was contributed by Deborah Schoch, a freelance health and science writer, and Douglas H. Weber, a senior researcher for the Center for Responsive Politics.

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This Is Why Your Drug Prescriptions Cost So Damn Much

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California’s Fight Over Condoms in Porn Is About to Climax

by JacquelGregg Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Among California’s long list of ballot initiatives up for grabs in November is Proposition 60, an initiative that would allow the state’s pornography viewers to sue adult-film producers—and, potentially, performers—if they can’t spot a condom in their latest download. And as it turns out, there’s at least one thing that California’s Democrats and Republicans can agree upon this election season: bareback porn.

Prop. 60 aims to fight the spread of sexually transmitted infections by adding the Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act to state law. While California has required porn stars to wear condoms since 1992, the proposition ramps up enforcement by permitting state residents to file a complaint about performers not wearing condoms with the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Cal-OSHA would then have three weeks to respond before those residents could sue anyone with a financial interest in the production and, if the court rules against the pornographers, collect a quarter of the penalties. The proposition also requires producers to obtain a state health licenses, register shoots with the state, and pay for performers’ STI testing.

The list of Prop. 60 opponents is formidable. Democrats don’t like it because of the potential for lawsuits that could compromise worker privacy. Republicans don’t like the cost: around $1 million in state expenses to license and regulate film production, and an additional several million dollars in lost taxes if the industry flees California, according to a state analysis. AIDS Project Los Angeles slammed the measure for its condoms-only approach, which “completely ignores recent developments in HIV biomedical prevention,” such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)—a position taken by multiple AIDS groups. Newspaper editorial boards think it’s poorly written. And the porn industry has spoken out loudly against Prop. 60, claiming that its lawsuits would leave workers vulnerable to harassment from overzealous fans, anti-porn crusaders, and stalkers, to whom actors are especially vulnerable.

On the other side is the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the world’s largest AIDS NGO, a 630,000-patient, 36-country behemoth with a $1.3 billion budget. Over the past decade, AHF’s president, Michael Weinstein, has become a gadfly to adult-film insiders due to his repeated attempts to impose safe-sex regulations on the industry. Now, after drafting a condoms-in-porn state bill that died in committee and failing to convince a Cal-OSHA supervisory board to adopt regulations over the objections of workers, AHF is appealing to the popular vote.

It’s a strategy that’s worked well in the past for Weinstein, who sees a larger public health significance to the condom question. “Many young people get their sex education from performers,” Weinstein said in an August interview with Mother Jones. “They get the message that the only kind of sex is unsafe.”

Weinstein said his interest in promoting condoms in porn started after an HIV outbreak struck the adult film industry in 2004. AHF began taking note of performers who came into its California clinics with HIV and other infections. Documented cases of HIV transmission on California adult-film sets have been virtually nonexistent since the 2004 outbreak, but gonorrhea and chlamydia are common among actors. And unlike PrEP, condoms can reduce their likelihood of transmission.

AHF has filed multiple OSHA complaints that have led to fines for some the most powerful porn producers. Still, by 2012, Weinstein was frustrated by a lack of enforcement. “For too long, elected officials have dodged this workplace safety issue, punting the issue from city to county to state,” he said in a statement. That year, Weinstein took the issue first to the Los Angeles City Council and then to the voters of Los Angeles County, home to the San Fernando Valley, the hub of mainstream US porn production. AHF’s county initiative, known as Measure B, passed, requiring pornographers to obtain health permits from the county before shooting and post signs notifying performers that they were required to use condoms.

Still, most of the industry refused to adopt condoms. Over the next year, filming permits for adult-film shoots plummeted 95 percent in Los Angeles County, and producers sought only 11 of the newly required health permits the whole year. According to a lawyer for the porn company Vivid Entertainment, which sued to block Measure B on First Amendment grounds, producers were leaving the county “in droves,” moving to Las Vegas or other parts of California.

Now, four years after Measure B, AHF is presenting a similar—and stricter—proposal to the rest of the state. As of September 24, the foundation has shelled out about $4.4 million to promote Prop 60 (for comparison, opponents have raised around $433,000). This isn’t AHF’s only fight on the ballot—the group is also staring down the pharmaceutical industry with a proposition to tie Medi-Cal drug spending to Veterans Administration prices—but it’s a lonely one, with no other group contributing a cent to the “Yes on Prop 60” PAC.

Lonely, except for support among 55 percent of registered California voters, according to a University of Southern California Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll last month.

“I’m just worried that voters are blindly going to say, ‘Oh, condoms are good, so let’s save the poor porn stars who are being abused, and are full of STIs,'” says Jiz Lee, a genderqueer, condoms-only performer and producer and a staunch opponent to Proposition 60. Lee, who also works behind the scenes for queer porn outfit Pink and White Productions, is especially worried about the extra spending Prop. 60 would mean for small operators. The expenses would less of a problem for the big studios, Lee says, than for the growing number of producers/performers who are dealing with the proliferation of free porn online by producing their own clips, “camming,” and distributing exclusive content to paying viewers. Nowadays, most performers are producers, according to the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee—a group that claims to represent about 500 performers.

“I don’t know a single active performer who is for this,” Lee says. And while Lee adds that some performers are genuinely concerned about harassment and stalking, the main issue for others is comfort—and chafing. Once, while shooting a scene, Lee’s male costar got an abrasion and began to bleed. That’s what comes from having porn-duration sex with a condom—and according to Lee, it gets worse when actors shoot several scenes a week. “There’s a lot of things that the proponents didn’t consider in terms of what it’s really like to do the work right now,” Lee said. “If you’re an individual performer, you have to have a lot of video.”

Meanwhile, the porn industry’s campaign against Prop. 60 has focused on on the issue of worker harassment. Ela Darling, the president of the APAC and founder of a virtual-reality porn company Cam4VR, says violent harassment is common. “I get people who threaten to rape me, people who threaten to kill me. I’ve had someone threaten to slit my throat. People threaten to kill my dog,” she says. But the most intrusive harassment began after the legal names of porn performers leaked in 2011, she says. One harasser was able to find her family. “He figured out my mothers work phone number, and he would call my mother and harass her, saying I’m a lesbian whore and that I’m bringing shame to the family. This is something people have done just with access to my legal name.”

As for Weinstein, Prop. 60 may be his final play to get more porn actors to wear condoms. “When this passes, from my point of view, this will complete the vast majority of our work on this subject,” he said. Will AHF use the proposition to file suits against porn companies, if it passes? “I don’t anticipate that,” Weinstein said. “I believe that either OSHA or the performers would take care of the issue.”

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California’s Fight Over Condoms in Porn Is About to Climax

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Our Future Is In Paul Ryan’s Hands

by TMQMason7050375 Posted on October 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s 23 days until this sordid campaign finally ends. Polls currently suggest that (a) Hillary Clinton will become president, (b) Democrats will regain control of the Senate, and (c) Republicans will maintain control of the House. Let’s assume that’s how things turn out. What happens next? A few things:

The Republican Party will completely disown and repudiate Donald Trump.
Mitch McConnell will be a nonentity. He doesn’t pretend to be a national leader, especially if he’s in the minority, and he’s shown pretty often that he’s willing to do deals in a fairly conventional way. He’s a caucus manager, not a visionary.
With few other choices around, Paul Ryan becomes the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.
After the election Republicans will do their usual “autopsy,” and it will say the usual thing: Demographic trends are working against them, and they have to reach out to non-white, non-male voters if they don’t want to fade slowly into irrelevance. In the last 25 years, they’ve won two presidential elections by the barest hair’s breadth and lost the other five—and this is only going to get worse in the future.
Hillary Clinton will remain the pragmatic dealmaker she is. And despite the current bucketloads of anti-Hillary red meat that Republicans are tossing around right now, most of them trust her to deal honestly when it comes to political bargains.

This means that the next four years depend entirely on Paul Ryan. So what will he do? I maintain that this is a very open, very interesting question.

I’ve gotten some pushback lately for a couple of posts where I’ve gone soft on Ryan. But here’s the thing: when it comes to Ryan’s budget policies, I have nothing but contempt for him. Here’s a typical post of mine from a few years ago, and there are plenty more just like it. But it’s foolish to insist that simply because someone disagrees with my politics they’re either stupid or irredeemably evil. Ryan is neither.

So what will Ryan do? One possibility, of course, is that he’ll take the simplest route: endless obstruction, just like 2009. Republicans may be a divided party, but one thing they all agree on is that they hate Hillary Clinton and they want to prevent her from doing anything.

But there’s another possibility. Ryan is not a racial fearmonger. He’s always been open to immigration reform. He’s consistently shown genuine disgust for Donald Trump. He’s been open to making low-key deals in the past. He’s smart enough to know precisely the depth of the demographic hole Republicans are in. And despite being conservative himself, he may well realize that the GOP simply can’t stay in thrall to the tea party caucus forever if it wants to survive. On a personal level, he saw what they did to John Boehner, and he may well be sick and tired of them himself.

It’s also possible that he wants to run for president in 2020, and if that’s the case he’ll do better if he has some real accomplishments to show over the next four years. Running on a platform of scorched-earth obstruction might get the tea partiers excited, but that’s not enough to win the presidency.

So maybe Ryan decides that now is the time to try to reform the Republican Party. Once he wins the speakership again, he makes clear to the tea partiers that they’re finished as power brokers: he’s going to pass bills even if it means depending on Democratic support to do it. He reaches out to women and minorities. He passes immigration reform. He makes sure that budgets get passed and we don’t default on the national debt. He works behind the scenes with Hillary Clinton in standard horsetrading mode: she gets some things she wants, but only in return for some things conservatives want.

This could go a long way toward making him the next president of the United States. If he plays his cards right, Clinton might suffer with her base for selling them out on some of the deals she makes. Ryan will get the tea partiers under control and have some accomplishments to run on. He’ll soften the nonwhite disgust with the party enough to pick up some minority votes. Maybe the economy helps him out by going soft in 2019. And he’s already got good looks, youth, and an agreeable speaking style going for him.

So which Paul Ryan will we get in 2017? The movement conservative who breathes fire and insists that Hillary Clinton will never get one red cent for any of her satanic priorities? Or a conservative but realistic leader who’s willing to make deals as a way of bringing the Republican Party back from the brink of destruction that Donald Trump has led them to?

If it’s the latter, this presents liberals with a real quandary: just what are they willing to give Ryan in return for passage of some of their priorities? That’s worth some thought just in case Ryan decides to take the smart route.

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Our Future Is In Paul Ryan’s Hands

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

by KatrinaSxn Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The withdrawal of Aetna from many of its Obamacare markets has unleashed a torrent of commentary about how Obamacare is now well and truly doomed. From Republicans, this is the usual hot air. From Democrats, it’s a little different. It’s also way overblown, and I’m happy to see Jonathan Chait make the case for Obamacare’s basic solvency here. Go read it.

For myself, I just want to focus on one of Chait’s points: The reason Aetna withdrew is that they weren’t making money. The reason they weren’t making money is because their premiums were too low. The reason their premiums were too low is because they were competing with other insurers for business. In other words, competing on a level playing field, they couldn’t succeed. That’s life in a free market.

So what happened? For some reason, insurers underpriced their policies substantially when Obamacare was introduced. It’s possible that their actuaries all badly miscalculated the makeup of the market. Or it’s possible that they were underpricing deliberately as a way of building market share. Or maybe a combination of both.

My own guess is that the underpricing was mostly deliberate. After all, even the Congressional Budget Office had a pretty good idea of what average premiums ought to be, and it’s hard to believe that a bunch of experienced insurance companies couldn’t do the same math as the CBO. Either way, though, this is, once again, life in a free market. Some vendors make mistakes and fail. Some can’t compete and fail. Some just decide to focus on other markets.

The flip side of this is that free markets usually stabilize eventually. In the case of Obamacare, this means premiums have to go up. Sorry. However, as that happens, new insurers are likely to enter. Eventually supply will more or less equal demand, and the market will find an equilibrium. This is why I’m much less panicked over Obamacare’s immediate problems than most people.

Obamacare is an artificial market in many ways, but that’s true of health care in general, which is highly regulated and has well-known eccentricities. Nonetheless, Obamacare is a market, and right now it’s operating like one. Prices are looking for an equilibrium, consumers are deciding whether to participate, and vendors are jockeying for position. That’s not painless, but then, nobody ever said capitalism was painless.

Of course, if you do want painless, we know how to do that too: true national health care funded through taxes. Dozens of countries do this, and it works fine.

Short of that, we could still reduce the pain considerably. Is Obamacare too expensive for many people? Yes. That could be fixed by increasing subsidies. Are insurers losing money in the early years? Yes. That could be largely fixed by funding the risk corridors. Are the poor still underserved? Yes. That could be addressed by adopting the Medicaid expansion in all states. Are there plenty of details here and there that ought to be cleaned up? Yes. That could be fixed via legislation.

If Republicans actually cared about providing health care to people, all of this would be trivial. But they don’t. To the extent that Obamacare has problems, this is why. There’s nothing inherent in the design that prevents it from operating successfully. In fact, as the chart on the right shows, even now, with all its problems, Obamacare is operating more successfully than anybody thought it would when it was first passed. 20 million newly insured people is nothing to sniff at.

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

by LannyFtflnztr Posted on October 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has seemed content to cede leadership in Syria to Russia. But at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made a stunning about-face from his running mate’s position by saying the United States should stand up to Russia and even be willing to bomb the Syrian military to stop humanitarian disasters.

“If Russia…continues to be involved in this barbaric attack on civilians in Aleppo, the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime,” Pence said. It was part of a forceful case that the United States should stand up to Russia, which is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian aircraft have flown bombing missions in Syria for the past year, killing almost 10,000 people in that time. Russia has also stepped up its air campaign in recent days in the city of Aleppo, killing several hundred civilians and destroying hospitals in the process. “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength,” Pence said.

Pence’s comments were by far the most hawkish ones made so far by either the Trump or Clinton campaigns. During the Republican primaries, Trump proposed putting 30,000 troops in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS. But he has also said that the US has “bigger problems than Assad” and has repeatedly called for working with Russia on an anti-ISIS campaign. “If we could get Russia to help us get rid of ISIS—if we could actually be friendly with Russia—wouldn’t that be a good thing?” he said at a rally this summer. Confronting the Syrian army and its Russian allies could lead to direct combat between US and Russian aircraft or US jets being shot down by recently placed Russian missiles.

Clinton is also seen as a Syria hawk. She has criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Syria and supports the creation of a no-fly-zone to protect Syrian civilians. That hawkishness has drawn criticism from other Democrats, and Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last month that a no-fly-zone could drag the United States into war with Russia. Kaine reiterated Clinton’s desire to create a “humanitarian zone” during Tuesday’s debate, but he pointedly avoided saying how a Clinton administration would enforce such safe areas and did not mention Clinton’s support for a no-fly-zone.

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

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Turns out solar power is the only thing Americans can agree on.

by JoeannSloan Posted on October 4, 2016

According to a paper released Tuesday by James Hansen, formerly of NASA and now at Columbia University*, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

*Correction: This story originally referred to Hansen as a former NASA director. He was director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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Turns out solar power is the only thing Americans can agree on.

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Donald Trump is Predictable and Controllable. On the Other Hand, He’s Also Predictable and Controllable.

by Darci5363yxecmd Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein writes about what we’ve learned for the thousandth time this week about Donald Trump:

The problem isn’t that Trump is cruel, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is boorish, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is undisciplined, though he is.

The problem is that Trump is predictable and controllable….His behavior, though unusual, is quite predictable — a fact the Clinton campaign proved by predicting it. His actions, though beyond the control ofhis allies, can be controlled by his enemies — a fact they proved by controlling them.

….Donald Trump can be forgiven for being caught off-guard at Monday’s debate. His presidency-disqualifying sin came in the hours after the debate. The Clinton campaign released a slickly produced video featuring Machado. The Guardian and Cosmopolitan rushed pre-planned Machado profiles to publication. Hillary Clinton did everything but spraypaint “THIS IS A TRAP” on the side of Trump Tower.

And still Trump fell for it. And fell for it. And fell for it. Six days later, he’s still falling for it.

All of this is precisely true. As Klein says, what Hillary Clinton did was so obvious, and so ploddingly executed, that it’s almost wrong to call it a trap. Any half-witted high school debater could have swatted it away contemptuously. But the Clinton camp knew Trump would fall for it anyway, and he did. His lizard-brain approach to life is that predictable.

But the funny thing is that there’s a completely different way that Trump’s biggest problem is that he’s predictable and controllable. In fact, it’s what I expected Klein’s post to be about when I read that line.

For months, liberals have been afraid that Trump might be smarter than he seems. Once the primary was over, he’d be able to remake himself as a normal person for a few consecutive months, and that might be enough to convince fence-sitters that he was presidential material. And for a while, after he brought Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway on board, it looked like that might happen. Trump calmed down and allowed his team to guide him. He started picking up a few points in the polls. Democrats were getting scared.

If he had kept that up, this might have turned into a real nailbiter of an election. And that was the real fear. Trump can, in fact, be predictable and controllable in a good way, and if he had managed to keep up that facade from Labor Day to Election Day, he might have fooled a fair number of people into voting for him. Fortunately, he couldn’t keep up the act, and within a few weeks he once again became predictable and controllable in a bad way.

In the end, Trump’s inability to play a role for even a few weeks in a row might be the only thing that saves us from a Trump presidency. That’s a little too close for comfort.

Original article – 

Donald Trump is Predictable and Controllable. On the Other Hand, He’s Also Predictable and Controllable.

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

by StaciWFOgmzdrj Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The polls are tightening and the freak-out is beginning. With hours to go before the first presidential debate, FiveThirtyEight‘s polls-plus forecast gives former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just a 53.4 percent chance of winning the election. It’s the closest the race has been since the elections site unveiled its model in June. The “bedwetting cometh,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin.

But Democrats have been here before. In 2012, President Barack Obama held a modest but consistent lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney heading into the first debate, only to uncharacteristically collapse. Within a few days, the lead had evaporated—according to FiveThirtyEight, Obama’s chances went from 86.1 percent to 61.1 percent, the steepest drop of the campaign—and his supporters started to lose it. No one captured this liberal angst better then Andrew Sullivan, then of the Daily Beast, who had championed Obama in 2008 and joyfully called him “the first gay president” in a Newsweek cover story.

Following Obama’s first debate with Romney, Sullivan was inconsolable:

Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate—and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better—and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

A week later, after the vice presidential debate had passed, Sullivan was even further gone. “Obama threw it all back in his supporters’ faces, reacting to their enthusiasm and record donations with a performance so execrable, so lazy, so feckless, and so vain it was almost a dare not to vote for him,” he wrote. And then Obama rebounded at the next two debates and won 332 electoral votes.

The race heading into the first debate tonight is closer than it was heading into the first presidential debate in 2012. If the election were held today, there’s a virtually even chance that Donald Trump would win. But Clinton backers anxiously hitting refresh on FiveThirtyEight and consulting their astrologers would do well to reread Sullivan’s lament. It’s fine to panic, but a 7-point polling swing is nothing a few good debates can’t reverse.

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

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