Tag Archives: election

Obamacare May Not Be Popular, But Its Provisions Sure Are

by TamaraAshcraft Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Brian Beutler on the way health care reform is playing out in the Arkansas Senate race:

The most interesting thing about Senator Mark Pryor’s decision to tout his support for the Affordable Care Act in a well-financed, statewide television ad isn’t that he stands apart from other embattled Democrats this election cycle. It’s that Republicans scrambled to spin the story, insisting to reporters that Pryor couldn’t possibly be running on Obamacare if he won’t refer to the law by name.

….Instead, Pryor says, “I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or deny sic coverage based on pre-existing conditions.” Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything about “a law” at all, but that’s a niggling, semantic critique. That Republicans working to defeat Pryor are asking reporters to squeeze the word “Obamacare” into this sentence is an admission that they’ve lost the policy fight. They criticize Pryor for eschewing the label, because the label’s just about the only thing they’re comfortable assailing.

I suppose this isn’t the biggest thing in the world, and as Beutler says, Republicans did manage to talk several reporters into mentioning this. So from their point of view, it’s just savvy media strategy. Besides, the truth is that Republicans have always focused on only a few things in their critique of Obamacare. That’s because polls have shown for years that most of the provisions of the law are popular even though support for the law itself is pretty shaky. This causes Republicans endless grief, since Democrats get to harass them relentlessly about whether they oppose closing the donut hole; whether they oppose subsidy assistance; whether they oppose guaranteed issue; and so on. Republicans can hem and haw about how they’d keep all this stuff and only get rid of the nasty taxes and mandates, but even the dimmer bulbs in the GOP caucus know perfectly well that this is untrue.

In any case, other Democratic politicians have touted their support for specific provisions of Obamacare, so Pryor isn’t really doing anything new. He’s just being smart. He knows that denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions is extremely unpopular, even among conservative voters, and he’d love to draw his opponent into a debate about exactly that. Tom Cotton has so far refused to take the bait, pretending that he’d somehow keep that provision while repealing everything else. This is a bald-faced lie, of course, but if he sticks to that story like glue he can probably avoid any serious damage from Pryor’s attacks.

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Obamacare May Not Be Popular, But Its Provisions Sure Are

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Pope Francis Convenes Vatican Synod on Family and Sex

by snorsenaf Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hmmm. Is Pope Francis about to convene Vatican III? Not quite, but we’re getting something along similar lines later this year:

On Pope Francis’ orders, the Vatican will convene an urgent meeting of senior clerics this fall to reexamine church teachings that touch the most intimate aspects of people’s lives….The run-up to the synod has been extraordinary in itself, a departure from usual practice that some say is a mark of the pope’s radical new leadership style, and a canny tactic to defuse dissent over potential reforms.

….Within a few months of his election last year, Francis directed every diocese in the world to survey local attitudes on family and relationships and report back to the Vatican, a canvassing of a sort that few of the faithful can recall previously….The exercise reflects Francis’ desire for less centralized and more responsive decision-making, mirroring his own self-described evolution from a rigid, authoritarian leader as a young man into one who consults and empathizes.

….Taking the public temperature also brings tactical advantages. Nobody at the Vatican will be surprised to learn that vast numbers of Catholics disobey its ban on premarital sex and birth control, or that some are in gay partnerships. Setting down those realities irrefutably on paper, however, could strengthen a bid by Francis to soften the church’s official line and put pressure on bishops inclined to resist, including some in the United States and many in Asia and Africa, conservative areas where the church has been growing.

The story is careful to say that no one expects any large doctrinal changes from this synod. Catholic teaching on gay marriage, divorce, women priests, and contraception will likely remain unchanged. Still, even baby steps would be welcome. Stay tuned.

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Pope Francis Convenes Vatican Synod on Family and Sex

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Here’s the Pitiful Micro-Drama Behind Yesterday’s Debt Ceiling Vote

by RafaelCatts Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the House finally decided to just pass a damn debt ceiling bill and head out of town, everyone figured the Senate vote wouldn’t produce any drama. But it did, though only in a sad, craven key. It all started when Ted Cruz insisted on filibustering the bill because it gave him a chance to pull off some cheap tea party theatrics, and that’s all Cruz cares about. (Apparently he’s under the sad delusion that this kind of thing might pave his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) Then the vote got up 58 ayes, and sort of stalled. Why? Dave Weigel points me to this report from Manu Raju and Burgess Everett:

Miffed that they have long been asked to take tough votes when the GOP leaders voted “no,” Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski, privately pressured McConnell and Cornyn to vote to break the filibuster, sources said. Murkowski resisted voting for the measure without the support of her leadership team.

As the drama grew in the chamber with the vote’s prospects in doubt, McConnell turned to his colleagues and said: “We’re not doing this again,” according to a source familiar with his remarks.

So McConnell and Cornyn — both facing reelection this year and battling tea party-inspired challengers in their states — took the plunge and risked the political backlash by voting to break a filibuster, the type of vote the two wily leaders have long sought to avoid in this election season.

It was a mini-revolt of the backbenchers. There’s a standard bunch of GOP moderates who keep getting asked to take one for the team, and they finally got tired of it. So they told Mitch McConnell they were through bailing out the party unless they got some help. McConnell and Cornyn caved, and that opened the floodgates for a bunch of other Republicans to follow suit. In the end, the debt ceiling increase passed 67-31.

But McConnell managed a small, almost touchingly meager victory. Apparently Harry Reid took pity on him and played along with a plan to keep the votes semi-private by not having the clerk call the roll. Everyone’s votes were still recorded, but at least they weren’t called out in stentorian tones on CSPAN-2. Weigel:

If this sounds pathetic, that’s because it is. Carl Hulse puts it very well here: Most Republicans want the country to keep running, but don’t want to provide tough votes if they can be used against them in primaries. But I’d go further than Hulse. More than ever, most members Congress are structurally protected from any consequences for any votes they take. Like I wrote yesterday, only four incumbent Republicans in the House and Senate, total, lost primaries in 2012. None of them lost only because they voted to raise the debt limit.

Individually, they’re totally safe. Collectively, they often can’t act. So the only real pressure exerted on a party is the external backlash that follows a big, collective failure — the definitive case this year being the government shutdown, the definitive case in 2011 being the collapse of a House Republican debt limit bill.

Four incumbents! But that’s all it takes to make all the rest of them petrified with fear of the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth. Senators these days are like our fabled youth who are supposedly so smothered with parenting that they’re afraid to face the real world on their own. Senators are so smothered with entitlement to their seats that they’re afraid of even the tiniest chance of a primary challenge. The result is a gutlessness in the face of mau-mauing from blowhards like Cruz that makes you want to avert your eyes. Even when it’s being done to a bunch of guys you can’t stand, it’s just too painful to watch.

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Here’s the Pitiful Micro-Drama Behind Yesterday’s Debt Ceiling Vote

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

by JuliaPage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn’t disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled “Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?” But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it’s clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.

In the case of Pennsylvania, a mysterious nonprofit called All Votes Matter spent large sums lobbying for these changes. Local officials wondered about its funding sources. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach told Mother Jones at the time. “We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.” But All Votes Matter didn’t disclose its donors, nor did it have to. The group is organized as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, which means that it can spend money on politics while keeping its donors secret. (Such groups are not supposed to spend more than half of their budget on political causes, but IRS enforcement is slack.) Thus the public knew little about the agendas behind this effort to upend the mechanics of presidential elections.

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

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How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Citizens United

by Billy Zane Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Four years ago, in his inaugural State of the Union address, President Obama famously shamed the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices for their decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The court, Obama said, “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” Democratic lawmakers, activists, operatives, and donors piled on, condemning the ruling as “scandalous,” a “disaster,” and “bad for American democracy.” When a subsequent court decision, nodding to Citizens United, opened the door to super-PACs, a new breed of political committee that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash, Obama branded them “a threat to our democracy.”

The Obama of 2010 might not recognize the Democratic Party of 2014.

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How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Citizens United

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The pope is writing a big green manifesto

by ManieFerrell Posted on January 26, 2014

The pope is writing a big green manifesto

By

neneo / Shutterstock

The first clue that Pope Francis might be a greenie came when he chose to name himself after Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment.

We’ve also learned that he likes riding buses and doesn’t like fracking.

Soon we’ll find out more about his views on environmental protection. The Associated Press reports:

Pope Francis has begun drafting an encyclical on ecology.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the document was still very much in its early stages and that no publication date has been set.

More from Reuters:

Since his election in March, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics has made many appeals in defence of the environment.

His latest on Jan. 14 was in his so-called “state of the world” address to diplomats accredited to the Vatican, when he said, “God always forgives, we sometimes forgive, but when nature — creation — is mistreated, she never forgives.”

In a speech about two weeks after his election on March 13, the pope said he had taken his name after St. Francis of Assisi because he “teaches us profound respect for the whole of creation and the protection of our environment, which all too often, instead of using for the good, we exploit greedily, to one another’s detriment.”

If he calls for climate action, Francis will be following in the footsteps of his predecessors. As Susie Cagle explained in Grist last year:

Ex-Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, used his papal platform to promote social and political action in response to global warming, and even added an electric car to the popemobile fleet. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was also a proponent of climate action. And other Catholic leaders have spoken out about the need for a response to the impending “serious and potentially irreversible” effects of a warmer planet.

Now if Francis would just drop his sexist opposition to birth control and abortion rights (and ditch the homophobia, and crack down on pedophilia …), then we might start liking the guy.

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The pope is writing a big green manifesto

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The future of a big coal-export project will be decided by this small Washington community

by LauraFore Posted on October 31, 2013

The future of a big coal-export project will be decided by this small Washington community

By

Lou

What say you on coal exports, Whatcom County?

Less than a week remains before what could be the most momentous council election in the Washington county’s hitherto humble electoral history.

About 125,000 registered voters will have a say Tuesday on whether a $700 million shipping terminal will be built near Bellingham in the northwest corner of Washington state. The Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point would load 48 million tons of coal dug up in Montana and Wyoming every year onto ships bound for Asia. The county council will decide whether to issue critical permits for the proposed terminal, giving members enormous power that extends far beyond the county borders.

The large stakes are attracting a lot of attention to the rural community — and a lot of big campaign contributions. Mother Jones reports:

The money pouring into four council seat races dwarfs anything ever seen in this county of lumberjacks, farmers, and banana slugs. Compared to fundraising during the last county election in 2011, money raised by council candidates and their allies has increased more than seven-fold, to roughly $1 million. Much of it comes from fossil fuel interests such as Cloud Peak Energy and Global Coal Sales, and, on the other side, from A-list environmentalists such as California billionaire Tom Steyer.

If you were a Whatcom County voter, who would you vote for? Even if you had made up your mind about whether the coal terminal should be built (hint: it shouldn’t be), it would be hard to say for sure how to mark your ballot. The Seattle Times reminds us about one of the quirks of this election:

The proposal is believed to be favored by four, and maybe five, of the seven members of the nonpartisan council. So the environmentalists are trying to flip one or two seats, and the coal companies are trying to stop them.

Four incumbents are up for re-election; two are believed to support the proposal, and two are believed to oppose it.

The word “believed” is necessary because of [a] quirk in this unusual election: In largely rural Whatcom County, council members have quasi-judicial duties and are supposed to remain impartial about matters that might come before them in the future.

Still, the candidates are dropping hints to help voters figure out where they stand. “Proven environmental values” is code for “hell no” on the coal terminal proposal. “Committed to creating jobs” means “coal aboard!”


Source
Coal issue dominates Whatcom County election, but nobody’s talking about it, Seattle Times
The County Council Election That Could Make or Break Big Coal, Mother Jones

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The future of a big coal-export project will be decided by this small Washington community

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Virginia voters know we’re changing the climate, Republican candidate does not

by Leon Russell Posted on October 28, 2013

Virginia voters know we’re changing the climate, Republican candidate does not

By

chesapeakeclimateTerry McAuliffe gets climate change. So do most Virginians.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe is ahead in the gubernatorial polls in Virginia, despite accusations from his climate-denying Republican opponent that he’s waging a “war on coal” in a coal-powered state. His lead might be partly attributable to the fact that Virginians actually are concerned about global warming.

With a week remaining before the election, Old Dominion University polling [PDF] is showing that 44.1 percent of likely voters intend to support McAuliffe in the race for governor. Republican Ken Cuccinelli is favored by 36.9 percent of poll respondents, while 6.9 percent said they plan to vote for Libertarian Rob Sarvis.

Notably, the pollsters found that Virginia voters strongly shared their favored candidate’s views on climate change — which is bad news for the Republican:

62.7 percent of likely voters indicated that they believed “human activity is a major contributing factor in climate change,” while 34.5 percent indicated that they did not believe this to be the case.

66.4 percent of Cucinelli supporters indicated that they do not believe human activity is a major contributing factor in climate change, while 88.5 percent of McAuliffe and 68.1 percent of Sarvis supporters indicated that human activity is a major contributor to climate change.

Climate Progress puts the poll results into some context:

Gage SkidmoreKen Cuccinelli does not get climate change.

Cuccinelli has made his opposition to climate science a key selling point of his candidacy. In Thursday’s final debate, he boasted of his unsuccessful lawsuit to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases and accused McAuliffe of waging a “war on coal.”

In the debate, McAuliffe criticized Cuccinelli’s also-unsuccessful attempt to wage a witch hunt against a University of Virginia climate scientist that cost the university $570,000. Cuccinelli “intimidated scientists at our great universities,” McAuliffe observed, warning that this would scare off businesses from investing in Virginia.

Also check out: The Virginia governor’s race, the craziest political race of the year, is putting climate in the spotlight


Source
Summary of Results from Social Science Research Center Poll, Old Dominion University
Virginia Poll Finds More Than 60 Percent Believe Human Activity A Major Cause Of Climate Change, Climate Progress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

by nension Posted on January 24, 2013

Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

By Philip Bump

Reuters / Danny Moloshok

This guy! We haven’t seen Robert Murray since around election time and, to be honest, we missed him. He’s the closest thing we’ve got in the 21st century to an evil 19th-century coal baron, hellbent on profit and laughing heartily at the misfortunes of the poor. He’s retro. That’s always fun.

Last time we heard from Murray was when he sent a prayer to his local West Virginia paper lamenting how the reelection of Barack Obama meant he had to fire a bunch of his staff. (Was it the staff that he docked a day’s pay to appear in a Romney ad? Was it the staff he forced to contribute to his political action fund? We may never know.) So, wiping away big fucking crocodile tears, Murray wrote these powerful words:

The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance. …

Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.

Then: boom, pink slips, because Obama is killing coal and hates white people, probably. Boo-fucking-hoo, Robert Murray is so sad.

Anyway, here’s the update. From New Republic reporter Alec MacGillis:

I was surprised when I got reports from Ohio this week suggesting that operations at the Red Bird West mine, the one whose shutdown was announced with such fanfare last summer, are now picking up again. “It’s opened back up…they’re hiring people,” said Gary Parsons, a former superintendent at the mine who worked there for five years before being laid off with the announcement of the shutdown last summer. Parsons himself has not been called back, and is planning simply to retire early, but he said he had talked to several locals who were taking steps to get hired back on. He said he did not understand why, after the big headline-making closure last year, things were perking up at the mine. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “They said they was going to close the mine down.”

Another former Murray employee confirmed that operations were picking back up at Red Bird West. “They’ve called back some hourly folks. They’re definitely starting it back up,” the former employee said. What explained the reversal? This former employee conjectured that presidential campaign politics may have played a role. After all, announcing the shutdown of the mine a few months before Election Day was not helpful to Obama, who dearly needed to win Ohio. “In my opinion, it was all for politics,” the former Murray employee said. “It was just a show of politics to try to scare people, to get votes for [Murray’s] candidate…I felt they were playing politics from day one, and they certainly didn’t waste any time starting back up again.”

If this is true — and it would take as much for me to believe it is as it would take to convince me that I exist on this planet Earth — it’s almost admirable in its sheer, egregious shittiness. For all of the handwringing and wailing and moaning done by Obama opponents about how horrible he was making the economy and how doomed we would be if he won reelection (all while unemployment dropped and the Dow soared), it takes a special kind of scumbag to actually lay people off to prove your point. Much less to invoke the name of Jesus in doing so. Lord, please forgive Robert Murray for possibly closing a mine and firing people just so his massive investment in Mitt Romney might be substantiated.

When speaking to MacGillis, the company denied it was reopening the facility. However:

The only work going on at the mine, they said, was “reclamation” required as part of any shutdown. “We’re required to put things back together. We’re picking up some remnants of coal, some coal that was left over, as we clean up the place,” said Gary Broadbent, a senior attorney for the company. He said that there were 42 or 43 people at the mine doing this work, and while the work could go on for a few years, there would be no expansion at the mine, which at its peak employed more than 200 people. …

[T]he company’s current account would appear to be at variance with the announcement last summer, when Broadbent said that the mine would “gradually be closed through late September or early October,” with no mention of a possibly years-long reclamation project. After all, if the head count was really dropping from only 56 to 43, odds are the move would not have made the headlines it did.

Oh, and an addendum:

A former Murray employee in Utah informs me that people are being hired back at the Murray operations there, too, just a couple months after the big post-election layoffs. The former employee said about 25 had recently been hired back on. Murray officials demurred when asked about any uptick in activity at the Utah or Illinois mines where the post-election layoffs occurred. “I’m not intimately involved with the hiring or firing of employees,” said Broadbent.

Lord, when Robert Murray appears before you for his final judgment, feel free to use any and all information from Grist’s archive to make your decision. If you need me to appear as a witness, I will do so happily.

Sorry. Not when he appears before you. If.

Source

Is Obama’s Coal-Country Nemesis Hiring Again?, The New Republic

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Time’s Person of the Year talks climate a tiny, tiny bit

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 19, 2012

Time’s Person of the Year talks climate a tiny, tiny bit

By Philip Bump

mistydawnphoto

/ Shutterstockclap clap clap

Well, everyone, it’s official: President Barack Obama was the most important person in the world in 2012, as determined by the person researchers at Time magazine. (For context, Time has previously named Hitler, Stalin, and “you” the person of the year. Two of those were deeply undeserved.)

Why did the most powerful man in the world deserve to be named the most important man in the world, again? (“Again” as in “for the second time,” since he was also the most important man of 2008.) Because he won reelection, basically, prompting speculation about who would have been named the Person of the Year had Mitt Romney won. Would it have been Mitt Romney? Our world will never know.

Time did mention other reasons for the honor besides the president’s successful campaign. In its long article (about 5,000 words), even climate change is mentioned! Once. But that’s appropriate; during his first term, Obama mentioned climate change .04 percent of the time.

After the election, Obama began writing goals for his second term on a legal pad.

They soon discovered that the yellow pad included some things spoken of only rarely during the campaign: dealing with the problem of climate change, for instance, emerged as a major thread, despite all the money the campaign had spent in southeastern Ohio praising Obama’s commitment to coal.

Obama grabs a pen. Chews on the end of it, thoughtfully. Slowly but with assurance writes “CLIMATE CHANGE” on a yellow sheet titled, “My Legacy.” Looks at it. Nods approvingly. Sets the pen down.

The magazine also secured an interview with the president, given that it had bestowed this big award on him again and everything. And there, too, Obama couldn’t resist talking about climate change (despite all the money his campaign had spent touting a commitment to coal). In response to a question about alternative crime sentencing:

I think this is one of those things where I don’t think you should anticipate that I’m leading with an issue like this. My primary focus is going to continue to be on the economy, on immigration, on climate change and energy.

The article-writers at The Hill touted this as suggesting that climate would be one of Obama’s top three priorities – neglecting the key phrase “and energy.” By which he means that action on climate will be reliant on it not affecting economic growth. We’ve heard this before.

Obama was a bit less modified — and even less specific – later in the interview. He was asked about how consideration of his daughters’ future affects his priorities.

[O]n an issue like climate change, for example, I think for this country and the world to ask some very tough questions about what are we leaving behind, that weighs on you. And not to mention the fact I think that generation is much more environmentally aware than previous generations. …

And so when we think about getting our fiscal house in order, when we think about climate change, when we think about the kind of economy that they’ll be inheriting and what opportunities they have, again, taking the long view is something that I’m constantly pushing for.

Maybe not “constantly,” but, you get the point.

The interview was 27,000 words. Climate change came up four times: .002 percent. Because Obama didn’t get to be Person of the Year (again) by taking bold action on the climate. He got to be Person of the Year (again) by winning a campaign.

And he didn’t win that campaign by taking bold action on the climate, either.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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