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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

by MarceliRister Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, in the course of linking to a Ryan Cooper post about Bernie Sanders, I mentioned that I thought Cooper was “very, very wrong about the history of health care reform too, but I’ll leave that for another time.” Well, why not now? Here is Cooper:

Democrats as a party were not “working their fingers to the bone” trying to get universal health care through this entire time i.e., since 1993. For two whole presidential elections the party’s nominees ran on measly little half-measures they barely mentioned….ObamaCare — a basically mediocre program that is still a big improvement on the status quo — reflects its political origins. It’s what milquetoast liberals had settled on as a reasonable compromise, so when George Bush handed them a great big majority on a silver platter, that’s what we got. It was Bush’s failed presidency, not 30 years of preemptively selling out to the medical industry, that got the job done.

That’s pretty brutal. But let’s go back a little further. Here’s a very brief history of health care reform over the past half century:

1962: JFK launches effort to provide health care for the elderly. It is relentlessly attacked as socialized medicine and Kennedy is unable to get it passed before he dies.

1965: Following a landslide victory, and with massive majorities in both the House and Senate, LBJ passes Medicare and Medicaid.

1971: Richard Nixon proposes a limited health care reform act. Three years later he proposes a more comprehensive plan similar in scope to Obamacare. Sen. Ted Kennedy holds out for single-payer and ends up getting nothing. “That was the best deal we were going to get,” Kennedy admitted later, calling his refusal to compromise his biggest regret in public life. “Nothing since has come close.”

1979: Jimmy Carter proposes a national health care plan. The Senate takes it up, but Carter is unable to broker a compromise with Kennedy, who wants something more ambitious.

1993: Bill Clinton tries to pass health care reform. He does not have a gigantic majority in Congress, and fails miserably. Two years later Newt Gingrich takes over the House.

1997: Clinton and Ted Kennedy pass a more modest children’s health care bill, SCHIP, with bipartisan support.

2009: Barack Obama gets a razor-thin Democratic majority for a few months and eventually passes Obamacare, which expands Medicaid for the poor and offers exchange-based private insurance for the near-poor.

This is what politics looks like. Every single Democratic president in my lifetime has tried to pass health care reform. Some of them partially succeeded and some failed entirely, but all of them tried. The two main things standing in the way of getting more have been (a) Republicans and (b) liberals who refused to compromise on single-payer.

Contra Cooper, George Bush did not hand Obama a “great big majority.” Democrats in 2009 had a big majority in the House and a zero-vote majority in the Senate. That’s the thinnest possible majority you can have, and this is the reason Obamacare is so limited. To pass, it had to satisfy the 40th most conservative senator, so that’s what it did.

There’s been a long and ultimately sterile argument over whether Obama could have gotten more. I think the evidence suggests he got as much as he could, but the truth is that we’ll never know for sure. And it doesn’t change the bigger picture anyway: thousands of Democrats—politicians, activists, think tankers, and more—have literally spent decades working their fingers to the bone creating plan after plan; selling these plans to the public; and trying dozens of different ways to somehow push health care reform through Congress. For most of that time it’s been a hard, grinding, thankless task, and we still don’t have what we ultimately want. But in the end, all of these hacks and wonks have made a difference and helped tens of millions of people. They deserve our respect, not a bit of casually tossed off disparagement just because they didn’t propose single-payer health care as their #1 priority every single year of their lives.

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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

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Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

by MaribelGregson Posted on May 2, 2016

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

By on May 2, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change reached an interesting, if not totally surprising, conclusion: The Earth has become significantly greener over the past 33 years.

The main reason? All the extra carbon dioxide we humans dump into the air.

Let me be clear right away: This is a kinda sorta good thing, but don’t celebrate the positive aspect of climate change just yet. The effect almost certainly won’t last, and this small positive is completely buried under a long, long list of negatives.

The research used satellites to examine vegetation growth over time, assuming that the extra green is coming from leaves on plants and trees. Using a computer model to estimate leaf growth, they find the extra greening is equivalent to adding about 18 million square kilometers of vegetated land to the globe, more than twice the area of the mainland U.S. That’s pretty astonishing.

Map showing vegetation across the globe.

Myneni et al.

The growth is due to added CO2 in the air. Plants use sunlight for energy and convert CO2 (plus water) into sugar, which is stored for food. In a naive sense, more CO2 means more food for plants (this is called carbon dioxide fertilization), so there’s more growth.

The good news, such as it is, is that this means plants are able to soak up more carbon from the atmosphere. The bad news is, it’s not nearly enough. This is made clear by a graph showing atmospheric carbon dioxide content, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii:

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

As you can see, the amount of CO2 in the air is still increasing, even with this extra vegetation. Worse, look at the increase from 1980 (roughly the start of the new study’s time range) to 1995. If you extend that slope, you’ll see that the increase has increased since 1995; in other words, we’re putting out even more CO2 per year than we did 35 years ago.

All that extra plant growth can’t keep up with the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide humans dump into the atmosphere every year.

Incidentally, some of that greening is in the Arctic. That place is usually covered with snow and ice, except warmer temperatures have been causing it to melt away. That’s not a place we want to see green. White would be way better.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the deniers, who tend to ignore inconvenient facts like that, and instead just tout how the Earth getting greener must be a good thing. World News Daily and the Cato Institute were two sources I found pretty easily making this fallacious claim. It’s cherry-picking in the worst sort of way, but then deniers have been making this ridiculous claim for a long time now.

What I find funny is that in the press release, one of the authors of the research preemptively smacks down the deniers [emphasis mine]:

The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians, notably Lord Ridley (hereditary peer in the U.K. House of Lords) and Mr. Rupert Murdoch (owner of several news outlets), to argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change, similar to those agreed at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) meeting in Paris last year under the U.N. Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change, namely global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, more severe tropical storms, etc. are not acknowledged. Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time,” says coauthor Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suvYvette, France, and contributing lead author of the Carbon Chapter for the recent IPCC Assessment Report 5.

Of course, deniers gonna deny. Using this study to say that climate change is good is like getting in a massive car accident and being happy you don’t have to vacuum out the car anymore.

But hey, if you’re willing to ignore rising sea levels, more extreme weather, melting polar ice, deoxygenation of the oceans, droughts, floods, acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching, more heatwaves, and the displacement of potentially hundreds of millions of people, then y’know, a little more green in your life is just great!

Enjoy it while it lasts.

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Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

by LinEagarwvz Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s lead in delegates over rival Bernie Sanders is now almost insurmountable as they move toward the conclusion of the Democratic presidential primary contest. But Clinton has not called on him to drop out of the race, for one simple reason: the example her own campaign set in 2008.

Eight years ago this month, Clinton was trailing hopelessly behind then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 1, 2008, Clinton loaned her bankrupt campaign $1 million (following at least $10 million in earlier loans). Before the end of that week, pundits were calling the contest for Obama, whose May 6 win in the North Carolina primary, by 14 points, had made his delegate lead essentially insurmountable. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC after the results came in. Less than a week later, Obama surpassed Clinton in the super-delegate count, signaling that the party establishment was shifting behind the presumptive nominee.

But Clinton was determined to fight until the last votes had been cast. She would go on to win contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota before the primary ended on June 3, even though there was no way for her to make up her deficit in the delegate count.

Along the way, the Clinton campaign put forward every conceivable argument to justify staying in the race. It used wins in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky to claim that Obama was losing support among white working-class voters and that she would be the stronger general election candidate. On May 5, it began to argue about the delegate math, making the case that the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination was actually 2,209, not 2,025, the figure that had been cited up until then—and that if neither campaign reached that new number, Clinton was prepared for a floor fight at the party’s convention. On May 23, Clinton justified her continued White House bid by noting that in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, after winning the California primary. And lurking in the background in these final weeks was the rumor that Republican operatives had gotten hold of a tape of Michelle Obama disparaging “whitey.”

Eight years later, Clinton knows she cannot turn around and tell Sanders it’s time to leave the race, even though her current lead over Sanders, at about 300 delegates, is larger than the nearly 160-delegate lead Obama had over her after the North Carolina primary in 2008. The Sanders campaign had $17 million on hand as of the latest public filings at the end of March, giving it far more fighting power than the broke Clinton effort had at the same point in 2008.

So the Clinton team has been careful not to say Sanders should drop out. After her victory in New York, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the campaign expected Clinton to be the nominee but that Sanders had a right to continue to fight. Instead of focusing on Clinton’s refusal to bow out in 2008, her campaign is talking up her unequivocal support of Obama after the primary was over—suggesting that that is the example Sanders should follow. In late May 2008, she said she and Obama “do see eye-to-eye when it comes to uniting our party to elect a Democratic president in the fall.” And when she announced her withdrawal from the race on June 7, she forcefully threw her support behind Obama and urged her fans to do the same.

“I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” Palmieri said on the night of the New York primary last month.

What Clinton isn’t mentioning is that before she tried to unify the party, she was questioning Obama’s appeal to white voters, hoping that a bombshell video would surface and help take down her rival, and entertaining a convention floor fight. Despite her team’s claims of magnanimity, at this point eight years ago, Clinton was five weeks and a few attacks shy of giving into the inevitable and uniting the party.

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

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Quote of the Day: John Boehner Sure Doesn’t Think Much of Ted Cruz

by XavierT89k Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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From former House speaker John Boehner, asked what he thinks of Ted Cruz:

I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.

The interesting thing about this is that it’s not very interesting. It’s just par for the course for Cruz.

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Quote of the Day: John Boehner Sure Doesn’t Think Much of Ted Cruz

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

by DarrenLashbrook Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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You probably haven’t heard much about it with the presidential election sucking up all the oxygen, but US lawmakers are mulling one of the nation’s most important and influential pieces of food legislation: a once-every-five-years bill that sets the budget and rules for school meals. And it hasn’t been a very appetizing process.

In a recent episode of Bite—the new podcast I host with colleagues Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman—the excellent school lunch analyst and blogger Bettina Elias Siegel lamented that there’s no push to increase our miserly annual outlay on the lunch program, which serves about 30.5 million kids each school day. Currently, we spend about $13 billion in federal dollars on it each year—equal to about 2 percent of annual defense spending. That leaves cafeteria administrators with a bit more than a dollar per meal to spend on ingredients, leading to generally dismal-quality food, often served reheated from a box.

Instead of pushing for more resources, advocates are having to play defense, fighting to preserve reforms made in the previous Child Nutrition Reauthorization (as the bill is known). That act, passed in 2010, included a tiny per-meal budget increase but also required cafeterias to serve more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and to cut back on sugar, fat, and salt. It also limited the amount of junk food that can be served in a la carte lines—restricting a practice that has been linked to higher obesity rates. And it adopted a program to allow schools in high-poverty areas to automatically offer all students free lunches—a provision widely praised in anti-hunger circles.

The 2010 reforms have largely proven a success, Steven Czinn, the chair of the department of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, recently showed in a Washington Post op-ed. While the new rules got off to a rough start in some districts, things have improved, and tales of rejected lunches and fresh fruit piling up in cafeteria trash cans are overblown, he wrote.

Even so, those healthier food provisions provoked a furious backlash from tea-party-associated Republicans. In a notorious 2014 rant on the House floor, US Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) thundered against what he called “nanny-state lunches.” Then there’s the School Nutrition Association, a group that represents cafeteria administrators but gets about half its $10 million budget from the food industry. As Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported in 2014, the group initially fought for the changes, but suddenly, in 2014, it began “standing shoulder to shoulder with House Republicans” in an effort to gut them.

In January, the Senate Agriculture Committee cobbled together a bill that preserved the 2010 reforms. But now its counterpart in the House, the Education and Workforce Committee, is pushing a bill that would ease restrictions of sales of junk like chips and cookies in cafeterias. “Children as young as five could go from having cookies or fries with their lunches once in a while to buying and eating them every day,” writes Jessica Donze Black, who directs the the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

More egregiously, the proposed House bill would undermine universal free-lunch programs for many high-poverty schools. Under the 2010 bill, when at least 40 percent of students in a school qualify for free lunches, the school can claim “community eligibility”—meaning all students automatically have access to free lunches. The program eases the administrative burden for these financially strapped schools, allowing them to “shift resources from paperwork to higher-quality meals or other educational priorities,” writes Zoë Neuberger of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It also eliminates the “stigma that sometimes accompanies free meals” and increased meal participation, which, in turn, “improves student achievement, diets, and behavior,” she adds.

The House bill would raise the threshold from 40 to 60 percent. If it becomes law, Neuberger writes, more than 7,000 schools—with nearly 3.4 million students—”would have to reinstate applications and return to monitoring eligibility in the lunch line within two years.”

Happily, none of these rollbacks are likely anytime soon, said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a veteran of the school food wars. That’s because first lady Michelle Obama pushed hard for the 2010 reforms, and her husband will veto any school lunch reauthorization bill that attempts to roll them back. Until a new bill passes, the 2010 reforms hold sway, she said. “For once, the status quo is on the side” of people pushing to widen access to free lunch and remove junk food from the cafeteria, she added.

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

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Congressional Republicans Found the Most Useless Way to Combat Race and Sex Discrimination

by JulianneR05 Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republicans in Congress are trying to end race and sex discrimination—in the womb. The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) would ban abortion on the basis of the race or sex of the fetus. Republicans say the measure is necessary to protect the civil rights of African Americans and women.

“It took the Civil War to make the state-sanctioned practice of human slavery come to an end,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill’s author, during a recent hearing on the measure. “One glaring exception is life itself, the most foundational civil right of all.”

According to Franks, who has introduced various versions PRENDA since 2008, ending race- and sex-selective abortions is the “civil rights struggle that will define our generation.” During a hearing by an all-male committee earlier this month, Franks also noted that upward of 50 percent of African American babies are “killed before they’re born,” and that “a Hispanic child is three times more likely to be aborted than a white child.”

The proposed measure would make it illegal for a physician to perform on abortion on a pregnant woman who wants the procedure because the fetus isn’t her desired sex or race. Under the measure, the father of the unborn child and the pregnant woman’s parents could sue a physician who performs such an abortion. Doctors would also be required to report suspected cases to law enforcement.

It’s unclear where Franks is getting his numbers. A 2012 Guttmacher report found that evidence of sex- and race-based abortions in the United States is limited and inconclusive. According to the report, two studies using 2000 US census data found that although the sex ratio of first-born children was normal in families of Chinese, Indian, and Korean descent, those families did have a preference for sons in second and third births. The authors in that study were unable to conclude whether the imbalance was caused by abortion or fertility treatments.

But in a single 2011 study, commonly cited by PRENDA advocates, 65 Indian Americans who were interviewed had practiced sex selection, through either fertility treatments or abortion.

More recent data suggests that contrary to some stereotypes, Asian American communities are not biased in sex selecting for sons. A 2014 report by researchers at the University of Chicago Law School and two abortion rights groups analyzed population data from 2007 to 2011 and found that Chinese, Indian, and Korean Americans have more girls that white Americans.

Evidence to suggest that black and Hispanic communities are targeting their abortions is even less clear. According to Guttmacher, abortions are more common in black communities than white ones because unintended pregnancies are also more common. As a result, African American women get abortions at a rate five times higher than white women. “The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy,” wrote Susan A. Cohen in a 2008 article on abortion and women of color.

In a letter to the House, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of 200 civil rights organizations, points out that health and economic disparities of black and Hispanic women are likely to blame for increased abortion. “African American women and Latina women have less access to contraception, prenatal care, and other critical reproductive health services, resulting in stark disparities across a number of sexual and reproductive health indicators,” the Leadership Conference wrote.

Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of SisterSong, a reproductive justice organization for women of color, told Mother Jones in 2011, “It’s kind of hard to find evidence that a black woman is going to have an abortion because she’s surprised to find her baby is black. It just strains credulity to think that’s a problem. I mean, she wakes up in the morning and says ‘Oh my God! My baby’s black!’?”

According to abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators, the measure could increase discrimination against pregnant women, particularly women of color, by forcing doctors to speculate on the reasons their patients seek abortions, and then requiring the physicians to report suspected discriminatory abortions. Because of stereotypes that Asian communities prefer male children, advocates worry that Asian women would be especially vulnerable to profiling by their physicians.

“This bill is so horrendous that I could not believe it when it was first brought up,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). “It is a nightmare. This is a piece of legislation that would impose criminal penalties on providers and limit the reproductive choices of women of color and all women.”

Seven states already ban abortion based on sex selection. Only Arizona, which Franks represents, also bans race-selective abortions.

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Congressional Republicans Found the Most Useless Way to Combat Race and Sex Discrimination

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The Mystery of the Churchill Bust Is Finally Explained

by yonggarling1379 Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the years, conservatives have invented a spectacular set of grievances against President Obama—teleprompters, whitey tapes, Bill Ayers, birth certificates, etc.—but in the category of just plain strange, none of them surpass the tale of the missing Churchill bust. Early in his presidency, someone noticed that a bust of Churchill that had adorned the Oval Office during W’s presidency was gone, and this became a cause célèbre, one that continues to this day. Why does Obama hate Churchill? Is it because of his Kenyan background? Because he hates anyone who showed toughness during a time of war? Because he wanted to snub the British?

The correct answer is, “Who cares?” Still, it’s true that the White House offered up something of a whirligig of responses when this first hit the fan, and that’s a little odd too. Why were they so sensitive about it?

That’s still a mystery. However, a few days ago Boris Johnson—basically the Donald Trump of London—brought up the Churchill bust yet again, and this time Obama decided to explain personally what happened:

It was, Mr. Obama said, his decision to return that Churchill to his native land, because he wanted to replace it with a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“There are only so many tables where you can put busts. Otherwise, it starts looking a little cluttered,” the president explained. “And I thought it was appropriate, and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African-American president, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office.”

He added that the choice of Dr. King was “to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.”

Bizarrely enough, then, it appears that conservatives were basically right (Obama actively chose to return the bust) and the White House pretty much lied about the whole thing. So score one for the conspiracy theorists.

What a weird affair. Why was the White House so hypersensitive about this? Did Obama really feel that he couldn’t afford to be seen favoring King over Churchill? I didn’t care much about this idiocy before, but now I kind of do. What was behind all the doubletalk?

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The Mystery of the Churchill Bust Is Finally Explained

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Senate passes energy modernization bill that would have been modern in 1980

by SOYTerri5434 Posted on April 20, 2016

Senate passes energy modernization bill that would have been modern in 1980

By on Apr 20, 2016commentsShare

The Senate passed the Energy Policy Modernization Act on Wednesday, the first comprehensive energy bill in nearly a decade. The bill will fund an increase in renewable energy as well as boost funding for natural gas, geothermal energy, and hydropower. The bill also reauthorizes a half-billion dollars to protect public lands and parks, updates building codes to increase efficiency and safety standards, and addresses the threat of potential cyberattacks on the electrical grid, reports The New York Times.

While the bill was hailed as a bipartisan victory by authors Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, 350.org likened it to the “V.H.S. of climate policy” — in other words, dated. It overlooks some obvious issues: Namely, it doesn’t come even close to addressing climate change.  The final compromise also leaves out a provision from an earlier version that would have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to fix Flint’s water pipes after lead contamination. Republicans vowed to block the bill if funding wasn’t removed.

Environmentalists also object to measures that will speed the export of domestically produced natural gas, the expansion of methane hydrate research and development, the delay on updating furnace efficiency standards, and the expansion of funding for nuclear research.

What some senators are thinking about doing to address climate change, however, is directing funds to the Department of Energy to a study a form of geoengineering, reports the journal Science. Known as albedo modification, the potential climate solution involves dispersing tiny particles into the atmosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the planet, and, if it’s successful, cool it. But that’s a big if. The effects of such a scheme are unknown, and there are plenty of critics who worry that geoengineering research diverts much-needed funds and focus away from technology that we know will reduce carbon emissions, like wind and solar. The measure has gone through the appropriations committee but has yet to be taken up by the Senate.

As for the Senate energy bill, negotiators must now work with the House, which has passed a similar version of the bill that also increases production of oil, coal and natural gas, before it goes to the president.

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Senate passes energy modernization bill that would have been modern in 1980

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How Cruz and Trump Dissed 9/11 Rescue Workers

by MellissaA42 Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Firefighters make their way over the ruins and through clouds of smoke at the World Trade Center in October 2001. Stan Honda/AP

Earlier this year in the GOP presidential race, Ted Cruz took a poke at Donald Trump by derisively referring to “New York values.” The jab sparked an uproar, and the celebrity tycoon blasted Cruz in response, citing New York City’s heroic response to the 9/11 attacks. As the two face off before Tuesday’s New York primary, Trump has been reminding Empire State voters that Cruz dissed them. But he has not pounded Cruz for ducking an effort to help the heroes of 9/11—the rescue and recovery workers who years afterward have dealt with severe health issues. When legislation was pending in the Senate last year to assist these workers, Cruz did not publicly support it. This ought to be ripe material for Trump to exploit. Except for one thing: Trump, too, did nothing to help this measure move through Congress.

Here’s the deal. Last year, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act—which provided medical coverage to workers who searched for victims at the site of the attack and who cleared the debris—expired. These workers were exposed to a variety of toxins, and hundreds of them have died from a range of afflictions, including various cancers. (Zadroga was a a New York City cop who died of a respiratory disease attributed to his participation in the rescue and recovery operations.) House and Senate members proposed a $3.5 billion extension that would last for 75 years. New York officials pleaded with Congress to pass the bill. Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart joined former rescue and recovery workers in lobbying Congress to adopt the legislation.

Many legislators in the House and the Senate heeded the call. Sixty-eight senators co-sponsored the bill, which had been introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). This list included 23 Republicans, but not Cruz.

Last August, Richard Alles, a deputy fire chief and board member of Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act, wrote to Cruz and asked if he would support the bill—and if he would sign the bill if he were president. Cruz didn’t respond. Months later, Alles tried again. Still, nothing from Cruz.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders refused to move the bill forward, and it became a victim of partisan maneuvering involving a big transportation spending bill. Eventually, the 9/11 bill was stuffed into a must-pass spending bill at the end of last year, and Congress approved this package. In the Senate, the vote was 65 to 33. Cruz voted no. Of course, he and other GOPers had reasons to oppose the overall spending measure. And this week, Cruz told Mother Jones, “I very much supported the Zadroga Act, it was just rolled into a giant omnibus that required funding Obamacare, funding President Obama’s illegal amnesty, funding the president’s foolhardy plan to bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees who could be ISIS terrorists to America. So I voted against the omnibus because I oppose those policies. I would have enthusiastically voted for the Zadroga Act as a freestanding bill.” But Cruz had not co-sponsored the 9/11 legislation. And he had ignored requests to explain his position.

Cruz’s failure to publicly support the 9/11 rescue and recovery workers certainly left him vulnerable to criticism from New Yorkers and others. After Cruz in January made his crack about “New York values” and tried to recover by praising New York cops and firefighters, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called him a “fraud” and pointed to his lack of public support for the Zadroga Act. And Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, declared, “He left the 9/11 responders behind.”

So here was a ready-made issue for Trump to use against Cruz during the New York primary. Yet Trump had just as lousy a record on the Zadroga Act. Advocates for the bill have slammed the GOP front-runner—who often praises cops and hails New York City’s 9/11 efforts—for doing nothing to help pass the measure. As ABC News reported in January:

Facing the expiration of the James Zadroga Act in October—a law passed in 2010 to fund health care for more than 70,000 sick first responders and the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—Alles and other advocates asked all the presidential candidates to support a bipartisan bill to permanently fund the programs.

Trump’s campaign did not return multiple letters and calls requesting his support for reauthorizing the Zadroga Act last fall, said Alles, who drafted the letters to the candidates as a board member of the group Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act. The campaign also did not respond to requests for comment from reporters covering the story at the time.

“It frustrated the hell out of me because he’s such a supporter of law enforcement,” said Anthony Flammia, a retired NYPD officer and registered Republican who said he hasn’t settled on which presidential candidate he’ll be voting for. “He didn’t even comment on it.”

Trump’s campaign would not respond to repeated requests from ABC News for comment.

Trump has repeatedly clashed with Cruz rhetorically over “New York values” and has attempted to use 9/11 as a political weapon against the Texas senator. But when the matter at hand was whether to provide assistance to those who responded heroically to the horrific attack, there was basically no difference between the two. They each told these New Yorkers: Fuggedaboutit.

Additional reporting by Pema Levy.

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How Cruz and Trump Dissed 9/11 Rescue Workers

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

by MaybellReddick Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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In response to my post yesterday about the tradition of truthtellers in Democratic primaries,1 a reader emails: “Offhand my guess would be that a lot of Bernie supporters think Obama proves that an outsider/rebel/truthteller can both win and end up a very successful president.” Another reader tweets the same sentiment:

Hmmm. I don’t think either of these is true. Obama didn’t run in the truthteller tradition. He ran more in the JFK/Clinton tradition: a young guy bringing the voice of a new generation to the White House. Obama was inspiring and wildly popular, but he didn’t spend his time explaining that we all had to face up to endemic corruption or tidal waves of money or demographic Armageddon. Just the opposite. He mostly sanded the rough edges off that kind of stuff. It was all hope and change and ending the partisan bickering in Washington.

As for Bernie supporters, I don’t think they view Obama as a rebel or a truthteller. Bernie himself is careful not to criticize Obama, but a lot of his supporters see Obama as basically a disappointment: just another squishy centrist who made some incremental progress and called it a day. In the end, we still don’t have universal health care; the banks are still running things; the Republican Party continues to obstruct; and rich people are still rich. That’s the very reason we need a guy like Bernie in the Oval Office.

This is certainly my impression, anyway. Am I wrong?

1A theme that Jamelle Bouie touches on in a much longer, more nuanced piece here about the Bernie insurgency. It’s well worth a read.

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

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