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Personal Health Update

by LelandGQEcbf Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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I haven’t had any fresh news on the health front lately, so I haven’t brought it up on the blog. But I continue to get lots of queries and good wishes, and today I finally have something to report. I’m 8 weeks through my 16-week regimen of chemotherapy, and last week my doctor ordered up sort of a halftime report on how I’m doing. This is an extended set of lab tests, and today she called to tell me the results.

Apparently they came out great. Unfortunately, I don’t actually remember the names of the protein markers and other things we were looking for, so I have to be a little vague here. Immunoglobulins? Lympho-somethings? In any case, the levels were way, way down, and that’s what we were hoping for. This means the chemo is working well so far and the myeloma is hopefully on the run.

That’s my good news for the day. What’s yours?

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Personal Health Update

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 December 2014

by JeremiaMack Posted on December 19, 2014

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I have to run, but before I do here’s what passes for an action shot of the dynamic duo. It’s about the best I can do these days. As you might guess, they’re entranced with something we’re waving around just outside the frame. Maybe a pencil? I’m not sure. But with cats, the cheapest cat toys are always the best.

(Seriously. Hopper’s favorite, by far, is an empty toilet paper tube. She just goes nuts over them.)

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Friday Cat Blogging – 19 December 2014

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More Good News For Obamacare: Employer Health Coverage Hasn’t Crashed

by JasmineClancy Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The share of the population with employer health insurance has been slowly eroding for years. The chart on the right tells the story: total coverage rates have dropped from 70 percent to 62 percent since 2001. The trend is pretty clear: the number of workers covered by employer insurance has been dropping about half a percentage point per year for more than a decade.

So has Obamacare accelerated this trend? There have long been fears that it might: once the exchanges were up and running, employers might decide that it was cheaper to ditch their own insurance and just pay their workers extra to buy coverage on the open market. But a new study says that hasn’t happened:

We found essentially no change in offer rates throughout the study period. Overall, the rates stayed steady, at around 82 percent. Offer rates in small firms also held steady, at around 61 percent….We found no change in take-up rates overall, or by income or firm size, between June 2013 and September 2014.

….As with offer and take-up rates of employer-sponsored insurance, there were no significant differences in coverage rates for the insurance overall or for any subgroup. The rates stayed roughly constant at about 71 percent across all workers, about 50 percent among workers in small firms, and about 82 percent among workers in large firms. The rates also remained constant among low- and high-income workers in either small or large firms.

Note that the percentages themselves differ between the Kaiser numbers and the study numbers thanks to differences in methodology. And there are, of course, plenty of reasons we might see only small changes in employer coverage. The economy has improved. Inertia might be keeping things in check for a while. Perhaps as Obamacare becomes settled law and its benefits become more widely known, more employers will drop their own coverage.

Those are all possibilities. For now, though, it looks as though fears of employers dumping health coverage were unfounded. It’s yet more good news for Obamacare.

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More Good News For Obamacare: Employer Health Coverage Hasn’t Crashed

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

by RitaCantor Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

by Donekola Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did the Soviet Union lose control of its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain in 1989? Lots of reasons, but the proximate cause was a disastrous war in Afghanistan; plummeting oil prices; and a resulting economic crisis. Here is Yegor Gaidar:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.

The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust….Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely. The money was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union tried to create a consortium of 300 banks to provide a large loan for the Soviet Union in 1989, but was informed that only five of them would participate and, as a result, the loan would be twenty times smaller than needed.

The Soviet Union then received a final warning from the Deutsche Bank and from its international partners that the funds would never come from commercial sources. Instead, if the Soviet Union urgently needed the money, it would have to start negotiations directly with Western governments about so-called politically motivated credits. In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy.

….Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West….The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? War, sanctions, an oil crash, and finally bankruptcy. And while history may not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme sometimes: 25 years later Vladimir Putin has managed to back himself into a situation surprisingly similar to the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the final victory of the West—the very event that’s motivated almost everything he’s done over the past few years. This is either ironic or chilling, depending on your perspective.

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

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The Ruble Continues Its Free Fall

by SelinaSkirving Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, we have our answer: the Russian central bank’s last-ditch effort to stop capital flight didn’t work. It was indeed taken by the market as a sign of desperation, not strength. The ruble recovered a bit right after the surprise interest hike in the middle of the night, but by mid-morning panic had settled back in and the ruble was once again in free fall. Even the enticement of 17 percent interest wasn’t enough incentive for people to keep their rubles in Russian banks:

By early afternoon in Moscow, the ruble dropped sharply, reaching 80 to the dollar, a record low and a 35% decline from opening levels when it rallied briefly. At 1630 local time, the dollar was trading around 73 rubles….Deputy Chairman Sergei Shvetsov called the situation “critical,” the Interfax news agency reported. “At lot of (market) participants are in serious condition because of these events.”

“The choice the central bank made (to raise rates) was between very bad and very, very bad,” he said, noting that the bank could yet take more measures to stabilize the market….Economists warned that the central bank appeared to be losing control of the market and might have no alternative but to restrict trading. “Capital controls as a policy measure cannot be off the table now,” said Citigroup’s Mr. Costa.

Stay tuned.

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The Ruble Continues Its Free Fall

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

by CaseyHSJTjrd Posted on December 16, 2014

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From Neil Irwin, commenting on the huge interest rate jump announced by Russia’s central bank in the wee hours of the morning:

It may go without saying, but a 6.5 percentage point emergency interest rate increase announced in the middle of the night is not a sign of strength.

Roger that. Russian central bankers hope that this will be an incentive for people to keep their money in Russia, earning high interest, instead of shipping rubles out of the country at warp speed and squirreling them away in any safe haven that comes to hand. And maybe it will work. Alternatively, as Irwin suggests, it may be viewed as a sign of desperation, causing Russia’s oligarchs to pile on the dilithium crystals and ship out their money even faster. You never know what’s going to work when a currency crisis goes into panic mode.

In any case, even if it works, the price is going to be high. Here in America, we argue about whether the Fed will choke off recovery if it raises interest rates to 2 percent. Russia is now at 17 percent. Even if this puts a halt to currency flight, it’s going to kill their economy. In Russia tonight, there are no good options left.

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

by BrunoSargood Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Hilbert got catblogging all to himself. This week it’s Hopper’s turn. Marian took this picture of Hopper gazing out the kitchen window with the bird bath in the background—and that’s no coincidence. The bird bath and the hummingbird feeders are objects of endless fascination.

In other news, I have a follow-up from last week. Now that he’s taken its measure, it turns out that Hilbert can jump onto the fireplace mantle with ease. No furious runup necessary. However, it also turns out that having taken its measure, he’s now bored with it. There’s no challenge left, I guess. So the mantle is safe once again. Maybe. Until he gets bored. Welcome to kittenland.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 December 2014

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

by BradyT03jjkzycx Posted on December 12, 2014

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Brian Beutler writes today about the enormous amount of attention we’ve paid to the cromnibus spending bill this week:

Until the country came to be governed by serial brinksmanship, the writing and passage of annual spending bills weren’t huge stories in American politics, and you had to be unusually attuned to both the content and the process to understand the political currents underlying both. When problems arose, there was always the palliative of earmarks to smooth things over.

But the narrow passage Thursday night of a big spending bill in the House of Representatives brought everything to the surface, even though the risk of a government shutdown was near zero.

I think that’s only part of the story. It’s true that as recently as a decade ago, spending bills didn’t have a big audience. Genuine insiders—aides, lobbyists, single-issue activists—paid attention to the minutiae, but most of us didn’t. More to the point, most of us couldn’t. Even if you were the kind of person who read TNR and National Review and Roll Call religiously, you just weren’t going to be exposed to that much coverage.

This wasn’t because budgets were more boring back then. Or because the political shenanigans were less egregious. It’s because print publications didn’t devote very much space to them. You’d get the basics, but that was it. And given the limitations of print production schedules, the drama of watching deals rise and fall on a daily or hourly basis simply wasn’t possible in real time.

But the often maligned rise of blogs and Twitter, along with their new media offshoots, has created a whole new world. Over at Vox, for example, they ran nine pieces about the spending bill just yesterday. If you follow the right people, Twitter will keep you literally up to minute on even the smallest issues. Dozens of blogs will explain the policy implications of obscure provisions. Politico will flood the zone with pieces about conflicts and personalities as the fight unfolds.

By normal standards, the spending bill the House passed yesterday was fairly routine. But digital media turned it into High Noon and we all played along. We pretended that this was something uniquely shameless, when it wasn’t. The sausage has always been made this way. The only difference is that now we all have box seats on the factory floor.

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

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Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the Cromnibus

by TNJNoellaswhkn Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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The worst part of the “cromnibus” spending bill was the provision that guts a small piece of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business. So why did Democratic negotiators agree to this? In a long tick-tock published yesterday, Politico tells us:

During [] negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.

OK. Democrats have been ambivalent about this particular provision of Dodd-Frank from the start, and therefore they were willing to cut a deal that allowed Republicans to repeal it. But what about the rest of the spending bill? Republicans got a bunch of venal little favors inserted, but what did Democrats get? Here’s retiring Rep. Jim Moran:

In 20 years of being on the appropriations bill, I haven’t seen a better compromise in terms of Democratic priorities. Implementing the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot more money for early-childhood development — the only priority that got cut was the EPA but we gave them more money than the administration asked for….There were 26 riders that were extreme and would have devastated the Environmental Protection Agency in terms of the Clean Water and Clean Air Act administration; all of those were dropped. There were only two that were kept and they wouldn’t have been implemented this fiscal year. So, we got virtually everything that the Democrats tried to get.

And here is President Obama:

The Administration appreciates the bipartisan effort to include full-year appropriations legislation for most Government functions that allows for planning and provides certainty, while making progress toward appropriately investing in economic growth and opportunity, and adequately funding national security requirements. The Administration also appreciates the authorities and funding provided to enhance the U.S. Government’s response to the Ebola epidemic, and to implement the Administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as well as investments for the President’s early education agenda, Pell Grants, the bipartisan Manufacturing Institutes initiative, and extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

What’s the point of posting this laundry list? Curiosity. Last night a reader sent a tweet to me: “Honest question: what do progressives get out of this? ‘Govt not shutting down’ not enough.” I was stumped. I really had no idea whether Democrats had gotten anything in this bill, or if they were just caving in to a whole bunch of obnoxious Republican demands merely in exchange for keeping the government funded.

But as it turns out, Democrats did get a bunch of stuff they wanted. And of course, that’s in addition to getting the government funded before Republicans take over Congress in January, which is worthwhile all by itself. We can each decide for ourselves whether Democrats got enough, or if they should have held out for a better deal, but they weren’t left empty-handed.

So what I’m curious about is this: why are virtually no Democrats talking about this? As near as I can tell, there was literally no attempt to sell this compromise to the base, or to anyone else. As a result, the general feeling among progressives is simple: this bill was an unqualified cave-in from gutless Democrats who, once again, refused to fight back against Republican hostage taking. And as usual, Republicans won.

I understand that trying to defend a messy, backroom bill that trades some dull but responsible victories for a bunch of horrible little giveaways isn’t very appealing to anyone. And who knows? Maybe Democrats were afraid that if they crowed too much about the concessions they’d won it would just provoke the tea party wing of the Republican party and scuttle the bill. The tea partiers were already plenty pissed off about the cromnibus, after all.

Still, shouldn’t someone have been in charge of quietly making the progressive case for this bill? It wouldn’t have convinced everyone, but it might have reduced the grumbling within the base a little bit. Why was that not worth doing?

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Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the Cromnibus

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