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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

by Lavon5225vx Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore points me to The Hill today, which reports that House Republicans plan to draft a genuine Obamacare replacement bill later this year:

For years, Republicans have promised a “repeal and replace” strategy on ObamaCare, but have never coalesced behind one plan. President Obama has repeatedly mocked the GOP for not delivering an alternative.

Eric Cantor intends to move a repeal-and-replace bill before the midterm elections in November, according to a source familiar with the situation. He broached the issue at the House GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., late last week.

“I think it is very likely that we’re going to have it before the election, we’re going to give the people — or at least we are going to try to give the people — a clear distinction of who we are versus who the Democrats are,” Florida Rep. Tom Rooney (R) said.

I’m genuinely baffled by this. Why bother? Republicans have spent years screaming “Repeal and Replace!” without ever offering up a replacement, and it’s worked fine. Sure, it invites mockery from folks like me, but has that ever done them any harm? Not that I can see.

On the flip side, any actual bill will be divisive within their own caucus and provide a rich target for Democrats at the same time. When it’s all just hazy smoke, Dems have nothing to get a handle on. Once there’s actual legislative language, all they have to do is find the least popular bits, twist them into granny-killing death panels, and go to town.

If there were an actual chance of passing this bill, it might be worth it. But there’s not, and as near as I can tell, it’s literally 100 percent downside and no upside. What on earth is the point?

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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

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Quote of the Day: GOP in a Tailspin Over Debt Limit Increase

by PartheniaDunlap Posted on February 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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From an anonymous Republican “leadership aide”:

We are mulling other options and trying to figure out the best way forward on this.

The topic here is the upcoming debt limit increase. Everyone in the Republican caucus with a room-temperature IQ knows that provoking yet another debt ceiling crisis would be a debacle. It didn’t work before, and it won’t work now. What’s worse, it takes attention away from Obamacare and reinforces the public view of Republicans as irresponsible grandstanders who are willing to risk the good credit of the United States for no reason except to kowtow to a bunch of know-nothing tea partiers.

But it turns out that those know-nothings aren’t willing to accept reality yet. They’ve rejected the latest plan—which already demanded more than they were ever likely to get—and now the GOP leadership is stuck. The yahoos won’t let them back down further regardless of how much damage it might do. As a result, it looks an awful lot like Republicans are going to incite yet another debt ceiling crisis a few weeks from now, whether they want to or not. Buckle your seat belts.

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Quote of the Day: GOP in a Tailspin Over Debt Limit Increase

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How Did the Media Blow It So Badly on Yesterday’s CBO Report?

by mirorita02 Posted on February 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the CBO released a long-term budget analysis that included a chapter about the effect of Obamacare. Among other things, the report concluded that in 2017 and beyond, it would have the effect of reducing employment by about 2 million jobs. This produced a gigantic raft of misleading headlines—some from outlets like Fox News, of course, but also from a wide variety of mainstream news sources. Among many others, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post then explained what the CBO report really meant. Erik Wemple tells the story:

For a while Tuesday morning, the Internet was hopping with job-killing hype, when in fact the truth was vastly different. Obamacare’s impact, the CBO concluded, would lessen the supply of labor by encouraging certain folks not to work: “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked. . . .”

For someone approaching retirement, notes Kessler, Obamacare could well mean that they needn’t hold onto a bad job just to keep health insurance. That’s a far different dynamic from job-killing.

To illustrate just how the media had handled the CBO study, Kessler’s post included a number of headlines harvested from the Internet this morning, amid a backlash highlighting the finer points of the CBO report. In some cases, headline changes ensued; in others, news outlets stuck to their original phrasing. Below, we chronicle some of the action….

This is a debacle. I came into this story pretty cold, reading about the CBO report and then clicking on a link to take a look at it. At the time, I hadn’t read any news accounts, so I just scrolled down to the chapter on Obamacare and spent about ten minutes browsing through it. And here’s the thing: the CBO’s conclusions were crystal clear. The report explained in simple language what effect Obamacare was likely to have and what channels it worked through. It even had a handy bullet list showing the most important causes of lower employment.

And yet, lots of reporters and headline writers got it wrong. It’s crazy. This is policy 101, not some deeply technical report that you need a data sherpa to understand. Obamacare doesn’t kill jobs. It makes people more secure and thus less likely to keep a job they don’t want—or to work more hours than they need to just to stay eligible for health insurance. It also, like all means-tested programs, provides a modest disincentive for poor people to work more hours, since extra income will be accompanied by lower subsidies.

This is easy stuff. How is it that so many folks blew it? Obviously Fox News deliberately wanted to put the worst spin possible on this report. But why did everyone else go along? What’s the deal here?

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How Did the Media Blow It So Badly on Yesterday’s CBO Report?

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal coffers are missing out on what could be billions of dollars in lost revenue due to shoddy accounting work by the office that handles leases for coal mines on public land, according to a report made public today by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a stalwart climate hawk, to look into whether the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management routinely sells leases to coal mining companies for far less than their market value. Investigators found that BLM agents in Wyoming (by far the country’s largest coal producer) set prices based on coal’s historic value, but, in contradiction of the department’s own rules, fail to take into account how much it will likely be worth in the future. Similar problems were found in other coal-producing states. As a result, the GAO report claims, many leases were sold far beneath their true market value, depriving taxpayers of additional royalties (which, as it stands, come to about $1 billion per year) that are normally skimmed from the mines’ profits.

“As a net result, the public is getting screwed,” said Tom Kenworthy, an energy analyst at the Center for American Progress who has kept tabs on Interior’s longstanding problems with coal lease valuation.

That the leases are selling for less than they’re worth seems clear; what’s less obvious is exactly how much money is at stake, since the values were never properly set in the first place (the GAO report doesn’t specify a number). A 2012 analysis of federal lease records by former New York State Deputy Comptroller Tom Sanzillo for the independent Institute for Energy Economics found that undervalued coal leases cost the Treasury $28.9 billion in lost revenue since 1983, or almost $1 billion every year. Meanwhile, analysis by Senator Markey’s office put the figure at $200 million, although a spokesperson would not specify the time period to which that applied, as the underlying data are considered proprietary to the Interior Department, he said.

Since 1990, the federal government has leased 107 parcels of public land for coal mining; these parcels typically account for 25-40 percent of the roughly one billion tons of coal produced annually nationwide. That adds up to a massive carbon footprint: Fossil fuels produced on public land create roughly a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every year, about as much as 285 coal plants.

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

by ColemanKrauss Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Health care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership. When he took office, more than 25% of US home mortgages were underwater—meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them. The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks. Now he’s offering health care through insurance companies.

In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government aid. Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people. To get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy private insurance.

Let a Hundred Middlemen Bloom

In other countries with national health plans, a variety of independent health care providers—hospitals, doctors, and clinics, among others—deliver medical care, while the government doles out the compensation. They let a hundred healthcare providers bloom, but there’s only a single payer. If the US moved to single-payer healthcare, however, what would happen to the private health insurance business?

In the 1990s, the conservative Heritage Foundation floated the idea of extending health coverage to more Americans via government exchanges or “connectors” that would funnel individual buyers to competing, for-profit health insurance companies. In other words, let a hundred middlemen bloom.

On the face of it, such a plan would seem expensive, since it means supporting two bureaucracies, one of which would be obliged to take profits for investors. Meanwhile, doctors would still have the expense of trying to collect from multiple insurers with reasons to stall. But the Heritage plan had one great advantage. Since Harry Truman, American presidents have tried unsuccessfully to get us national health care. The exchange system, however awkward it might be, pacified the insurance companies which had previously spent millions of dollars to defeat other plans for “socialized medicine.” With the support of those companies for a program that not only kept them in the picture, but also promised to deliver millions of new, subsidized customers to them, Obama gave us a national healthcare law.

The danger is that it essentially makes insurance companies our medical receptionists, a profit-making face that greets sick people whenever they try to use their government healthcare. That gives private companies a lot of power to make the government look bad.

That’s why it’s important to understand how banks used Obama’s mortgage subsidy program to sabotage debt relief and discredit government. If we grasp how they pulled that off, we may be able to protect the present health plan and someday even get genuine single-payer healthcare out of it. So here’s the story.

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Here’s What We Can Learn About Health Care From the Mortgage Crisis

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Slam the GOP for Blocking Unemployment Benefits

by ShirleenHowell Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Monday evening, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) denounced GOP lawmakers for blocking an extension of federal unemployment insurance, which expired at the end of last year, and called on Congress to act immediately on behalf of the roughly 1.6 million Americans who depend on the benefits.

“Unemployment insurance is a critical lifeline for people who are trying their hardest and need a little help—a recognition that Wall Street and Washington caused the financial crisis, but Main Street is still paying the price,” Warren said in a speech on the Senate floor.

She added that it’s hypocritical for Republicans to push for an extension of a package of mostly corporate tax breaks called “tax extenders” without offsetting the cost, but are demanding that aid for the unemployed be paid for. “Republicans line up to protect billions in tax breaks and subsidies for big corporations with armies of lobbyists,” the senator said, “but they can’t find a way to help struggling families trying get back on their feet.”

Each year since the onset of the recession in 2008, Congress has re-authorized federal emergency unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, which kick in after state unemployment benefits run out—usually after 26 weeks. The number of extra weeks of federal unemployment insurance has varied over the years, but last stood at 47 weeks.

The long-term unemployment rate—the percentage of those without a job for 27 weeks or longer—remains at record high levels, but Republicans in the House and Senate don’t want to extend federal unemployment benefits unless they are offset by savings elsewhere. A Senate plan to renew the benefits failed a couple of weeks ago, because Republicans said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wouldn’t allow them to amend the legislation to their liking. The upper chamber is now working on a new proposal that would pay for the $6-billion extension by temporarily increasing taxes on employers. But even if the Senate passes the measure, it is unclear whether House speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will bring the bill up for a vote, according to Democratic House aides.

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Slam the GOP for Blocking Unemployment Benefits

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

by ZeldaMoritz Posted on February 3, 2014

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When I wrote my big piece last year about the connection between childhood exposure to lead and rates of violent crime later in life, one of the big pushbacks came from folks who are skeptical of econometric studies. Sure, the level of lead exposure over time looks like an inverted U, and so does the national rate of violent crime. But hey: correlation is not causation.

I actually addressed this in my piece—twice, I think—but I always felt like I didn’t address it quite clearly enough. The article spent so much time up front explaining the statistical correlations that it made the subsequent points about other evidence seem a bit like hasty bolt-ons, put there mainly to check off a box against possible criticism. That’s not how I intended it,1 but that’s how it turned out.

For that reason, I’m pleased to recommend Lauren Wolf’s “The Crimes Of Lead,” in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News. It doesn’t ignore the statistical evidence, but it focuses primarily on the physiological evidence that implicates lead with higher levels of violent crime:

Research has shown that lead exposure does indeed make lab animals—rodents, monkeys, even cats—more prone to aggression. But establishing biological plausibility for the lead-crime argument hasn’t been as clear-cut for molecular-level studies of the brain. Lead wreaks a lot of havoc on the central nervous system. So pinpointing one—or even a few—molecular switches by which the heavy metal turns on aggression has been challenging.

What scientists do know is that element 82 does most of its damage to the brain by mimicking calcium. Inside the brain, calcium runs the show: It triggers nerve firing by helping to release neurotransmitters, and it activates proteins important for brain development, memory formation, and learning. By pushing calcium out of these roles, lead can muck up brain cell communication and growth.

On the cell communication side of things, lead appears to interfere with a bunch of the neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter receptors in our brains. One of the systems that keeps popping up in exposure experiments is the dopamine system. It controls reward and impulse behavior, a big factor in aggression. Another is the glutamate system, responsible in part for learning and memory.

On the brain development side of things, lead interferes with, among other things, the process of synaptic pruning. Nerve cells grow and connect, sometimes forming 40,000 new junctions per second, until a baby reaches about two years of age. After that, the brain begins to prune back the myriad connections, called synapses, to make them more efficient. Lead disrupts this cleanup effort, leaving behind excess, poorly functioning nerve cells.

“If you have a brain that’s miswired, especially in areas involved in what psychologists call the executive functions—judgment, impulse control, anticipation of consequences—of course you might display aggressive behavior,” says Kim N. Dietrich, director of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine….“Overall, the evidence is sufficient that early exposure to lead triggers a higher risk for engaging in aggressive behavior,” says U of Cincinnati’s Dietrich. “The question now is, what is the lowest level of exposure where we might see this behavior?”

There’s more, including a number of items I didn’t include in my article. The whole thing is worth a read if you’d like to learn a bit more than my piece covered about the brain science behind lead and crime.

1So why did I write it the way I did? No good reason, really. Partly it’s because I told the story chronologically, and the really compelling parts of the brain science story are fairly recent. Partly it’s because it just seemed to be easier to explain things doing it in the sequence I did it.

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Lead and Crime: It’s a Brain Thing

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Meet the Next Michele Bachmann

by EileenRubinstei Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Liberals rejoiced when Michele Bachmann announced her intention to retire from Congress at the end of 2014. Bachmann will no longer be around to carry the Tea Party banner in Congress. But she’s almost guaranteed to be replaced by another far-right conservative. Minnesota’s 6th congressional district skews heavily Republican—voting 56 percent for Romney in 2012. Whichever GOPer emerges from the primary should easily waltz to a general election win in November. And that successor could either be a Bachmann clone or Minnesota’s own version of Grover Norquist.

The race is between two candidates from diverging wings of the Republican party: There’s Tom Emmer, the social conservative who hews closely to Bachmann and Phil Krinkie, a small-business owner whose mission in life is to block tax increases. A key vote for the nomination comes this week. Minnesota’s primary isn’t until August, but candidates are traditionally handpicked at summer conventions by the state party, while the primary is a mere formality. Local precincts will hold caucuses on Tuesday to elect delegates to the state convention, determining which candidate has the edge.

Emmer, a failed gubernatorial candidate from 2010, closely replicated the Bachmann model. For his first major bill after he entered the Minnesota House in 2005, Emmer proposed that the state medically castrate sex offenders. That was just the beginning of a career defined by extreme views. He’s unsure when quizzed about evolution. He favors harsh immigration laws—Arizona’s punitive 2010 law was a “wonderful first step.” He thinks a minimum wage for restaurant staff is a silly concept: “With the tips that they get to take home, they are some people earning over $100,000 a year,” Emmer said during his 2010 campaign.

Exempting Minnesota from federal laws was Emmer’s pet cause as a legislator. He proposed the Firearms Freedom Act, an implausible bill that would have declared Minnesota exempt from federal gun laws. He then took that a step further, introducing a bill that said Minnesota must ignore any federal law unless a supermajority approved each measure. “A federal law does not apply in Minnesota unless that law is approved by a two-thirds vote of the members of each house of the legislature and is signed by the governor,” his bill read. None of these measures succeeded, but they charmed the Bachmann wing of Minnesota’s Republican Party.

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Meet the Next Michele Bachmann

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Contact: Cellist Leyla McCalla Channels the Poet Langston Hughes

by bestpage Posted on February 3, 2014

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Leyla McCalla is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist (cello, banjo, guitar) who performed for several years with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Out this week, her Kickstarter-funded debut solo album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, weaves together Hughes’ poetry, Haitian folk music, and her own original songs. The photo was shot in Harlem, across the street from Hughes’ home of 20 years, where McCalla spoke with Jacob Blickenstaff about why she chose Hughes as her muse. The following is in her words.

Langston Hughes is a focal point in my life, and inspired me to pursue a creative path. I read both of his autobiographies. One is called The Big Sea, and the other is I Wonder as I Wander. The Big Sea is about his early life as an artist, his childhood and upbringing.

Hughes has all these different layers of artistry. His voice was so simple, but it encompasses so many issues and subtleties of our culture. He’s the Duke Ellington of words—painting the most incredible portraits with simple musical ideas that just come together in amazing ways. I feel like he does that with concepts, words, and color in his language. I Wonder as I Wander starts in Haiti. It was interesting to me that he traveled so much, and that that was such a big part of his work. I think it’s under-acknowledged and it made me realize that being an artist is hard work. He wasn’t just sitting in Harlem writing poems all day, you know?

He connected with a Haitian writer named Jacques Roumain. Through him, Hughes was exposed to this pan-Africanism—black culture in a more universal way—and I think it was eye-opening for him to realize that black culture wasn’t just of the United States, but that it existed everywhere.

That resonated with me. My family’s from Haiti. I’ve been exposed to the culture of black America, I’ve lived in Africa, and even from recently going to Europe I have a better understanding of the racial relations in places like France and the UK. I feel like the work that he started continues today. It was really important to acknowledge that through this album.

Finding the sound was a pretty intuitive process. I followed my ear: What I heard is what I tried to make happen. I heard the arrangements as sparse, and wanted to focus on bringing the words to the forefront. I heard steel guitar, which has a dreamy, otherworldliness to it that echoes a dreamy quality in the poems.

I’ll usually pick up an instrument as I read through a poem. I’ll use GarageBand to flesh out some ideas and try different things, but the connection that I feel is pretty immediate. With “Heart of Gold.” I just played that A minor and C9 chord for a while, and then was playing it in 5/4 time—I can’t remember how it really happened.

The original title for the poem was “Vari-Colored Song,” but I had always called it “Heart of Gold.” When it was time to name the album, a friend asked if it’s too weird to call it “a tribute to Langston Hughes?” and I said, “No, I think that makes it stronger,” and then I thought, what about Vari-Colored Songs for the title? I felt like there were so many different things happening in the record, and I felt like conceptually the strongest way to tie it all together was to continue to use his words.

“Contact” is an occasional series of artist portraits and interviews by Jacob Blickenstaff.

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Contact: Cellist Leyla McCalla Channels the Poet Langston Hughes

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From Russia With Love: Photos of Brave Gay Activists Fighting Homophobia

by Alison O'neil Posted on February 3, 2014

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On June 28, 2013, five couples in wedding finery piled into a white limo and pulled up to a municipal office in St. Petersburg, Russia. The same-sex pairs come to apply for marriage licenses they knew they were unlikely to get, but they wanted to make a statement. A video of the day shows confounded clerks unsuccessfully trying to keep the beaming lovers out as they head to a waiting room where they kiss in protest. “They didn’t even want to give us the blank applications,” says Yana Petrova, who tried to marry her partner, Elena Davydova. “But there wasn’t much they could do—we’d already downloaded them.”

Just two days earlier, the nation’s upper house of parliament had unanimously passed a bill banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors” and imposing fines between $120 and $30,000 for offenders. The bill was understood to prohibit all open expression of gay identity, from parades and rainbow flags to same-sex couples holding hands in public. President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law on June 30.

The new law, which has drawn worldwide criticism and inspired calls to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, further codified Russia’s widespread homophobia: 12 cities, including St. Petersburg, had already passed similar measures, and surveys suggest more than 70 percent of Russians believe LGBT people should remain closeted. Last year, Moscow enacted a century-long ban on gay-pride events.

Since the gay-propaganda law passed, activists have noted a sharp uptick in antigay violence. Yet some also say the law has bolstered their cause. “Before, it wasn’t accepted to talk about this,” Petrova says. “Now, there are no neutral people left. Everyone wants to express their opinion. That’s good. Debate is the only thing that can lead to any battle or change.”

Danish photographer Mads Nissen was in Russia teaching a photography workshop when Article 6.21 passed. A student tipped him off to the wedding registry attempt. The activists he met were suspicious at first, asking him to share his website and other information to test his intentions. (Antigay activists have attempted to infiltrate Russia’s LGBT community.) But soon, they were bringing him to underground clubs and spaces where the community gathers, and sharing their stories of being assaulted and arrested. At one gay pride rally, Nissen witnessed a brutal attack on Kirill Fedorov, a young gay man and activist he’d been following for several days. “An antigay activist just came up to him and punched him in the face,” Nissen recalls. “In that moment, this wasn’t a theoretical thing anymore. It was real. It was happening. It was worse than I imagined.”

“Sometimes you do a story—you think it’s a big topic, and then when you get into it, it doesn’t seem so bad,” Nissen says. “This was absolutely the opposite. The more I got into it, the worse it was.”

Yaroslav Yevtushenko with his boyfriend Dmitry Chunosov. On June 30, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses into law. The law had passed Russia’s lower and upper chambers of parliament with unanimous approval.

Ultra-nationalists, wearing Cossack-style hats and holding whips, shout abuse at participants in a Gay Pride rally in June 2013 in St. Petersburg. Anti-gay protestors later violently assaulted some of the people taking part in the rally. Attacks on the gay community have become the norm: Since the law’s passage, Moscow’s main gay club, Central Station, has seen at least five attacks—including a shooting, a poison gas attack, and a raid in which equipment was stolen and the roof was damaged.

LGBT activist Kirill Fedorov was violently assaulted by anti-gay protestors during the St. Petersburg gay pride rally in June. He was later arrested.

Yana Petrova, 28, appears in court after being arrested at the June gay pride rally. A few years ago, Petrova probably would not have ended up in court—or have been at a pride event. “These laws are terrible, but thanks to them, so to speak, many people are actually coming out,” she says. “Before this, many gay people in Russia believed that if this isn’t being discussed, no one’s beating us, so great, all is fine, we can live. We can’t marry, but we can live. So, okay. Leave it at that.”

Natali Zamanskix, right, and her girlfriend, Ludmila Gorbatova, meet after work near their home on St. Petersburg’s outskirts.

Ilmira Shayhraznova, left, and Elena Yakovleva, on their way to the St. Petersburg municipal office where they and four other gay couples attempted to file applications for marriage. When they arrived, the clerks gave the couples a copy of the Russian code to read, which de facto defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Pavel Lebedev, right, with his boyfriend Kirill Kalugin. Lebedev says that he has been violently attacked six times in the previous year. In spite of the danger, he insists on his right to be open about his sexuality and to choose whom he loves.

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From Russia With Love: Photos of Brave Gay Activists Fighting Homophobia

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