Tag Archives: obama

Congress Once Again Fails to Fund the Fight Against Zika

by TAXCyrildxylli Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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The fight against the Zika virus stalled in Congress on Tuesday when Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill they said was stuffed with unpalatable measures, including a provision that barred Planned Parenthood from the emergency funding. With the $1.1 billion funding bill now dead in the water, lawmakers could fail to reach a compromise before they leave for a seven-week recess next month.

It has already been more than four months since President Barack Obama first submitted a request for $1.9 billion in emergency funds to combat the mosquito-borne virus, which has been linked to devastating birth defects.

Congress’ failure to respond to the crisis drew criticism Tuesday from the American Public Health Association. “We know Zika could cause hundreds of US infants to be born with preventable birth defects—if we don’t intervene,” the organization’s executive director, Georges Benjamin, said in a press release. He added that the latest bill was “both late and inadequate.” Obama criticized Congress for its lack of progress last month, saying, “They should not be going off on recess before this is done.”

The GOP bill passed the House last Thursday under unusual circumstances: The vote took place over the shouts of Democrats holding an all-night sit-in in an attempt to force a vote on gun control. Democrats sharply criticized the Zika bill for preventing emergency funding from going to the women’s health organization Planned Parenthood, a favorite target of conservatives, even though the Zika crisis affects pregnant women. They also objected to a provision weakening regulations on pesticides.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Monday described the bill as “nothing more than a goodie bag for the fringes of the Republican Party.” Republicans, meanwhile, blamed Democrats for the holdup. “It’s really puzzling to hear Democrats claim to be advocates for women’s health measures when they are the ones trying to block the Zika legislation,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Tuesday’s vote was 52 to 48, short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

As the partisan squabble stretches on, the Zika crisis is only growing. The disease has spread quickly in Puerto Rico, where the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned this month it could result in “dozens to hundreds of infants born with microcephaly in the coming year.” Nearly 2,000 cases have been reported in US territories, the vast majority of them contracted locally, according to the CDC. A total of 820 cases have been reported in US states. One of those was contracted in a lab; all the rest resulted from travel.

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Congress Once Again Fails to Fund the Fight Against Zika

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Paul Ryan Wants to Increase the Medicare Eligibility Age to 67

by StaceyDowling61 Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republicans announce a lot of health care plans. All of them are essentially the same, “a familiar hodgepodge of tax credits, health savings accounts, high-risk pools, block granting of Medicaid, tort reform, and interstate purchase of health plans.” Today, after months of cogitating, House Republicans have finally agreed on yet another a health care plan. It’s not a hodgepodge, however, it’s a “backpack.” Beyond that, however, it should sound pretty familiar:

In place of President Barack Obama’s health law, House Republicans propose providing Americans with refundable tax credits….catastrophic insurance….health-savings accounts….plans offered in other states….fee-for-service insurance through a newly created Medicare insurance exchange not a voucher! not a voucher! absolutely positively not a voucher! -ed.….pay taxes on the value of whatever health insurance employers provide.

Hmmm. There’s no mention of high-risk pools or tort reform or Medicaid block grants. What the hell is going on here? Who was responsible for—oh, wait. Maybe the Wall Street Journal just did a crappy job of describing it. Let’s check in with the Washington Post:

The GOP plan floats a variety of proposals….refundable tax credit….health savings accounts….“high-risk pools”….Medicaid funds would be handed to the states either as block grants or as per-capita allotments.

Now we’re talking. Every single buzzword is there except for tort reform. But maybe I should check in with Reuters:

The Republican proposal would gradually increase the Medicare eligibility age, which currently is 65, to match that of the Social Security pension plan, which is 67 for people born in 1960 or later….The Republican plan includes medical liability reform that would put a cap on non-economic damages awarded in lawsuits, a measure aimed at cutting overall healthcare costs.

Tort reform is there after all! And as an extra added bonus, the Medicare eligibility age goes up to 67! Hallelujah!

How could this possibly have taken more than five minutes to write? It’s identical to every health care plan ever proposed by Republicans. There is, of course, no funding mechanism, possibly because Republicans know perfectly well that it will do nothing and therefore require no funding. But here’s my favorite bit of well-hidden snark from the Washington Post account:

The most significant omission from the Republican health-care plan, though, is to what degree it will maintain — or, more likely, reduce — insurance coverage for Americans….Asked about the plan’s effect on coverage, a Republican leadership aide said Monday, “You’re getting to the dynamic effect of the plan and we can’t answer that until the committees start to legislate.”

But there is a significant clue in the GOP plan that it anticipates a surge in the ranks of the uninsured. Before the Affordable Care Act, the federal government’s primary mechanism for compensating health providers for delivering care to the uninsured was through “disproportionate share hospital” payments, or DSH, which are allocated to facilities that treated large numbers of the uninsured.

Under Obamacare, DSH payments were set to be phased out because coverage rates were expected to increase dramatically….The Republican plan would repeal those cuts entirely.

Bottom line: this is just the usual conservative mush. It would accomplish nothing. It would insure no one. It would wipe out all the gains of Obamacare. Millions of people would have their current health care ripped away from them, all so that Republicans can repeal the 3.8 percent tax on high-earner investment income that funds Obamacare.

And just for good measure, it will also raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Because apparently, the old hodgepodge just wasn’t quite Scrooge-like enough.

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Paul Ryan Wants to Increase the Medicare Eligibility Age to 67

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Fight over Grand Canyon pits Native Americans against John McCain

by Darrel52U68209 Posted on June 17, 2016

Fight over Grand Canyon pits Native Americans against John McCain

By on Jun 17, 2016 3:45 pmShare

President Obama has already protected over 265 million acres of land and water in the U.S. — more than any other president in history. He’s headed out west this weekend to Carlsbad Caverns and Yosemite to celebrate that record, at the same time that there is a battle underway in Arizona to see one more region protected before he exits office.

Sierra Club and Native American tribal leaders have been organizing local support for designating 1.7 million acres around the Grand Canyon as the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has taken up the cause, proposing a long-shot bill to create the monument. Activists argue it would mean better protection for areas that have been harmed by uranium mining (there is a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mining in the greater Grand Canyon region). The Orphan Mine, a former copper and uranium mine in the area, closed in 1969 and is now a highly radioactive waste site.

While conservation efforts are popular among residents — 85 percent support national monuments and a plurality want more to be done for the Grand Canyon area — some lawmakers and business interests are pushing back. Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake have advised Obama against conservation that would “lock away” land from development, even though the designation would only block uranium mining. The opposition is flanked by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which called the proposal a “monumental mistake.”

But activists would say that leaving tribal sites and the Southwest’s largest old-growth Ponderosa pine forest unprotected would be its own monumental problem.

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Fight over Grand Canyon pits Native Americans against John McCain

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Donald Trump Just Banned the Washington Post From Covering His Campaign

by RalfBarunga Posted on June 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump issued an edict on his Facebook page Monday afternoon: The Washington Post will no longer be credentialed to cover his campaign. “Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign,” Trump wrote, “we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post.”

Trump appeared to take issue with the Post‘s characterization of his response to this weekend’s Orlando shooting, in which he suggested that President Barack Obama had some involvement in the attacks, according to the Post. The paper now joins an extensive list of publications that have incurred Trump’s wrath—though this is the first time his campaign has publicly acknowledged a blanket ban on allowing a media outlet to cover his campaign. As I reported in March, Trump’s campaign has regularly denied press credentials to outlets including Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, the Des Moines Register, Univision, National Review, and Mother Jones.

For a time, being denied credentials was more of a hassle than a true impediment for reporters seeking to cover Trump’s events. When I’ve been turned down for credentials in the past, I’ve waited in the general public line, which is sometimes hours long, and still been able to attend Trump’s events. Recently, however, the Trump campaign ejected a Politico reporter from an event in California after he entered the event with the general public.

Update: Shortly after Trump made his pronouncement on Facebook, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron fired back.

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Donald Trump Just Banned the Washington Post From Covering His Campaign

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India and U.S. team up to give boost to solar power startups

by ViolaClaflin984 Posted on June 8, 2016

India and U.S. team up to give boost to solar power startups

By on Jun 8, 2016Share

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is serious about fighting climate change, and about collaborating with the U.S. to do it, he made clear during an address to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday. He said that “protection of the environment … is central to our shared vision of a just world,” and called for “a lighter carbon footprint and a greater use of renewables.”

On Tuesday, the first day of Modi’s state visit to Washington, D.C., his government and the Obama administration issued a joint statement on U.S.-India cooperation that led with plans for expanding clean energy deployment in India. The most important component is $60 million in clean energy financing. The Indian and U.S. governments will split the costs of helping small Indian solar startups get off the ground, especially in rural villages that are not on the country’s electrical grid. These subsidies and loan guarantees should help the young companies expand to the point where they can attract far greater international investment — as much as $1.4 billion, the two governments estimate. That additional money will mostly come from the private sector, although some may come from other government sources, such as the U.S. Export-Import bank.

“These off-the-grid companies are small and need funding to scale up,” John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s director of international climate campaigns, told Grist. “The hope is that it will raise far more than that seed money.”

Boosting India’s renewable sector will help curb the need for expanded coal power by providing electricity to areas in India that current lack it. Modi has emphasized in past speeches that 300 million Indians still don’t have access to electricity. As seriously as India takes climate change, Modi warns, it won’t keep its people in the literal dark. The new financing deal with the U.S. is specifically designed to address that concern.

The two countries also made plans for a $30 million public-private research program on smart grids and storage of renewable energy, and agreed to improve cooperation on wildlife conservation and combating wildlife trafficking.

One part of the announcement that won’t sit well with some environmental activists is that India will buy six nuclear reactors built by Westinghouse, an American firm. But even green groups that oppose the nuclear portion of the deal are pleased overall. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement that the agreement will “accelerate the momentum toward a 100 percent clean energy economy” and “help connect families to clean, reliable electricity after generations of being failed by the fossil fuel grid.”

India is the second most populous country in the world, and its enthusiastic participation is crucial to any global effort to limit climate change. It has poverty that needs to be alleviated through economic development and it has large reserves of coal — a potentially lethal combination for the planet.

Before the U.N. climate negotiations in Paris last December, climate hawks were nervous about whether India would cooperate. Efforts to bring the country into a strong deal proved challenging but ultimately successful. India agreed to dramatically increase its renewable energy deployment and to increase its coal use less than previously expected (although still not enough to help the world stay below 2 degrees C of warming).

This represents major progress. In 2014, Modi skipped the U.N. Climate Summit in New York and made peculiar, inscrutable comments to the U.N. General Assembly shortly thereafter suggesting that yoga could help combat climate change. But, as pollution from burning coal and gasoline has turned Delhi and other Indian cities into some of the most polluted in the world, India has started to shift its stances.

This week in D.C., Modi reiterated his commitment to the Paris Agreement, pledging to work on getting his government to ratify it this year, a complex and arduous process. The global community is newly focused on bringing the agreement into effect before next January because Donald Trump has threatened to try to undo the global pact. If at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions have ratified it before a President Trump takes office, then the agreement will go into force and can’t be easily unraveled.

India’s new plans for collaborating with the U.S. won’t just matter in Delhi and D.C. India is the de facto leader of a large bloc of developing nations in climate negotiations, so its latest actions will reverberate around the world.

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India and U.S. team up to give boost to solar power startups

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Obama Is Right: We Need to Expand Social Security. But Not For Everybody.

by DelilahRegister Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday President Obama joined the retirement crisis bandwagon:

A lot of Americans don’t have retirement savings. Even if they’ve got an account set up, they just don’t have enough money at the end of the month to save as much as they’d like because they’re just barely paying the bills. Fewer and fewer people have pensions they can really count on, which is why Social Security is more important than ever.

We can’t afford to weaken Social Security. We should be strengthening Social Security. And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.

I concur in part and dissent in part. First the dissent: it’s not true that “fewer and fewer” people have pensions they can count on. There has been a change in the number of old-style pensions (“defined-benefit plans”) vs. 401(k)-style pensions (“defined-contribution plans”), but the overall share of workers covered has stayed pretty steady:

The total share of workers in pension plans of one kind or another was 45 percent in 1979 and 45 percent in 2011. There’s been virtually no change over the past 30 years.

But wait! Those old-style pensions were more generous. Surely that’s what Obama meant by pensions that people “can really count on”? Not so much, it turns out. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has been warning about the retirement crisis for some time, but recently they re-analyzed pension data based on new NIPA data that allows a more accurate look at pension accruals. Here’s their updated chart:

The total pension wealth of the American public has barely budged even as the source of pension wealth has changed dramatically. It was about 13 percent of total wages in 1984 and 14 percent in 2012. CRR’s conclusion from this new data is that “the accumulation of retirement assets has not declined as a result of the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans.” As they cheerfully admit, “We are going to have to change our story!”

Now it’s true, in theory, that old-style pensions were safer than 401(k) plans, which bob up and down with the stock market. But this difference is often overstated. For one thing, 401(k) plans generally show fairly steady growth over any time frame more than three or four years. Even the Great Recession only weakened them from 2009-12, and they’ve recovered very nicely since then. For another, all those old pension funds were invested in stocks and bonds as well, and if the market goes south, they go south as well. The most recent example of this is the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund.

That said, I concur in part with President Obama. Probably the biggest problem with 401(k)-style plans is that they tend to benefit high earners more than old-style pensions did. The difference isn’t enormous—though we can’t say for sure since distributional detail isn’t available for past decades—but it’s probably true that 401(k)s are somewhat less generous to low earners than older defined-benefit plans were. This is not a fatal defect, however, and it’s one that’s being addressed fairly successfully already. Another problem with 401(k) plans is high fees, and that’s also a problem that’s being addressed—though for my money it could stand to be addressed with considerably more vigor.

Here’s what all this adds up to: the best way to address retirement security is to continue reforming 401(k) plans and to expand Social Security—but only for low-income workers. Middle-class workers are generally doing reasonably well, and certainly as well as they did in the past. We don’t need a massive and expensive expansion of Social Security for everyone, but we do need to make Social Security more generous for the bottom quarter or so of the population that’s doing poorly in both relative and absolute terms. This is something that every liberal ought to support, and hopefully this is the bandwagon that President Obama in now on.

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Obama Is Right: We Need to Expand Social Security. But Not For Everybody.

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

by CindyParkhill Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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I was musing the other day about something or other, and for some reason it occurred to me that there are several subjects near and dear to progressive hearts that I flatly disagree with. I’m not talking about, say, charter schools, where there’s a robust, ongoing intra-liberal debate and both sides already have plenty of adherents. Nor am I talking about things like Wall Street regulation, where everyone (including me) thinks we need to do more but we disagree on technical issues (Bernie wants to break up big banks, I want to double capital requirements).

I’m thinking instead of things that seem to enjoy something like 90+ percent liberal support—and which I think are basically a waste of liberal time and energy. So if I write about them, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed off. Something like 90+ percent of my readership, I’d guess. Who needs the grief? After all, for the most part there’s usually not much harm in spending time and energy on these things (though there are exceptions).

But let’s give it a go anyway. Maybe this will be the first entry in a periodic series. Maybe I’ll discover that I’m not quite as alone on these issues as I think. Here’s my first entry.

Campaign Finance Reform

Liberals love campaign finance reform. Citizens United is our Roe v. Wade, and it’s become an even more central issue since Bernie Sanders began his presidential run last year. As near as I can tell, Bernie—along with most liberals—thinks it’s the key foundational issue of modern progressivism. Until we seriously reduce the amount of money in political campaigns, no real progressive reform is possible.

I’m pretty sure this is completely wrong. Here are seven reasons that have persuaded me of this over the years, with the most important reason left to the end:

  1. Half a century has produced nothing. Liberals groups have been putting serious effort into campaign finance reform for about 40 years now. The only result has been abject failure. Ban union donations, they create PACs. Ban hard money, you get soft money. Ban soft money, you get Super PACs. Etc. None of the reforms have worked, and even before Citizens United the Supreme Court had steadily made effective reform efforts harder and harder. What’s even worse, the public still isn’t with us. If you ask them vaguely if they think there’s too much money in politics, most will say yes. If you ask them if they really care, they shrug. After nearly half a century, maybe it’s time to ask why.
  2. Other countries spend less. Most other rich countries spend a lot less on political campaigns than we do. Are they less in thrall to moneyed interests because of this? Some are, some aren’t. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that there’s much of a correlation.
  3. Billionaires are idiots. Seriously. The evidence of the last decade or so suggests that billionaires just aren’t very effective at using their riches to win elections. This is unsurprising: billionaires are egotists who tend to think that because they got rich doing X, they are also geniuses at Y and Z and on beyond zebra. But they aren’t. This stuff is a hobby for them, and mostly they’re just wasting their money.
  4. The small-dollar revolution. Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the internet has produced an explosion of small-dollar donations, accounting for over a third of presidential fundraising in 2012 and 2016. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $288 million (including money raised by outside groups). Bernie Sanders has raised $208 million, all of it in small-dollar donations averaging $27. Ironically, at the same time that he’s made campaign finance reform a major issue, Bernie has demonstrated that small dollars can power a serious insurgency.
  5. Money really is speech. Obviously this is an opinion, and a really rare one on my side of the political spectrum. But why should political speech be restricted? My read of the First Amendment suggests that if there’s any single kind of speech that should enjoy the highest level of protection, it’s political speech.
  6. We may have maxed out anyway. There’s increasing evidence that in big-time contests (governors + national offices), we’ve basically reached the point of diminishing returns. At this point, if billionaires spend more money it just won’t do much good even if they’re smart about it. There are only so many minutes of TV time available and only so many persuadable voters. More important, voters have only so much bandwidth. Eventually they tune out, and it’s likely that we’ve now reached that point.

    In the interests of fairness, I’ll acknowledge that I might be wrong about this. It might turn out that there are clever ways to spend even more; billionaires might get smarter; and Citizens United has only just begun to affect spending. Maybe in a couple of decades I’ll be eating my words about this.

  7. Campaign spending hasn’t gone up much anyway. I told you I’d leave the most important reason for the end, and this is it. It’s easy to be shocked when you hear about skyrocketing billions of dollars being spent on political campaigns, but billions of dollars aren’t that much in a country the size of the United States. In 2012, Obama spent $1.1 billion vs. Mitt Romney’s $1.2 billion. That’s about 1 percent of total ad spending in the US. Hell, in the cell phone biz alone, AT&T spent $1.3 billion vs. Verizon’s $1.2 billion. If you want to look at campaign spending, you really need to size it to the growth in GDP over the past half century or so.

So here it is. These two charts show our skyrocketing spending on presidential campaigns as a percent of GDP. Data for the chart on the left comes from Mother Jones. The chart on the right comes from the Center for Responsive Politics. Total presidential spending is up about 18 percent since 2000. I supposed I’d like to see this reduced as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to see it as the core corrupter of American politics. It’s a symptom, but it’s really not the underlying disease. There really are problems with the influence of the rich on American politics, but campaigns are probably the place where it matters least, not most.

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

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Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Outside the White House

by DeborahESSM Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Secret Service officers shot and arrested a man who brandished a gun outside the White House on Friday afternoon, according to a statement from the agency.

“Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers gave numerous verbal commands for the subject to stop and drop the firearm,” said Secret Service spokesman David A. Iacovetti. “When the subject failed to comply with the verbal commands, he was shot once by a Secret Service agent and taken into custody.”

The shooting took place at 2 p.m. on West Executive Drive, a closed street that runs next to the White House and leads to the West Wing. Neither President Barack Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden were in the White House during the incident, and the Secret Service confirmed that no one under its protection had been harmed.

The White House confirmed after the incident that no one else in the building was harmed. “”No one within or associated with the White House was injured, and everyone in the White House is safe and accounted for,” a White House official told CNN.

The Secret Service has yet to release a name or any other information on the man who was shot. The White House lockdown that went into effect after the shooting has been lifted.

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Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Outside the White House

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Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives

by AureliaHMDJ Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jim Geraghty asks a question that’s been on my mind too:

How happy do you think Hillary Clinton is with the Obama administration’s decision that schools must permit transgender students to use the bathroom they prefer?

Here’s an issue that will irk a lot of parents of daughters who might otherwise not care that much about politics. It’s not an automatic political winner for Obama and his allies; a Reuters poll found 43 percent saying that people should use public restrooms “according to the biological sex on their birth certificate” compared to 41 percent who opt for “according to the gender with which they identify.” Sure, Donald Trump said he opposed the North Carolina law, but if this rule makes you feel like Washington is arrogant, meddling, out-of-touch, and forcing changes upon your community that you don’t want, who do you think you’re going to vote for?

It’s almost inevitable that liberals will annoy a lot of people over cultural issues like this. It goes with the territory. But I suspect Geraghty is right: Hillary Clinton would probably have preferred that this just stay on the back burner for a while.

It’s true that she caught a break when Donald Trump said he didn’t think this was a big problem and states like North Carolina should just settle down. But let me tell you something about Trump: he could change his mind. Really! I’ve seen him do it. It wouldn’t even be hard. All he has to do is say that he favored leaving things alone, but if the Obama administration is going to start sending out decrees to schools about it, well, that’s going too far. We need to fight back against this kind of government overreach in the service of PC nonsense.

We’ll see. But as a voter turnout tool for conservatives, this could be the new gay marriage. I wonder if it will be for liberals too?

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Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives

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Secret Service Will Investigate Trump’s Former Butler as Campaign Disavows Statements

by AntoineKeldie Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, Mother Jones published a story detailing some extreme and threatening statements about President Barack Obama written by Donald Trump’s former butler Anthony Senecal on his personal Facebook page. The 84-year-old worked as Trump’s butler for 17 years before becoming the in-house historian at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. In the last year, Senecal has written multiple public posts on Facebook calling for Obama to be killed, with remarks such as, “If that means dragging that ball less dick head from the white mosque and hanging his scrawny ass from the portico–count me in !!!!!”

Threatening the president is a federal crime, and the Secret Service told the Daily Beast in a statement Thursday afternoon that it plans to investigate the butler’s statements. “The U.S. Secret Service is aware of this matter and will conduct the appropriate investigation,” wrote spokesman Robert Hoback in an email to the Daily Beast.

Also on Thursday afternoon, the Trump campaign distanced itself from Senecal’s statements. “Tony Senecal has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for years, but nevertheless we totally and completely disavow the horrible statements made by him regarding the President,” campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN.

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Secret Service Will Investigate Trump’s Former Butler as Campaign Disavows Statements

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