Tag Archives: obama

Tyrant Obama Issues Rule Creating Death Panels, No One Cares

by MarquitPFR Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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This happened last Friday and I completely missed it:

Six years after legislation to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a furor over “death panels,” the Obama administration issued a final rule on Friday that authorizes Medicare to pay doctors for consultations with patients on how they would like to be cared for as they are dying.

The administration proposed the payments in July, touching off none of the rancor that first accompanied the idea during debate on the Affordable Care Act in 2009….“We received overwhelmingly positive comments about the importance of these conversations between physicians and patients,” Dr. Conway said. “We know that many patients and families want to have these discussions.”

Huh. It turns out that Republicans never really had any problem with this at all.1 I guess that whole “death panel” thing was just a big misunderstanding. The Wall Street Journal explains what happened:

Since 2010, legislation that would allow reimbursements to physicians for advance planning discussions has gained bipartisan support….The climate has changed in part because of lobbying and education campaigns by medical groups.

Yeah, that must be it. I’m glad we got that straightened out.

1Except for Sarah Palin, of course, who offered her familiar common-sense take: “Government needs to stay the hell out of our ‘end-of-life’ discussions,” she said in a long, um, commentary on Facebook. “I’m so angry at democrat and republican politicians who just rolled their eyes when I, and many others, rose up with warnings that each step forward taken by champions of this socialist program would jerk back two steps from every free American and our God-given rights.” Etc.

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Tyrant Obama Issues Rule Creating Death Panels, No One Cares

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The World’s Plan to Save Itself, in 6 Charts

by DewittRhein Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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World leaders have a pretty comprehensive plan to fight climate change, according to a United Nations report released Friday—even if it doesn’t go as far as many of them had hoped.

In just over a month, representatives from most of the countries on Earth will gather in Paris in an attempt to finalize an international agreement to limit global warming and adapt to its impacts. The video above is a snappy explainer of what’s at stake at this meeting, but suffice it to say the proposed deal is split into two keys parts. First is the core agreement, parts of which may be legally binding, that comprises broad, non-specific guidelines for all countries. It calls on countries to take steps such as transparently reporting greenhouse gas emissions and committing to ramp up climate action over the next few decades.

But the real meat-and-potatoes is in the second part, the “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs). The INDCs are what sets the Paris talks apart from past attempts at a global climate agreement in Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Those summits either left out major polluters (the US dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol; China and India were exempted) or fell apart completely (Copenhagen), in large part because they were built around universal greenhouse gas reduction targets that not everyone could agree to.

This time around, the UN process is more like a potluck, where each country brings its own unique contribution based on its needs and abilities; those are the INDCs. The US, for example, has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, mostly by going after carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. So far, according to the World Resources Institute, 126 plans have been submitted, covering about 86 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. (The European Union submitted one joint plan for all its members.) Those contributions are likely to limit global warming to around 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100. That’s above the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) limit scientists say is necessary to avert the worst impacts—but it’s also about 1 degree C less warming than would would happen if the world continued on its present course.

Now, we have a bit more insight into how countries are planning to make this happen. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the group that is overseeing the Paris talks, combed through all the INDCs to look for trends. Its report is a bit convoluted and repetitive; I don’t recommend it to any but the nerdiest climate nerds. But I pulled out a few of the charts as an overview of what global action on climate change really looks like.

Types of targets: Most of the INDCs contain specific emission reduction targets. (Not all do; some countries, such as the small island nations, have such small or nonexistent emissions that it wouldn’t make sense to promise to reduce them.) The most common way to state these targets is to promise that emissions at X future date will be lower than they would be with no action. Indonesia, for example, has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. The US commitment fits in the second category, an “absolute” target where emissions actually begin to go down. Others specify a date at which emissions will “peak,” or set a goal for emissions per unit of GDP or energy production (“intensity”).

UNFCCC

Greenhouse gases: The commitments cover a broad range of greenhouse gases (most cover more than one), but carbon dioxide is the most common enemy. That’s no surprise, as it’s by far the most common.

UNFCCC

Economic sectors: In different countries, different economic sectors are more or less responsible for climate pollution. In the US, the number-one source of emissions is coal-fired power plants; thus, President Barack Obama’s plans focus on the power sector. In Indonesia, by contrast, deforestation is the biggest problem. Most plans cover more than one sector, but the most common is energy.

UNFCCC

How to fix it: This section finds that implementing renewable energy is the most common way countries are planning to meet their targets. More interesting is the tiny role played by carbon capture, use, and storage, down at the bottom of the chart. This refers to technology that “captures” greenhouse gas emissions on their way out of power plants, or directly from the atmosphere, and buries or re-purposes them. Support for carbon capture—also known as “clean coal”—is popular with policymakers who don’t want to curb coal use (including GOP presidential contender John Kasich), even though it remains costly and unproven at scale.

UNFCCC

How to adapt: Many countries’ INDCs also contain information about how they plan to adapt to climate change. Water use, agriculture, and public health appear to be the biggest areas of focus.

UNFCCC

A terrible, no-good, very bad summary: The most important question is clearly how all this adds up to reducing the world’s greenhouse gas footprint and averting the worst threats posed by climate change. But the chart that addresses this question (below) is…not great. I’m including it so you have some sense of one big drawback of the Paris approach—without universal emissions targets, it’s a lot harder to specify what the cumulative effect of these plans will really be. In short, here’s what this chart shows: The gray line is global greenhouse gas emissions up to today. The orange line is how emissions will grow over the next couple decades if we do nothing. The three blue lines show how quickly we would need to reduce emissions to keep global warming to 2 degrees C; the longer we wait to take action, the steeper the cuts have to be. The yellow rectangles show a snapshot of where the INDCs leave us.

UNFCCC

So, we’re better off than before, but we’re not out of danger. That’s why it’s essential for the core agreement to include requirements that countries adopt even more aggressive goals in the future; that’s one of the key things that will be debated in Paris. In other words, the Paris meeting is just one key battle in a war that’s far from over, Jennifer Morgan, director of the WRI’s global climate program, said in a statement.

“Despite the unprecedented level of effort, this report finds that current commitments are not yet sufficient to meet what the world needs. Countries must accelerate their efforts after the Paris summit in order to stave off climate change. The global climate agreement should include a clear mandate for countries to ramp up their commitments and set a long-term signal to phase out emissions as soon as possible.”

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The World’s Plan to Save Itself, in 6 Charts

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Head Witch Hunter Now Wants Fewer Witch Hunts

by ErwinX26bghrinc Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today’s Charles Krauthammer column cracks me up:

Skip the investigations, win the election

I’m all for demonstrating malfeasance. But the GOP House has given a five-year display of its inability to successfully demonstrate anything…. Operation Fast and Furious….IRS….Planned Parenthood….Benghazi.

….In each of these cases, Republicans had the facts and the argument. And yet in every one, they failed. What makes them think that they will fare any better in the next iteration, the impeachment of a minor official in an expiring administration?

Krauthammer is a hardcore conservative, but he’s also a very high-IQ conservative. So this makes me wonder: does he really believe this? Or does he know it’s baloney but figures he needs some kind of acceptable cover to get Republicans off their Ahab-like zeal for investigating nothingburgers?

As I’m sure Krauthammer knows, the problem Republicans have with their mania for investigations is that what turned out to be scandalous wasn’t high-ranking, and what was high-ranking wasn’t scandalous. Fast & Furious was scandalous, but it was a local botch. The IRS was slightly scandalous, but never went beyond middle management. Planned Parenthood did nothing wrong at all. And Benghazi—well, that reached the very highest levels, but there’s just no scandal to be uncovered. There may have been some bad security decisions, but the evidence of malfeasance by anyone in the Obama administration is all but nonexistent.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter. All through the Clinton administration and now the Obama administration, Republicans have been fixated on uncovering the scandals they just know have to be out there. But the plain truth is that Obama has run perhaps the cleanest administration in modern history. It’s actually sort of remarkable. There’s plenty of stuff you can legitimately disagree about with him, but there’s been virtually no scandal of the conventional sort.

Either way, though, Krauthammer is probably right. The latest obsession in the House is to impeach the head of the IRS. It’s idiotic because he did nothing wrong, and it’s doubly idiotic because it would never pass in the Senate. It devalues the whole notion of impeachment and makes Republicans look like crackpots.

Then again, PPP recently polled Republicans in North Carolina, and 66 percent supported the idea of impeaching Hillary Clinton “the day she takes office.” This is the conservative movement people like Krauthammer have built. It can hardly come as a surprise to him that their primary mode of governance now consists mostly of an endless quest for malevolent phantoms that Krauthammer and his buddies have been assuring them all along are out there.

Continued – 

Head Witch Hunter Now Wants Fewer Witch Hunts

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

by LakeshaHorowitz Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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James West/Climate Desk

At first glance, there are just two groups of presidential contenders when it comes to climate change: those who think it’s real and urgent, and those who don’t. But take a closer look, and the picture blurs. The matrix above depicts subtle differences, at least in the Republican field, in the extent to which the candidates believe the science and want to act on it. Of course, selecting each set of coordinates wasn’t an exact science—many of the White House hopefuls have a history of confused and contradictory statements on the issue. But here’s a short analysis of the candidates’ positions on global warming and an explanation of how we came up with this graph.

The Do-Nothing Denier crowd—Donald Trump, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, all Republicans—reject or aggressively downplay the science of manmade climate change, and they don’t want to do anything about it. They occupy the bottom-left corner of our matrix because they’ve called global warming a “hoax” (Trump) or “junk science” and “patently absurd” (Santorum), and have pushed dumb pseudo-science, such as Huckabee’s insistence that “a volcano in one blast will contribute more than a hundred years of human activity.” Santorum gets a little bit of a nudge to the right on our graph for saying during Wednesday’s presidential debate that “if we really want to tackle environmental problems, global warming, what we need to do is take those jobs from China and bring them back here to the United States, employ workers in this country”—which does sort of implicitly admit there’s a problem.

Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, somewhat surprisingly, is an outlier on the denial side of the matrix. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in September: “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” (That comment inspired California Gov. Jerry Brown to send Carson a thumb drive full of climate research.) But Carson moves up in our estimate because of his apparent support for alternative energy. Maybe it was more “thought bubble” than policy, but he said he’d like to see “more than 50 percent” clean energy by 2030. “I don’t care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative, if you have any thread of decency in you, you want to take care of the environment because you know you have to pass it on to the next generation,” he said in a separate interview.

Sure it’s real, but we shouldn’t act on it alone, or at all. That’s basically the position of our next Republican outlier, Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard. She appears to accept the science (mainly by avoiding it), but she doesn’t want to act on it, positioning herself as anti-regulation: “A single nation acting alone can make no difference at all,” she told CNBC, and therefore the United States needs to stop “destroying peoples’ livelihoods on the altar of ideology.” Fiorina’s opposition to climate action is pretty standard for the Republican pack. But her rivals have a more problematic history of tangling with the science.

Let’s move on to the “Humans Aren’t to Blame” crowd—those candidates, all Republicans, who admit that the climate is changing, but question just how much it can be attributed to humans burning fossil fuels. Take Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. He voted “yes” on a resolution declaring that climate change is real and not a hoax. He has promised to reverse President Barack Obama’s clean energy rules, but his campaign did announce a detailed energy policy that included “affordable fuel alternatives” (raising his position slightly up the “action” axis in our matrix). Still, Rubio actively casts doubt on humanity’s role in warming the planet by saying things like: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

It could be argued that Ted Cruz belongs with the “Do-Nothing Denier” crowd on our matrix. But he at least engages in the science, somewhat. He voted in the Senate to call climate change real, but he has also called it a “pseudoscientific theory.” He subscribes to the “there’s no warming lately” theory: He told Seth Meyers that “satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever”—a statement that one climate expert criticized as “a load of claptrap…absolute bunk.” Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky acknowledges that the world is warming because of carbon, but he has also said he is “not sure anybody exactly knows why” climate change is happening. Somewhere over here is Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, who has, at times, called for acting on climate change, even if he’s not totally sure what’s causing it. “We do not know for sure how much is caused by man and how much is part of a natural cycle change,” he said in 2008, adding, “I do believe we must work toward reducing emissions…” More recently, however, Gilmore has called the goal of reducing carbon emissions “ephemeral” if China and India don’t act, too.

That brings us to a pack of Republicans with mixed histories on the issue. These candidates have at times acknowledged the science and importance of climate change, and may have even advocated steps to act on it, but they don’t want to be tarred and feathered as liberals. I’m calling them Dog-Whistlers. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is among this crowd. In general he says humans contribute to the globe’s warming, but he insists Obama’s policy agenda is wrong. “I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” he told Bloomberg. What makes him different from Fiorina is that he previously claimed it was arrogant to assume the science was settled. And Bush’s energy policy proposes more drilling and less regulation—so not an all-star climate plan there.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likes to brag about his state’s position as the country’s third largest solar energy producer—and did so again during Wednesday night’s CNBC presidential debate. But in 2011, Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast. And while he believes in climate change, he hasn’t put forward any concrete proposals yet. I’m going to put Ohio governor John Kasich in this clique, too. He started off sounding pretty moderate on the issue and has historically voiced his support for climate science. But then, as a candidate, he walked his position towards the Republican mainstream by saying, “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.” Noncommittal, at best.

Curious in the club of Republicans are South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki, who have both urged action on climate change. Graham told CNN, “If I’m president of the United States, we’re going to address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.” He added: “When 90 percent of the doctors tell you you’ve got a problem, do you listen to the one?” Graham backed this up during the debate Wednesday by saying: “You don’t have to believe that climate change is real. I have been to the Antarctic. I have been to Alaska. I am not a scientist, and I’ve got the grades to prove it. But I’ve talked to the climatologists of the world, and 90 percent of them are telling me the greenhouse gas effect is real, that we’re heating up the planet.” Pataki was one of the driving forces behind RGGI’s creation. In 2007, he was named co-chair of the Independent Task Force on Climate Change organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and has become an advocate for climate action and green-friendly enterprise. He told the debate audience Wednesday that “one of the things that troubles me about the Republican Party is too often we question science that everyone accepts.” But Graham and Pataki are positioned lower on the matrix than the Democrats because neither of them has rolled out a clear and convincing plan explaining how they’d address climate change as president.

Now we move farther into the top right-hand quadrant, where candidates believe in science and really want to act on it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says he would repeal Obama’s climate regulations, but he has laid out smaller-scale projects such as forest management and the energy efficiency for airlines. For the record, he has called for action to combat warming temperatures—but he is a bit squishy. In 2014 he said, “Let the scientists decide the underlying facts,” and he questioned “how much” humans actually contribute to warming. Still, he earns a place in the top-right section of the graph because of a detailed energy policy that includes wind and solar.

Three Democrats vying for the nomination—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley—all believe in climate change, want to do something about it, and have serious plans to combat it. Experts have weighed in on the strengths and weaknesses of each of their proposals, but for the purposes of this chart, they are all in essentially the same place. Clinton has put installing a half-billion solar panels by 2020 at the heart of her clean energy policy and wants to best President Obama’s own plans by generating 33 percent of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. Sanders has said that “we have a moral responsibility to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and leave this planet a habitable planet for our children and our grandchildren.” He’s also described climate change as the country’s greatest national security threat. O’Malley wants to phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2050. “As president, on day one, I would use my executive power to declare the transition to a clean energy future the number one priority of our Federal Government,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed in June.

Mapping politicians like this is always a tricky process, and some of our expert readers will no doubt disagree with these conclusions. So tell us what you think. Leave your thoughts about the candidates’ various plans in the comments below to add to the discussion.

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

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This Commercial Might Be One of the Only Factual Things to Air During Tonight’s GOP Debate

by KurtisBoisvert9 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you watch tonight’s Republican primary debate on CBNC, you can expect to hear opinions on the economy and pot, attacks on newly annointed front-runner Ben Carson, and more. You can also expect to see the ad above, which lays out the economic case for action on climate change.

The 30-second spot is part of a six-figure TV and digital ad buy from NextGen Climate, the advocacy group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. At the beginning of the primary season, Steyer promised to focus his group’s energy on holding Republican presidential candidates accountable for their lack of climate action, and to pursue a campaign to “disqualify” any candidate who doesn’t accept mainstream climate science.

“America has never been a country of quitters,” the ad states, over bucolic b-roll of farmers, veterans, and small town Main Streets. “We don’t ignore threats like climate change.”

Then the scene changes to wind farms and solar panels, as the narrator promises that American-made clean energy will produce jobs, innovation, and energy independence. At the end, it advocates a specific goal of getting half the country’s power from renewable sources by 2030. (We’re at about 7 percent now.)

Steyer is clearly right that clean energy is a major 21st-century growth industry. Solar is the fastest-growing energy source in the country, and employment in that sector already outnumbers coal miners two-to-one. Nearly $40 billion was invested in clean energy in the United States in 2014, 7 percent higher than the previous year. Earlier this month, California adopted the same ambitious target that Steyer is calling for: The state’s power companies will be required to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

But the message hasn’t yet gotten through to most of the Republican presidential candidates. Marco Rubio’s energy plan is basically the exact opposite of what Steyer wants. Jeb Bush wants to eliminate all energy subsidies, including those for renewables. Other candidates have variously denied the existence of climate change, championed fossil fuels, and taken pot shots at President Barack Obama’s climate agenda.

The one exception, believe it or not, is Ben Carson, who—despite engaging in climate change skepticism—recently said he wants “more than 50 percent” clean energy. Maybe tonight we’ll learn more about how exactly he plans to get us there.

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This Commercial Might Be One of the Only Factual Things to Air During Tonight’s GOP Debate

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Lots of People Still Aren’t Aware That Obama Wants to Give Them Cheap Health Care

by OYGBridget Posted on October 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Covered California, my state’s version of Obamacare, announced some discouraging results yesterday. Among the uninsured, lots of people know about the tax penalty for not buying insurance, but a full third have no idea that subsidies are available to reduce the cost of buying coverage. Here’s what they’re doing about it:

Based on the survey results, as well as a review of research from a wide range of other sources (including those who have enrolled), Covered California has refined its comprehensive outreach campaign aimed at reaching the uninsured in their communities, through Navigator grants to community organizations; support for more than 18,000 Certified Insurance Agents; and promotion of storefronts where consumers can get free, confidential help enrolling.

The outreach campaign will include a new television, radio, digital and outdoor advertising campaign to reach multi-segment, Hispanic, Asian and African-American audiences. Details about the campaign and television ads, the route of the “Spotlight on Coverage” bus tour and new dental coverage will be released next week.

Meh. I have taken the liberty of creating a punchier campaign. Just running this up the ol’ flagpole to see if anyone salutes, you understand. Of course, we’ll need to rework the website too if we want to create a disruptive culture that appeals to people who like free money. And TV too. I’m thinking of a micro-targeting campaign that uses big data analytics to reach our SES demo, and impacts eyeballs with maximum penetration at minimal cost. And let’s not forget social media either. Those guys love free stuff. Let me know what you think.

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Lots of People Still Aren’t Aware That Obama Wants to Give Them Cheap Health Care

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Coal-Loving Republicans Are Suing Obama Again

by AlbertoMueller Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama’s signature plan to fight climate change was formally published this morning, thus opening the season for a fresh round of legal challenges from two dozen states, most of which are major coal consumers.

The Clean Power Plan, as it’s known, aims to reduce the nation’s power-sector carbon footprint to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. To reach that goal, each state has a unique target that it can achieve by cleaning or shuttering coal-fired power plants, building renewable energy systems, and investing in energy efficiency. Ever since it was first proposed a couple years ago, it’s been a punching bag for Republicans in Congress, in state capitals, and in the 2016 presidential race. Marco Rubio recently promised to “immediately stop” the plan if elected.

The dangerous, cutthroat world of America’s most notorious coal baron

The plan has also already spent a lot of time in court, so far surviving a series of attempts by states and coal companies to block it from being implemented. The last such case ended in September, when a federal court ruled that legal challenges couldn’t be brought until the final version of the new rules was officially published.

Now that threshold has been crossed, and the lawsuits are flooding in. According to the Hill, 24 states and Murray Energy, a coal company, filed suits Friday morning:

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R), who is leading the legal fight against the plan, called it “the single most onerous and illegal regulations that we’ve seen coming out of D.C. in a long time.”

The West Virginia and Murray lawsuits came the day the rule was published in the Federal Register, the first day court challenges can legally be filed. The states joining West Virginia are Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Arizona and North Carolina.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of these states are major consumers of coal, the most carbon-polluting form of energy, and are thus the most likely to take a beating from the regulations. (Of course, coal has been struggling since before Obama even took office). Here’s a look at how much the suing states depend on coal; I’ve ranked them by the share of their total electricity mix that comes from coal, rather than by their total consumption volume:

Tim McDonnell

It’s worth noting as well that all but three of those states (Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina) have Republican attorneys general. Now that the dust has basically settled on battles over gay marriage and Obamacare, the Clean Power Plan is the next logical thing for GOP-led states to fight with the Obama administration about.

But the plan really isn’t as crazy as Morrisey, et al., would have you believe. In fact, it has taken some heat from environmentalists for not going far enough, and for doing little more than locking in the incremental greenhouse gas reductions that were already happening. Still, there’s a lot riding on these legal challenges, because the Clean Power Plan is the administration’s main bargaining chip for the global climate negotiations coming up in a month in Paris. The promises that Obama has made to the rest of the world as to how the United States will help slow climate change basically ride on this plan. So if the plan were to be killed in court, the whole international agreement could collapse.

Fortunately, it seems very unlikely that the court will throw the rule out, said Tomás Carbonell, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Carbonell added that if history is a guide, the litigation is likely to come to a conclusion before Obama leaves office, which would preclude the possibility that a President Donald Trump or another climate change denier could let the plan wither on the vine by refusing to defend it in court.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good explainer on the plan’s strengths, not least of which is that most states are already well on their way to coming up with a plan for compliance. So far, it doesn’t seem like anyone is following Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) advice to just ignore the plan altogether.

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Coal-Loving Republicans Are Suing Obama Again

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

by Lenore55Fuug Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hudson Christie

Has any piece of legislation in American history held on by its fingertips more dramatically than the Affordable Care Act? Let’s review the tape.

In 2009, it passed in the Senate by a margin of zero votes. In 2010, thanks to some fancy parliamentary maneuvering, it survived the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-­proof majority after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death. In 2012, it squeaked through a Supreme Court challenge after Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly changed his vote at the last minute. It hung on again later that year when President Barack Obama won reelection. In 2013 came the disastrous rollout of its website, and in 2015, yet another unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge. And along the way it outlasted more than 50 attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of it.

For six years, Obamacare has been the ultimate Republican punching bag. It helped win the party a landslide victory in the 2010 midterms. Repealing it has consistently been an applause line for conservative politicians. And even now that it’s up and running pretty successfully, poll after poll shows at least 40 percent of the public still disapproves of it.

All this means that Obamacare should be a killer issue for Republicans in 2016. It’s fragile, it’s unpopular, it’s hated by the base, and this is their last realistic chance to repeal it. If they don’t take the presidency and both houses of Congress next year, they’ll have to wait until 2020 for another opportunity. By that time, the law will have been in place for a decade, and it will be covering upward of 20-25 million people. While that might not be enough to make it as beloved as Social Security or Medicare, it’s certainly enough to make it politically unassailable. Conservatives have been warning for years that if Obamacare doesn’t get repealed this instant, it will soon be too late. This time they’re finally right.

And yet, so far the issue has been oddly MIA in the Republican primary. Chants of “repeal and replace” are still around, but they have a distinctly pro forma ring to them. Obamacare was barely mentioned in the first two Republican debates, eclipsed by Donald Trump, border walls, and ISIS. And even if a Republican wins the White House next fall, conservative health care wonks have nearly given up on enacting anything more than a partial rollback of the law.

So what happened? What killed off the frenzied demands to destroy Obama’s signature achievement?

The most obvious answer is that conservatives have been whipping up outrage about the law for so long that even its most ardent haters are exhausted. What’s more, it’s much harder to take away a benefit that lots of people are actually relying on than to repeal a theoretical one.

But Obamacare’s foes running out of steam is just the most obvious sign of a larger trend: A lot of traditional conservative issues are losing their momentum. Gay marriage lost its fear factor years ago and was taken off the table once and for all by the Supreme Court in June. The economy is probably in good enough shape to not be a big campaign issue. Taxes have already been lowered so much that the average family pays only about 5 percent of its earnings to the IRS. And 14 years after 9/11 and four years after Osama bin Laden’s death, accusing liberals of being spineless on terrorism no longer packs the same punch.

True, Republicans still have a short list of hot-button topics that inflame their base, but increasingly these are wedge issues that promise nearly as much downside as upside. Immigration is the most visible example. Hysteria over border walls, birthright citizenship, and anchor babies risks losing Hispanics to the Democratic Party for good—something the GOP can ill afford. And the problems go far beyond immigration. Republican voters aren’t sold on the idea of Iraq War 2.0, and as a result even the most hawkish candidates are unwilling to propose sending more than a few thousand troops to fight ISIS. Even abortion runs the risk of becoming a wedge issue for the party as activists demand that candidates take extreme positions such as opposing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother—even though these are popular among most Republican voters.

This is the point at which liberals are supposed to sneer that the GOP is now the party of no new ideas. But that’s not really fair. The difference between the two parties isn’t so much one of ideas, but of unity behind those ideas. Thirty years ago, Democrats were the ones torn apart by wedge issues: affirmative action, crime, abortion, taxes. These tensions haven’t gone away completely—just look at Black Lives Matter activists heckling Sen. Bernie Sanders over the summer—but they no longer dominate the party. Now the tables have turned. A recent survey showed that nearly half of Democrats agreed with their party’s core position on at least six of seven major issues. Only a quarter of Republicans were in such broad agreement with their party. And the discord is coming at the worst possible time, just as long-term demographics are starting to seriously eat into their base.

Millennials, the most socially liberal generation ever, are increasing their share of the electorate as more conservative cohorts die off. And every year, the racial minority share of the population rises by 0.4 percent. The net result is simple: Every four years, roughly 2 percent of the population leans further left. It’s a slow enough process that Republicans can still win presidential elections, but in a 50-50 nation even small changes in support are enough to make these wins more difficult. Gerrymandering and incumbency effects may keep Republicans in partial control of Congress for a while longer, but the presidency is slipping out of their reach.

There are no obvious solutions. If Republicans move to the center—as Democrats did in the ’80s—they risk losing the support of their base. If they move to the right, they lose moderates and independents. Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, acknowledged this conundrum recently when he told the Washington Post that “Republicans need to recognize this and change the terms of the conversation—or they’ll pay the price for decades.”

Every party faces conflict between its center and its base, but the emergence of the tea party and the Fox News echo chamber has put this dynamic on steroids. Moving even to the moderate right, let alone to the center, is all but impossible for the GOP. Its base demands not just a border fence, but the repeal of the 14th Amendment; not just opposition to gun control, but rejection of universal background checks, which even the National Rifle Association used to support; not just skepticism about climate change, but insistence that global warming is a grand hoax perpetrated by liberals to subvert the free market. This conflict between party and base entered uncharted territory earlier this month when Republicans literally couldn’t find a single plausible candidate willing to be Speaker of the House. No one wanted to deal with the bomb-throwing antics of the reactionary wing of their own party. Even candidates who consider themselves tea partiers didn’t think they could control a caucus dominated by tea partiers. Among Republicans, becoming Speaker is now considered a career death sentence.

It’s hard to see any way out of this. If Republican candidates appeal to nativism, they lose the Hispanic vote. If they appeal to social conservatives, they lose the millennial vote. If they appeal to older white voters, they energize black voters and do the Democrats’ grassroots organizing for them. And if they throw up their hands and rely on endless hysteria about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email server, the tea partiers will turn out in droves but they lose everyone else. In an era when the inmates are running the asylum, it’s not just Obamacare bashing that’s become a double-edged sword for Republicans. It’s nearly everything they’ve relied on for the past three decades.

Increasingly, this is the GOP’s true dilemma. It’s not the party of no ideas; it’s the party of no escape.

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

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We Now Know Marco Rubio’s Energy Plan: Drill, Drill, Drill, and Drill Some More

by StarlaHeidelber Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Marco Rubio sidestepped the challenges posed by climate change as he laid out his campaign’s energy policy Friday afternoon at a manufacturing plant in Salem, Ohio. Instead, the Florida senator and GOP presidential hopeful called for expanding oil and gas development, weakening environmental protections, and rolling back President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat climate change, which Rubio characterized as an illegal intrusion into the market by overreaching government agencies.

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Rubio’s proposals amounted to a conservative policy wish list. He’d dismantle Obama’s carbon pollution rules for existing power plants, change Department of Energy grants for new energy research, and make it harder for environmental groups to sue the government.

“On matters of energy, Washington uses a vast regulatory bureaucracy to override consumers and undercut innovators,” Rubio told the audience. “And the results are fewer choices, fewer jobs, and higher prices.” He cast himself as a Washington outsider, saying, “Leaders in both parties are to blame,” and he criticized Hillary Clinton’s promise to tackle climate change as simply a misguided attempt at “changing the weather.” He described the Clean Power Plan—Obama’s new rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants—as “one of the costliest regulations of all time.”

Rubio paid scant attention to efforts to develop clean energy. Instead, he pledged to review Obama’s offshore drilling policies to ensure increased oil and gas production, promised to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and called for speeding up approval of natural-gas export terminals, according to a policy paper posted to his website Friday afternoon.

The announcement from Rubio—who previously declared that America shouldn’t act on climate change because “it is not a planet”—provides a stark contrast to the Democratic presidential candidates, who called for climate action in their first televised debate Tuesday night. Clinton, for example, promised new investments “in infrastructure and clean energy, by making it possible once again to invest in science and research, and taking the opportunity posed by climate change to grow our economy.”

Rubio has said that climate change is real (he voted in January for a Senate resolution that said climate change is real and not a hoax), but he has publicly speculated that humans aren’t to blame. “I do not believe in climate change in the way that some of these people out there are trying to make us believe,” Rubio told CBS’ Face the Nation in April. “I believe the climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the climate is not changing.”

“The question is what percentage of that, or what is due to human activity,” he said.

Not surprisingly, green groups immediately slammed Rubio’s energy plan. The vice president of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement that Rubio’s proposals “will unleash waves of damage like those already flooding Miami’s streets. His plan would accelerate climate change just to protect the profits of the big polluters that fund his campaign.”

“Senator Rubio’s plan appears to have been written by executives in the fossil fuel industry,” said Khalid Pitts, political director at the Sierra Club, according to the Hill.

Rubio’s remarks also come at a time when the candidate is drawing interest from big donors, including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

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We Now Know Marco Rubio’s Energy Plan: Drill, Drill, Drill, and Drill Some More

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A Massive National Security Leak Just Blew the Lid off Obama’s Drone War

by Kayla59Qqop Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the Intercept published a major package of stories that reveals the inner workings of the US military’s drone program, including how and why people are targeted for assassination on the amorphous battlefields of Yemen, Somalia, and other countries. “The Drone Papers,” according to the Intercept, is based on a trove of a classified documents leaked by a whistleblower who grew concerned by the government’s methods of targeting individuals for lethal action.

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.

The package is a deep look into how the US military has conducted its counterterrorism operations around the world, and it comes on the same day that President Barack Obama cited the counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda as one of the two reasons to keep nearly 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan for at least another year.

Amnesty International called for an immediate congressional inquiry into the drone program, saying the leaked documents “raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killings.”

The entire series is worth your time, so please go read it. But for now, here are some key takeaways:

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A Massive National Security Leak Just Blew the Lid off Obama’s Drone War

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