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Republicans Nearing a Dead End on Obamacare

by MaurineLarose Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent says that although the Obamacare website debacle scared some Democrats, in the end virtually none of them meaningfully abandoned the law:

It’s clear they believe the worst is now over and it is safe to return to the message they always expected to adopt.

I know I’m a broken record here, but folks are overlooking the possibility that no matter how unpopular the law, the Republican stance on health care may prove a liability, too. The basic Dem gamble is that disapproval of Obamacare does not automatically translate into zero sum political gains for Republicans, and that voters will grasp that one side is trying to solve our health care problems, while the other is trying to sabotage all solutions while advancing no constructive answers of their own. Polling shows disapproval of the law does not translate into majority support for GOP attempts to repeal or sabotage it, and Dems think this will only harden as more people enjoy the law’s benefits.

It’s funny that Republicans don’t believe their own propaganda. For years, they’ve been hellbent on repealing Obamacare because they knew that once it was fully implemented in 2014, it would have millions of beneficiaries who would fight to keep it. Once the benefits of a new program start flowing, it’s very, very hard to turn them off.

They were always right about that. By the middle of 2014, Obamacare is going to have a huge client base; it will be working pretty well; and it will be increasingly obvious that the disaster scenarios have been overblown. People with employer health care will still have it and very few will notice even a minor change in their normal routine.

Given all this, it’s hard to see Obamacare being a huge campaign winner. For that, you need people with grievances, and the GOP is unlikely to find them in large enough numbers. The currently covered will stay covered. Doctors and hospitals will be treating more patients. Obamacare’s taxes don’t touch anyone with an income less than $200,000. Aside from the tea partiers who object on the usual abstract grounds that Obamacare is a liberty-crushing Stalinesque takeover of the medical industry, it’s going to be hard to gin up a huge amount of opposition. And that’s doubly true since, as Sargent says, the Republican Party will have no credible alternative for a benefit that lots of people will already be getting.

Maybe I’m missing something. But either Republicans are seriously miscalculating, or else they’re simply betting the farm on the hope that Obamacare will be an epic disaster. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Either way, I think they’re fooling themselves pretty badly.

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Republicans Nearing a Dead End on Obamacare

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The Big Irony in Charging Bob Dylan With Inciting Racial Hatred in France

by Titus1586p Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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In case you haven’t heard, France is going after Bob Dylan.

French authorities have filed preliminary charges of “public insult and inciting hate” against the legendary singer-songwriter. Dylan was reportedly questioned and charged in November; the charge stems from a complaint filed by the Council of Croats in France (CRICCF), which flagged comments made by Dylan in a Rolling Stone interview published in September 2012.

The comments (which were also carried in the French edition of the magazine) were in response to the question, “Do you see any parallels between the 1860s and present-day America?” (Emphasis mine.)

The United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn’t give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that’s what it really was all about.

This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back—or any neighborhood back… Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery—that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

Dylan was referring to the slaughter and persecution of Serbs at the hands of Croatian fascists during World War II. “We have nothing against Rolling Stone magazine or Bob Dylan as a singer,” Vlatko Maric, the organization’s secretary general, said. “But you cannot equate Croatian war criminals with all Croats.”

CRICCF members allege that the “Croatian blood” comment violates France’s strict racial hatred and hate speech laws. Under French law, such complaints automatically trigger formal investigations. If found guilty, Dylan could face probation and a fine, even though he is not a French citizen. It is unclear if he will appear in court.

So, yeah, this is dumb, and it highlights the problems with Europe’s hate speech laws. But the epic irony here lies in what Dylan was doing in France when he was questioned and charged. He was in Paris to play some concerts—and to accept the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest civil and military decoration. (Other non-French recipients include American WWII veterans.) Earlier this year, Dylan’s honor was temporarily blocked after the Grand Chancellor of the Legion objected to the artist’s anti-war sentiments and recreational drug use. But things went ahead anyway.

“A journalist who attended the ceremony said Dylan, 72, had looked distinctly uncomfortable,” the BBC reported.

During the ceremony, culture minister Aurélie Filippetti praised Dylan’s ability to inspire young people with his words and music, and pointed out his influence on the May 1968 Paris student protests. “More than anyone, in the eyes of France, you demonstrate the subversive power of culture that can change people and the world,” Filippetti said.

France was giving Bob Dylan a major award for exercising free speech, while they were investigating him for exercising free speech.

Source – 

The Big Irony in Charging Bob Dylan With Inciting Racial Hatred in France

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Solar Composting Toilets Highlight Green Changes to NYC Park

by e0knk4m Posted on November 19, 2013

The proposed design at Riverside Park includes green rooftops and solar-powered composting toilets. Photo: COOK + FOX

Typically, the opening of a public restroom doesn’t merit a lot of hoopla. But then again, most public restrooms aren’t as green and carbon neutral as the facilities that are being planned for Riverside Park in New York City. The restrooms in the park overlooking the Hudson River will use solar power and compost sewage to fertilize park greenery. The new restroom complex is being designed so that it will not create any carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming. Plus, in addition to producing fertilizer (instead of sewage), the composting toilets will use little to no water. (By comparison, conventional toilets use about 3.5 gallons of water per flush.)

“These toilets are vital,” says Mark McIntyre, executive director of the Riverside Clay Tennis Association. He says that much of the Hudson River Greenway, where the park is located, is built on a landfill along areas that are not connected to New York City’s sewer system. Even if they were able to connect to the existing sewer system, that system is already aging and stressed.

“Tens of thousands of people are now using this riverfront pathway, and there are not enough [bathrooms] to accommodate the need,” McIntyre says. The opening of the Hudson Riverwalk has increased bike and pedestrian traffic by the thousands, and presently portable toilets are the only option for park visitors.

“If we are to build the necessary amenities, we want to do it in an environmentally responsible way and one that is economically feasible,” he says.

Next page: Going Off the Grid

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Solar Composting Toilets Highlight Green Changes to NYC Park

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The Chattering Classes Are Now in Full Chicken Little Mode

by Kiera5434lfzrmb Posted on November 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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We are in full feeding frenzy mode. Politico, by my count, has no fewer than 14 front page headlines today about the great Obamacare debacle. The Washington Post’s four top news articles and its four top op-eds are all about Obamacare, and the top op-eds are uniformly panicky.

Is panic just built into political observers, or what? Ruth Marcus thinks Obama’s entire presidency at risk. Ditto for Milbank. And if that’s not bad enough for you, Krauthammer suggests that yesterday’s events spell doom for the entire liberal project. It’s almost a relief to get down to the unsigned editorial, which is merely troubled, not in full-scale meltdown (or, in Krauthammer’s case, glee).

So what causes this? It’s pretty obviously ridiculous, and I suspect that even the folks writing this stuff would agree about that if they took a breath. But they write it anyway. Are they truly that panic-stricken? Do they simply need something exciting to write? Or what?

Well, this isn’t very exciting, but here’s what really happened yesterday. Obama made a short speech and then took questions. It wasn’t the high point of his presidency, but virtually no one outside the Beltway thought it was a disaster. It was just another forgettable presidential press conference. The Obamacare website is in deep trouble, but the evidence is pretty clear that it really is getting better, and will continue to get better. Lots of people are suffering from rate shock, but not as many people as Republicans and the press would have you believe. It’s early days, and signups will continue to improve as we get closer to the deadline. Insurers are upset with Obama’s new fix, but they’ll calm down. Their denunciations yesterday were pretty pro forma.

This is a bleak moment for Obama, but it’s not his Iraq or even his Katrina. Within a few months everything will settle down. Republicans have an obvious political motive for stoking panic, but the rest of us should be a little smarter about buying into it. OK?

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The Chattering Classes Are Now in Full Chicken Little Mode

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Denial dries up: Americans finally seeing the light on climate change

by ErvinMcGuinness Posted on November 14, 2013

Denial dries up: Americans finally seeing the light on climate change

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Looks like Fox News and Congress are becoming ever more intellectually isolated from the American people, perched together on a sinking island of climate denialism.

Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led analysis of more than a decade’s worth of poll results for 46 states. The results show that the majority of residents of all of those states, whether they be red or blue, are united in their worries about the climate — and in their desire for the government to take climate action.

“To me, the most striking finding that is new today was that we could not find a single state in the country where climate scepticism was in the majority,” Krosnick told The Guardian.

In every state surveyed for which sufficient data was available:

At least three-quarters of residents are aware that the climate is changing.
At least two-thirds want the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions from businesses.
At least 62 percent want regulations that cut carbon pollution from power plants.
At least half want the U.S. to take action to fight climate change, even if other countries do not.

This map shows the percentage of state residents who believe global warming has been happening:

Committee on Energy & CommerceClick to embiggen.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress continue to block climate action. Many of them are so idiotic as to claim that global warming doesn’t exist, that it’s not a big deal, or that it’s caused by forces beyond the control of humans. How could Congress be so out of touch with the people it represents? Fossil fuel campaign contributions and lobbyists don’t help, nor does the bubble in which the lawmakers live. Here are some reflections from the research summary:

We have seen through these surveys that contrary to expectations, Americans support many of the energy policies that have been discussed over the years and are willing to pay some amount to have them enacted. This runs contrary to the idea that the reason why congress is not enacting these policies is because there is not public support and that the public would be unwilling to pay. It is unfair to blame the public for the lack of policies enacted by the federal government on these issues. Why has legislation action been so limited with regard to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions? Two possibilities include that legislators have decided to ignore their constituents or that they are simply unaware of the public consensus on these issues.

“These polls are further proof that the American people are awake to the threat of climate change, and have not been taken in by the polluting industries’ conspiracy of denial,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), one of the co-chairs of a congressional climate change task force. “Now it’s time for Congress to wake up and face the facts: climate change is real; it is hurting our people, our economy, and our planet; and we have to do something about it.”

Want to know what your neighbors think about climate change? Click here for fact sheets on all the states studied. You might be pleasantly surprised.


Source
Majority of red-state Americans believe climate change is real, study shows, The Guardian
Does the American Public Support Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?, Stanford University

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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I Really Hope Richard Cohen is Wrong About Iowans

by Ajax Isaac Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

Richard Cohen today:

Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old….Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.

WTF? It’s 2013, even in Iowa. This sounds like the reaction of a stone racist, not someone with “conventional views.” Does anyone even bother reading this stuff after Cohen turns it in?

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I Really Hope Richard Cohen is Wrong About Iowans

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The Loophole That Allows Facebook to Avoid Paying Taxes on Billions of Earnings

by Lionel4334 Posted on November 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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Most Americans assume that Silicon Valley, a shining beacon of US economic growth, will give a lot of dough back to Uncle Sam over the next few years. But thanks to a controversial loophole in US tax code, 12 tech companies—including Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin—are poised to avoid paying income taxes on their next $11.4 billion in earnings, netting the companies a collective savings of $4 billion, according to a report put out this week by the Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).

The way the law stands now, US companies get big tax deductions when they pay their employees in stock options. For example, if an executive is given the option to buy a million shares of a company at five cents a share and later cashes those options in when they’re selling for $20 a share, the company can deduct the price difference in tax breaks, even though they never actually paid that higher salary. This is especially profitable to emerging industries, like tech, where companies give stock options to young executives when they’re still coding out of their parents’ basements. These tech employees have an incentive to stay with the company over the long-term, and then cash in once the company is profitable. That means that companies get to store these tax breaks until—ta-da!—they’re not paying income taxes for years. Here’s how much these 12 companies have saved:

CTJ

Twitter is the latest company that stands to profit from this, since it just went public. But in this latest report, CTJ determined that Facebook still has the highest amount of stock deductions to cash in—about $6.2 billion worth, allowing it to avoid income taxes for almost five years. And it’s not just tech companies. In April, CTJ found that 280 Fortune 500 companies have benefited from this break in the last three years alone.

Tony Nitti from Forbes argues that even with this loophole, Uncle Sam isn’t losing money, since as Facebook deducts $5 billion in taxes from Mark Zuckerberg’s stock, Zuckerberg is taxed on $5 billion in income, and the individual rate is higher than the corporate rate. Facebook did not immediately respond to comment on the report, but a spokesperson told the Huffington Post earlier this year that “it’s a mistake to look at only the corporate tax revenue while ignoring the billions of taxes paid from initial shareholders.”â&#128;&#139;

But Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, tells Mother Jones that the IRS is still losing money, since Zuckerberg would be taxed on his income no matter where it came from, and under the loophole, the company is able to write off his income without corporate income taxes. “If Facebook buys Zuckerberg a lottery ticket for a buck, and then he wins a million dollars, should the company be able the write off that million? That’s absurd, but that gives you a sense of what’s going on here,” says Gardner.

Bipartisan lawmakers have recently started to denounce this loophole, and in February of 2013, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) proposed a bill that would limit how high companies could go with their stock-option tax breaks.

“People recognize that these loopholes are not fair. They are wrong in every sense that a policy can be wrong—wrong fiscally, wrong economically, wrong ethically,” said Levin in a statement.

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The Loophole That Allows Facebook to Avoid Paying Taxes on Billions of Earnings

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Most Tea Partiers think warming is “just not happening”

by adndseu13da Posted on November 4, 2013

Most Tea Partiers think warming is “just not happening”

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How many Tea Partiers does it take to swap out an incandescent lightbulb?

Nine percent of them. The rest don’t believe in energy-efficient alternatives because they haven’t figured out that humans are warming the globe. (Also, they’re pissed about FASCIST GOVERNMENT PLOTS to control their sources of illumination.)

A Pew Research Center poll of 1,504 American adults last month found that about two-thirds of Americans understand that the climate is changing. That figure has been more-or-less unchanged during the last few years of Pew polling on the subject.

More Democrats than Republicans are clued in to the reality of climate change — 84 percent of Democrats agreed that there is “solid evidence the Earth is warming,” compared with 61 percent of Republicans. But within the Republican Party, there’s about as much agreement over climate science as there was over the Tea Party-fueled federal government shutdown.

Pew Research Center

Just 25 percent of people who identify as members of the Tea Party accept that the weather is changing — and most of those thinks it’s because of “natural patterns.” From the summary of the survey results:

Among the 26% of the public who say there is no solid evidence of global warming, about as many say “it’s just not happening” (13%) as say “we just don’t know enough yet about whether the earth is getting warmer” (12%).

Opinions of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents divide into four roughly equal size groups: 23% say there is solid evidence of global warming and it is mostly caused by human activity; 19% say warming exists but is due to natural patterns; 25% see no solid evidence and say it is just not happening; 20% say there is no solid evidence but not enough is known yet.

Among Tea Party Republicans, the largest share — 41% — says that global warming is just not happening, while another 28% say not enough is known. Among non-Tea Party Republicans, just 13% say global warming is not happening and among Democrats and Democratic leaners, just 4% express this view.

Let’s see if the Tea Partiers start seeing the folly of their ways as climate change dries up the world’s tea crop.


Source
GOP Deeply Divided Over Climate Change, Pew Research Center

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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TV Stars Lead Online Push to Curb China’s Shark Fin Appetite

by Myrna Posted on October 18, 2013

Celebrities using social media spearhead a Chinese campaign to conserve sharks by cutting demand for shark fin soup. Link: TV Stars Lead Online Push to Curb China’s Shark Fin Appetite Related Articles As China’s demand for grain rises, its water tables drop How Do You Get People to Give a Damn About Climate Change? For Climate Scientists, Shutdown Casts Long Shadow

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TV Stars Lead Online Push to Curb China’s Shark Fin Appetite

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Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities in the New Communication Climate

by Myrna Posted on October 3, 2013

An exploration of the challenges and benefits that come as environmental communication moves to social networks and the Web. Continue reading: Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities in the New Communication Climate Related Articles Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities in the New Communication Climate Fuel From Landfill Methane Goes on Sale Jellyfish Invasion Paralyzes Swedish Reactor

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Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities in the New Communication Climate

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