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The NRA Meets Its Potent New Foe: Moms

by PrestonSidney Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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For years, advocates of stricter gun laws have rallied at the barricades of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. But this year, as the gun lobby convenes in Indianapolis, there’s a new posse in town. They’re mothers, they’re survivors of gun violence, and some of them are both. And they’re dead set on disarming the NRA of its outsize political power.

They operate as Everytown for Gun Safety, a new organization combining the grassroots group Moms Demand Action, launched after the Sandy Hook Massacre, and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. At a press conference in a packed downtown hotel conference room on Friday, the group unveiled a forceful new report and political ad.

“We are in Indianapolis to send the NRA leadership a message,” said Shannon Watts, the 43-year-old mother of five who founded Moms Demand Action. Americans can no longer abide by “a Washington lobby run by extremists,” she said.

“Not Your Grandparents’ NRA,” a heavily annotated 21-page report, makes the case that there’s a schism within the nation’s biggest firearms group. “Today’s NRA has remained true to its roots in some important ways,” it begins. “The organization’s gun safety and marksmanship programs remain useful contributions to the shooting sports and to public safety. And it is largely because of these nationwide programs that the organization is well known, and relatively well liked, in much of the country. This is the NRA most American gun owners know and trust.”

“It was painful for me, but it’s been even more difficult for my family,” said shooting survivor Antonius Wriadjaja Everytown for Gun Safety

Then the report presents a stockpile of evidence showing how the NRA’s leadership “puts Americans at risk” by fighting for the interests of gun manufacturing companies under the guise of defending citizens’ constitutional freedoms. The Everytown report documents how the NRA has made it easier for felons to get guns, has fought local gun laws, and even backed an Indiana measure that would have expanded Stand Your Ground to include using lethal force against uniformed police officers. Everytown also calls out the NRA for blocking doctors from discussing the safe gun ownership with their patients, as well as trying to keep military commanders from asking soldiers at risk of suicide about their personal firearms.

The new political ad, which airs in Indianapolis and Washington, DC, through the weekend, uses the pro-gun advocates’ own words to make the case against them. “The presence of a firearm makes us all safer,” intones 30-year-old Antonius Wiriadjaja, reciting the words of NRA figurehead Wayne LaPierre as he pulls up his T-shirt to reveal multiple scars. Wiriadjaja, whom I interviewed in Indianapolis, was shot in the chest in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on July 5, 2013. The intended target was a young pregnant woman who was being hunted by her domestic partner; Wiriadjaja was a bystander caught in crossfire. Others easily could have been hit, he said. Though the woman was not injured, the shooting occurred in broad daylight with children nearby. “There were two little girls and their mother and an elderly man very close to me when it happened.” (The suspected shooter is in custody.)

Wiriadjaja maintains a blog where he details his recovery process with photos. “It was painful for me, but it’s been even more difficult for my family and friends to watch me go through it,” Wiriadjaja told me. “They’re hurting too. I wanted them to understand how I’m healing.”

Getting survivors to tell their stories may be one of Everytown’s most formidable weapons. “I’m a supporter of the Second Amendment, I’m a gun owner, and I’m paralyzed as the result of random gun violence,” Jennifer Longdon said. Her then-fiancé, who was armed at the time, was also gravely injured when someone in another car riddled their car with bullets in 2004. “He was a good guy with a gun,” she said, but it was no help.

Indiana state Rep. Ed Delaney spoke of the legions of responsible gun owners in his state. And he denounced the NRA leadership for using the premise that gun rights are under attack to get legislators to ease restrictions on guns. Just last month, lawmakers here passed a controversial bill allowing guns in school parking lots. “There is no threat to gun ownership in Indiana,” he said, anger rising in his voice.

A few blocks from the Everytown press conference, the NRA was raising the curtain on “spectacular displays” of weaponry from “every major firearm company in the country,” banquets for its million-dollar corporate donors, and red-meat speeches from the likes of Sarah Palin, Oliver North, and Franklin Graham (who blamed Sandy Hook on godlessness).

There are plenty of responsible gun owners among the estimated 70,000 people enjoying the entertainment and weaponry on display in Indianapolis. Polls show that the majority of gun owners also believe in universal background checks for buyers—a policy the NRA leadership continues to vigorously oppose.

Indeed, some striking data from the Pew Research Center shows that the NRA leadership is glaringly at odds with the views of most of its members. (The NRA, of course, has its own data suggesting the exact opposite.) According to Pew’s polling from last year, three-quarters of Americans who live in a household where they or someone else is an NRA member overwhelmingly favor regulating private gun sales and sales at gun shows with background checks. A third of people from NRA households support a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And 28 percent of gun owners believe that the NRA exerts too much influence over the debate about gun laws—as do 44 percent of all women.

If the well-financed and growing Everytown succeeds, those numbers may well rise by the next time the NRA convenes for its annual bash.

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The NRA Meets Its Potent New Foe: Moms

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My Life in the New American Minimum Wage Economy

by Dewey9573gnwoi Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

There are many sides to whistleblowing. The one that most people don’t know about is the very personal cost, prison aside, including the high cost of lawyers and the strain on family relations, that follows the decision to risk it all in an act of conscience. Here’s a part of my own story I’ve not talked about much before.

At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the US Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging? I was worried. That pension was the thing I’d counted on to provide for us and it remained in jeopardy for many months. I was scared.

My skill set was pretty specific to my old job. The market was tough in the Washington, DC area for someone with a suspended security clearance. Nobody with a salaried job to offer seemed interested in an old guy, and I needed some money. All the signs pointed one way—toward the retail economy and a minimum-wage job.

And soon enough, I did indeed find myself working in exactly that economy and, worse yet, trying to live on the money I made. But it wasn’t just the money. There’s this American thing in which jobs define us, and those definitions tell us what our individual futures and the future of our society is likely to be. And believe me, rock bottom is a miserable base for any future.

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My Life in the New American Minimum Wage Economy

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

by LuciaUmbagai Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Need some more good news on Obamacare? How about some mixed news instead? Here it is:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released last week show that health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought….CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).

The good news is obvious: the Medicaid expansion is an even better deal for states than we thought. The federal government will pick up nearly the entire cost of expansion, and when you account for money that states will save from reduced amounts of indigent care and greater help with mental health costs, the net cost of expansion gets very close to zero.

The mixed nature of this seemingly good news comes from the reason for CBO’s more optimistic budget projection: it’s because they think the program will cover fewer people than they previously projected. There had always been a fear among states that lots of people who were already eligible for Medicaid—but had never bothered applying for it—would hear the Obamacare hoopla and “come out of the woodwork” to claim benefits. Since these folks weren’t technically part of the expansion, states would be on the hook to cover the bulk of their costs.

CBO now believes this fear was overblown. Apparently most people who didn’t bother with Medicaid before Obamacare took effect aren’t going to bother with it now either. That’s good for state budgets, but obviously not so good for all the people who could be getting medical care but aren’t.

For what it’s worth, this is a tradeoff we’re going to see a lot of. Unless the actual cost of medical care comes down, the budget impact of Obamacare is always going to depend on how many people benefit from it. If lots of people sign up, that’s good for public health but costly for taxpayers. If fewer people sign up, then government spending goes down but fewer people receive medical care. There aren’t very many ways around this iron law.

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

by FelixHuddleston Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jared Diamond didn’t start out as the globe-romping author of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world’s foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. “I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world,” remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050.”

The result was Diamond’s first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It’s the book that came before his mega-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that work, as well as for Diamond’s 2005’s ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond’s thinking: It’s a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the “various messes that we’re making now,” in Diamond’s words. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond’s view that our entire future now depends on “enabling young people to make better decisions than their parents.”

In other words, if you want to boil down Diamond’s message these days to its essence, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. (Or else.) For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.

Jared Diamond’s new edition of The Third Chimpanzee is directed at all the young chimpanzees out there, who had better be wiser than their parents. GlobalP/Thinkstock

So who are we? From the perspective of genetics, we are clearly the third species of chimpanzee. Our DNA is only 1.6 percent different from that of either chimps or pygmy chimpanzees (today more commonly called bonobos). “The reason why you and I are talking, and we’re not locked up in cages—whereas chimpanzees are not talking, and are locked up in cages—all that lies in 2 percent of our DNA,” explained Diamond on Inquiring Minds.

In fact, as Diamond emphasizes in his book, we are more genetically similar to chimps than many other closely related species are to one another. Gorillas and chimps, for instance, are 2.3 percent different, which means that chimps are considerably closer to us than to their other nearest primate relatives. Or, consider two very closely related songbird species: the red-eyed and white-eyed vireo. They are 2.9 percent different, notes Diamond.

So what makes humans so seemingly special? Until pretty recently, we weren’t. All the way up to 80,000 years ago, we were just “glorified chimpanzees,” in Diamond’s words. But then, something changed. Diamond calls it the “Great Leap Forward.” “The first art appears, necklaces, pierced ostrich shells,” says Diamond. “There’s rapid invention of tools, implying that even though our brains had been big for hundreds of thousands of years, we were not doing much interesting with these big brains—at least nothing that showed up preserved in the fossil record.”

We’re still not sure what brought on the Great Leap Forward. There wasn’t any big environmental change that drove us to adapt; all this happened in the middle of an Ice Age. Diamond’s hypothesis is that it was the development and perfection of spoken language that catapulted us forward, making possible teamwork, collaboration, planning, long-distance trade, and much more. Whether for lack of vocal capacity, brain development, or some other reason, chimps never made this leap. “A baby chimpanzee that was brought up in the home of a clinical psychologist couple, along with their baby, by age two, the chimpanzee could pronounce only four consonants and vowels, and it never got better,” says Diamond. “But if all you can say is, bi, ba, di, do, that doesn’t get you Shakespeare, and it also doesn’t let you discuss how to construct atomic bombs and bows and arrows.”

7 Stories.

In this view, the downstream consequences of language acquisition are, basically, everything that stands out about human civilization. That ranges from the highly beneficial—the dramatic growth in life expectancy—to the mixed: technologies that have significant benefits but also huge costs (like, say, devices to exploit fossil fuels for energy). And most of all, it includes environmental despoilment and resource depletion. “At present, we, humans, are operating worldwide on a non-sustainable economy,” says Diamond. “We’re exploiting resources, water, energy sources, fisheries, forests, at a rate such that most of these resources will get seriously depleted within a few decades.”

As a result, Diamond believes that our big brains are now setting us up for a major fall—a Great Leap Backward, if you will. “We are now reversing our progress much more rapidly than we created it,” writes Diamond in the new The Third Chimpanzee. “Our power threatens our own existence.”

In our interview, host Indre Viskontas asked Diamond where he thought humanity would be 100 years from now. What’s striking is that he wasn’t positive that the modern world, as we know it, would be around at all. It all depends, he says, on where we are at 2050:

DIAMOND: Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.

In 2005’s Collapse, Diamond provided a great deal more detail on how ecological despoilment led to the collapse of other societies, such as the Easter Islanders, who cut down all their trees. The difference now, however, is that globalization causes our peril to be more widely distributed, kind of like a house of cards. “In this globalized world,” says Diamond, “it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”

And yet despite all of this, Diamond says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of humanity. What exactly does that mean? “My estimate for the chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent,” explains Diamond. “And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent,” he adds.

Not everybody agrees with Diamond that we’re in such a perilous state, of course. But there is perhaps no more celebrated chronicler of why civilizations rise, and why they fall. That is, after all, why we read him. So when Diamond says we’ve got maybe 50 years to turn it around, we should at least consider the possibility that he might actually be right. For if he is, the consequences are so intolerable that anything possible should be done to avert them.

Which brings us back to his book for young people—or, perhaps more accurately, for young chimpanzees. “This is the spirit in which I dedicate this book to my young sons and their generation,” writes Diamond in the new edition. “If we learn from the past that I have traced, our future may be brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.”

To listen to the full interview with Jared Diamond, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week’s “blood moon,” and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Mindsvia iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

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Medical Inflation Is Up, But It’s Probably Just a Blip

by WilliamThrelkel Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff reports that health care spending ticked upward at the end of 2013:

A four-year slowdown in health spending growth could be coming to an end….Federal data suggests that health care spending is now growing just as quickly as it was prior to the recession.

….The Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Mich. tracks health spending growth by month. It saw an uptick in late 2013 that has continued into preliminary numbers for 2014. Separate data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which tracks the growth or consumer spending by quarter, shows something similar: health spending grew by 5.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013, the fastest growth recorded since 2004.

Inflation in the final quarter of 2013 ran a little over 1 percent, which means health care spending rose 4.5 percent faster than the overall inflation rate. That’s a lot. But it’s also only one quarter, and it’s hardly unexpected. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows how much per capita health care spending has increased over and above the inflation rate for the past 40 years. There are two key takeaways:

Medical inflation has been on a striking long-term downward path since the early 80s.
There’s a ton of noise in the data, with every decline followed by a subsequent upward correction.

The HMO revolution of the 90s sent medical inflation plummeting. Then a correction. Then another big drop. And another upward correction. Then another drop. If that’s followed by an upward correction for a few years, it would hardly be a surprise.

Nonetheless, the long-term trend is pretty clear, and it shows up no matter how you slice the data. For many years, medical inflation was running as much as 4-6 percent higher than overall inflation. Today that number is 1-2 percent, and the variability seems to be getting smaller. What’s more, that 1-2 percent number matches the long-term trend during the entire postwar period (see chart below). There’s good reason to think that it might be the natural rate of medical inflation, with the 80s and early 90s as an outlier. That’s where I’d put my money, anyway.

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Medical Inflation Is Up, But It’s Probably Just a Blip

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Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

by ShannonKortig Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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A disability rights advocacy group sued Montana officials this week in federal court for allegedly placing mentally ill prisoners in extreme forms of solitary confinement for months and years at a time, often because the prisoners displayed symptoms of their illness or expressed suicidal thoughts. The prison’s psychiatrist also accused prisoners with well-documented mental illnesses of using their symptoms to get attention and ceased giving them medication, according to the lawsuit.

Disability Rights Montana, a federally mandated civil rights protection and advocacy group says that Montana State Prison’s treatment of prisoners amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” and is unconstitutional. The group filed the lawsuit after conducting a year-long investigation with the ACLU of Montana. According to the Associated Press, the groups hope that the matter can be resolved through negotiations with the state, not through legal action. Prison officials are “taking the allegations seriously” according to the AP. Judy Beck, a spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Corrections, told Mother Jones that the state would file its response within 60 days and could not comment.

According to the lawsuit, prisoners are subject to solitary confinement in spaces that sometimes have blacked-out windows, as well as “behavior management plans”—whereby a prisoner is put in 24-hour solitary confinement with only a mattress, blanket, a suicide smock, and nutraloaf, a tasteless, controversial food product that civil rights groups have alleged is unconstitutional. (In 2003, the Montana Supreme Court also ruled that certain behavior management plans are illegal.) “One prisoner with serious mental illness explained that being placed in solitary confinement makes him feel like a young child locked in a closet with nothing to do and, as a result, he spreads feces on the walls of his cell to keep bad spirits away,” the complaint reads.

In a case outlined in the lawsuit, a 50-year-old prisoner sentenced “guilty but mentally ill” in 2006, was placed in a state hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the state hospital, staff allegedly described him as “polite, friendly, cooperative, and socializing appropriately with staff and peers.” But after he was suspected of stealing another patient’s jewelry, he was transferred to prison and placed in solitary confinement. In 2012, the prison’s doctor allegedly discontinued the prisoner’s antipsychotic medication, because he believed the man was “malingering.” The prisoner told mental health staff that he wanted to cry when placed in “the hole” because he did not “do hole time well,” according to the lawsuit.

In another case outlined in the lawsuit, a 43-year-old prisoner with a very low IQ score of 78, was transferred to prison from a community group home. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for more than three years for acts that the plaintiffs allege were related to his mental illness, such as “banging his head until it bled on his cell door while asking for real food instead of nutraloaf, crying and saying people on the floor were talking to him, and attempting suicide,” according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs claim that the doctor also stopped giving the prisoner medication, on the basis that he was “simply malingering,” and “laughed at” the prisoner after he complained about losing his medication.

In 2011, a United Nations specialist on torture said that solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days should be abolished. He also said it shouldn’t be used at all on people with mental disabilities. According to the ACLU, “Isolation creates and exacerbates symptoms of mental illness in prisoners, undermining successful re-entry into society and jeopardizing public safety.”

A 33-year-old prisoner—with a long history of self-harm—who was mentioned in the lawsuit was transferred from the state hospital to prison, allegedly to keep him from harming himself. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for “significant periods of time.” In July 2011, he told mental health staff that he had “been in locked housing for way too long” and was worried about doing “something stupid.” In August, when he was taken out of solitary, he murdered another prisoner and was sentenced to life without parole.

About five years earlier, prior to being placed in extended solitary confinement, he filled out a “treatment planning worksheet” on how staff could help him get better at the prison’s Mental Health Treatment Unit, the plaintiffs claim. The prisoner wrote: “Groups with homework. Give me stuff to do so I can keep myself and my mind busy” and “be there to talk to me when I’m having problems.”

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Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

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George W. Bush Is a Far Better Painter Than He Was a President. Here’s His Portrait of Vladimir Putin.

by SuzannaMoloney Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, NBC aired an interview with former president and aspiring painter George W. Bush. The president—talking to his daughter Jenna Bush Hager on Today—unveiled 24 portraits of world leaders.

It was only a little over a year ago that we learned of Bush’s second act painting passion. Some people hate the paintings. Some people love them. Some people don’t spend that much time thinking about them. Still others can’t consider them without remembering that, you know, he was an awful president. I, for one, consider George W. Bush’s public painting career to be endearing. He’s not the best painter in the whole wide world, but he’s not the worst. There’s some skill on display, which is more than could be said for much of his presidency. Do I want to hang them in my house and look at them everyday? Of course not. But I’ve seen worse paintings. More than that, I’ve seen worse paintings painted by actual professional painters. I’m no expert, but Bush’s Putin looks pretty not-the-worst-thing-in-the-world to me.

NBC

The Tony Blair painting on the other hand is a little splotchy, but nobody can be perfect all the time.

NBC

4,486 American servicemen and women, and more than 100,00 Iraqis lost their lives as a consequence of the war in Iraq. Here is a clip of the president who led us into that war talking about his painting career with his daughter on NBC.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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George W. Bush Is a Far Better Painter Than He Was a President. Here’s His Portrait of Vladimir Putin.

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The Hobby Lobby Case Probably Doesn’t Depend Much on What the Law Says

by ncf01r Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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So the Hobby Lobby case was heard today, the latest in a long string of challenges to Obamacare. (Next up: whether the law allows subsidies only for policies bought on state exchanges, not on the federal exchange.) In short, the question in this case is whether Obamacare’s requirement that insurance policies cover contraception is legal.

I haven’t written about it before because I’m frankly not sure what to say. As with so many other recent cases, the law seems pretty clear to me. There’s no precedent for corporations having rights of religious freedom in the first place, and that alone seems like enough to toss the case out. But even if they do, the plaintiffs have to show that the contraception requirement imposes a “substantial burden” on them. Their argument is that if they don’t comply, they’ll get hit by substantial penalties. But that’s ridiculous. The question is whether complying with the law is a substantial burden. In other words, does insurance coverage that includes contraception cost them more than insurance coverage without it? The evidence on this is fuzzy, but it seems to be fuzzy only on the question of whether there’s any cost at all. Even if there is, it appears to be small. There’s simply no serious evidence that the cost of complying with the law is large in financial terms, and it’s obviously not large in operational terms since Hobby Lobby literally has to do nothing except continue buying insurance from the same carrier they’ve always bought it from.1

So that’s where we stand. There’s no precedent in the past two centuries that gives corporations First Amendment religious freedom rights. And as near as I can tell, the contraception mandate imposes, at most, only a tiny burden on Hobby Lobby.

But none of that seems to matter. It doesn’t matter that I’m not a lawyer and might be wrong about all this. Others with the intellectual chops to know this stuff have made similar arguments in much more detail. And anyway, I thought the same thing about the original Obamacare case. It simply didn’t seem legally tenable. But it almost carried the day. A frail argument, invented a couple of years earlier and with exactly zero precedent behind it, came within a whisker of getting five votes on the Supreme Court.

This sure seems to be a similar case. The law doesn’t really matter. Four justices just don’t like the Obamacare mandate and will vote anywhere and at anytime to strike it down. Four justices will vote to uphold the mandate. Anthony Kennedy will provide the swing vote. It’s also possible, I suppose, that John Roberts will vote to uphold the mandate, simply on the principle that having upheld Obamacare once before on a slim technicality, he’s not going to relitigate it over and over on increasingly trivial details.

So….I don’t know. In cases like this, the legal arguments seem like little more than window dressing. Everyone knows the outcome they want, and they tailor their opinions to produce those outcomes. Maybe that’s too cynical. I guess we’ll find out next June.

1Oddly enough, I don’t really buy the contention that the burden is small because, after all, Hobby Lobby can simply choose not to provide health insurance at all. Technically, this might be a good argument, but it doesn’t really feel right to me. If the price of complying with the law is eliminating health insurance for Hobby Lobby’s entire employee base, that sure seems pretty substantial to me, even if the federal government isn’t directly coercing its choices one way or the other.

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The Hobby Lobby Case Probably Doesn’t Depend Much on What the Law Says

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Now You Can Get Solar Panels at Best Buy

by ChelseaDown Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

There was an era when putting solar panels on your roof was a time- and money-sucking hassle on par with remodeling your kitchen. But the cost of going solar has been dropping fast. The latest signal of the industry’s move into the mainstream came last week, when Oakland-based SolarCity announced it would begin to sell solar systems out of Best Buy, alongside big-screen TVs and digital cameras.

“There are a lot of people out there with unshaded roofs, paying high electricity bills, who just don’t know this is an option for them,” said Jonathan Bass, SolarCity’s vice president of communications. The move into Best Buy “gives us a chance to have that conversation with more people.”

The company is the biggest installer in the country’s biggest solar market, California, a state that earlier this month broke its all-time solar power production record twice on two consecutive days, churning out enough electricity from solar panels to power roughly 3 million homes. Just since last summer, California’s solar production has doubled, according to the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electric grid. There’s a lot more growth where that came from, Bass said.

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Now You Can Get Solar Panels at Best Buy

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Has the Conservative Political Action Conference Purged the Kooks?

by BetteSupple Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the bowels of the National Harbor convention center in suburban Maryland on Thursday, a nonprofit called Empact America schooled attendees about the threat of a terrorist attack by way of an electromagnetic pulse. Former Reagan Defense Department official Frank Gaffney articulated his view that anti-tax activist and American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist is an undercover agent for the Muslim Brotherhood. Ginni Thomas, a Daily Caller contributor and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, alleged that President Barack Obama may be guilty of providing material support for terrorism. At least one panelist suggested that Speaker of the House John Boehner was a part of the Benghazi cover-up. (Who can say?)

But this gathering of very concerned right-wingers wasn’t an official part of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference underway in the same facility. The panelists were the “uninvited”—a motley crew of conservative activists who had been shunned by CPAC organizers and assembled, for the second consecutive year, as a sort of shadow convention by Breitbart News. After building a reputation for catering to conspiracy theorists and bigots (especially during the first five years of the Obama administration), CPAC, the nation’s largest annual conservative political shindig, seems to have turned down the volume.

That is, CPAC is getting soft.

Just consider the recent history. In 2012, CPAC organizers opened up their conference to folks like John Derbyshire (since fired from the National Review for telling his kids to avoid black people), and the founder of VDare.com, celebrating the first English child born in North America. Last year, Wayne Allyn Root, who attempted to swing the 2012 election by claiming Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, spoke from a CPAC side stage. Three years ago, Thomas Woods, a founder of the secessionist group League of the South, spoke at a CPAC breakout session and held a book signing. Last year, a Fox News commentator made a rape joke about a rape victim. There have even been CPAC panels on the supposed Muslim Brotherhood takeover of CPAC.

None of these figures appear on the CPAC schedule this year. Nor does Pamela Geller, who once published a scoop claiming that Obama was the secret love child of Malcolm X. She was exiled from CPAC in 2013. Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a leader of the movement that believes the conservative movement is being co-opted by stealth Islamists, didn’t make the trip this year. Bishop Harry Jackson, who claims gays are trying to “recruit” children, is nowhere in sight, even though he’s from suburban Maryland. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the Republican party’s most prominent anti-immigrant voice, didn’t get a speaking slot.

Oh, at this year’s CPAC there was still the Georgia man who travels the country dressed up as Declaration of Independence signer Button Gwinnett. There were plenty of bow ties. And two college-age bros walked around in American-flag boxers and boat shoes—which is to say, they walked around like college-age bros. CPAC was still, very noticeably, CPAC. There was the now-annual controversy about refusing to allow an LGBT conservative group, GOProud, to cosponsor the conference. Donald Trump was there, Donald Trumping.

But for the first time in a long while, the lunatics haven’t taken over the CPAC asylum. At least not yet.

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Has the Conservative Political Action Conference Purged the Kooks?

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