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Gruber: "It Was Just a Mistake"

by HungLvksmm Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did Jonathan Gruber tell an audience in 2012 that states which failed to set up Obamacare exchanges would be depriving their residents of federal subsidies? Jonathan Cohn caught up with Gruber this morning and got an answer:

I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake.

….There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right.

I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsides would be conditional of who ran the exchanges.

So there you have it: Gruber screwed up. More importantly, as he points out, he’s performed immense amounts of technical modeling of Obamacare, and all of his models assumed that everyone would get subsidies even though not every state would set up its own exchange. As Cohn says, this was pretty much the unanimous belief of everyone involved:

As I’ve written before, I had literally hundreds of conversations with the people writing health care legislation in 2009 and 2010, including quite a few with Gruber. Like other journalists who were following the process closely, I never heard any of them suggest subsidies would not be available in states where officials decided not to operate their own marketplaces—a big deal that, surely, would have come up in conversation.

Kudos to Peter Suderman and his sleuths for uncovering this and getting everyone to talk about it for a day. It’s a news cycle win for conservatives. But restricting subsidies to state exchanges just flatly wasn’t part of Congress’s intent. There’s simply no way to rewrite history to make it seem like it was.

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Gruber: "It Was Just a Mistake"

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57 Percent of Republicans Want to Impeach Obama

by LauriElliot Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is completely, barking insane:

I don’t even know how to react to this stuff anymore. A solid majority of Republicans wants to impeach President Obama for….what? An EPA regulation they don’t like? Postponing Obamacare’s employer mandate for a year? Not prosecuting some immigrant kids who have been in the country since they were three?

This goes beyond politics as usual. It’s nuts. Fox News is now officially in charge of one of America’s two major political parties.

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57 Percent of Republicans Want to Impeach Obama

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

by LashundU23 Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time‘s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.

* The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They’re so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn’t even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We’re talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran’s Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I’m them.

* In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren’t going to be part of it.

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A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

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Fighting in Gaza Bad for Mankind, Great for Right-Wing Website

by CherylMangum Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza, which began last Thursday after a week of air strikes, has come with a heavy price: 20 Israelis and 445 Palestinians have now died since the conflict flared up two weeks ago. But at least one group is happy about the news—WorldNetDaily, the far-right website, which reports, in a story titled “Hamas Rockets Boon to Israel Tour,” that the ground offensive has been good for business:

WASHINGTON – During the week Hamas fired thousands of rockets on Israel, interest in WND’s Israel tour with Joseph Farah and Jonathan Cahn spiked, with 68 signups in seven days, the most in a one-week period since registration began in February, WND announced.

“I thought news of thousands of rockets raining down on Israel would be a deterrent to Americans who were thinking about joining us on WND’s Israel tour,” said Farah. “It wasn’t at all. In fact, it seems like Americans are eager to show solidarity with the Jewish state at this time.”

The second annual tour is on pace to match last year’s size, with nearly 400 participants, most originating in the U.S.

Congrats, guys.

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Fighting in Gaza Bad for Mankind, Great for Right-Wing Website

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Vladimir Putin’s Games Finally Blew Up In His Face Today

by WinifredTrimm Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Josh Marshall practically reads my mind with this post:

Were it not for the hundreds killed, it would also be comical the ridiculous series of events Vladimir Putin’s reckless behavior led up to this morning. For months Putin has been playing with fire, making trouble and having it work mainly to his advantage….But the whole thing blew up in his face today in a way, and with repercussions I don’t think — even with all wall to wall coverage — we can quite grasp.

Find extremists and hot-heads of the lowest common denominator variety, seed them with weaponry only a few militaries in the world possess — and, well, just see what happens. What could go wrong?

Read the whole thing. It’s almost precisely what I’ve been thinking all day long. I’d only add one thing: It was sickening listening to Putin’s bleating prevarications and denials after the plane was shot down. Really, truly revolting. If anything could expose him, once and for all, as the petty schoolyard bully that he is, this was it.

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Vladimir Putin’s Games Finally Blew Up In His Face Today

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California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under

by CarenSundberg Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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California, the producer of nearly half of the nation’s fruits, veggies, and nuts, plus export crops—four-fifths of the world’s almonds, for example—is entering its third driest year on record. Nearly 80 percent of the state is experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In addition to affecting agricultural production the drought will cost the state billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and a whole lot of groundwater, according to a new report prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture by scientists at UC-Davis. The authors used current water data, agricultural models, satellite data, and other methods to predict the economic and environmental toll of the drought through 2016.

Here are four key takeaways:

The drought will cost the state $2.2 billion this year: Of these losses, $810 million will come from lower crop revenues, $203 million will come from livestock and dairy losses, and $454 million will come from the cost of pumping additional groundwater. Up to 17,100 seasonal and part-time jobs will be lost.
California is experiencing the “greatest absolute reduction in water availability” ever seen: In a normal year, about one-third of California’s irrigation water is drawn from wells that tap into the groundwater supply. The rest is “surface water” from streams, rivers, and reservoirs. This year, the state is losing about one-third of its surface water supply. The hardest hit area is the Central Valley, a normally fertile inland region. Because groundwater isn’t as easily pumped in the Valley as it is on the coasts, and the Colorado River supplies aren’t as accessible as they are in the south, the Valley has lost 410,000 acres to fallowing, an area about 10 times the size of Washington, DC.
Farmers are pumping enough groundwater to immerse Rhode Island in 17 feet of it: To make up for the loss of surface water, farmers are pumping 62 percent more groundwater than usual. They are projected to pump 13 million acre-feet this year, enough to put Rhode Island 17 feet under.
“We’re acting like the super-rich:” California is technically in its third year of drought, and regardless of the effects of El Niño, 2015 is likely to be a dry year too. As the dry years accumulate, it becomes harder and harder to pump water from the ground, adding to the crop and revenue losses. California is the only western state without groundwater regulation or measurement of major groundwater use. If you can drill down to water, it’s all yours. (Journalist McKenzie Funk describes this arcane system in an excerpt from his fascinating recent book, Windfall.) “A well-managed basin is used like a reserve bank account,” said Richard Howitt, a UC-Davis water scientist and co-author of the report. “We’re acting like the super-rich, who have so much money they don’t need to balance their checkbook.”

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California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under

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Watch Jon Stewart Try to Get Hillary Clinton to Admit She’s Running For President

by MirandaEdmondst Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton is running for president. She has not officially announced this yet because it’s 2014 and tradition dictates that prospective candidates pretend to “weigh all their options” and “talk about it with their family” for a few years before actually coming out and declaring. Presumably she’ll announce sometime next autumn. Anyway, she’s running for president.

Her most recent non-campaign campaign stop was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night. Clinton came on nominally to talk about her new memoir “Hard Choices” which documents her four years as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. “It’s an incredibly complex and well-reasoned, eyewitness view to the history of those four years,” Stewart begins, “and I think I speak for everybody when I say, no one cares. They just want to know if you’re running for president.”

What followed was a very entertaining game wherein Stewart tried to trick her into betraying her presidential ambitions. (When Stewart asks whether she’d like her next office to come in a particular shape, Clinton replies, “You know, I think that the world is so complicated, the fewer corners that you can have, the better.”)

Watch the whole extended interview. It’s pretty great.

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Watch Jon Stewart Try to Get Hillary Clinton to Admit She’s Running For President

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Your Almond Habit Is Sucking California Dry

by VictorF32nso Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

California farmers will reap a record 2.1 billion pounds of almonds this year, the USDA estimates—about three times as much as they did in 2000. That’s great news for the world’s growing horde of almond eaters, because the state’s groves supply 80 percent of the global harvest. As this chart shows, California has been planting more and more almonds over the past two decades:

And those almonds are miniature cash cows:

But in the long term, the almond boom may prove bad news for everyone who relies on California’s farms for sustenance. You might have heard that the state, supplier of half of US-grown produce, is locked in its worst drought on record. Meanwhile, it takes 1.1 gallons of water to produce a single almond, as my colleagues Alex Park and Julia Lurie have shown. You don’t have to scramble to figure how many almonds make up 2.1 billion pounds to realize that that’s a hell of a lot of water.

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Your Almond Habit Is Sucking California Dry

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Lebron James Is Going Back to Cleveland

by Matthia76J Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Boom.

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Lebron James Is Going Back to Cleveland

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How hot will future summers be in your city?

by RochellCullen Posted on July 10, 2014

A little slice of Saudi Arabia right at home

How hot will future summers be in your city?

By

Fancy spending a summer in Kuwait City? That’s what scientists project summers will resemble in Phoenix by the end of the century. And summertime temperatures in Boston are expected to rise 10 degrees by 2100, resembling current mid-year heat in North Miami Beach.

Thanks to this nifty new tool from Climate Central, you can not only find out what temperatures your city is expected to average by 2100 — you can compare that projected weather to current conditions in other metropolises.

The “1,001 Blistering Future Summers” interactive is based on global warming projections that assume the world takes little to no action to slow down climate change. But the nonprofit warns that even if greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced, such as through an energy revolution that replaces fossil fuel burning with solar panels and wind turbines, “U.S. cities are already locked into some amount of summer warming through the end of the century.” You might be feeling some of that warming already. Pass the ice cubes!


Source
1001 Blistering Future Summers, Climate Central

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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How hot will future summers be in your city?

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