Same Old, Same Old...Tax Revolters, Tea Baggers
The Tax Revolters burst onto the national scene amid an inflation-battered economy[in the late 1970s]. They blamed “big government” for what ailed America, and they offered a simple remedy: cut taxes. Lower taxes, they promised, would get average Americans back on track.....And [...]
Title courtesy of Gina Kolata, the excellent science writer, in the NY Times Nov 22, where she shows the timeline of back-and-forth recommendations on screening mammography to detect Breast Cancer (BrCA).
Like archeologists arguing endlessly over the same set of bones, cancer specialists, it can seem, have been [...]
Harvard Med School study shows that lack of access to healthcare killed many more U.S. veterans in 2009 than the wars in Afghanistan (155 fatalities) and Iraq (~ 314):
The analysis produced by two Harvard medical researchers estimates that 2,266 US military veterans under the age of 65 died [...]
Props to Merrill Nelson, co-sponsor of the Fair Boundaries Initiative, for a great editorial in the Trib:
Rarely do Utah voters have the opportunity to make as significant an improvement to state government as that presented by the initiative petition to establish an independent redistricting standards commission.
Support for [...]
I'm with Howard Dean on this:
The bottom line on healthcare reform is that it is not worth doing if it is not done right....Subsidizing Americans to buy private health insurance without giving them the choice of a more rational and less expensive system is simply pouring money into' [...]
I'm with Howard Dean on this:
The bottom line on healthcare reform is that it is not worth doing if it is not done right....Subsidizing Americans to buy private health insurance without giving them the choice of a more rational and less expensive system is simply pouring money into' [...]
Rep. Jim Matheson, pseudo-Democrat of Utah's 2nd Congressional District, announced Friday that he will line up with the rest of the Utah Congressional Delegation in voting against healthcare reform. KSL reported
Utah Congressman Jim Matheson planned a series of amendments to the health care reform bill. It was a [...]
Rep. Jim Matheson, pseudo-Democrat of Utah's 2nd Congressional District, announced Friday that he will line up with the rest of the Utah Congressional Delegation in voting against healthcare reform. KSL reported
Utah Congressman Jim Matheson planned a series of amendments to the health care reform bill. It was a [...]
Today,Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize!
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The [...]
Op-ed in the Boston Globe:
They're called micro-scripts, and they are the lethal weapons in any war of words or ideas. They work because people love to repeat them as much as hear them. [...] They're more than sound bites — they are idea bites. [...]
Consider some of the phrases [...]
Moral hazard is the idea that when individuals and executives are protected from punishment for their bad judgments and risk-taking, they will continue such behavior in the future.
Moral hazard is repeatedly held up by Republicans and health insurance companies, as the reason that universal affordable healthcare is a BAD [...]
Were you under the impression that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected the meat we eat? Or that hamburgers labelled "beef" contain only beef? Wrong and Wrong. USDA "allows [hamburger] grinders to devise their own safety plans", and merely "encouraged them to test the ingredients first."
Michael Moss's' [...]Op-ed from Robert W. Robertson Jr., M.D., in the LA Times:
The uninsured numbers are constantly increasing. The unreimbursed expenses incurred by hospitals in treating those ever-increasing numbers of the uninsured are constantly increasing.Musings by Hunter at Daily Kos:
If health insurance companies ran the mail service, you wouldn't know what it would cost to mail a package, because nobody involved would be able to tell you, even if you spent the better part of a week on the phone with them. You' [...]
Paul Craig Roberts was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, and is called the "Father of Reaganomics." He writes about The Healthcare Deceit at Counterpunch:
The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent [...]
By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William [...]
Right now a huge argument is going on about whether to include a public option in healthcare reform legislation. Policymakers should understand the views of U.S. doctors on this - and finally we have reliable information on how doctors view the public option. According to the New England Journal [...]
Interesting how upset the Mad TeaParty gets about the Trillion Dollar Deficit NOW, and how silent they were when the GOP was legislating that deficit. War costs keep on growing for a lifetime. Michael Winerip on the continuing drain on US healthcare from the Vietnam war four decades later:
[...]
My anecdotal, small-sample poll of friends who are Utah Independents and mellow Democrats elicited extremely favorable reviews of President Obama's speech on his healthcare plan. He was specially praised for clarity ("he used short words and simple sentences") and being very effective in communicating exactly what his plan was - [...]
According to pollster Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com, the public option is unpopular in Utah, including in Blue Dog Rep. Jim Matheson's district (UT-2). The public option is still a good idea, of course, but we shouldn't try to convince Matheson with the argument that it's wildly popular among his' [...]
Richard Berner, Chief U.S. Economist at Morgan Stanley, offers the following lessons from the collapse of Lehman Brothers one year ago (WSJ):
1. “A strong and well-regulated financial system should be the first line of defense against financial shocks …. [T]he more free-market oriented we want our economies to be, [...]
Bad choices, bad strategy, and a general lack of spine:
The White House has no overarching message or story on healthcare reform (Drew Westen at Huffington Post — you really need to read this). The White House doesn't care about framing or language (James Wolcott at Vanity Fair).Josh Marshall suggests "Public Option For Dummies":
In an interview with the Economist magazine recently, former House Majority Leader and current FreedomWorks Capo Dick Armey said that something like a Public Option would be great. But the issue comes down to choice. "If you in fact freely choose to" [...]
Rousing editorial sign-off from Bill Moyers' on his Journal, Sept 4:
BILL MOYERS: The editors of THE ECONOMIST magazine say America's health care debate has become a touch delirious, with people accusing each other of being evil-mongers, dealers in death, and un-American.
Well, that's charitable. I would say it's [...]
The Salt Lake Tribune reports today that Utah's Sen. Bob Bennett is being attacked by the right-wing Club for Growth for supporting a bill that would, in the group's words, entail "massive government control of health care." In reality, the Wyden-Bennett bill (S. 391) would allow the federal government [...]
What politicians bloviating about "socialized Medicine" don't get OR don't want you to know:
Basically these [healthcare systems in other capitalist democracies] are social insurance systems, and this is ... what some politicians cannot get through their heads. They talk about socialized medicine as if, of course, it were [...]
Rick Perlstein gives a brief history of the conservo-crazy strain in American politics, which seems to bloom every time a liberal gains the presidency (WaPo):
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles — instead of long-range bombers — [...]
I've been so fed up with the healthcare issue — Republican lies and Democratic wimpiness — that I haven't felt like posting for a while. Fortunately UtahOwl has been picking up the slack.
The news out of Washington lately is that the public option is all but dead. It's not. [...]
Sunday Aug 16, Orrin Hatch was holding forth on ABC about how many people would sign up for "a public option" and bankrupt Medicaid/Medicare/Public Option. The figures he was quoting came from an outfit called the Lewin Group:
In May,[2007] UnitedHealth bought the Lewin Group, a Washington-based health-policy consulting firm, [...]
The New England Journal of Medicine has put up a public-access website, so we can read the many articles NEJM has been publishing in the past year on Healthcare Reform, such as "Understanding How Americans View Health Care Reform" "The Individual Mandate — An Affordable and Fair Approach to Achieving" [...]
Check it out):
For two decades, the Dartmouth Atlas Project has examined regional variations in the practice of medicine and in spending for health care, principally in the Medicare population. [They focus] on what we have learned about the relationship between regional differences in spending and the quality [...]
The Dartmouth Atlas Project describes whopping variations in Medicare costs per enrol
Huge inefficiencies in the U.S. health care system are hamstringing the nation's ability to expand access to care, according to a new analysis of Medicare spending by researchers of the Dartmouth Atlas Project...differences in growth rates [...]
I've finally lost all patience with Jim Matheson's abdication of any and all responsibility for progressive ideas, healthcare reform in particular. Jason at The Sidetrack gets it right:
With health care, Matheson had a choice. He could run from it with a "no," or he could spend time, money' [...]
Matt Yglesias at the Daily Beast:
Unfortunately, the willingness of prominent media figures to indulge in wild attacks on Obama seems to be spurring a rising tide of dubious ideas among the population at large....The impact of this indulgence on public opinion is visible. A recent Research 2000 poll [...]
Another Front Group sponsoring anti-healthcare reform astroturfing is Americans for Prosperity [AFP]:
AFP was one of the lead organizations behind the Tax Day Tea Party protests April 15, 2009. In mid 2009, Americans for Prosperity launched an advertising and advocacy campaign opposing U.S.
The news has been full of "grassroots" disruptions of town meetings held by Democratic legislators. The astroturf group Tea Party Patriots was spawned by the front group FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks was founded in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy (and changed its name in 2004 when it merged with Empower [...]
The Health-Care issue is growing a bumper crop of freak-out lies...like the one about healthcare reform leading to euthanasia of grandma and gramps. Michelle Goldberg in The Helthcare Lie Machine:
On July 23, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his colleague Thaddeus McCotter released a statement charging that a [...]
Still, there remains the problem of the senseless moniker, “Blue Dog.” In the interests of improved political nicknames, let me propose an alternative. Back in 1932, the future Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas advised progressives not to expect too much from the Democratic Party. It was, he wrote, “maintained [...]
In 2003, Pres. George W Bush pushed to enact the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Republicans held the vote open in the House of Representatives for almost 3 hours in the middle of the night, to get some of their colleagues to vote for passage, they were so determined to pass this. [...]
Almost exactly one year ago, we reported on a proposed program called Cash for Clunkers, in which our government would provide rebates to Americans who traded in their old, polluting cars for newer, cleaner vehicles. Your Democratic Congress put the program into effect, and now, according to The [...]
Paul Rosenberg at Open Left delves into the wacko right-wing "birther" mindset:
By now, you've probably seen at least part of the video of Delaware Congressman Mike Castle's town-hall encounter with the Birther base [...] What struck me immediately on seeing it was how perfectly it epitomized something I wrote' [...]
Isn't it time to dismantle the metal detectors, send the guards at the doors away and allow Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights by being free to carry their firearms into the nation's Capitol? [...]
Why would freedom-loving lawmakers want to hide behind guards and metal detectors? Shouldn't [...]
Good news for those of you with cable: our man Howard Dean will be the guest host on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann this Tuesday and Wednesday. Yeeeeaaaaargh!
[...]The New York Times reports:
Meanwhile, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill called the Say No to Drug Ads Act. It would amend the federal tax code to prevent pharmaceutical companies from deducting the cost of direct-to-consumer drug advertisements as a business expense.
Good news from AMERICAblog:
The questions covered a range of topics. Cheryl asked if the public option would cover the self-employed and small businesses. Obama responded that those would be "primary beneficiaries of the public option." McJoan noted that some on the Senate Finance Committee were still working on a [...]
Wall Street Journal (subscription required):
Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that [...]
South Carolina newspaper The State got copies of e-mails sent from media outlets to governor Mark "AWOL in Argentina" Sanford's office:
The e-mails show some outlets promised Sanford "friendly ground," while others objected to early reports that questioned his disappearance.
"If you all want to speak on this publicly, you're welcome'" [...]
From Bill Moyers Journal:
BILL MOYERS: You told Congress that the industry has hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street. You said, "I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors." [...]
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) during today's Sotomayor hearings (via Daily Kos):
For all the talk of "modesty" and "restraint," the right-wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the [...]
If you wonder what judicial activism looks like, consider one of the court's final moves in its spring term.
The justices had before them a simple case, involving a group called Citizens United, that could have been disposed of on narrow grounds. The organization had asked to be [...]
Okay, I've now been able to get independent information from multiple sources that all of this precedes what are said to be possible federal indictments against Palin, concerning an embezzlement scandal related to the building of Palin's house and the Wasilla Sports Complex built during her tenure as' [...]
Diarist Something the Dog Said at Daily Kos:
In a nut shell, the Health Care Insurance companies are concerned about protecting their near monopolies. The way these companies are going at this is by controlling major portions of a local market, at the State level. The Department of Justice considers [...]
Transcript of Obama's Wednesday press conference via NY Times:
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.
Two of the key players in the insurance industry, America's Health Insurance Plans and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, sent a letter to the Senate this morning saying that a government health insurance plan would, quote, "dismantle," end quote, [...]
Via slinkerwink at Daily Kos, five of the Congressional Progressive Caucus's nine principles for a strong, robust Medicare-like public option:
Available to All. Be available to all individuals and employers across the nation without limitation. […] Paid for Wellness, not Sickness. Have the ability to structure the provider rates to promote [...]The rapid rise in medical costs has put many employers in a tough spot. They have had to pay much higher insurance premiums, which have increased their labor costs. To make up for these increases, many have given meager pay raises. [...]
Research by Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra [...]
An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period. [...]
A Texas [...]
Zachary Roth at TPM Muckracker:
In a jailhouse interview with the AP over the weekend, Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion zealot who's been charged in the murder of Dr. George Tiller, revealed:
I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.
Roeder declined to [...]
Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, writing at his blog Orcinus:
Eight episodes of right-wing extremist violence in four and a half months. We haven't gone four weeks since February without some poor guy — always with a long history of mental' [...]
President Obama says he wants to create a national health care plan that's both affordable and easy to use. Yup. Yeah, good. And the insurance industry says they'll fight the plan with congressmen who are both affordable and easy to use. For Congress, it's all about the money...er, bribes...from' [...]
Sea of Red Ink: How It Spread From A Puddle
President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying.
The Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office figures from 2001 to the present. In [...]
In the June 12 Bill Moyers Journal, Bill asks
When you talk about these lobbies, the public seems to want something that tends toward public option, if not single-payer. So how is it possible for these big lobbies to trump what the public and the President seem to want? [...]
Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what should concern us today even more [...]
There are two sides and only two sides to every "debate" — the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment. If those two sides agree on X, then X is deemed true, no matter how false it actually is. If one side disputes X, then X cannot [...]
AP:
A public plan that would compete with private insurers is opposed by nearly all Republicans. Obama long has supported it, but he had avoided going into detail about his health goals, leaving the specifics to Congress and emphasizing hopes for a bipartisan bill. [...]
Opponents say private insurers could not [...]
AP:
A public plan that would compete with private insurers is opposed by nearly all Republicans. Obama long has supported it, but he had avoided going into detail about his health goals, leaving the specifics to Congress and emphasizing hopes for a bipartisan bill. [...]
Opponents say private insurers could not [...]
A new four-year study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University finds that employers are increasingly using anti-union and punitive tactics against workers' efforts to form unions. The report analyzes employer behavior in union representation elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and also compares recent employer-behavior data' [...]
It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles [...]
WaPo reports that advocates of marriage equality in several Northeast states are taking pre-emptive strikes against the LDS Church, which was instrumental in passing California's Proposition 8:
"The Mormons are coming! The Mormons are coming!" warned ads placed on newspaper Web sites in three Eastern states last month. The ad [...]
From the Washington Post's profile of Brooksley Born, the woman who tried (unsuccessfully) to regulate financial derivatives when she was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission:
Born's baptism as a new agency head in 1996 came in the form of an invitation. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — routinely' [...]
A couple days ago, I got some pushback for arguing that the credit industry's tiered model amounted to a subsidization scheme: Credit card users who fall into debt get socked with fees and interest rates that in turn subsidize reward programs and low APRs for the credit users [...]
Ah, schadenfreude (Salt Lake Tribune):
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday accused an Alpine man of defrauding investors in a multimillion dollar real estate scheme.
U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman said Rick Koerber collected more than $100 million from investors but spent much of it on expensive cars, restaurants, movie making and his own [...]
Self-described "activist progressive blogging lawyer" Seneca Doane at Daily Kos points out this part of the California Supreme Court's ruling on Proposition 8:
Because, as a general matter, the repeal of constitutional provisions by implication is disfavored (see, e.g., In re Thiery S. (1979) 19 Cal.3d 727, 744; Warne v. [...]
3. We'll all save a bunch of money. The public health insurance option won't have to spend money on things like CEO bonuses, shareholder dividends, or excessive advertising, [...]
An excerpt from Obama's speech on Guantánamo today (via AMERICAblog):
I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence, I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I reject the assertion [...]
According to Nate Silver, that question has a measurable effect on your age cohort's political affiliation for the rest of your lives. And that's not good news for Republicans:
The former group [people aged 26–34] came of age in the Clinton era. Clinton, in the public's mind, is usually regarded' [...]
The average American works nine weeks more per year than the average European. In addition to harming our family, social, and civic lives, this overwork also affects our health. So why don't Americans just choose to work fewer hours? According to obstetrician Suzanne Schweikert, it's not that simple (from
The President seems to me especially thoughtful and passionate about one of the great moral questions of domestic policy today: widening inequality of income and wealth, and therefore of opportunity and political power. As I've noted before, as recently as 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans' [...]
According to the OECD, the 10 happiest countries are, in order: Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Norway, and Belgium (Forbes). So, why are the countries with a shorter work week and a stronger social safety net happier than we are? (I think I just answered [...]
This article will make you see red, but go read it anyway. It's the GOP's game plan for obstructing healthcare reform. It's slimy language from the slimy Frank Luntz (Politico):
(6) Healthcare quality = "getting the treatment you need, when you need it." That is how Americans define quality, and [...]
Barbara O'Brien at the Mahablog:
The bottom line is that civilizations, and their governments and economies, exist to support the lives of humans, and civilizations forget that at their own peril.
The thing that bugs me most about "free market" conservatives is that they assume people exist to serve the economy,' [...]
Right now, a person who develops a serious medical problem can continue to enjoy health insurance coverage if and only if he or she is able to maintain health insurance continuously. But if you lose your insurance because you get laid off, and then can't find a new' [...]
Governor John E. Baldacci today signed into law LD 1020, An Act to End Discrimination in Civil Marriage and Affirm Religious Freedom. [...]
"In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions," Governor Baldacci said. "I have come to believe that this is a question" [...]
They say it was a mistake (Salt Lake Tribune):
President Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, was baptized posthumously into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints last year during her son's campaign, according to Salt Lake City–based researcher Helen Radkey. [...]
"The LDS Church is" [...]
A reader contacted me last week, saying that last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, the Mormons had posthumously baptized Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Baptizing the dead of other faiths, secretly and without the consent of their families, is a common Mormon practice. [...]
Looking at past Washington Post/ABC News polling on the issue, support for legalizing gay marriage is now at a record high (49% support, 46% oppose). It is the first time that fewer than half oppose gay marriage. Importantly, much of this change has come from an increase in "strong" [...]
Drollery from the Washington Post:
President Obama this morning will announce a series of measures to shut down offshore tax havens, a potential boon to the U.S. Treasury. [...]
The tax havens allow major U.S. corporations to pay taxes on only a fraction of their profits. According to 2004 numbers, the [...]
So the New York Times will henceforth stop referring to the Bush Administration's "interrogation techniques" as "harsh" and instead will call them "brutal." But Digby asks why the media won't just call it "torture":
People used waterboarding for centuries and civilized nations have since outlawed it. We prosecuted it' [...]
Salt Lake attorney David R. Irvine in the Salt Lake Tribune:
[Deputy White House counsel Timothy] Flanigan once told his LDS ward congregation that it was gratifying "to work in a White House where every day was begun with prayer." In 2005, prior to his rejection by the Senate to [...]
When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans. [...]
But former White House political czar Karl Rove [...]
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. [...]
But a document filed in a federal [...]
