#but only because it -also- came with the repeal of the -underlying policy-

[the-fallen-blue]

We, as a queer community, really need to get better at teaching our history to our youngest members. Because you cannot go forward without knowing where you have been, because you cannot know what you have if you don't know what it cost, and because I never want to see another damn fic where a character who lived through the 80s and 90s in the military acts like Don't Ask, Don't Tell was some cruel oppressive assault on their rights that they hate and resent their superiors for.

[robertreich]

The Triumph of the Oligarchs

The Republican tax plan to be voted on this week is likely to pass. 

“The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress, urging swift approval, adding that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”

Please. The Koch network doesn’t care a fig about the pockets of American families. It cares about the pockets of the Koch network. 

It has poured money into almost every state in an effort to convince Americans that the tax cut will be good for them. Yet most Americans don’t believe it. 

Polls shows only about a third of Americans favor the tax plan. The vast majority feel it's heavily skewed to the rich and big businesses – which it is.  

In counties that Trump won but Obama carried in 2012, only 17 percent say they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent say they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.

Most Americans know that the tax plan is payback for major Republican donors. Gary Cohn, Trump’s lead economic advisor, even conceded in an interview that “the most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”

Republican Rep. Chris Collins admitted “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” Senator Lindsey Graham warned that if Republicans failed to pass the tax plan, “the financial contributions will stop.”

By passing it, Republican donors will save billions -- paying a lower top tax rate, doubling the amount their heirs can receive tax-free, and treating themselves as “pass-through” businesses able to deduct 20 percent of their income (effectively allowing Trump to cut his tax rate in half, if and when he pays taxes).

They’ll make billions more as their stock portfolios soar because corporate taxes are slashed.

The biggest winners by far will be American oligarchs such as the Koch brothers; Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor; Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets football team and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune; and Carl Icahn, the activist investor.

The oligarchs are the richest of the richest 1 percent. They’ve poured hundreds of millions into the GOP and Trump. About 40 percent of all contributions for the entire federal election came from the richest 0.01 percent of the American population.

The giant tax cut has been their core demand from the start. They also want to slash regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and cut everything else government does except for defense -- including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

In return, they have agreed to finance Trump and the GOP, and mount expensive public relations campaigns that magnify their lies.

Trump has fulfilled his end of the bargain. He’s blinded much of his white working-class base to the reality of what’s happening by means of his racist, xenophobic rants and policies. 

The American oligarchs couldn’t care less about what all this will cost America. 

Within their gated estates and private jets, they’re well insulated from the hatefulness and divisiveness, 

They don’t worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes.

Climate change doesn’t concern them because their estates are fully insured against hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

They don't care about public schools because their families don't attend them. They don't care about public transportation because they don't use it. They don’t care about the poor because they don’t see them. 

They don’t worry about the rising budget deficit because they borrow directly from global capital markets. 

Truth to tell, they don't even care that much about America because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want Congress and the President to represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. The new tax plan is their triumph.

But if polls showing most Americans against the tax cut are any guide, that triumph may be short lived. Americans are catching on. 

The recent electoral results in Virginia and Alabama offer further evidence. 

A tidal wave of public loathing is growing across the land -- toward Trump, the GOP, and the oligarchs they serve; and to the deception, the wealth, and the power that underlies them.  

That wave could crash in the midterm elections of 2018. If so, the current triumph of the oligarchs will be the start of their undoing.

[doctormead]

Death of a Conservative

I was born in June of 1974.  Two months later, Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency.  The Cold War was in its final stages and would end before I graduated high school.  But its shadow defined my upbringing.

I was raised in a Evangelical Christian, conservative, Republican home.  And that is what I was raised to be:  a Christian, an Evangelical, a conservative and a Republican.  I was never actually told that you couldn’t be a good Christian and be a Democrat.  In fact, I was explicitly told the opposite…but there was this underlying attitude in everything every adult around me said and did that said otherwise.  I’m pretty sure that the adults in my life didn’t mean to come across this way, but this was the “logic train” that I absorbed over time.  

Here’s where the U.S.S.R.’s cold shadow crept in.  Russia was the boogieman for every churched kid in those days.  We were fed horror stories about religious oppression in the Soviet Union and inspiring sagas about good Christian people who held onto their faith in spite of the danger.  We were given pamphlets and Christian comic books about heroes who smuggled bibles behind the Iron Curtain.  We were told over and over that the Russians wanted to do that to everyone, and that the U.S. was the bulwark that kept them from grinding all of us under the heel of state-established atheism.

And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Russia wanted to impose its economic system on us.  “Socialism” and “Communism” were words to conjure demons by.  We heard tale after tale of how poor the Russian people were because of prices fixed by the state.  How nobody was motivated to do their best because there was no way to really advance.  That the lack of competition kept everything stagnant and miserable.   Then Capitalism was set up as the Aslan to Communism’s Tash.  Capitalism was why things were so much better in America!  Capitalism provides competition and incentive for people to get off their asses and work hard.  This creates better, cheaper products which makes everything better for everyone!

This was the dichotomy I grew up.  Russia/Communism = evil.  America/Capitalism = good.  Enter the liberals in general and the Democrats in particular.  They weren’t “tough” on the Russians.  Worse, they wanted to erode good Christian institutions like prayer in schools which would put us on the “slippery slope” (yes, that logical fallacy got a lot of play in school time lectures and political discussions around me ) toward outlawing Christianity outright.  This made them foolish dupes at best and collaborators at worst.  And, since no good Christian would stand by while the Evil U.S.S.R. and their liberal sympathizers in the U.S. pushed us down the road toward atheistic totalitarianism, you couldn’t REALLY be a good Christian and be a democrat.  Simplistic, I know, but I was a kid and, for an embarrassingly long time, even into my adult years, I held on to that simplicity even if it was only in the back of my mind.  To paraphrase John Fischer, this was something that I wasn’t so much taught as something that I “caught”.

But, as I got older, cracks started to appear in the facade of “Righteous Capitalist America”.  The benefits of the sweeping, upper level tax cuts and the repealing of economy-shackling regulations that were supposed to “trickle down” to everyone never seemed to reach us.  Looking back, we were doing pretty well, but I remember mom and dad seeming to constantly worry about finances.  Costs of living kept going up while wages were stagnating for the middle and lower class.  As corporations merged into virtual (and sometimes literal) monopolies, I learned that Capitalism doesn’t guarantee competition.  It is “good business” to eliminate your competition from the viewpoint of a corporate overlord.  Thus an in-theory “free market” can become just as locked in and stagnant as any State run economy.  This made it easier for hard-working people to fall into financial trouble and cutting of social safety nets in the name of “fiscal responsibility” and “not encouraging freeloaders” made it harder and harder to climb out of that trouble.  And the continual gutting of public education only exacerbated matters.

I slowly grew away from the Republican Party, because, well, they weren’t living up to their hype.  Take the War on Drugs.  You’d think we’d have learned something from Prohibition.  Yeah, they “got tough” on drugs with the “three strikes you’re out” policy and militarizing the police to a fare-the-well.  All they actually did was explode the prison population and didn’t really make a significant dent in drug trafficking and use.  Drug use is the same between white and black people, but black people are disproportionately arrested and convicted which exacerbates the issue of poverty in that demographic as families lose providers and young people get a black mark on their records that will bar them from many opportunities for the rest of their lives.  At the same time, they advocated (and followed through) with cutting assistance programs for inner cities and other impoverished areas, making drug dealing one of the few available means for having an income that is above subsistence level…and the cycle continues.  (And, then in the last year, I learn that the War on Drugs was pretty much started by Nixon to target his political opponents:  i.e. liberals and African Americans.  And this isn’t “fake news”.  One of his aides confessed to this.)  Then there were the incessant wars overseas (granted with strong support from Democrats in many cases) which, in the long run, only seemed to exacerbate the problems they claimed to be solving.  There was also the outright hostility to science.  I admit, I was a climate change denier to begin with, but then the evidence finally piled up to a point where I couldn’t deny it any longer and remain intellectually honest with myself.  Also, the stifling of research into areas that might hurt their platform (for example, preventing the CDC from even starting to research gun violence/fatalities).  The party was gradually adopting a stance that facts should be discounted and ignored when they are inconvenient.  Then, to put the cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, there was the courtship of racism  When hordes of angry, white southerners left the Democratic party over the party changing to support the Civil Rights Movement, the Republican party tried to bring them into their fold to bolster their voter support.  It was subtle.  So very, very subtle at first.  The used “dogwhistles” instead of obviously racist statements and/or policies to let them know they’d be welcome.  And, as they took root in the “Party of Lincoln”, they started throwing their weight around becoming more and more openly racist.  It finally came to a head for me half-way through Obama’s first term, when Republicans flat out refused to even try to work with the President or the people across the aisle.  Their entire policy was “obstruct everything”.  The Republican party no longer represented my ideals…if it ever in fact did.  After that, I no longer considered myself Republican or conservative.  I was an independent with increasingly “leftist” leanings.

I still considered myself an Evangelical Christian but “cracks” were starting to appear there as well.  Evangelical Christianity was the vanguard of conservatism and the Republican Party.  They led the charge against the “moral erosion” of our society.  As I got older I and got to know more people outside of the Evangelical bubble, I became more and more uneasy.  Many of the things that were being railed against by Evangelicals and the Moral Majority were…simply applying the rights of the 1st Amendment to everyone.  Prayer in schools?  Unless you’re going to give a service for every religion represented in that school, it’s not fair to people who aren’t Christian.  And, even if you could do that, it singles out members of minority religions to be picked on (and, if you think minority religions wouldn’t be picked on in school, you haven’t been paying attention).  You can make it “all right” in the rules for people to abstain from the opening prayer, but see what I write before about minorities being picked on.  When I was in undergrad at Bryan College, there was a program where our students would go to the local grade school to teach bible lessons in their classes.  I’m pretty sure they only got away with it for as long as they did because Dayton, TN was pretty insular.  Looking back, I cringe at the idea.  Yeah, kids weren’t “required” to attend the lessons, but the lessons were held in each of the homerooms.  It would be painfully obvious if you left and…minorities being picked on, etcetera etcetera.  Gay marriage?  Folks, homosexuality isn’t forbidden in all religions (and certainly not in any atheist or agnostic creed I know).  If you’re going to have a religious/legal hybrid of an institution in the first place, you have to let it be applied across all faiths or lack thereof across the board to be in sync with the idea of Religious Freedom.  I kept hearing respected voices in the church rail against Islam and the stifling theocracies its followers created…but, from the way they talked about other issues, they seemed to be longing for a Christian version of Sharia law: a theocracy where the outward behavior of one sect of Christianity was enforced by the government.

Then there was Evangelical Christianity’s increasing lack of compassion for the poor in our country.  Oh, Evangelicals had tons of compassion (and open wallets) for poor people as long as they were overseas, but, if you were poor in America, you were out of luck.  The attitude seemed to be that it wasn’t the fault of people overseas if they were poor.  After all, they didn’t have all the advantages of living in America - the land of opportunity.  But poor people in the U.S.?   Well, if they can’t bootstrap themselves up like the American Dream says, it’s their fault.  They’re too lazy or irresponsible or “not right with God”.  I overheard or participated in many discussions about kids growing up expecting to draw a check like momma or single mothers having baby after baby just so they could get a bigger welfare check.  I’m sure that some people abuse the system.  Some people always find a way to abuse systems, but it became increasingly hard to believe that so many did that it negated the good such safety nets do.  I’ve gotten to meet and get to know some people who had come out of a background like that and they were nothing like the “entitled, lazy welfare-queen” of the stories.  At the worst, the poor became scapegoats for the failure of “trickle down” economics.  If those leeches weren’t being supported by the rest of us, we’d have much more money, or so went the logic.  I heard several people advocate for getting rid of the welfare system entirely and “let churches and private charities take over that job”.  The thing was, churches and private charities were around when these programs were set up.  If they were doing such a good job of it, government wouldn’t have had to start them.  Quite frankly, I didn’t see these advocates for private and church based welfare giving anywhere near enough to the local poor to make the governmental programs redundant.  And the racial component of this kept getting more and more pronounced.  The “welfare queens” were increasingly cast as black or Latina.  Stagnant wages were the fault of all those illegal immigrants who would take pennies for hours of work.  The lack of well paying jobs in your area was because they were given to less qualified minorities to meet “racial quotas”.

And, finally, there was the demonization of the “other”.  People who didn’t agree with us weren’t just mistaken.  They became “The Enemy”, and somehow Jesus’ admonition to “love your enemy” didn’t apply to them.  They weren’t to be listened to.  They weren’t even to be tolerated.  They were to be shouted down and attacked.  Grace?  Who has time for grace?!  There’s a war on, so get down to the battlefield and hold the line at all costs!  

Now, I hear you Evangelicals out there objecting to this.  “We’re not all like that!”  you say.  I know, but THIS is the public face of Evangelicalism.  “That’s not fair!” you say.  “The liberal media just focuses on that minority!”  Folks, I know that argument.  I’ve MADE that argument for years to my friends outside the Evangelical bubble.  Over and over again and, after a while, it began to ring increasingly hollow.  I could SEE what was going on inside Evangelical churches.  I could hear what my fellow Evangelical Christians were saying and “liberal slant” couldn’t excuse all of that.  And, quite frankly, this last election year was the nail in the coffin for me because Evangelical Christianity (mainly WHITE Evangelical Christianity) as a whole showed its true colors for all the world to see.  Evangelicals were a major help in putting a mysogynistic, bigoted, entitled bully in the White House.  Numbers vary, but the figures I find most likely are 58% for Evangelicals as a whole and 80% for white Evangelicals.  Let me say that again.  Of the people who identified as Evangelical who turned out for the 2016 Presidential Election, over half of them voted for Trump and a particular subset had over three quarters vote for the Orange Anti-Beatitude.  Even if a large population of the Evangelical community stayed home, that’s a pretty damning percentage and no amount of yelling that liberal media is doing a smear job can overcome it.  And Trump *still* has strong Evangelical support!  I could forgive what happened on election night if it wasn’t for the fact that the majority of white Evangelical Christians still seem to support him in spite of everything he’s done and all the lies he’s been caught out in.  Top Evangelical voices like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham still staunchly support him in spite of the fact that he is the opposite of what they’ve been saying a Christian leader should be for years and years.  And, you know what?  I don’t care why they’re doing so.  Because I’m out.

I am a Christian, and it is because of that that I can no longer consider myself an Evangelical.  There are no doubt pockets in the Evangelical movement that haven’t been corrupted, but, when the rot is THIS far spread, I don’t see how I can do otherwise.  If Jesus and the current Evangelical movement are in conflict, then I must go with Jesus.  A huge chunk of Evangelicalism has sold its birthright of grace for a mess of political pottage.  And, let me give you a word of warning, Evangelicals.  I came to Christ in the age of Billy Graham, a man of grace.  If my introduction to Christianity was Franklin Graham and his ilk, I’d have run far, far away.  There is far too little of Christ in the lives of these Christians.  Think about that.  If I was growing up and seeking truth in this day and age, I strongly suspect that I would reject Christianity due to the hateful behavior of His servants.  Think about all the young people who ARE looking for truth in this day and age…and how you’re driving them away.

[yerbevan]

ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Triumph of the Oligarchs

The Republican tax plan to be voted on this week is likely to pass.

“The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress, urging swift approval, adding that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”

Please. The Koch network doesn’t care a fig about the pockets of American families. It cares about the pockets of the Koch network.

It has poured money into almost every state in an effort to convince Americans that the tax cut will be good for them. Yet most Americans don’t believe it.

Polls show only about a third of Americans favor the tax plan. The vast majority feel it’s heavily skewed to the rich and big businesses – which it is.

In counties that Trump won but Obama carried in 2012, only 17 percent say they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent say they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.

Most Americans know that the tax plan is payback for major Republican donors. Gary Cohn, Trump’s lead economic advisor, even conceded in an interview that “the most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.”

Republican Rep. Chris Collins admitted “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” Senator Lindsey Graham warned that if Republicans failed to pass the tax plan, “the financial contributions will stop.”

By passing it, Republican donors will save billions – paying a lower top tax rate, doubling the amount their heirs can receive tax-free, and treating themselves as “pass-through” businesses able to deduct 20 percent of their income (effectively allowing Trump to cut his tax rate in half, if and when he pays taxes).

They’ll make billions more as their stock portfolios soar because corporate taxes are slashed.

The biggest winners by far will be American oligarchs such as the Koch brothers; Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor; Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate; Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets football team and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune; and Carl Icahn, the activist investor.

The oligarchs are the richest of the richest 1 percent. They’ve poured hundreds of millions into the GOP and Trump. About 40 percent of all contributions for the entire federal election came from the richest 0.01 percent of the American population.

The giant tax cut has been their core demand from the start. They also want to slash regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and cut everything else government does except for defense – including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

In return, they have agreed to finance Trump and the GOP, and mount expensive public relations campaigns that magnify their lies.

Trump has fulfilled his end of the bargain. He’s blinded much of his white working-class base to the reality of what’s happening by means of his racist, xenophobic rants and policies.

The American oligarchs couldn’t care less about what all this will cost America.

Within their gated estates and private jets, they’re well insulated from the hatefulness and divisiveness.

They don’t worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes.

Climate change doesn’t concern them because their estates are fully insured against hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

They don’t care about public schools because their families don’t attend them. They don’t care about public transportation because they don’t use it. They don’t care about the poor because they don’t see them.

They don’t worry about the rising budget deficit because they borrow directly from global capital markets.

Truth to tell, they don’t even care that much about America because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want Congress and the President to represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. The new tax plan is their triumph.

But if polls showing most Americans against the tax cut are any guide, that triumph may be short lived. Americans are catching on.

The recent electoral results in Virginia and Alabama offer further evidence.

A tidal wave of public loathing is growing across the land – toward Trump, the GOP, and the oligarchs they serve; and to the deception, the wealth, and the power that underlies them.  

That wave could crash in the midterm elections of 2018. If so, the current triumph of the oligarchs will be the start of their undoing.

Sunday, December 17, 2017

robertreich.org

[6dogs9cats]

Today we live in a polling bubble – surveys taken from the perches in New York, Washington and Los Angeles may be obscuring rather than illuminating many of the underlying views and trends of the American electorate. How else can one explain that although many polls showed a close race last November, almost no one (myself included) predicted a lopsided victory for Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Most media analysts and modelers concluded a Hillary Clinton victory was in the bag. One Princeton professor even agreed to eat a bug if Trump won. As President Trump enters his 100th day, several of the same organizations are using their polls to proclaim that he has had the worst start of any modern president and the worst ratings of a president at this time in his presidency. While Trump is no FDR when it comes to forming a political coalition, a fairer reading of the polls and the election results shows his performance is probably 5 or 6 points better than is being touted and that his base of support with which he won the election remains intact. There are several reasons for this mismatch between likely reality and the interpretations we are seeing. Most polls have moved away from voters or likely voters to U.S. adults with no screen for registration or even citizenship. And the questions often focus on storylines and narratives critical of Trump. Rarely are they written from the perspective of having missed the major swings and economic discontent that upended the election. The current crop of stories also sets Trump ratings expectations, as though America went through the typical process of coming together around the winner. Instead we had recounts, Russian conspiracies, investigations and rallies unlike any seen after any election. The country was sharply politically divided on Election Day and remains that way today. That is the backdrop of any realistic assessment of what is happening in America. But there are some facts and trends that are being missed in the polls. First, Trump is likely NOT at 40 percent approval with the American electorate. He is likely higher. Trump got 46.1 percent of the popular vote, several million votes less than Clinton did, but neither candidate got a majority. Six million voters opted for a libertarian candidate and most of those votes would never go to a liberal Democrat. And when all of the congressional votes were tallied, Republicans got 3 million more votes than the Democrats and won a majority of both the popular vote and of the seats in Congress. The recent special election in Georgia came out about the same as the Trump/Hillary vote, with Republicans nosing out Democrats. As The Washington Post poll reported, a replay of the Trump/Hillary race would today come out more for Trump than Hillary. So what is the disconnect between polls that show his job rating at 40 and the electoral results? The major network polls all now report “U.S adults” as the sampling frame, not people who voted in the last election or expect to vote in the next one. The non-voters include 11 million undocumented aliens and a lot of folks who liked neither candidate and stayed home, as well as younger people who have lower rates of participation. These polls should not be confused with the views of the American electorate. If you look just at the past voters, Trump is holding his base – The Washington Post said that 94 percent of Trump voters approve of the job he is doing. That would be 43.1 percent of the voting electorate. Trump then conservatively gets 10 percent approval from the remaining voters (30 percent from voters to other candidates and 8 percent among Clinton voters) which would give him another 5 percent or about 48 percent approval among the group that voted in the last election. That’s a more realistic assessment. And attitudes towards the economy are surging, which is usually good news for whoever occupies the White House. Third, the media echo chamber has, I think, made it more difficult for people to express their political views, especially to live interviewers. With the growing gender gap, I’m not sure most men are even telling their spouses or partners what their real views are on the president. In a recent Harvard Harris poll we did, only about 60 percent in the country now feel free enough to express their views to friends and family. Consequently, it's no surprise that polls done online show a consistently better picture for Trump than most live interviewer polling, and today reaching America through the phone is an increasingly difficult task compared to new methods available through the internet. But another piece of this polling bubble is also created by the narrow questioning in many of the polls. Many of the hot-button issues and expressions Trump uses are rarely if ever polled compared to questions about Russian election interference. No major poll in five years had polled on the support for local law enforcement contacting immigration authorities when they arrest someone, for instance. While many polls have picked up the genuine sympathy Americans have for “Dreamers” or for those who work hard and pay taxes, none of the polls examined what they think should be done with undocumented aliens who are arrested for crimes, or the deep support out there for something like Kate’s law. Trump campaigned on a unique set of issues that indicted bad trade deals for economic dislocation, supported the police over the Black Lives Matter movement, called for making NATO members pay their fair share, and deporting criminal undocumented aliens. He called for repeal and replacing ObamaCare, lower taxes, more immigration police and a border wall paid for by Mexico. You will find plenty of polling on what a bad idea Americans think the wall is and on the “Muslim ban” (often without even mentioning security), but where is the polling on the rest of his themes and messages? On the power of “Buy American, Hire American”? On tax cuts to stimulate jobs? In the end, Trump had a fairly powerful message that spoke to a lot of voters. He is now attempting to turn that message into policy. So far, the results have been mixed. The Ryan healthcare plan was neither fish nor fowl and didn't immediately lower premiums, making ObamaCare look better. The executive order on immigration was a Steve Bannon-led disaster. But despite these two clear setbacks, we should not be too quick to dismiss and trivialize the overall power of the rest of his message. That was the ultimate mistake of 2016 and the polling bubble: The election turned not on Hollywood Access or Huma Abadein’s laptop, it turned on serious issues too easily dismissed by polling focused on Trump’s temperament, conflict of interest, tweets and Russian conspiracies. And because none of the pollsters or analysts saw it that way, they concluded that Trump, the developer/entertainer, could not possibly win even if the polls had in fact tightened up. So as we enter the second hundred days, Trump has not crossed the 50 percent mark to expand his base, but he is also not down at 40 percent. On key issues he has a lot of support, especially when it comes to America being taken advantage of by its allies and trading partners, failing to stand up to its red lines, and the need for change that drains the corruption and gridlock of Washington. Don’t let the polling bubble obscure the fact that the forces – pro and con – that produced the surprise upset last November are just as powerful today. IT'S NOT TRUMP, well it is but MOSTLY, It's his supporters and mostly the people who see Bernie as the "only" person who has the answer "to everything" even when his actions or votes have done otherwise. When the majority in this country are Bystanders and 70% of the millennial generation refuses to vote, be involved or care about the future....it's a anarchists recipe for disaster.

[leftpress]

All the News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

It's Going Down | IT'S GOING DOWN | March 9th 2017

The post All the News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down appeared first on IT'S GOING DOWN.

This was a busy week.

Trump rolled out a new version of the Muslim Ban in a new executive order as attacks and deportation of immigrants ramped up – both of which led to various protests and demonstrations. Meanwhile, the State itself has entered into its latest shoving match, putting the FBI, Justice Department, and Trump regime at odds over claims that Obama tapped the Cheeto’s phone. Meanwhile, Ben Carson made himself look like Ben Carson, the Women’s Strike kicked off, threats of trade war with China loomed, WikiLeaks revealed yet another vast CIA spying ring, the Republicans rolled out a p...

roposal for an even worse replacement for Obamacare, at home far-Right terror attacks continued, and the police in Sacramento, CA have pushed the DA to charge upwards of 106 people for taking part in anti-fascist clashes on June 26th against the neo-Nazi group, the Traditionalist Worker Party.

With all that in mind, let’s get to the news. 

Trump that Regime

This week, the US installed a new missile system in South Korea as it pondered regime change in North Korea and prompted China to threaten an arms race, while at home Trump announced that Obama had bugged his phones, though citing no evidence whatsoever. This claim has set off a tug-of-war within the State itself, as the FBI put pressure on the Justice Department to deny these claims while the White House has remained tight-lipped.

Meanwhile, Republicans have rolled out their proposed plans for replacing Obamacare, which includes all of the worst aspects of ACA and added new horrific qualities while threatening Medicaid for the poor. As Kate Randall wrote:

The proposed Republican plan repeals the ACA’s mandate, which requires those without insurance to obtain coverage from a private insurer under threat of a tax penalty. It also repeals the requirement that large companies provide health care to their employees. It replaces the ACA’s subsidies to help low- and middle-income people pay the cost of premiums with fixed tax credits based on age.

The most important changes involve Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor as well as some elderly and disabled people, which is jointly administered by the federal government and the states. Beginning in 2020, the Republican plan would convert federal funding for Medicaid to a per capita allotment, as well as end the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. This will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in benefits for those who qualify, as well as higher rates of uninsured poor people.

The American Health Care Act draft legislation capitalizes on the reactionary features of Obamacare–rising premiums and deductibles, lack of choice of insurers, narrowing networks of doctors and other providers, penalties for being uninsured–by offering up a plan that is even more heavily skewed in the interests of the health care industry and the wealthy.

While the Republican plan would eliminate the mandate and tax penalty, it would still penalize people who don’t have insurance. If consumers allowed their coverage to lapse for as long as two months–due to a job loss or other unforeseen interruption–insurers would be required to charge them a 30 percent penalty when they bought a health plan.

While many have panned ‘Trumpcare,’ and called it dead in the water, the reality is that the elites want to gut all lifelines and support programs from the poor and working-class while distributing wealth back up to the extremely wealthy.

Bill Moyers this week put Trump’s class war agenda front and center, and shook off claims of Trump or Bannon’s ‘populism’:

A glance at the membership of the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum shows they are flocking to his side, with masters of financial buccaneering like Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, along with Doug McMillon of retail giant Walmart. There is even an ex-governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Bush appointee Kevin Warsh. This is hardly a populist revolution of the kind preached by John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad.

Trump’s senior government appointments reinforce this impression: his Cabinet, filled with moguls from Big Oil, mega-banking, investment and retail, makes George W. Bush’s Cabinet look like a Bolshevik workers’ council. Even Steve Bannon, Trump’s “alt-right” Svengali, is an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, whose stock has surged 38 percent since the election. The fact that America’s premier corporate raider, Carl Icahn, will be special adviser on regulatory reform, and that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman executive for 16 years, does not inspire confidence that economic management will be different from that which piloted us into the 2008 crash.

Trump’s $6.2 trillion in planned tax cuts are the Bush policy on steroids, and are potentially three times the magnitude of the 10-year cost of Bush’s cuts. Because they are heavily targeted at the rich—47 percent of the cuts will go to the top 1 percent—they will exacerbate income inequality, which is already at its highest level since the 1920s. The tax-relief crumbs for low-income earners will be nullified or made worse by an assault on the minimum wage. Assistance to the poor and near-poor could be further eroded by a reduction in Medicaid benefits (already in the works, courtesy of Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican Congress). These actions will exacerbate the ongoing trend toward jobs without benefits.

Despite their windfall from Trump’s tax policies, the rich will only be able to consume so many filet mignons, Sub-Zero refrigerators and Patek-Philippe watches before reaching satiation. The rest of their tax cut dividend will go into lifting the equities market to stratospheric levels or building palatial monuments in Glen Cove, Palm Beach or Palo Alto. Since the tax cuts will be much greater than Bush’s own prodigious fiscal mismanagement, the potential equities and real estate bubble could be a thing to behold. This is anything but a populist economic policy.

Ironically, in the face of Trump’s latest temper tantrum about spying, it has been revealed that the CIA has created a vast web of apparatuses that allow them to better spy on people using cellular devices. According to The New York Times: 

WikiLeaks on Tuesday released a significant cache of documents that it said came from a high-security network inside the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks called the documents Vault 7, and they lay out the capabilities of the agency’s global covert hacking program.

By the end of 2016, the C.I.A. program had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors. And they had produced more than a thousand hacking systems. The agency’s arsenal, the documents indicate, included an array of malware ranging from viruses to clandestine “zero day” vulnerabilities in the software of major companies.

The files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in “an unauthorized manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” WikiLeaks said.

It goes on to write about the threats to a person’s smartphone:

The software targeted by the hacking program included the most popular smartphone operating systems: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

The C.I.A. hacking initiative had a “mobile devices branch,” which developed an array of attacks on popular smartphones to infect and extract data, including a user’s location, audio and text messages, and to covertly activate a phone’s camera and microphone.

Apple’s iPhone software, according to the documents, was a particular target, including the development of several “zero day” exploits — a term for attacking coding flaws the company would not have known about.

Though Apple has only 15 percent of the global smartphone market, the intensive C.I.A. effort was probably explained by the “popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.”

Even more chilling:

The C.I.A. focused on smartphone operating systems in large part to intercept messages before they could be encrypted, according to the WikiLeaks documents. So by targeting the phone’s underlying software, the C.I.A. was looking to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo and other smartphone communications applications.

The Intercept wrote:

In addition to the CIA’s efforts, an FBI hacking division, the Remote Operations Unit, has also been working to discover exploits in iPhones, one of the WikiLeaks documents, the iOS hacking chart, indicates. Last February, while investigating the perpetrator of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, the FBI attempted argued in court that Apple was obligated to give the FBI access to its phones by producing a weakened version of the device’s operating system. If the WikiLeaks documents are authentic, it would appear FBI and other elements of the intelligence community are already deeply involved in discovering their own way into iPhones. The compromise of the documents also calls into question government assurances in the San Bernardino case that any exploit developed by Apple to allow the FBI access to the killer’s phone would never be exposed to criminals or nation states.

The CIA and FBI hacking revelations originate with a trove of more than 8,000 documents released by WikiLeaks, which said the files originated from a CIA network and date from 2013 to 2016. The CIA declined to comment on the documents, which also disclose techniques the CIA allegedly developed to turn so-called smart televisions into listening devices. Apple did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment, though indicated it was actively investigating the revelations.

However in another article they also pointed out in regards to the Signal app:

Contrary to the clear implication from these journalists and news sources, the documents WikiLeaks published do not appear to show any attack specific to Signal or WhatsApp, but rather a means of hijacking your entire phone, which would of course “bypass” encrypted chat apps because it thwarts virtually all other security systems on the device, granting total remote access to the CIA.

The Wikileaks dump also includes information about CIA malware that can hack, and remotely spy on and control, computers running Windows, macOS, and Linux. Which means that it’s also true that the CIA can bypass PGP email encryption on your computer. And the CIA can bypass your VPN. And the CIA can see everything you’re doing in Tor Browser. All of these things can be inferred by the documents, but that doesn’t mean using PGP, VPNs, or Tor Browser isn’t safe. Basically, if the CIA can hack a device and gain full control of it — whether it’s a smartphone, a laptop, or a TV with a microphone — they can spy on everything that happens on that device. Saying Signal is bypassed because the CIA has control of the entire device Signal is installed on is akin to saying the diary you keep in your bedside table is vulnerable because the CIA has the ability to break into your house. It’s true, technically, but not exactly a revelation, and odd to fixate on to the exclusion of other vulnerable items.

White House Statement Lifts Paragraph from ExxonMobil Press Release https://t.co/vLVg4pu0IE pic.twitter.com/ew9nqo44cY

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) March 8, 2017

Lastly, Democracy Now and the Washington Post reported:

On Monday, the White House issued a statement on ExxonMobil that includes an entire paragraph lifted from an ExxonMobil press release issued less than an hour earlier. The paragraph, which celebrates ExxonMobil’s investments in new oil refineries and chemical manufacturing projects, was first noticed by a Washington Post reporter who posted the side-by-side comparison on Twitter. The ExxonMobil press release was issued at 3:10 p.m., and the White House statement was sent to reporters at 3:44 p.m. Besides small copy editing changes, the paragraphs differ by only one word: The ExxonMobil release calls its project the “Growing the Gulf expansion program,” while the White House statement calls it the “Growing the Gulf program.” The final sentence of the White House statement is also nearly identical to one in the ExxonMobil release, which claims the projects will create “many more jobs.” Longtime ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is now secretary of state.

Fire to the Patriarchy

In Texas:

Today, just a month after a federal judge in Austin blocked a new state health department rule that would require women bury aborted or miscarried fetal tissue, lawmakers in the Texas House State Affairs Committee held an hours-long hearing considering a bill that seeks to do exactly that.

The point of the measure is to honor the “dignity of the deceased” and nothing more, said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Byron Cook. “Let me be clear: This bill has nothing to do with the abortion procedure whatsoever.”

Of course the bill does directly impact the provision of abortion and women seeking such care, as noted by Judge Sam Sparks in a strongly worded January 27 order blocking the Department of Health Services rule. While state lawyers have argued that U.S. Supreme Court precedent protects Texas’ ability to pass a measure that demonstrates its interest in “potential life,” Sparks wrote that desire couldn’t justify a rule that relates to the disposal of aborted or miscarried tissue, an activity that occurs “when there is no potential life to protect.”

Across the world, actions for International Women’s Day and the Global Women’s Strike took place and despite many of the events being controlled or managed by hacks associated with non-profits or the Democratic Party, autonomous, anarchist, and militant feminist actions still shown through:

#InternationalWomensDay #WomensStrike NYC pic.twitter.com/mmDXbqZFB7

— Peter Soeller (@SoellerPower) March 9, 2017

Fave photo from today's #GenderStrike in SF: "Love dumps hate" and "The future is tire fires." pic.twitter.com/yZOWtf7NrC

— Blake Montgomery (@blakersdozen) March 9, 2017

"No borders, no nations, stop deportations" at the #GenderStrike for #InternationalWomensDay in San Francisco pic.twitter.com/KXDKAqKZ5V

— Blake Montgomery (@blakersdozen) March 9, 2017

"Every nation, every race! Punch a nazi in the face!" #InternationalWomensDay pic.twitter.com/B3laRogjy3

— Shay Horse (@HuntedHorse) March 8, 2017

Say it loud Say it clear Immigrants are welcome here!#internationalwomensday #genderstrike pic.twitter.com/9YKmQEvQiz

— Indybay (@Indybay) March 8, 2017

#Anarchist bloc on Dublin march for Choice, IWD 2017 #Strike4Repeal #March4Repeal pic.twitter.com/oLjIxgHE9H

— Workers Solidarity (@WSMIreland) March 8, 2017

As always, send us your action reports!

Muslim Ban and Attacks on Immigrants Lead to Protests

This week Trump rolled out a new version of the Muslim Travel ban:

US President Donald Trump issued a revised executive order banning travel from six majority-Muslim countries and halting all refugee entry into the United States for the next 120 days. The order revokes and replaces Executive Order 13769, signed by Trump January 27, which was struck down as unconstitutional by several federal courts.

The revised order targets six of the countries named in the previous order—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—but exempts the seventh country, Iraq. This was after objections from the Pentagon, which feared widespread popular anger in the country where 6,000 US troops are deployed alongside tens of thousands of Iraqi army and militia forces in the ongoing conflict with Islamic State guerrillas.

The order omits several of the most flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional provisions of the earlier order, including a specific preference for “minority religious groups,” which in the context of Muslim-majority countries meant overt discrimination against Muslims.

Unlike the first order, the travel ban is prospective only: it freezes new applications for visas for the next 90 days, but has no effect on current visas, or on US legal residents (green card holders) coming back from visits to one of the six targeted countries. There will be no mass cancellation of visas, as was the case under the initial draft of the order.

That said, the reactionary and anti-democratic character of the order remains, with the main immediate effect felt by refugees, who will make up the vast majority of those denied entry to the United States, rather than travelers.

The ACLU wrote:

President Trump’s intentions regarding the Muslim ban have been clear. In a statement “ON PREVENTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION” posted to his campaign website — and still available on it as I write — then-candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Again and again, he refused to disown this proposal, expressing his opinion that “Islam hates us” and that there are “problems with Muslims coming into the country.”

Democracy Now reported:

An Afghan couple and their three young children have been released after being detained at the Los Angeles airport Thursday and held in custody over the weekend despite having valid visas to enter the U.S. The family all arrived with Special Immigrant Visas, which they had received because the father had worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan.

Family of Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez Seeks to Stop Deportation https://t.co/KgCuNa46Fp pic.twitter.com/LvbIW2h1dC

— Carl P. DeLuca, Esq (@DeLucaAttorney) March 9, 2017

Meanwhile, deportations continued to led to protests, including the case of Rómulo Avelica-González:

Rómulo Avelica-González is the 48-year-old father of four US citizen daughters. He was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on February 28 while dropping his daughter Fatima off at school. Fatima recorded the arrest on a mobile phone, and the video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Rómulo is currently being held at a detention center in Adelanto, California. The facility is under quarantine for a measles outbreak, and his family has not been allowed to visit him.

In Santa Cruz, where there has been recent heavy handed ICE activity, it has just come out that an DHS/ICE agent has been embedded within the local police.

In Santa Ana, people have pushed back against ICE:

ICE confirmed they sent Santa Ana officials written notification on Feb. 23 advising them the agency intends to terminate its detention contract in 90 days. The Santa Ana ICE facility announcement comes just weeks after a series of immigration raids across the country left immigrant communities reeling with fear and anxiety. But now that ICE has announced they’re leaving the Santa Ana facility, the activists have been reinvigorated and have a new set of demands for the city officials that approved the ICE contract in the first place.

Trump officials are also now stating that ICE officials will implement radical changes for how the State will deal with families that are apprehended at the border. As MSNBC reported:

The plan is part of a new set of policies for those apprehended at the border that would make good on President Trump’s campaign promise to end the practice critics call “catch and release.”  

“If implemented, this expansion in immigration detention would be the fastest and largest in our country’s history,” says Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer in Nashville who represents clients applying for asylum. “And my worry is it’ll be permanent. Once those beds are in place they’ll never go away.”

Reached by phone, Lafferty said he was not authorized to speak on the matter. The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment.

The plans for the expansion reflect the Trump administration’s planned overhaul of U.S. policy for dealing women and children seeking asylum, thousands of whom continue to show up at the southern border fleeing violence, vengeance and sexual assault in Central America.

Under the plan under consideration, DHS would break from the current policy keeping families together. Instead, it would separate women and children after they’ve been detained – leaving mothers to choose between returning to their country of origin with their children, or being separated from their children while staying in detention to pursue their asylum claim.  

In the background, news of mass roundups and incarceration has also meant potential mass profits for certain corporations:

President Donald Trump’s tough-on-immigration agenda has been a boon for the for-profit detention industry, which months ago was facing lost government contracts and waves of negative press. This administration’s insistence on a zero-tolerance illegal immigrant policy, which aspires to undo some, if not all, of President Obama’s Executive Orders, has helped prison stocks return to levels comparable with prices of mid-August, when the DOJ announced it would move to phase out its use of p

[lodelss]

ACLU: D.C. Statehood is a Racial Justice Issue

D.C. Statehood is a Racial Justice Issue

As the movement for D.C. statehood gains undeniable momentum, anxious cries from its detractors are reaching a fever pitch. Following the House of Representatives’ recent approval of the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, H.R. 51, which would finally grant statehood and full voting representation in Congress to over 700,000 people living in our nation’s capital, critics emerged in the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and elsewhere to wring their hands over the alleged “partisan advantage” that statehood would bring. Further, they argued, D.C. statehood can only spring from a constitutional amendment. This focus on the potential partisan leaning of the new state’s federal delegation misses the point: D.C. statehood would correct an overt act of racial voter suppression with roots in the Reconstruction era. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill granting adult citizens of the District — including Black men — the right to vote. Congress overrode the veto, granting significant political influence to Black Washingtonians. But just as Black voters started to exercise their power, Congress replaced D.C.’s territorial government with three presidentially appointed commissioners. The goal of that move was obvious: disenfranchising an increasingly politically active Black community. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being.” As he put it more simply, and shamefully: It was necessary to “burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.”  In one cautionary opinion piece, attorneys David Rivkin and Lee Casey raise some policy concerns against the House bill. But their stated arguments are not constitutional barriers. Relying on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 memo opposing D.C. statehood, the authors conclude that “abolishing the permanent seat of the federal government would be a profound change — the sort that can be accomplished only with a national consensus implemented through a constitutional amendment.” But H.R. 51 does not abolish the national capital — it only shrinks it, making a new state out of most of the resized District’s surrounding areas. Congress can do this, because the Framers knew how to say what they meant. They gave Congress authority to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the District, stating only that it could not be larger than ten square miles. That sweeping authority includes the power to shrink the District to less than its current size. As Viet Dinh, Assistant Attorney General under President Bush, explained to Congress in 2014, Kennedy’s policy concern “is just that: a policy concern,” and would not override a constitutional act of Congress. There’s no better proof that the Framers meant to give Congress the power to shrink the District’s boundaries than the fact that it immediately did so after the District was first established. Congress gave back most of Arlington and Alexandria to Virginia in 1846. But the first Congress also changed the District’s configuration in 1791, less than four years after the Constitutional Convention. This bolsters the constitutionality of the House bill, because, as the Supreme Court said in Marsh v. Chambers (1983), acts of the first Congress offer “contemporaneous and weighty evidence” of the Framers’ intent. And when the court addressed the 1846 retrocession in Phillips v. Payne (1875), it strongly hinted that Congress had vast authority over the District’s boundaries, saying the case involved “action of the political departments” that “bound” the courts. Nor does the House bill violate the Twenty-Third Amendment, which gives the District of Columbia three votes in the Electoral College. That amendment would lead to a curious result: It would give the few residents of the smaller, reshaped national capital outsized influence in presidential elections. But there’s no constitutional conflict between the House bill and the Twenty-Third Amendment. As Viet Dinh explained, “the Constitution is not violated anytime the factual assumptions underlying a provision change.” Indeed, the Amendment gives the current District three — and only three — Electoral College votes even if its population somehow quadrupled tomorrow, and the bill provides an expedited process for removing those three electors. And importantly, as noted by Rivkin and Casey, the House-passed bill establishes expedited procedures for the House and Senate to repeal the Twenty-Third Amendment. Critics continue to ignore the essential argument in favor of statehood: ending the continued disenfranchisement of a non-minority Black jurisdiction that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without representation in Congress. They also overlook the fact that in 2016, almost 80 percent of D.C. voters supported statehood in a referendum. Admitting a new state will always have political implications. That’s why the Framers fully left the matter to Congress’s discretion. Rivkin and Casey are right that D.C. statehood would be a “profound change,” —  a profound, constitutionally viable change — that would bring our country one step forward to an inclusive democracy.

Published July 27, 2020 at 10:30PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2OWRIJ8 from Blogger https://ift.tt/2WYY3Za via IFTTT

[nancydhooper]

D.C. Statehood is a Racial Justice Issue

As the movement for D.C. statehood gains undeniable momentum, anxious cries from its detractors are reaching a fever pitch. Following the House of Representatives’ recent approval of the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, H.R. 51, which would finally grant statehood and full voting representation in Congress to over 700,000 people living in our nation’s capital, critics emerged in the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and elsewhere to wring their hands over the alleged “partisan advantage” that statehood would bring. Further, they argued, D.C. statehood can only spring from a constitutional amendment. This focus on the potential partisan leaning of the new state’s federal delegation misses the point: D.C. statehood would correct an overt act of racial voter suppression with roots in the Reconstruction era. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill granting adult citizens of the District — including Black men — the right to vote. Congress overrode the veto, granting significant political influence to Black Washingtonians. But just as Black voters started to exercise their power, Congress replaced D.C.’s territorial government with three presidentially appointed commissioners. The goal of that move was obvious: disenfranchising an increasingly politically active Black community. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being.” As he put it more simply, and shamefully: It was necessary to “burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.”  In one cautionary opinion piece, attorneys David Rivkin and Lee Casey raise some policy concerns against the House bill. But their stated arguments are not constitutional barriers. Relying on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 memo opposing D.C. statehood, the authors conclude that “abolishing the permanent seat of the federal government would be a profound change — the sort that can be accomplished only with a national consensus implemented through a constitutional amendment.” But H.R. 51 does not abolish the national capital — it only shrinks it, making a new state out of most of the resized District’s surrounding areas. Congress can do this, because the Framers knew how to say what they meant. They gave Congress authority to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the District, stating only that it could not be larger than ten square miles. That sweeping authority includes the power to shrink the District to less than its current size. As Viet Dinh, Assistant Attorney General under President Bush, explained to Congress in 2014, Kennedy’s policy concern “is just that: a policy concern,” and would not override a constitutional act of Congress. There’s no better proof that the Framers meant to give Congress the power to shrink the District’s boundaries than the fact that it immediately did so after the District was first established. Congress gave back most of Arlington and Alexandria to Virginia in 1846. But the first Congress also changed the District’s configuration in 1791, less than four years after the Constitutional Convention. This bolsters the constitutionality of the House bill, because, as the Supreme Court said in Marsh v. Chambers (1983), acts of the first Congress offer “contemporaneous and weighty evidence” of the Framers’ intent. And when the court addressed the 1846 retrocession in Phillips v. Payne (1875), it strongly hinted that Congress had vast authority over the District’s boundaries, saying the case involved “action of the political departments” that “bound” the courts. Nor does the House bill violate the Twenty-Third Amendment, which gives the District of Columbia three votes in the Electoral College. That amendment would lead to a curious result: It would give the few residents of the smaller, reshaped national capital outsized influence in presidential elections. But there’s no constitutional conflict between the House bill and the Twenty-Third Amendment. As Viet Dinh explained, “the Constitution is not violated anytime the factual assumptions underlying a provision change.” Indeed, the Amendment gives the current District three — and only three — Electoral College votes even if its population somehow quadrupled tomorrow, and the bill provides an expedited process for removing those three electors. And importantly, as noted by Rivkin and Casey, the House-passed bill establishes expedited procedures for the House and Senate to repeal the Twenty-Third Amendment. Critics continue to ignore the essential argument in favor of statehood: ending the continued disenfranchisement of a non-minority Black jurisdiction that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without representation in Congress. They also overlook the fact that in 2016, almost 80 percent of D.C. voters supported statehood in a referendum. Admitting a new state will always have political implications. That’s why the Framers fully left the matter to Congress’s discretion. Rivkin and Casey are right that D.C. statehood would be a “profound change,” —  a profound, constitutionally viable change — that would bring our country one step forward to an inclusive democracy.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/d-c-statehood-is-a-racial-justice-issue via http://www.rssmix.com/

[growlegalweed-blog]

Legal Weed Resources

Check out... http://legalweed.gq/420/the-gnomes-of-darkness-present-top-cannabis-industry-clusterfucks-of-2018%e2%80%b3/

The Gnomes of Darkness Present..”Top Cannabis Industry Clusterfucks of 2018″

Top Cannabis Industry Clusterfucks of 2018 – the legal cannabis industry in the United States and Canada tried to drown itself in a tsunami of superlatives and hyperbole during the past year.

Everyone seems to be stoned from “huffing their own stink” and have forgotten about some spectacular “clusterfucks” that could have drowned the fledgling industry in a torrent of noxious effluent.

We have designated ourselves as the Gnomes of Darkness and present our list of five top clusterfucks for 2018.

1.)

Medmen’s CEO and COO – Appropriate $53 million from Canadian IPO. – The risk, when allowing US weed deals to head up north to go public, is that they’ll bring their OTC way of doing things up here and soil our pretty little public company kingdom.

I mean, let’s be clear – the Canadian venture capital markets are a rank pit of vipers that live by sucking on the lifeblood of the foolish, recycling shit into prettier shit, and tapping grandma on the shoulder repeatedly for a financial refill. But hey, we’re not just watching Mr. Bierman find cheap money for the company. He’s also getting the cheap money personally.

The CEO and the Chairman will each receive US$1.5 million per year in salary for four years, plus US$10 million in ‘redeemable units’ based on share price, that have vested, plus another $30 million in long term incentive plan units that vest over 24 months, at the end of every month.

This means Bierman is coming into this deal – stock aside – with $1.5 million in salary, another $15 million annually in ‘incentives’, and $10 million ‘just cuz’, or $26.5 million off the top. President Andrew Modlin gets the same deal, so of the $100 million raised in new shares going public, $53 million of it goes straight into the pockets of the big two.

2.)

US Customs and Border Protection Bans Canadian that came to the US in connection with cannabis industry business for life. TSA Lifetime Bans Canadian  – Unsurprisingly the TSA radar was well aware of the MJ Biz Con Vegas hoopla….

A Canadian investor traveling to Las Vegas, Nevada, to attend a prominent cannabis conference and tour a new cannabis facility has been issued a lifetime entry ban to the United States, according to an immigration lawyer he consulted.

“He was traveling straight from Vancouver to Vegas. When they found out he was going down to tour the marijuana facility and that he was an investor in marijuana, they gave him a lifetime ban,” said Len Saunders, an immigration lawyer based in the border town of Blaine, Wash., who was consulted by the individual after receiving the ban.

The individual, who invests in a Canadian cannabis business that has an operation in Nevada, received the ban on the morning of Nov. 14, as he traveled to Las Vegas to attend the Marijuana Business Conference & Expo, one of the largest gatherings of cannabis industry players. The conference attracted close to 25,000 investors, entrepreneurs, lenders, lobbyists and executives of major U.S. and Canadian licensed cannabis producers, among others.

3.)

Tax Court “Schools” Attorney in Accounting – In Alterman and Gibson TC Memo 2018-83 where cannabis tax attorney Henry Wykowski, Esq. of Henry G. Wykowski & Associates got his balls cut off by the judge. It is plain as the nose on your face that the taxpayers got screwed due to their own crappy record keeping, Henry Wykowski, Esq.counsel’s failure to fully review records and documentation before getting to court, and failure to engage a CPA where tasks were outside of counsel’s competence. [There is an excellent article on the topic written by Prof. Bryan Camp that should be required reading��Lesson From The Tax Court: Into The Weeds on COGS]

4.)

Cannabis CPA Gets Disqualified As Expert – In Neil Feinberg et ux., et al. v. Commissioner, (2017 Memo 2017-211) if there EVER we an example of taxpayer’s being granted the benefit of the doubt by a court, and then proceeding to shoot themselves in the head due to self-inflicted wounds from a bumbling expert, incomplete and sloppy record keeping this is it.

Whether the report and testimony will be received in evidence and considered in determining THC’s COGS for tax years 2009-11 depends on the application of principles expressed in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), and Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.

Renowned cannabis tax expert Jim Marty, CPA of Bridge West CPA’s was eviscerated by a Tax Court judge who wrote.

“The Marty report is brief and summary, and its content is unreliable. Multiple statements in the report refer to no underlying source of information. For other statements that do cite an underlying source, Marty has failed to include the[*9] information or data on which he relied. In many instances, the report does not reference or provide sufficient information or data for us to conclude that the opinions expressed are based on anything other than his own conjecture…

For the reasons stated above, we conclude that the Marty report is not admissible under rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence because is it is not helpful in understanding evidence or in determining a fact and it includes legal conclusions.”

California Legislature forced to create “provisional licenses” due to backlog in the licensing process at regulatory agencies to avoid a crisis due to lapse of Temporary Licenses as of December 31, 2018.

The California legislature is currently finalized a bill (SB-1459) which would establish a provisional licensing regime for California cannabis businesses. The bill moved into “enrolled” status late last week, which means that SB-1459 has been approved by both houses of the state legislature and is being proofread to ensure all amendments were properly inserted. Once SB-1459 is “correctly engrossed”, only a signature from Governor Brown is needed for the bill to take immediate effect. In all, provisional licensing seems imminent.

These pending, provisional licenses would provide holders with a year-long, non-renewable, provisional license to operate after filing completed license applications. These provisional licenses would alleviate pressures on licensing agencies caused by the backlog of pending applications. Provisional licenses would also allow holders to continue operating, rather than potentially ceasing operations later this year.

5.)

AG Sessions Rescinds Cole Memo Tries to Restart War on Drugs – Attorney General Jeff Sessions undertook a single-handed effort to restart the “War on Drugs” through his edict which repealed the Cole Memorandum. In a seismic shift, will announce Thursday that he is rescinding a trio of memos from the Obama administration that adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws, according to a source with knowledge of the decision.

While many states have decriminalized or legalized marijuana use, the drug is still illegal under federal law, creating a conflict between federal and state law. The main Justice Department memo addressing the issue, known as the “Cole Memo” for then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole in 2013, set forth new priorities for federal prosecutors operating in states where the drug had been legalized for medical or other adult use.

The memo will be rescinded but it’s not immediately clear whether Sessions will issue new guidance in its place or simply revert back to older policies that left states with legal uncertainty about enforcement of federal law. Opponents of legal marijuana on Thursday celebrated the long-awaited action.

While there is much to be grateful for in the legal cannabis industry in 2018. However, we would be well advised to reflect on our collective missteps and learn from them.

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Obama: GOP’s Stance On Preexisting Conditions Off-Base, Especially During Pandemic

Republicans “have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Barack Obama, in his video endorsement of Joe Biden for president, April 14

Endorsing his former vice president, Joe Biden, to win the White House, former President Barack Obama sought to contrast the 2020 platforms of Democrats and Republicans on a critical plank: their stance on the Affordable Care Act. It’s a difference, he argued, that has assumed newfound urgency.

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.

This story can be republished for free (details).

“The Republicans occupying the White House and running the Senate … have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis,” Obama said.

Obama was referring to a couple of GOP policies, the former president’s senior adviser Eric Schultz told KHN. The first: a pending Supreme Court case, Texas v. Azar, in which the Trump administration has argued the 2010 health law should be struck down. Schultz also highlighted the White House’s refusal to provide a special open enrollment period for the ACA health exchanges in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve previously checked claims about President Donald Trump’s stance on the law’s preexisting condition protections — arguably its most popular component ― and his position on the Texas v. Azar lawsuit.

But COVID-19 adds new relevance, because of both the virus’s devastating health implications and bludgeoning impact on the American economy. Indeed, the Trump administration’s handling of the virus crisis is shaping up to be a defining issue in the run-up to November. Meanwhile, Biden made the health care law a signature component of his presidential platform and has been a vocal critic of the administration’s pandemic response.

With that in mind, we decided to take another look.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

The Republican Agenda

Obama is correct: The Republican Party has opposed the ACA for years. In 2016, then-candidate Trump campaigned on its repeal. Since then, the White House and congressional Republicans have pursued an agenda that would dismantle the law’s preexisting condition protections. Republicans haven’t united behind an alternative plan, either.

First: the lawsuit. Texas v. Azar stems from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That measure took the teeth out of the health law’s individual mandate, which required that all Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty. The tax law, pushed by Republicans and signed by Trump, set that penalty to $0.

A collection of Republican states’ attorneys general now argue that, without the penalty, the rest of the health law doesn’t work and should be struck down.

Killing the ACA would eliminate the stipulation that insurance plans cannot charge people more if they have a preexisting condition, get rid of the subsidies it provides for people to buy insurance on the exchanges and gut the Medicaid expansion that, in six years, directly extended coverage to more than 13 million people. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, although it won’t rule until after the November election.

The Trump administration, while technically in the position that would defend the law in court, has declined to support it — a move legal experts say is almost unprecedented.  In fact, the administration has even sided with the states arguing that it should be struck down. Neither the White House nor Senate Republicans have put forth a replacement bill that would maintain the ACA’s protections in the event the high court rules against the law.

We asked the White House if the administration had changed its stance in the wake of the pandemic. Trump’s staff redirected us to the Department of Justice, the federal government’s legal arm. The DOJ did not respond to emailed requests for comment. As recently as the end of March, though, Trump told reporters he still wanted the law “terminated.”

Senate Democrats have pushed the administration to change its position on the lawsuit. But Republicans, who hold the Senate majority, have been silent, a position that hasn’t changed even since COVID-19 effectively shut down large swaths of the country.

In some ways, the Republican stance isn’t important, argued Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank. It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court voting to get rid of the health law, especially in the midst of COVID-19, he said.

Still, that doesn’t change the facts of what Trump is arguing.

And the lawsuit is also only one part of the equation. Another, is healthcare.gov.

Americans who have lost their jobs ― and, often, the insurance that came with it — are eligible to buy insurance on the federal exchange, since job loss is a“qualifying life event” that gets you special access. Those who otherwise lack coverage would normally have to wait until the regular open enrollment period, which takes place at the end of the year. But the threat of COVID-19 has changed the risk for many of these potential shoppers.

In response, 11 states have independently reopened their state-run health exchanges for a special sign-up period. But the administration has declined to take such steps for the national marketplace.

“If you have been uninsured and picked up your newspaper, or turned on your news and realized your health was in much greater risk than you had anticipated, and would like to rush and get health insurance in case you end up on a ventilator ― you’re out of luck,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.

Even before coronavirus, the institute estimated that 32 million Americans were uninsured. About 20 million of them could benefit from a special enrollment period, Blumberg said. Without insurance, coronavirus treatment poses not just a health risk, but also a financial one.

The Trump administration has said it will pay hospitals directly, out of a pool of $100 billion, to cover the cost of treating uninsured people with COVD-19. After treating patients, hospitals would get paid at the Medicare rate.

But the administration’s policy extends only to covering COVID-19 treatment. Uninsured people with underlying chronic conditions don’t have a way to pay for health care, noted Robert Berenson, another Urban Institute fellow. If left untreated, those chronic ailments make COVID-19 far more dangerous than it would be for someone able to get preventive treatment earlier on.

Coronavirus And The ACA

President Trump’s stance raises another question, experts noted. Without the ACA, what kind of impact would COVID-19 have?

Sources:

Barack Obama, endorsement video for Joe Biden, April 14, 2020.

The Daily Beast, “GOP Plows Forward on Plans to Kill Obamacare, Pandemic Be Damned” March 31, 2020

Email interview with Larry Levitt, vice president, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Jonathan Oberlander, chair, Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Eric Schultz, senior adviser to Barack Obama, April 14, 2020

Joe Manchin Senate office, “Letter to President Trump,” Feb. 14, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “Data Note: Limited Navigator Funding for Federal Marketplace States,” Nov. 13, 2019

Kaiser Health News-PolitiFact, “Trump’s claim that he ‘saved’ pre-ex conditions ‘part fantasy, part delusion,’” Jan. 14, 2020

Kaiser Health News-Politifact, “Better than other plans or better than nothing? Trump’s claim about ‘affordable’ options, Feb. 11, 2020

The Hill, “Vulnerable Republicans Dodge Questions on Support for Obamacare Lawsuit,” March 6, 2020

MACPAC, “Medicaid Enrollment Changes Following the ACA,” accessed April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Linda Blumberg, fellow, Urban Institute, April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Robert Berenson, fellow, Urban Institute, April 15, 2020

Telephone interview with Thomas Miller, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2020

Even with the heath law intact, many Americans won’t be able to find affordable health insurance. That particularly applies to people who can’t afford the premiums on the individual marketplace, don’t qualify for federal subsidies or live in one of the 14 states that didn’t opt into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provision.

And the ACA is nowhere near sufficient on its own, Miller noted. Having insurance is part of the picture, but it doesn’t guarantee access to testing or that a hospital will be able to treat you. “On the margins, it does help a little bit to have insurance coverage, but the problem is so much larger than that,” Miller argued.

Still, without the health law, the virus’s impact would be “catastrophic,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Striking the individual marketplace and Medicaid expansion would leave almost another 20 million people uninsured — “at risk,” said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Without the ACA, COVID-19 could be considered a preexisting condition. Insurance companies could charge more to cover people who have previously contracted the virus (assuming, of course, those people can get tested and recorded as having had COVID-19). Plus, emerging evidence suggests severe cases of COVID-19 may leave lingering health consequences, that even after recovery would require ongoing medical care, Levitt said.

“The ACA’s consumer protections ensure that persons with COVID-19 can obtain insurance without fear of being turned away or charged exorbitant premiums because of their preexisting condition,” Oberlander said.

The health law also imposed strict regulations over what insurance must cover. Without those regulations, plans could ― and likely would — revert to skimpier coverage, Blumberg said.

That, she said, means plans that perhaps don’t cover ventilators or branded medicines, or that cap how many days of hospital care they’ll cover, or that require people to pay much more out-of-pocket.

“Insurers, given the legal ability to do it, would limit their legal liability and protect themselves from high claims,” she said. “They did it before and will do it again.”

Our Ruling

Obama accused the Trump administration and Senate Republicans of being “willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Evidence indicates that this is an apt characterization. None have put forth a plan that would maintain coverage or consumer protections ― policies that benefit millions of Americans — if the Supreme Court rules against the ACA. And as Obama asserts, striking down the law without an equivalent replacement could be devastating, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We rate this claim True.

Obama: GOP’s Stance On Preexisting Conditions Off-Base, Especially During Pandemic published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Obama: GOP’s Stance On Preexisting Conditions Off-Base, Especially During Pandemic

Republicans “have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Barack Obama, in his video endorsement of Joe Biden for president, April 14

Endorsing his former vice president, Joe Biden, to win the White House, former President Barack Obama sought to contrast the 2020 platforms of Democrats and Republicans on a critical plank: their stance on the Affordable Care Act. It’s a difference, he argued, that has assumed newfound urgency.

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.

This story can be republished for free (details).

“The Republicans occupying the White House and running the Senate … have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis,” Obama said.

Obama was referring to a couple of GOP policies, the former president’s senior adviser Eric Schultz told KHN. The first: a pending Supreme Court case, Texas v. Azar, in which the Trump administration has argued the 2010 health law should be struck down. Schultz also highlighted the White House’s refusal to provide a special open enrollment period for the ACA health exchanges in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve previously checked claims about President Donald Trump’s stance on the law’s preexisting condition protections — arguably its most popular component ― and his position on the Texas v. Azar lawsuit.

But COVID-19 adds new relevance, because of both the virus’s devastating health implications and bludgeoning impact on the American economy. Indeed, the Trump administration’s handling of the virus crisis is shaping up to be a defining issue in the run-up to November. Meanwhile, Biden made the health care law a signature component of his presidential platform and has been a vocal critic of the administration’s pandemic response.

With that in mind, we decided to take another look.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

The Republican Agenda

Obama is correct: The Republican Party has opposed the ACA for years. In 2016, then-candidate Trump campaigned on its repeal. Since then, the White House and congressional Republicans have pursued an agenda that would dismantle the law’s preexisting condition protections. Republicans haven’t united behind an alternative plan, either.

First: the lawsuit. Texas v. Azar stems from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That measure took the teeth out of the health law’s individual mandate, which required that all Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty. The tax law, pushed by Republicans and signed by Trump, set that penalty to $0.

A collection of Republican states’ attorneys general now argue that, without the penalty, the rest of the health law doesn’t work and should be struck down.

Killing the ACA would eliminate the stipulation that insurance plans cannot charge people more if they have a preexisting condition, get rid of the subsidies it provides for people to buy insurance on the exchanges and gut the Medicaid expansion that, in six years, directly extended coverage to more than 13 million people. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, although it won’t rule until after the November election.

The Trump administration, while technically in the position that would defend the law in court, has declined to support it — a move legal experts say is almost unprecedented.  In fact, the administration has even sided with the states arguing that it should be struck down. Neither the White House nor Senate Republicans have put forth a replacement bill that would maintain the ACA’s protections in the event the high court rules against the law.

We asked the White House if the administration had changed its stance in the wake of the pandemic. Trump’s staff redirected us to the Department of Justice, the federal government’s legal arm. The DOJ did not respond to emailed requests for comment. As recently as the end of March, though, Trump told reporters he still wanted the law “terminated.”

Senate Democrats have pushed the administration to change its position on the lawsuit. But Republicans, who hold the Senate majority, have been silent, a position that hasn’t changed even since COVID-19 effectively shut down large swaths of the country.

In some ways, the Republican stance isn’t important, argued Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank. It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court voting to get rid of the health law, especially in the midst of COVID-19, he said.

Still, that doesn’t change the facts of what Trump is arguing.

And the lawsuit is also only one part of the equation. Another, is healthcare.gov.

Americans who have lost their jobs ― and, often, the insurance that came with it — are eligible to buy insurance on the federal exchange, since job loss is a“qualifying life event” that gets you special access. Those who otherwise lack coverage would normally have to wait until the regular open enrollment period, which takes place at the end of the year. But the threat of COVID-19 has changed the risk for many of these potential shoppers.

In response, 11 states have independently reopened their state-run health exchanges for a special sign-up period. But the administration has declined to take such steps for the national marketplace.

“If you have been uninsured and picked up your newspaper, or turned on your news and realized your health was in much greater risk than you had anticipated, and would like to rush and get health insurance in case you end up on a ventilator ― you’re out of luck,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.

Even before coronavirus, the institute estimated that 32 million Americans were uninsured. About 20 million of them could benefit from a special enrollment period, Blumberg said. Without insurance, coronavirus treatment poses not just a health risk, but also a financial one.

The Trump administration has said it will pay hospitals directly, out of a pool of $100 billion, to cover the cost of treating uninsured people with COVD-19. After treating patients, hospitals would get paid at the Medicare rate.

But the administration’s policy extends only to covering COVID-19 treatment. Uninsured people with underlying chronic conditions don’t have a way to pay for health care, noted Robert Berenson, another Urban Institute fellow. If left untreated, those chronic ailments make COVID-19 far more dangerous than it would be for someone able to get preventive treatment earlier on.

Coronavirus And The ACA

President Trump’s stance raises another question, experts noted. Without the ACA, what kind of impact would COVID-19 have?

Sources:

Barack Obama, endorsement video for Joe Biden, April 14, 2020.

The Daily Beast, “GOP Plows Forward on Plans to Kill Obamacare, Pandemic Be Damned” March 31, 2020

Email interview with Larry Levitt, vice president, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Jonathan Oberlander, chair, Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Eric Schultz, senior adviser to Barack Obama, April 14, 2020

Joe Manchin Senate office, “Letter to President Trump,” Feb. 14, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “Data Note: Limited Navigator Funding for Federal Marketplace States,” Nov. 13, 2019

Kaiser Health News-PolitiFact, “Trump’s claim that he ‘saved’ pre-ex conditions ‘part fantasy, part delusion,’” Jan. 14, 2020

Kaiser Health News-Politifact, “Better than other plans or better than nothing? Trump’s claim about ‘affordable’ options, Feb. 11, 2020

The Hill, “Vulnerable Republicans Dodge Questions on Support for Obamacare Lawsuit,” March 6, 2020

MACPAC, “Medicaid Enrollment Changes Following the ACA,” accessed April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Linda Blumberg, fellow, Urban Institute, April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Robert Berenson, fellow, Urban Institute, April 15, 2020

Telephone interview with Thomas Miller, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2020

Even with the heath law intact, many Americans won’t be able to find affordable health insurance. That particularly applies to people who can’t afford the premiums on the individual marketplace, don’t qualify for federal subsidies or live in one of the 14 states that didn’t opt into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provision.

And the ACA is nowhere near sufficient on its own, Miller noted. Having insurance is part of the picture, but it doesn’t guarantee access to testing or that a hospital will be able to treat you. “On the margins, it does help a little bit to have insurance coverage, but the problem is so much larger than that,” Miller argued.

Still, without the health law, the virus’s impact would be “catastrophic,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Striking the individual marketplace and Medicaid expansion would leave almost another 20 million people uninsured — “at risk,” said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Without the ACA, COVID-19 could be considered a preexisting condition. Insurance companies could charge more to cover people who have previously contracted the virus (assuming, of course, those people can get tested and recorded as having had COVID-19). Plus, emerging evidence suggests severe cases of COVID-19 may leave lingering health consequences, that even after recovery would require ongoing medical care, Levitt said.

“The ACA’s consumer protections ensure that persons with COVID-19 can obtain insurance without fear of being turned away or charged exorbitant premiums because of their preexisting condition,” Oberlander said.

The health law also imposed strict regulations over what insurance must cover. Without those regulations, plans could ― and likely would — revert to skimpier coverage, Blumberg said.

That, she said, means plans that perhaps don’t cover ventilators or branded medicines, or that cap how many days of hospital care they’ll cover, or that require people to pay much more out-of-pocket.

“Insurers, given the legal ability to do it, would limit their legal liability and protect themselves from high claims,” she said. “They did it before and will do it again.”

Our Ruling

Obama accused the Trump administration and Senate Republicans of being “willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Evidence indicates that this is an apt characterization. None have put forth a plan that would maintain coverage or consumer protections ― policies that benefit millions of Americans — if the Supreme Court rules against the ACA. And as Obama asserts, striking down the law without an equivalent replacement could be devastating, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We rate this claim True.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/obama-gops-stance-on-preexisting-conditions-off-base-especially-during-pandemic/

[stephenmccull]

Obama: GOP’s Stance On Preexisting Conditions Off-Base, Especially During Pandemic

Republicans “have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Barack Obama, in his video endorsement of Joe Biden for president, April 14

Endorsing his former vice president, Joe Biden, to win the White House, former President Barack Obama sought to contrast the 2020 platforms of Democrats and Republicans on a critical plank: their stance on the Affordable Care Act. It’s a difference, he argued, that has assumed newfound urgency.

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.

This story can be republished for free (details).

“The Republicans occupying the White House and running the Senate … have shown themselves willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis,” Obama said.

Obama was referring to a couple of GOP policies, the former president’s senior adviser Eric Schultz told KHN. The first: a pending Supreme Court case, Texas v. Azar, in which the Trump administration has argued the 2010 health law should be struck down. Schultz also highlighted the White House’s refusal to provide a special open enrollment period for the ACA health exchanges in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve previously checked claims about President Donald Trump’s stance on the law’s preexisting condition protections — arguably its most popular component ― and his position on the Texas v. Azar lawsuit.

But COVID-19 adds new relevance, because of both the virus’s devastating health implications and bludgeoning impact on the American economy. Indeed, the Trump administration’s handling of the virus crisis is shaping up to be a defining issue in the run-up to November. Meanwhile, Biden made the health care law a signature component of his presidential platform and has been a vocal critic of the administration’s pandemic response.

With that in mind, we decided to take another look.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

The Republican Agenda

Obama is correct: The Republican Party has opposed the ACA for years. In 2016, then-candidate Trump campaigned on its repeal. Since then, the White House and congressional Republicans have pursued an agenda that would dismantle the law’s preexisting condition protections. Republicans haven’t united behind an alternative plan, either.

First: the lawsuit. Texas v. Azar stems from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That measure took the teeth out of the health law’s individual mandate, which required that all Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty. The tax law, pushed by Republicans and signed by Trump, set that penalty to $0.

A collection of Republican states’ attorneys general now argue that, without the penalty, the rest of the health law doesn’t work and should be struck down.

Killing the ACA would eliminate the stipulation that insurance plans cannot charge people more if they have a preexisting condition, get rid of the subsidies it provides for people to buy insurance on the exchanges and gut the Medicaid expansion that, in six years, directly extended coverage to more than 13 million people. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, although it won’t rule until after the November election.

The Trump administration, while technically in the position that would defend the law in court, has declined to support it — a move legal experts say is almost unprecedented.  In fact, the administration has even sided with the states arguing that it should be struck down. Neither the White House nor Senate Republicans have put forth a replacement bill that would maintain the ACA’s protections in the event the high court rules against the law.

We asked the White House if the administration had changed its stance in the wake of the pandemic. Trump’s staff redirected us to the Department of Justice, the federal government’s legal arm. The DOJ did not respond to emailed requests for comment. As recently as the end of March, though, Trump told reporters he still wanted the law “terminated.”

Senate Democrats have pushed the administration to change its position on the lawsuit. But Republicans, who hold the Senate majority, have been silent, a position that hasn’t changed even since COVID-19 effectively shut down large swaths of the country.

In some ways, the Republican stance isn’t important, argued Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank. It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court voting to get rid of the health law, especially in the midst of COVID-19, he said.

Still, that doesn’t change the facts of what Trump is arguing.

And the lawsuit is also only one part of the equation. Another, is healthcare.gov.

Americans who have lost their jobs ― and, often, the insurance that came with it — are eligible to buy insurance on the federal exchange, since job loss is a“qualifying life event” that gets you special access. Those who otherwise lack coverage would normally have to wait until the regular open enrollment period, which takes place at the end of the year. But the threat of COVID-19 has changed the risk for many of these potential shoppers.

In response, 11 states have independently reopened their state-run health exchanges for a special sign-up period. But the administration has declined to take such steps for the national marketplace.

“If you have been uninsured and picked up your newspaper, or turned on your news and realized your health was in much greater risk than you had anticipated, and would like to rush and get health insurance in case you end up on a ventilator ― you’re out of luck,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.

Even before coronavirus, the institute estimated that 32 million Americans were uninsured. About 20 million of them could benefit from a special enrollment period, Blumberg said. Without insurance, coronavirus treatment poses not just a health risk, but also a financial one.

The Trump administration has said it will pay hospitals directly, out of a pool of $100 billion, to cover the cost of treating uninsured people with COVD-19. After treating patients, hospitals would get paid at the Medicare rate.

But the administration’s policy extends only to covering COVID-19 treatment. Uninsured people with underlying chronic conditions don’t have a way to pay for health care, noted Robert Berenson, another Urban Institute fellow. If left untreated, those chronic ailments make COVID-19 far more dangerous than it would be for someone able to get preventive treatment earlier on.

Coronavirus And The ACA

President Trump’s stance raises another question, experts noted. Without the ACA, what kind of impact would COVID-19 have?

Sources:

Barack Obama, endorsement video for Joe Biden, April 14, 2020.

The Daily Beast, “GOP Plows Forward on Plans to Kill Obamacare, Pandemic Be Damned” March 31, 2020

Email interview with Larry Levitt, vice president, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Jonathan Oberlander, chair, Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 15, 2020

Email interview with Eric Schultz, senior adviser to Barack Obama, April 14, 2020

Joe Manchin Senate office, “Letter to President Trump,” Feb. 14, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “Data Note: Limited Navigator Funding for Federal Marketplace States,” Nov. 13, 2019

Kaiser Health News-PolitiFact, “Trump’s claim that he ‘saved’ pre-ex conditions ‘part fantasy, part delusion,’” Jan. 14, 2020

Kaiser Health News-Politifact, “Better than other plans or better than nothing? Trump’s claim about ‘affordable’ options, Feb. 11, 2020

The Hill, “Vulnerable Republicans Dodge Questions on Support for Obamacare Lawsuit,” March 6, 2020

MACPAC, “Medicaid Enrollment Changes Following the ACA,” accessed April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Linda Blumberg, fellow, Urban Institute, April 14, 2020

Telephone interview with Robert Berenson, fellow, Urban Institute, April 15, 2020

Telephone interview with Thomas Miller, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2020

Even with the heath law intact, many Americans won’t be able to find affordable health insurance. That particularly applies to people who can’t afford the premiums on the individual marketplace, don’t qualify for federal subsidies or live in one of the 14 states that didn’t opt into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provision.

And the ACA is nowhere near sufficient on its own, Miller noted. Having insurance is part of the picture, but it doesn’t guarantee access to testing or that a hospital will be able to treat you. “On the margins, it does help a little bit to have insurance coverage, but the problem is so much larger than that,” Miller argued.

Still, without the health law, the virus’s impact would be “catastrophic,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Striking the individual marketplace and Medicaid expansion would leave almost another 20 million people uninsured — “at risk,” said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Without the ACA, COVID-19 could be considered a preexisting condition. Insurance companies could charge more to cover people who have previously contracted the virus (assuming, of course, those people can get tested and recorded as having had COVID-19). Plus, emerging evidence suggests severe cases of COVID-19 may leave lingering health consequences, that even after recovery would require ongoing medical care, Levitt said.

“The ACA’s consumer protections ensure that persons with COVID-19 can obtain insurance without fear of being turned away or charged exorbitant premiums because of their preexisting condition,” Oberlander said.

The health law also imposed strict regulations over what insurance must cover. Without those regulations, plans could ― and likely would — revert to skimpier coverage, Blumberg said.

That, she said, means plans that perhaps don’t cover ventilators or branded medicines, or that cap how many days of hospital care they’ll cover, or that require people to pay much more out-of-pocket.

“Insurers, given the legal ability to do it, would limit their legal liability and protect themselves from high claims,” she said. “They did it before and will do it again.”

Our Ruling

Obama accused the Trump administration and Senate Republicans of being “willing to cut millions off their health insurance and eliminate preexisting condition protections for millions more, even in the middle of this public health crisis.”

Evidence indicates that this is an apt characterization. None have put forth a plan that would maintain coverage or consumer protections ― policies that benefit millions of Americans — if the Supreme Court rules against the ACA. And as Obama asserts, striking down the law without an equivalent replacement could be devastating, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We rate this claim True.

Obama: GOP’s Stance On Preexisting Conditions Off-Base, Especially During Pandemic published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[mikemortgage]

10 things people still get wrong about the Financial Crisis

One of the most intriguing aspects of the 2007-09 financial crisis is how little understanding there is of what actually occurred. Some of this has to do with the complexities of the event, as well as how hard it is to identify forces lurking below the surface that had built up over the years.

Even a decade later, many people still cling to false ideas about the underlying causes (there wasn’t just one, folks!) of the crisis. What follows are my 10 favorite flawed memes, misunderstandings and just outright falsehoods about the financial crisis and its aftermath:

  A financial news update in Canary Wharf on September 15, 2008 in London, England.

No. 1. Lehman’s collapse caused the crisis: “If only we had saved Lehman Brothers, we could have avoided the crisis,” goes a popular lament. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale of the dislocations. To accept this premise — former Lehman employees are some of the loudest apostles of this theory — then one has to pretend an entire universe of other issues didn’t exist.

Lehman, like Bear Stearns before it, suffered from many of the same issues that afflicted most of the U.S.’s other big banks and brokers: too much junk paper, too much leverage, too little capital and deficient risk controls. Lehman was simply among the most overleveraged and undercapitalized of the lot.

No. 2. If not for X, we would have been OK: Take your pick of things to insert here, but it’s important to understand that this was not a single event, but rather the result of many factors that came together over time. These include: the Federal Reserve’s ultralow interest rates, a fundamentally weak recovery from the dot-com collapse, the housing boom and bust, huge amounts of financial leverage, securitization of mortgages, the embrace of derivatives and reckless deregulation of the financial industry that enabled much of the above, and more. No. 3. Repeal of Glass-Steagall: The argument is that in the decades after Glass-Steagall was enacted during the Great Depression, Wall Street crises were confined to Wall Street and didn’t spill onto Main Street. See as examples the 1987 stock-market crash or the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. But the causative issue we run into to is the but-for test. Would we have had a crisis if Glass-Steagall were still in place? I don’t see how we can make that claim. Perhaps had Glass-Steagall not been repealed, the crisis might have been smaller, but it is very hard to say it wouldn’t have occurred anyway.

People rally in the financial district against the proposed government buyout of financial firms September 25, 2008 in New York City.

No. 4. Bailouts were the only option: There were many other options, but they would have been very painful and required considerable foresight. I believed then (and still believe) that the best course of action would have been prepackaged bankruptcies for all the insolvent institutions instead of bailouts. I would have had the federal government provide debtor-in-possession financing, allowed qualified private institutional investors to bid on the assets thereby letting markets set the valuations, with the government picking up the rest. It would have been more difficult in the short term, but the economy would have rebounded much sooner.

No. 5. Taxpayers were repaid in full and even made a profit: There are two major issues with this claim: The first is that the Troubled Asset Relief Program and most other loans and bailouts were all (or almost all) repaid. But to make that happen, the federal government in a move questioned by tax experts allowed failed American International Group to carry forward the net operating losses for use to offset future earnings; this was a stealth bailout worth tens of billions of dollars that didn’t appear to “cost” anything. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve kept rates at zero for almost a decade. This resulted in a huge transfer from savers to bailed-out lenders.

The federal government also took a huge amount of risk during a period when financial markets tripled. And that is before we account for all of the collateral losses and moral hazards we created.

No. 6. No one went to jail because stupidity isn’t a crime: This one is laugher, from the behavior of the executives at Lehman Brothers to all of the foreclosure fraud that took place. Jesse Eisinger, author of “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives,” explained how the white-collar defence bar successfully lobbied and undercut the Department of Justice during the years before the crisis. You can’t convict a criminal if you don’t have the personnel, intellectual firepower or stomach to prosecute in the first place.

An abandoned home stands behind a padlocked gate April 29, 2008 in Stockton, California.

No. 7. Borrowers were as blameworthy as lenders: First, we know that for huge swaths of the banking industry, the basis for lending changed in the run-up to the crisis. For most of financial history, credit was granted based on the borrower’s ability to repay. In the years before the crisis, the incentive to lend shifted: It was based not on the likelihood of repayment but on whether a loan could be sold to someone else, often a securities firm, which would repackage the loan with other loans to create a mortgage-backed security. Selling 30-year mortgages with a 90-day warranty changes the calculus for who qualifies: just find a warm body that will make the first three payments; after that it’s someone else’s problem.

Second, we know that if you offer people free money, they will take it. This is among the reasons we have banking regulations in the first place. We expect the banking professionals to understand risk better than the unwashed masses.

No. 8. Poor people caused the crisis: This is another intellectually dishonest claim. If any U.S. legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act was the actual cause of the crisis, then the boom and bust wouldn’t have been global. Second, if poor people and these policies were the cause, then the crisis would have been centered in South Philadelphia; Harlem, New York; Oakland, California; and Atlanta instead of the burgeoning suburbs of Las Vegas, Southern California, Florida and Arizona. The folks making this argument seem to have questionable motivations.

No. 9. The Fed made a mistake by stepping in when Congress refused: Congress is the governmental entity that should have done more in response to the crisis. But it didn’t, and all of those members who opposed efforts to repair the economy and financial system should have been thrown out of office. The Fed gave cover to Congress, creating congressional moral hazard and allowing it to shirk its responsibilities. We don’t know how the world would have looked if that hadn’t happened, but I imagine it would be significantly different than it does today — and not necessarily better.

No. 10. Lehman could have been saved: This is perhaps the most delusional of all the claims. Lehman was insolvent. We know this from an accounting sleight-of-hand it performed called Repo 105, in which it which “sold” US$50 billion in holdings to an entity it owned, booked a profit just before quarterly earnings, then repurchased the holdings. The sleuthing done by hedge-fund manager David Einhorn reached the same conclusion about Lehman’s solvency long before the collapse; the Fed itself also made clear that it couldn’t take on Lehman’s losses.

When people stubbornly refuse to acknowledge facts, when they insist on staying married to their own faulty belief system, it becomes very challenging to respond with sound policies. As a society, the sooner we reckon with reality, the sooner we can begin to avoid disasters like the financial crisis.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Barry Ritholtz is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He founded Ritholtz Wealth Management and was chief executive and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

Bloomberg.com

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2NLEtvS via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[jscottscales]

Once eyed as a tool for fighting Obamacare, state waivers hit limitations

A provision of Obamacare that opponents once saw as a potential loophole allowing a Republican president to unravel the law by executive order is now being used by some states to steady their shaky Obamacare markets.

Since the inception of Obamacare, "state innovation waivers," which ostensibly provide states with some flexibility to experiment with different ways to provide healthcare for their residents, were eyed by those seeking to repeal the law. During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, Mitt Romney repeatedly vowed that if elected, "On Day One I would issue an executive order paving the way for Obamacare waivers to all 50 states." Early in the Trump administration, officials saw the waivers as a backup plan to ease Obamacare regulations if congressional repeal efforts were unsuccessful.

In reality, the mechanism, also known as a "1332 waiver" due to the relevant section of the law, comes with significant limitations that prevent presidents from issuing broad orders allowing states to get around Obamacare's regulations wholesale. Instead, applications have to meet specific criteria to be approved. The changes states ask for cannot increase the federal deficit, and they cannot cause more people to become uninsured, increase the cost of coverage, or reduce benefits. They can be approved for up to five years, but must be renewed later.

“The idea is to give states more flexibility, but it’s flexibility in service of the goals of the Affordable Care Act,” said Justin Giovannelli, project director at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

Last year, as states faced rising premiums and uncertainty over Obamacare's future, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price cast the waivers as a way to help “alleviate the burdens of the Affordable Care Act” that could “lower premiums for consumers, improve market stability, and increase consumer choice.”

He singled out waivers on reinsurance or high-risk pools, which allow government dollars to pay for high medical costs so premiums can go down.

At least 35 states have considered bills to start applications, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. State officials haven't always been sure about what type of applications the Trump administration would greenlight, but so far, four waivers have been accepted, three of which were for reinsurance. Three more states have applied for similar programs, which are bipartisan and aimed at lowering premiums.

But efforts to overhaul Obamacare through these waivers, whether sliding the law to the right or left, have proved elusive. This is partially because some states tried to apply for waivers without following the rules, whether trying to move too quickly or not meeting the law's requirements.

“Finding a balance that falls into those guardrails and allows states to meet their policy goals is not as easy as states would have thought,” said Daniel Meuse, deputy director for State Health and Value Strategies.

While the GOPhas for years framed waivers as a way for states to get out of Obamacare, Democrats say waivers can protect against actions Republicans have taken to unravel the law.

But officials on both sides of the political spectrum are running into the realities of how limited the waivers are. That’s attributablein part tothe intent of the tool: It was never supposed to be an exit route from Obamacare, indicates its author, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

“I created state innovation waivers to give pioneering states the opportunity to go above and beyond the strong consumer protections in the ACA — some have already taken advantage to blunt the impact of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign of sabotage against Americans’ healthcare,” Wyden said. “This law gives states a chance to do better, not worse.”

The waivers must follow a specific process that starts with lawmakers passing a bill that then receives feedback and hearings with the public. States assemble reports on spending, the anticipated outcome, and how the plan will be put into place. They then put the information together in an application that goes to the federal government, which holds another public comment period, before rejecting or signing off on the idea.

The process has been a roadblock to approval. The Trump administration told Ohio that it had not met requirements earlier this year and determined the application was incomplete. In rejecting the Massachusetts plan last year, federal officials noted the application wasn’t submitted enough in advance as stipulated in the rules.

Jason Lefferts, spokesman for the Massachusetts Health Connector, said the commonwealth was “always considering ways to use state flexibility to best implement an exchange that provides the broadest access to affordable coverage” but wasn’t looking at seeking another waiver now.

The application process is part of the problem, believes Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He asked the Trump administration in a recent letter to toss certain application rules, set by the Obama administration, noting state officials have labeled the process "too cumbersome, inflexible, and expensive."

The administration should create a "fast-track" approval for states facing an emergency, and should move quicker when states want to copy others, Alexander said. Along with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Alexander tried to pass a bill that would have provided more flexibility in creating waivers, but the efforts are at an impasse because lawmakers disagree over abortion funding.

Certain states view the waivers as an opportunity to take the law into their own hands in the face of Washington inaction that has contributed to higher premiums. Wisconsin, for instance, cites this reason behind its reinsurance application.

“Wisconsin is stepping up to add stability to a healthcare mess left after Obamacare that Washington has not fixed,” said Amy Hasenberg, press secretary for GOP Gov. Scott Walker.

Iowa’s waiver tested the limits of what could be allowed. The state tried to set up a reinsurance fund but also wanted to create cheaper health plans that fell outside of Obamacare to entice young people. Legal experts said the application couldn’t pass because it didn’t follow the correct process or meet the requirements that say coverage must be as extensive as Obamacare.

Doug Ommen, Iowa's insurance commissioner, acknowledged certain older adults would have paid more but that the status quowas leaving too many young people uninsured.

The state ultimately determined the waiver rules were inflexible for what they planned and withdrew the idea. Ommen, a Republican, said Iowa may take another shot, but that reinsurance alone was inadequate.

"Reinsurance doesn't solve the underlying problem," he said. "The structure is bad ... States shouldn’t pay for something to prop up the ACA when the structure itself isn’t working."

Adding to the complications with Iowa was that President Trump intervened against the waiver, the Washington Post reported. Still, there had long been doubts about its legality.

"I would agree that out of Washington there has been a fair amount of starts and stops," Ommen said. "But ultimately the law has to be changed. It’s not going to be fixed by waivers."

Similar confusion happened elsewhere. Oklahoma pulled its reinsurance plan in September after the Trump administration passed its deadline. Wyden sent a letter to HHS accusing the agency of not following through on helping states as promised. In reply, the administration said the timing to meet all the requirements had been “challenging.”

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, told the Trump administration that the experience of applying for reinsurance was “nightmarish.” He noted Minnesota followed all instructions, but waited longer than expected only to discover funding for another healthcare program would be cut.

“The program is certainly not designed to be a quick fix to what one might describe as an emergency situation,” Giovannelli said. “That’s just not the way it’s set up.”

Still, some signs show the applications are moving faster. Andrew Ratner, chief of staff for the Maryland Health Benefits Exchange, said the state faced no troubles with its reinsurance application.

“I don’t think it was laborious,” he said of the process, which was carried out over roughly six weeks from the time a bill was signed to filing the application. “We have good communication with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”

Blue states that have tried to use waivers to expand on Obamacare are hitting barriers, too. Vermont, for instance, tried to set up a single-payer system, but officials abandoned the effort after they realized they couldn’t find a way to pay for it. Because of the waiver’s specifications, Vermont officials couldn’t ask the federal government to kick in more funding.

“It’s a combination of the deficit guardrail and the realities of the healthcare system,” Meuse said. “Making changes with a large but limited number of federal dollars often requires state investment.”

Other states, including New Mexico, are considering using waivers to create a “public option” that would allow people to buy into Medicaid.

Though politics are another factor at play. California had filed a plan under the Obama administration to allow immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally to join the exchange, but not receive subsidies. State officials withdrew the waiver when Trump was elected, out of concern the data would be used for deportations.

“It’s a resource-intensive application process,” Meuse said of the waivers. “For a state to be willing to go through with it, they will have to look at all factors, the policy factors and the political factors.”

Source

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/once-eyed-as-a-tool-for-fighting-obamacare-state-waivers-hit-limitations

[oldguardaudio]

AR15.com NewsLetter -> Shopping for Custom Leather Holsters

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Issue 1804    

AR15.com News April 2018

If there’s one thing I would ask of all of you to do today, it is to click the link right below and contact your lawmakers to oppose any attacks on the Second Amendment.

It takes 30 seconds or less start to finish.

Simply enter your info and then the page will select your representatives and provide you with a form letter so all you need to do is hit SEND. Took me less than 10 seconds, and I urge all of you to do the same.

Ask Your Lawmakers to Oppose New Gun Control

NRA ANNUAL MEETING Next month is the NRA Annual Meeting, and it’s being held in Dallas, Texas.

This year promises to be interesting, with the number of people threatening to protest.

I know many of you are unhappy with some of the NRAs recent comments, but they are the best organization we have to support the 2A.

So rather than protest, or start social media campaigns, let’s steer the NRA to where it should be.

The Annual Meeting is the best opportunity you will have to gain access to the board members, voice your opinion, and let them know what you as a member would like to see.

Complaining is not the solution. Doing something about it is, so hope to see you there.

GIVEAWAY Winners of the NightGoggles Night Stalker Carbon Fiber Shooting Tripods are announced in this newsletter!

VIDEOS Below we’ve highlighted all the new videos since our last newsletter. We’ve got more ammo and product tests for you.

Gunstruction

If you haven’t planned a future build with us, swing by and give it a try!

Or if you are more of a mobile fan, we have mobile apps available for iOS and Android users.

We thank you for your continued support, and don’t forget that we can only make this possible through you-the firearms community, and the support of our partnered companies!

Please feel free to give us feedback in our forum or visit us at our Facebook page.

If you make an AR15 or AR308 or Remington 700 rifle and would like to get your rifles or parts into GUNSTRUCTION, please feel free to contact us at: info@gunstruction.net.

Custom Leather Holsters I recently went shopping for holsters, and as expected, being left-handed AND carrying something other than one of the big brand popular production pistols makes it hard to find a holster sitting on the shelf.

Kydex is an easier option, and there are many great companies that can make something quickly. But this time I chose to go with a leather holster. Perhaps I’m getting old and starting to appreciate the old-world craft of making a fine leather holster, or perhaps I’m starting to have a hard time sorting through the dozens of Kydex holsters I have, but I definitely wanted leather this time around.

My current carry is a Wilson Combat EDC-X9. For those not familiar with it, it’s a compact 4″ barrel double-stack 1911-style pistol in 9mm. Magazine capacity is 15+1, and I chose to have a railed version with an ambi-safety. (you can click on the images at the right to see a larger version)

So I had to sort through the many custom leathersmiths that are out there. Not many have experience with the EDC-X9 as it’s a fairly new pistol and not one produced in great numbers. A little research led me to a few highly-recommended individuals, and in the end, I chose Paul at Warbird Leathersmiths.

Now Paul does not have a website (that I could find), so you have to contact him via email.

He sent me a link to a photo gallery of his work, and I created a custom combination of exactly what I wanted. I ended up going with an IWB/OWB holster made with two shades of elephant. This is a very cool looking holster that can be worn IWB but you’d probably wear OWB most of the time due to the exotic leathers. It is really a functional work of art.

Paul does not make holsters for guns with a light, so my next step was to find someone who did, as I also wanted a holster to carry with the attached OLight PL-Mini I’m liking more and more the longer I use it.

He recommended Rocky at PureKustom, and I chose one of his IWB/OWB Black-Ops Pro holsters in a dark brown leather.

Rocky can make a holster for anything: pistols with lights, red dot sights, extended barrels, you name it, and he can do it. Plus his holsters are very versatile and can be worn and adjusted to get exactly what you want.

While it comes with a couple of leather loops for IWB carry, I ended up switching them out for a set of plastic clips that I could more easily put on and take off without removing my belt. Just a matter of convenience, but since I wear it every day, and often change clothes during the day, this makes things easier.

Both Paul and Rocky were excellent to deal with, and their work speaks for itself as does their loyal following. They are not volume manufacturers, so expect to wait a few weeks when you place your order, but I can highly recommend both individuals if you’re looking for a high-quality leather holster.

New ARFCOM Videos Varmint Bullets For Defense? .300AAC 110gr V-Max Gel Test

Nikon M Tactical Scope

Testing The Army’s 7.62mm Wonder Bullet: M80A1 Reduced Velocity Gel Test

Lightweight 10mm and 45ACP Carbines Silenced

MK319 Reduced Velocity Gel Test – How does it compare to the Army’s M80A1?

Direct from Modern-Musket / NRA-ILA Updates Unfriendly Skies: Delta CEO Claims Bashing NRA Members is Good Business

In the wake of the Parkland, Florida, murders, there has been an unusual amount of anti-gun and anti-NRA commentary by private corporations with plenty of problems of their own.

In February, Delta announced it was ending a discount program for passengers who used the airline to travel to the NRA’s 2018 Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas. The move had nothing to do with any problems Delta itself experienced with the NRA or its members, but supposedly came in response to what the airline called “the current national debate over gun control amid recent school shootings.” Bizarrely, Delta characterized its decision to link innocent NRA members with school shootings and to punish them by reneging on a contract as a reflection of its “neutral status” and an attempt to “refrain from entering this debate.”

Bailed-out Banks Launch Coordinated Attack on Law-abiding Gun Owners

There is growing evidence that some of America’s financial elite want to create a world in which America’s public policy decisions emanate from corporate boardrooms in Manhattan rather than from citizens and their elected officials. This was demonstrated in recent weeks when both Citigroup and Bank of America announced changes to their corporate guidelines aimed at preventing law-abiding Americans from exercising their constitutional rights.

So They’re Not Coming for Our Guns, Eh? We call BS.

Why do we even have the Second Amendment?

Because British tyrants came for the Founders’ guns, and the Founders knew, given the chance, overreaching officials in the U.S. would do the same thing.

Now, some believe that chance has finally come.

Dissenting Justice in the Heller Case Now Argues for Repeal of the Second Amendment.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was on the losing side of District of. Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Supreme Court case that clearly recognized the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms independent of service in an organized militia. Stevens wrote a lengthy dissent, insisting that the framers of the amendment showed not “the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms.”

Years later, Stevens wrote a book which argued in favor of amending the Second Amendment to reverse the Heller decision and give his side the win. On Tuesday, however, Stevens dropped the pretense of believing the Second Amendment has any value at all, arguing in a New York Times editorial that the concerns which underlie the amendment are a “relic of the 18th century” and that it should be repealed in its entirety.

Keep Calm and Carry On: Pro-Gun Sentiment Reasserts Itself in Wake of Antigun Blitz

Like the long-delayed coming of spring to the Mid-Atlantic, evidence is appearing that Americans are regaining their senses and reverting to an instinctual embrace of freedom after a withering barrage of some the nastiest and most ugly anti-gun campaigning in memory.

There is nothing more predictable than the tendency of gun control advocates to exploit a tragedy. Yet the post-Parkland media and activist blitz still managed to dubiously distinguish itself for its intensity, its hyperbole, its vitriol, its shrillness, and perhaps for its overreach.

AR15.com NewsLetter -> Shopping for Custom Leather Holsters AR15.com NewsLetter -> Shopping for Custom Leather Holsters Issue 1804     AR15.com News April 2018 If there's one thing I would ask of all of you to do today, it is to click the link right below and contact your lawmakers to oppose any attacks on the Second Amendment.

[manipulative-media]

Why do They Want us to know this?: News Media’s Framing of the Opioid Crisis

For Americans under the age of 50, drug overdose is the leading cause of death. The New York Times estimates that drugs claimed the lives of over 59,000 Americans in 2016, a 19 percent increase from the previous year. Since the emergence of this issue, now described as an epidemic, the news media has covered hundreds of thousands of stories regarding opioid abuse. Dr. Emma McGinty from the Department of Health Policy and Management led a team of researchers who examined the content of such stories released between 1998 and 2012. Her results suggest that the news media may have had a profound effect on the consensus of the general public. The study identifies different approaches used by news media providers to emphasize specific features of opioid abuse in America. An author’s process of presenting a certain viewpoint of a much larger story is known as framing.

https://twitter.com/9gag/status/570199000114188288

This image illustrates how news media sources have the ability to tell a story in a manner that benefits their specific application of that story. 

Frames can be made evident through a process of evaluation called framing analysis. A key component to framing analysis is exposing the distresses a news story chooses to highlight, then recognizing who the story deems responsible for such distress. News stories are closely related to narratives because they combine factual information with implicit messages. The news media conglomerate controls what its society sees and thus influences how they feel about events that shape their understanding of the world. Media framing, combined with an individual’s personal experience, and social exchanges, come together to form a person’s opinions on an issue. Framing analysis gives news consumers the ability to distinguish how the media wants them to perceive an event. The opioid crisis has been reported through a number of different frames as communicated by the news media’s terminologies and reiteration of standpoints. Most opioid news frames seem to be episodic, meaning the content of the article focusses on specific circumstances relating to the opioid crisis, rather than taking the overarching condition of the issue into account.

As the death toll from drug overdoses continue to rise, it is crucial for policy-makers and news media outlets to present opioid addiction as a treatable disease. The social stigma toward addiction that has been instigated by the news media’s framing of opioid abuse needs to change if we want to make any headway in suppressing the epidemic. The news media’s coverage of the opioid crisis sways people’s opinions of addicts and policy-makers who are responsible for finding a solution. This paper intends to identify frames employed by news media sources in reports involving opioid abuse; through this framing analysis, I aim to enhance the readers understanding of the sheer impact that news media sources have on society, as it pertains to the opioid crisis.

Framing analysis is an important tool within the field of communication because it allows researchers to study how trends in the media effect society as a whole. The media and the news that derive from its sources facilitate people’s interpretation of the world. When a multi-faceted story reveals itself, it is broken down and interpreted frame by frame for the purpose of supporting different viewpoints and ideas. The framing theory suggests that information bearers present certain pieces of information and disregard the rest, for the purpose of supporting a much larger concept. A study published in the Journal of African American Media Studies executed a framing analysis of comments made by readers responding to the Cape Argus newspapers coverage of the Green Point Stadium construction. The building project was a conflicting topic of debate for Cape Town residents in 2007. The stadium would be used for tournament play in the 2010 World Cup, which projected to bring national attention and economic growth to the city. Cape Argus newspaper chose to cover stories that depicted a harmful image of the stadium. Readers’ comments on Argus’ news articles reveal conflicting racial, class, political and sporting identities in South Africa. The study examines Cape Argus’ news reports through an environmental and racial affairs frame. In one news article, the Cape Argus newspaper releases statements from CEPA (Cape Town Environmental Protection Association), claiming that the organization had acted “in the public interest and those whose environmental and administrative justice rights under the constitution have been violated” (Chuma, 2012). This was in reference of CEPA’s attempt to halt the Green Point Stadium building project. The racial divide stems from citizen’s contradictory opinions of the stadium. The study claims that “supporters of the soccer stadium identified or sought to identify themselves as Black and working class/poor while opponents of the stadium came across as wealthy, or at least well-off, Whites” (Chuma, 2012). These assumptions were supported by readers’ comments that hurled insults at the opposition. For example, one comment reads, “only a bunch of old white dinosaurs were opposed to the stadium” (Chuma, 2012). The study analyzes these news reports through an environmental frame since conservationism efforts were the primary focus of the opposition’s argument.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/business/global/hip-cities-that-think-about-how-they-work.html

The news media’s framing of the opioid crisis exists so that its effects can be broken down into different areas of concentration; in my analysis I address frames such as, health, resource (cost), economy, and politics. Essentially, different media outlets uncover and interpret information varyingly depending on the underlying purposes of their news story. The opioid epidemic has provided media outlets with an extensive amount of content that can be used to highlight their implicit messages. This capacity gives news media conglomerates an opportunity to use opioid abuse stories to take on related matters such as, healthcare- reform, funding, policy-procedure, or issues that plague the American economy. “By highlighting certain aspects of issues, the news media can influence how the public and policy makers perceive the causes of and appropriate responses to a given issue” (McGinty, 2016).

The media frequently criticizes the healthcare industry for enabling the opioid epidemic and profiting off those who became addicted to prescription painkillers. Weather its doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies, treatment centers etc. news stories often blame healthcare providers for the opioid crisis when reporting from a health frame. This sort of causal framing intends to hold someone responsible for the issues it presents. When news stories pertaining to the opioid crisis hold one person/organization solely responsible, people believe the issue is less complex than it actually is. Consequently, news media consumers who don’t conduct framing analysis's have a much narrower view of the issue and are easily influenced to support underdeveloped solutions that fail to address the overarching problem.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=ee55c2b13c399f8c6fcdbe8e7df0365d

A broad view of the primary verbiage used in a NY Times article that defends pain patients who’ve experienced backlash from insurance companies that now refuse to cover their opioid medications.

In an article from ProPublica, the author presents a limited view of the opioid crisis in her attempt to demoralize United HealthCare’s handling of specific cases regarding substance abuse. The article uses framing techniques to deem insurance companies responsible for patient suffering. The report highlights a particular case involving a woman who experienced difficulties getting coverage for her opioid medicine to alleviate the “stabbing pain in her abdomen.” The woman, whose name is Alisa Erkes, along with her pain specialist, Dr. Jordan Tate were interviewed about the negative experience she had with United HealthCare. Matt Wiggin, a spokesman for United HealthCare and Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a critic of extensive opioid prescribing were also interviewed. The author’s choice and assemblage of quotations is a clear indication of media framing. Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University was quoted talking about the current insurance system, asserting that she believes it is “one of the major causes of the [opioid] crisis” (Thomas, 2017). The terminology used by the author makes all insurance companies seem greedy and immoral, which speaks to her audiences insights. Moreover, the report incorporates an expense frame to further emphasize how unacceptably costly it is for patients to obtain their opioid medications because their insurance providers no longer cover the drug. Frontline made a documentary called “Chasing Heroin” that focuses on specific stories of individuals who became addicted to heroin as a result of doctor’s overprescribing painkillers. The documentary appeals to viewer’s emotions more so than their cognitions since it focuses on people’s lives and the consequences of their addiction.

In order to produce viable solutions to the opioid crisis, resources need to be identified and accurately accounted for. Such resources include, treatment centers, medical personnel, education, and the one thing that makes it all possible, money. The news media continuously reports on the opioid crisis through a cost frame. Since articles on the opioid crisis intend to propose definitive solutions to multi-billion dollar problems, they need to present expenses and anticipate the cost of resources. In an editorial piece that evaluates the impact of repealing the affordable care act, the authors disclose the devastatingly high number of addicts who aren’t able to receive treatment because they cannot afford it. “1 in 10 Americans with substance use disorders receive treatment. Nearly one-third of all those who did not seek treatment cite cost or lack of insurance coverage as a reason” (Wen, 2017). The article goes on to describe the importance of Medicaid in regard to treating opioid addiction. The authors conclude that preserving Medicaid is ultimately the most cost-effective solution to the opioid crisis. “No matter what, the American people will bear the cost of this epidemic-either by paying for treatment now or by paying for the medical, economic, and social consequences of denying it later” (Wen, 2017). The article influences the reader’s opinions of Medicaid as a cost-effective healthcare supplier. A New York Times article confronting president Trump’s announcement of the opioid crisis as a “national emergency,” (Haberman, 2017) implements a resource and political frame. The political frame stems from Haberman’s choice to focus on the inactivity of the president since his proclamations about “spending a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis” (Haberman, 2017).  

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/30/trump-sells-snake-oil-on-opioids#.8O3LbpxKe

This graphic depicts president Trump’s unsympathetic policy on drug abuse as framed by Maria Mcfarland Sánchez-Moreno, author of “Trump sells snake oil on opioids.”

News media’s coverage of opioids often present politically motivated frames that influence the public’s perception of policymakers and other government officials. Depending on political dynamics, a news story may choose to concentrate on the abuse of opioids as an issue of criminal activity or as a treatable health condition. Despite rumors of fake news, the framing of stories released through the media matter not only to the news consuming public but to politicians as well. Haberman’s New York Times article draws attention to Trump’s unfulfilled promises and undisclosed diplomacies on the subject of funding crucial resources used to treat the opioid crisis in America. Although the president has declared the opioid crisis to be a state of national emergency, the media commonly frames opioid abuse as an issue of criminal justice. “Among stories mentioning any cause, illicit drug dealing was mentioned most frequently (57% of news stories)” (McGinty, 2016). The negative portrayal of the opioid crisis further intensifies the social stigma that addicts have a choice. The news media’s application of Trump’s comments on drug policy, in a politically framed [opioid crisis] news articles tend to support left-wing enthusiasts. The media’s uncovering of evidences, as it pertains to the opioid crisis and politics, allow news media sources to sway the public’s discernment of political representatives. In a Washington Post article, the author exhausts all attempts to deprecate president Trumps attitudes toward the war on drugs. The article employs an all-out offensive on the credibility of the president, I’d label the line of attack as using a Trump’s a racially motivated bigot frame. The author assesses Trump’s judicial approach to the opioid crisis saying he’s “ignored the public health-focused recommendations of [his] own opioids commission by invoking the language of law and order” (McFarland, 2017).

An economic frame is an important and rather rare frame to use in regard to the opioid crisis because it recognizes the direct impact of opioid abuse on the job market. An opinion piece from NPR titled “Opioid Crisis Looms over Job Market, Worrying Employers and Economists” focuses on manufactures who have had to outsource for employees because of widespread opioid use in the workplace. This economic frame used by the author of this article provides readers with a more complete perspective of the consequences caused by the opioid crisis.

We know employers who just don't want to know, Miller says. 'Don't drug test them, we don't want to know.' It's not necessarily the best practice, but it is something that they do because they need people, and they need them so badly. (Noguchi, 2017)

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/07/545602212/opioid-crisis-looms-over-job-market-worrying-employers-and-economists

This graphic reveals the estimated impact that substance abuse has recently had on the American workforce environment. 

Statistics show the decline in the percentages of American workers since the dawn of the opioid epidemic. CEO’s of manufacturing companies are interviewed and asked about their drug policies. Although they claim to have a zero-tolerance drug policy, they admit it would be challenging to find labor if that were entirely true.

Having an awareness that media framing exists and sustaining the ability to conduct a framing analysis is critical to understanding the underlying concepts that are present in the news media. The removal of biases and concealed agendas allow news consumers to candidly retain their own opinions while simultaneously cultivating other people’s perceptions. Overconsumption of the news media can alter standpoints to reflect ideologies dissimilar from our own natural reactions and responses. Debating who’s to blame for the opioid crisis will not incite change. The news media has an important role to play in determining future standpoints of this national epidemic. Negatively portraying addicts and pointing fingers will not save lives or create new resources. Motivating everyday citizens to contribute their time, effort, and money to assist family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, or strangers who struggle with addiction is highly positive frame to incorporate in a news story. If the news media takes a more positive approach on the topic of the opioid crisis, people may be more inclined to make change rather than waiting for someone or something to happen.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=ee55c2b13c399f8c6fcdbe8e7df0365d

The bulk terminology found in Dr. Emma McGinty’s examination of the news media’s framing effect on the opioid crisis. Terminology is a critical aspect of framing theory. Consider what gives a news story its newness.