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The Commentariat -- Nov. 12, 2013
CW: Evidently, you can't post a comment today. I just tried, & my test comment disappeared. I'll contact my host to see what's wrong this time. ...
... Update: Oh, thank goodness -- it's a "known issue."
Tom Tomorrow for Daily Kos.Reed Abelson, et al., of the New York Times: "Some major health insurers are so worried about the Obama administration's ability to fix its troubled health care website that they are pushing the government to create a shortcut that would allow them to enroll people entitled to subsidies directly rather than through the federal system. The idea is only one of several being discussed in a frantic effort to find a way around the technological problems that teams of experts are urgently trying to resolve." ...
... Amy Goldstein & Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post: "Roughly 40,000 Americans have signed up for private insurance through the flawed federal online insurance marketplace since it opened six weeks ago, according to two people with access to the figures. That amount is a tiny fraction of the total projected enrollment for the 36 states where the federal government is running the online health-care exchange, indicating the slow start to the president's initiative." ...
... Caroline Humer of Reuters: "President Barack Obama's healthcare reform has reached only about 3 percent of its enrollment target for 2014 in 12 U.S. states where new online health insurance marketplaces are mostly working smoothly.... States with functioning exchanges have signed up 49,100 people compared with the 1.4 million people expected to be enrolled for 2014, according to the report by healthcare research and consultancy firm Avalere Health." ...
... Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP: "The underdog of government health care programs is emerging as the rare early success story of President Barack Obama's technologically challenged health overhaul. Often dismissed, Medicaid has signed up 444,000 people in 10 states in the six weeks since open enrollment began, according to Avalere Health, a market analysis firm that compiled data from those states. Twenty-five states are expanding their Medicaid programs, but data for all of them was not available.... A big reason for the disparity [in enrollment]: In 36 states, the new private plans are being offered through a malfunctioning federal website that continues to confound potential customers. And state-run websites have not been uniformly glitch-free."
Julie Pace of the AP: " President Barack Obama's hopes for a nuclear deal with Iran now depend in part on his ability to keep a lid on both hard-liners on Capitol Hill and anxious allies abroad, including Israel, the Arab Gulf states and even France."
Tony Barboza of the Los Angeles Times: "Climate change will disrupt not only the natural world but also society, posing risks to the world's economy and the food and water supply and contributing to violent conflict, an international panel of scientists says. The warnings came in a report drafted by the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 29-page summary, leaked and posted on a blog critical of the panel, has been distributed to governments around the world for review. It could change before it is released in March."
Dina Cappiello & Matt Apuzzo of the AP: "... the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today. As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found. Five million acres of land set aside for conservation ... have vanished on Obama's watch.... The government's predictions of the benefits [of ethanol] have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases. That makes the hidden costs even more significant." CW: Also, ethanol has wrecked three of my lawnmowers. Waaahh!
Obama 2.0. Julie Pace & Marcy Gordon of the AP: "President Barack Obama is nominating a top Treasury Department official to run the independent agency that regulates the futures and options market. The White House says Obama will announce the nomination of Timothy Massad to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday. For the past three years, Massad has overseen the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bank rescue plan known as TARP Obama is expected to use Massad's nominating ceremony to call on Congress to fully fund the CFTC, one of the smallest and most thinly funded U.S. agencies."
Josh Eidelson of Salon: "Four days after the end of a Southern California strike, Seattle-area Wal-Mart workers plan to mount their own walkout this morning. The one-day strike is the latest in the lead-up to a larger day of strikes and protests planned for Black Friday, the high-profile post-Thanksgiving shopping day at the end of this month.... Sub-contracted Twin Cities janitorial workers who clean stores for Target and other corporations plan to announce today that they're prepared to strike that day as well."
Andrew Dugan of Gallup: "With momentum building at the federal and state level to increase hourly base pay, more than three-quarters of Americans (76%) say they would vote for raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour (it is currently $7.25) in a hypothetical national referendum, a five-percentage-point increase since March. About one-fifth (22%) would vote against this."
Paul Buchheit of Alternet in Salon on four ways capitalism is robbing us & making us sick.
Michael Shear of the New York Times: " President Obama pledged Monday that Americans 'will never forget' the sacrifices made by the country's military veterans, and promised that his administration would continue pushing for money to support the men and women home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan":
Steve Benen: Everything President Obama does is "worse than Watergate."
Paul Waldman of the American Prospect on "maybe the most ridiculous Obamacare 'victim' story yet": whiney California psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb wrote a New York Times op-ed complaining that her health insurer cancelled her policy & offered her a more expensive one & it's too much trouble to check out other options on the California exchange. Also her FaceBook "friends" care more about millions of poor people than they do about her inconvenience. CW: I didn't link Gottlieb's op-ed yesterday, & I ain't linking it now. However, I highly recommend Waldman's sarcastic retort. ...
... Tom Scocca of Gawker: "Psychotherapist Is Unable to Understand What Medical Insurance Is."
Kreepy Koch Keggers. Juliet Lapidos of the New York Times: "Generation Opportunity, the Koch-funded group behind the Creepy Uncle Sam ads, is throwing tailgate parties to 'educate' undergraduates about the exchanges. Read: To convince young people to forgo health insurance. The group's communication director, David Pasch, wrote an email to The Tampa Bay Times describing a drunken event at Saturday's University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game." ...
... Sy Mukherjee of Think Progress: "This won't be the last time Generation Opportunity throws this kind of event, either. The group is touring 20 different campuses this fall in a $750,000 effort to convince college students that they're better off being uninsured than getting health coverage through Obamacare." The Tampa Bay Times story, featured in the appropriately-titled blog "The Buzz," is here. ...
... Chris Moody of Yahoo! News: "The group hired models with bull horns who walked around with anti-Obamacare petitions. Organizers said 'hundreds' of students signed a pledge not to enroll in health insurance exchanges.... Welcome to the strange new front in the war over Obamacare." A picto-report worth viewing.
November 2013 Election
David Nir of Daily Kos: "According to the [Virginia] State Board of Elections' official count as of Monday afternoon, Republican Mark Obenshain now leads Democrat Mark Herring by just 17 votes ... out of over 2.2 million cast. As local election officials throughout Virginia have been reviewing their results, Obenshain's edge had continued to narrow. And on Monday, following a retabulation in the heavily Democratic city of Richmond -- where votes from a previously uncounted voting machine were incorporated for the first time -- Herring appeared to unofficially take the lead." ...
... Abby Phillip of ABC News: "Virginia's Attorney General race could be decided by the smallest margin in U.S. history, and Twitter might be able to claim some of the credit. More than 2.2 million ballots were cast in a statewide election last Tuesday, and it has all come down to 17 votes as of Monday morning -- though ballots are still being counted. Republican Mark Obenshain's razor thin lead over Democrat Mark Herring came about because days after the election, one eagle-eyed math whiz on Twitter found a significant ballot discrepancy in one of the state's largest counties." ...
... Both Nir & Phillip feature Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report in their posts. To get the latest on the tight race, Nir recommends Wasserman's Twitter feed. ...
... Also Phillip writes, "The liberal blogosphere exploded over the weekend with a story -- now known to be unfounded -- that Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli had authorized a rule change that would make it harder for provisional ballots to be counted in Fairfax County." CW: Since I perpetuated that rumor by linking to a HuffPost story on it, I'd like to set the record straight, but I can't find a more definitive refutation that Phillip's report. ...
... Update: Richard Hasen, who has more election expertise than Phillip -- or most anybody else -- clarifies. And, no, the story is not unfounded, but it hasn't fully played out. Phillip seems to have been engaging in the standard "both sides do it" journalism as she also cited an actual bogus rumor coming from Right Wing World.
David Atkins of Hullabaloo: "Yes, your vote does matter." ...
... Also, your "personal" decisions matter. Julia Joffe of the New Republic: "I've got whooping cough.... So thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013."
Presidential Race 2016
Ben White & Maggie Haberman of Politico: "There are three words that strike terror in the hearts of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives across the land: President Elizabeth Warren. The anxiety over Warren grew Monday after a magazine report [by Noam Scheiber of the New Republic, linked here yesterday] suggested the bank-bashing Democratic senator from Massachusetts could mount a presidential bid in 2016 and would not necessarily defer to Hillary Clinton -- who is viewed as far more business-friendly -- for the party's nomination. And the fear is not only that Warren ... might win.... It is also that a Warren candidacy, and even the threat of one, would push Clinton to the left in the primaries and revive arguments about breaking up the nation's largest banks, raising taxes on the wealthy and otherwise stoking populist anger that is likely to also play a big role in the Republican primaries." ...
... Alex Bolton of the Hill: "Liberal leaders want Hillary Clinton to face a primary challenge in 2016 if she decides to run for president. The goal of such a challenge wouldn't necessarily be to defeat Clinton. It would be to prevent her from moving to the middle during the Democratic primary." ...
... Ezra Klein argues that Elizabeth Warren would have a hard time differentiating herself from Hillary Clinton because "... broadly, they agree: Clinton, like Warren, believes in higher taxes on the rich and universal health care and higher-education costs and universal pre-k and so on." CW: Klein may be right, but I think Democrats associate Clinton with Wall Street & Warren with Occupy. I don't like the saying "Perception is reality," but in this case, I'd say perception matters a great deal. ...
... David Dayen, in Salon. It isn't all about 2016. "Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- in many ways the avatar of a new populist insurgency within the Democratic Party that seeks to combine financial reform and economic restoration -- will speak later today in Washington at the launch of a new report that marks a key new phase in this movement. Released by Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute -- and called 'An Unfinished Mission: Making Wall Street Work for Us' -- the report is a revelation, because it finally invites fundamental discussions about these issues."
Now, for a Rare Reality Chex Topic:
What Is Sarah Palin Saying Now? *
Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due -- and this isn't racist, but it'll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master. -- Sarah Palin, at an Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition fundraiser ...
... Here is a free tip. There is no phrase or sentence which is made better by the inclusion of this isn't racist, but. -- Hunter of Daily Kos
The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there's more competition, there's less tort reform threat, there's less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It's the far left. It's President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care. -- Sarah Palin, "explaining" her alternative to the ACA ...
... Thirty-five seconds of word salad. -- Dan Amira of New York
'Doctor-patient relationship links'??? I think she's talking about a Website -- sort of e-Harmony.com where sick people meet medicos. Yes, a free-market Website linking doctors & patients would solve all our healthcare problems. Especially one designed by Sarah Palin who can't even link words in the form a sentence. -- Constant Weader
I would never put my faith and hope in any one individual politician. Not any of them. There is no Ronald Reagan on the scene today. If he were on the scene, that's who I would put my faith in. New Jersey, a blue state, has a Republican governor. Right on; it beats the alternative. -- Sarah Palin, on whether or not Chris Christie would be a good presidential candidate
* With apologies to those who come to Reality Chex for actual news & reasoned opinions.
News Ledes
New York Times: "Under intense American, British and European pressure, the coalition [of Syrian rebels] voted early Monday, after two days of debate, that it would attend peace talks sponsored by the United States and Russia in Geneva if certain conditions were met, including full access for delivery of humanitarian aid and the release of prisoners."
AFP: "Rightwing firebrand Avigdor Lieberman took his oath of office in front of the Israeli parliament on Monday, returning as foreign minister after he quit to fight corruption allegations. The 120-member house confirmed his reappointment by a vote of 62 to 17 almost a year after he resigned to fight the charges which he was cleared of last week."
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