As of a few weeks ago, groups affiliated with the Koch brothers had already aired 44,000 ads attacking Democrats, most on the subject of the Affordable Care Act. You’d think billionaires would focus their political “investment” in a manner that would bear huge dividends, but thus far, the Kochs’ big bet appears to be a loser.Charles and David Koch’s obsession with “ObamaCare” certainly isn’t resonating. Despite spending tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars attacking the new healthcare law, people have essentially tuned out their efforts.The ratio of anti- to pro-Affordable Care Act (ACA) ads is likely more than 1,000-to-1. No outside political group is defending the law on the airwaves, and just a handful of candidates have — briefly — done so. Yet when the Kaiser Family Foundation asked poll respondents whether they saw more ads in favor of the ACA, more opposed, or about the same on both sides, only 20 percent said they saw more ads opposed to the law. Half the poll respondents say they couldn’t remember seeing any anti-ACA ads, and nearly a quarter claimed they’d seen an equal number from both sides.Ouch.Read More.Source: The Hill/Markos Moulitsas
Meet ‘the Elizabeth Warren Wing of the Democratic Party’
A new crop of progressive populists is winning primaries across the nation and challenging Clintonian orthodoxy.Suppose an insurgent movement with a sharp critique of Wall Street and a determination to end the Democratic Party’s compromises on core economic issues was taking shape across the country. Suppose the candidates associated with this movement were winning tough primaries and developing the outlines of a fifty-state strategy that rejects the self-interested calculations of party elites. Would that count as big news? Not yet, perhaps, since most mainstream pundits are still obsessed with the wrangling over which extremes the Republican Party will embrace. But while GOP insiders were busy beating back their Tea Party wing, the progressive populist tendency within the Democratic Party was going from strength to strength.Read More.Source: The Nation/John Nichols
Carl Hiaasen: ’Tis the season for sleazy ads
The season of sleaze is in full bloom.More than 4,000 times, Gov. Rick Scott has broadcast a campaign commercial featuring an unnamed Floridian with a tale of woe.The poor fellow claims to have been fleeced by convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein and also former Gov. Charlie Crist, Scott’s Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race.While governor (and a Republican), Crist took campaign money from Rothstein.
Miami Herald/Carl Hiaason
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic
This Changes Everything is as much about the psychology of denial as it is about climate change. “It is always easier to deny reality,” writes Naomi Klein, “than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of diehard Stalinists at the height of the purges as of libertarian climate deniers today.” Much of this book is concerned with showing that powerful and well-financed rightwing thinktanks and lobby groups lie behind the denial of climate change in recent years. There is not much reasonable doubt as to the findings of science on the subject. As a result of human activities, large-scale climate change is under way, and if it goes on unchecked it will fundamentally alter the world in which humans will in future have to live. Yet the political response has been at best ambiguous and indecisive. Governments have backed off from previous climate commitments, and environmental concerns have slipped down the policy agenda to a point at which in many contexts they are treated as practically irrelevant.Read More.Source: The Guardian/The Observer...John Gray
Administration announces 7.3 million paid Obamacare enrollments, Republicans whine
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa held yet another "oversight" hearing on Thursday, trying to find something, anything that smelled like an Obamacare scandal. Instead, he got the gut-punch of finding out that there are officially 7.3 million paid up enrollees, beating the Congressional Budget Office's prediction of 6 million.
"As of Aug. 15 this year, we have 7.3 million Americans enrolled in health insurance marketplace coverage and these are individuals who paid their premiums. We are encouraged by the number of consumers who paid their premiums and continue to enroll in the marketplace coverage every day through special enrollment periods," [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn] Tavenner said. […]Compared to the enrollment total of 8 million detailed in a May report about the sign-up period that began last October, the retention rate for private Obamacare coverage would be more than 90 percent.However, because people have been allowed to buy health insurance on the exchanges since then under special circumstances, such as marriage or the birth of a child, the count of people who were enrolled at any given time this year likely rose higher than 8 million.
There's always a lot of change in enrollments numbers, as people's life circumstances change and they move in and out of coverage because of marriage, new employment or loss of a job, and retirement. So 7.3 million paid enrollments is just about where you'd expect it to be following the 8 million enrollment figure from May.Read More.Source: Daily Kos/Joan McCarter
Print Less but Transfer More
...Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly to the PeopleIn the decades following World War II, Japan’s economy grew so quickly and for so long that experts came to describe it as nothing short of miraculous. During the country’s last big boom, between 1986 and 1991, its economy expanded by nearly $1 trillion. But then, in a story with clear parallels for today, Japan’s asset bubble burst, and its markets went into a deep dive. Government debt ballooned, and annual growth slowed to less than one percent. By 1998, the economy was shrinking.
That December, a Princeton economics professor named Ben Bernanke argued that central bankers could still turn the country around. Japan was essentially suffering from a deficiency of demand: interest rates were already low, but consumers were not buying, firms were not borrowing, and investors were not betting. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy: pessimism about the economy was preventing a recovery. Bernanke argued that the Bank of Japan needed to act more aggressively and suggested it consider an unconventional approach: give Japanese households cash directly. Consumers could use the new windfalls to spend their way out of the recession, driving up demand and raising prices.
As Bernanke made clear, the concept was not new: in the 1930s, the British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed burying bottles of bank notes in old coal mines; once unearthed (like gold), the cash would create new wealth and spur spending. The conservative economist Milton Friedman also saw the appeal of direct money transfers, which he likened to dropping cash out of a helicopter. Japan never tried using them, however, and the country’s economy has never fully recovered. Between 1993 and 2003, Japan’s annual growth rates averaged less than one percent.
Source/Foreign Affairs...published by the Council On Foreign Relations...Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan
How The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecast Model Works
The FiveThirtyEight Senate forecast model launched earlier this month. Right now, it shows Republicans with about a 53 percent chance of picking up the Senate next year. We owe you a lot more detail about how that forecast is calculated and how it might change between now and Nov. 4 — and how our model differs from some of the others out there.This article, which outlines the model’s methodology, is going to be on the detailed side. I’ve tried to keep the descriptions in plain language as often as possible (the footnotes get somewhat more technical). But it’s meant to be a reasonably comprehensive reference guide rather than breezy bedtime reading.First, however, I want to describe the principles behind the model. Some of these are more philosophical and abstract — they describe what I think of as best practices for applied statistical modeling. I can get passionate about this stuff — but somewhat contrary to the media portrayal of election forecasters as wizards who conjure up spells from their spreadsheets, our goal is not to divine some magic formula that miraculously predicts every election. Instead, it’s to make sense of publicly available information in a rigorous and disciplined way.Read More.Source: FiveThirtyEight/Nate Silver
Taking insurance companies out of health care
Commentary: Boeing experiment will be closely watched by business CEOs and insurers alike.There are many Americans who are beginning to question the contributions big insurance companies make to our health care system. And I’m not just talking about lefty advocates of a single-payer system. Corporate executives are also wondering why we need the big insurers and whether higher-quality and more cost-effective care could be provided to employees if they didn’t have to deal with health insurers at all.I wrote a few months back that my former CEO at Cigna once said that what kept him up at night was the possibility that Americans — business leaders in particular — would ultimately conclude that insurers were an unnecessary expense. He used the term “disintermediation,” a fancy word that means “cutting out the middle man.”Read More.Source: The Center For Public Integrity/Wendell Potter
Everyone Into the Pool!
Republicans were relying on health-care reform to bring down the president. Instead, people are signing up in droves. But after testing the system, the author—with his own serious, incurable, and expensive pre-existing condition—zeroes in on Obamacare’ s core contradiction.I am an insurance company’s worst nightmare. I have a “pre-existing condition.” It’s serious and incurable, but with a variety of prescription drugs it can be kept under control. The drugs cost more than $10,000 a year (and most of them are generics). There’s also an operation that can ameliorate the symptoms. I had the operation a decade ago. It worked well and cost more than $200,000. Every four or five years the operation requires an update. This is a fairly minor procedure: The last time I had it, I was in and out of the hospital in less than three hours. The bill was $26,618.50. (That 50 cents is a nice touch.) I go to various doctors and other specialists to deal with the many side effects, running up an annual tab of $5,000 to $10,000.Read More.Source: Vanity Fair/Michael Kinsley
The Federal Budget Deficit Has Disappeared. Really.
The U.S. Treasury announced last Thursday that the federal deficit was $128.7 billion in August. That’s 13 percent lower than it was during the same month last year.Washington typically records a budget surplus in September and $80 billion or so in black ink is in fact projected for next month. If that occurs as expected, the deficit for all of 2014 will be about $500 billion. That will be more than 26 percent below 2013 and the smallest federal deficit by far since 2008.The deficit has been such a corrosive and destabilizing issue over the past six years that the Treasury’s report should have provided an excuse for all of the participants in the budget debate to say something about the numbers.Whether you like them and want to take a victory lap for the lowest deficit in six years, or hate them and want to criticize a deficit that still seems high in nominal terms, last Thursday presented the kind of rhetorical opportunity that in the past would have been too good for most people to pass up.Read More.Source: Forbes/Stan Collender
Number of Americans Without Health Insurance Falls, Survey Shows
Federal researchers reported on Tuesday that the number of Americans without health insurance had declined substantially in the first quarter of this year, the first federal measure of the number of uninsured Americans since the Affordable Care Act extended coverage to millions of people in January.
The number of uninsured Americans fell by about 8 percent to 41 million people in the first quarter of this year, compared with 2013, a drop that represented about 3.8 million people and that roughly matched what experts were expecting based on polling by private groups, like Gallup. The survey also measured physical health but found little evidence of change.
Source: New York Times/Sabrina Tavernise
Republicans Caught In A Colossal Lie About Unemployment Benefits
Not that they'll ever read it, but a study released by the Federal Reserve Division of Research and Statistics, Monetary Affairs blows a huge hole in one of the GOP's most enduring fictions about providing jobless Americans with unemployment benefits.You know the one about how providing extensions just serves to make the unemployed lazy. How it encourages them not to look for a job. and actually fosters unemployment. So cutting off their benefits will make them "get off their butts" and go find work, because they'll have no other choice. This is one of the GOP's greatest hits because it feeds into the (often race-based) biases of their constituents and justifies doing absolutely nothing to help those Americans. And nothing is what the GOP does best.But a new study by Regis Barnichon of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional in Barcelona and Andrew Figura of the Federal Reserve Board reveals that provision of long term unemployment benefits has no significant impact on whether a person continues to pursue employment:Read More.Source: Daily KOs/Dartagnan
Senate Update: Democrats Draw Almost Even. Is it The Money?
When we officially launched our forecast model two weeks ago, it had Republicans with a 64 percent chance of taking over the Senate after this fall’s elections. Now Republican chances are about 55 percent instead. We’ve never quite settled on the semantics of when to call an election a “tossup.” A sports bettor or poker player would grimace and probably take a 55-45 edge. But this Senate race is pretty darned close.What’s happened? The chart below lists the change in our forecast in each state between Sept. 3 (when our model launched) and our current (Sept. 15) update.
Read More.Source: Five Thirty Eight/Nate Silver
Crist team explores Medicaid expansion
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist said his team is researching the prospect that he could sign an executive order on his first day in office to immediately and unilaterally expand the state's Medicaid program to cover uninsured Floridians.In a day of dueling politics in Orlando – with both Crist and Gov. Rick Scott appearing – Crist started by announcing his interest in an executive order while speaking to the Florida Nurses Association on Saturday at the Florida Hotel and Conference Center.Read More.Source: Orlando Sentinel, Scott Powers
Testing 4
testing 8,9,10
The Senate Tried To Overturn "Citizens United" Today. Guess What Stopped Them?
A majority of the United States Senate has voted to advance a constitutional amendment to restore the ability of Congress and the states to establish campaign fundraising and spending rules with an eye toward preventing billionaires and corporations from buying elections.“Today was a historic day for campaign finance reform, with more than half of the Senate voting on a constitutional amendment to make it clear that the American people have the right to regulate campaign finance,” declared Senator Tom Udall, the New Mexico Democrat who in June proposed his amendment to address some of the worst results of the Supreme Court’s interventions in with the recent Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decisions, as well as the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo.That’s the good news.The bad news is that it’s going to take more than a majority to renew democracyRead More.Source: The Nation/John Nichols
Rand Paul’s foreign policy fraud: Where’s the supposed anti-interventionist now?
Where’s Rand?Robert Draper just informed us: This might be the nation’s “libertarian moment,” and that’s good news for Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul. The son of libertarian cult figure U.S. Rep. Ron Paul came in first among Republican 2016 contenders in a recent poll of millennial voters. “On issues including same-sex marriage, surveillance and military intervention,” Draper explained, “his positions more closely mirror those of young voters than those of the G.O.P. establishment.”Draper’s an excellent reporter, but I’m not sure how he made that last claim, about military intervention. Because we don’t know Rand Paul’s positions on military intervention right now. He went radio silent after President Obama ordered airstrikes against Iraq, refusing multiple media requests for comment. Finally he commented on Obama’s decision Monday night in remarks to the Campbellsville, Kentucky, Chamber of Commerce:
I have mixed feelings about it. I’m not saying I’m completely opposed to helping with arms or maybe even bombing, but I am concerned that ISIS is big and powerful because we protected them in Syria for a year. Do you know who also hates ISIS and who is bombing them? Assad, the Syrian government. So a year ago, the same people who want to bomb ISIS wanted to bomb Syria last year. Syria and ISIS are on opposite sides of the war. We’re now bombing both sides of one war that has spread into another country.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh
Finally, Wall Street gets put on trial: We can still hold the 0.1 percent responsible for tanking the economy
The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom, on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president’s Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers.But high-ranking financiers? Obama’s Department of Justice has thus far shown virtually no interest in holding leading bankers criminally accountable for what went on in the last decade. That is ruled out not only by the Too Big to Jail doctrine that top-ranking Obama officials have hinted at, but also by the same logic that inspires certain conservative thinkers—that financiers simply could not have committed fraud, since you would expect fraud to result in riches and instead so many banks went out of business.“Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent,” reported a now-famous 2010 story in the Huffington Post. “But convincing a jury that executives intended to make fraudulent loans, and thus should be held criminally responsible, may be too difficult of a hurdle for prosecutors. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”read more.Source: Salon/Thomas Frank
How to wreck the GOP in 3 easy steps!
President Obama is in the doldrums. He has run out of ideas, and out of gas. His strongest supporters are in the grip of a morbid fatalism. There is nothing the president can do any longer, they sigh, because of the intransigent Republicans in the House of Representatives. The great days of the Obama presidency are behind us, everyone seems to believe, and the most this once-promising president can do now are hold convenings and issue small-bore executive orders while awaiting a round of midterm elections that are likely to go against him. Oh, woe is he.It’s time to snap out of it. Obama is still the most powerful man in the world. The nation still needs presidential action. And the Democrats need action too, if they’re going to avoid disaster this fall.Last week, I asked around for suggestions, things the Obama administration could do, all on its own, that the Republicans in Congress would be powerless to stop. I heard countless good ideas: Obama could make it absolutely clear to his FCC chairman that net neutrality is the policy of his administration; he could reclassify marijuana so that it is no longer a Class 1 narcotic; he could reform the federal contracting system to discourage outsourcing and promote good labor practices; he could encourage whistleblowers rather than punishing them.read more.Source: Salon/Thomas Frank
Why Immigration Reform Has To Go Hand-in-Hand With Stronger Labor Rights
This weekend, President Obama again pushed away the issue of immigration. Despite growing pressure to take executive action to curtail deportations, Obama again swept the lives of millions of immigrants off this fall’s agenda—enraging advocacy groups by heeding his party’s fears of angering right-wing voters before key mid-term elections.But while politicians dismiss immigration as a third rail, they cruelly ignore the fact that another major election issue, the economic woes plaguing workers, is also an immigration issue.With Congress paralyzed on immigration reform, Obama has mulled taking some form of executive action to provide deportation relief and work authorization for the undocumented. Obama has already created a template for such a move with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, issued two years ago to provide temporary protection from deportation to undocumented students and military members.read more.Source: The Nation/Michelle Chen