Month: February 2014

A story of hope for a Friday evening: de-extinction edition

by David Atkins

This story from the New York Times about the real possibility of bringing back extinct species made me happier than any news item has in some time.

Passenger pigeons, great auks, Carolina parakeets, wooly mammoths are among the millions of species human beings have wiped from the face of the earth. It’s no substitute for environmental measures to reduce the extinction-event calamity we are creating, and there are concerns about both ecological impacts and the potential that reviving extinct species might reduce the impetus to change our ways.

But human beings also need hope, and even if we can only give a few species another shot at life that has to be a good thing.

The photo below is of a Carolina parakeet and a passenger pigeon. We killed them all. All of them. Just looking at them brings tears of sadness and rage to my eyes. But I hope I can live long enough to see one of these beautiful creatures living and breathing again, even if only as a sliver of hope in a world of ecological darkness and destruction.

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Obamacare isn’t going away any time soon. And neither is the fight over Obamacare.

by digby

How many people are going to see this ad?

… and how many people are going to see the Fact Check on that ad?

Lamb’s old plan was provided through a public-private program aimed at lower-income workers called CoverTN, which split the premium costs between an employee, the employer and the state. That’s a big reason why Lamb’s premium was only $52 a month, but in an interview she said she would have gladly paid and could have afforded the full $156 a month.

Why was the plan so inexpensive? For one thing, it had a $25,000 cap on annual benefits. It also had no limit on out-of-pocket costs, and it would only cover generic medications.

CoverTN was terminated at the end of the 2013 because it did not meet key requirements of the ACA, in particular a ban on such caps on benefits. The Obama administration denied the state’s request for a waiver, and so the plan was shut down.

For health-care reformers, such annual caps on benefits were a sign of a substandard plan that could put someone in bankruptcy if they had an accident that resulted in unexpected medical costs. But Lamb doesn’t look at it that way because she already had suffered a major and costly accident that was unrelated to her chronic condition.

In 2007, Lamb fell off a horse, requiring seven surgeries at Vanderbilt Medical Center. She saw one surgical bill for $125,000, but after negotiations with CoverTN, the hospital agreed to reduce the charges to below $25,000. In the end she barely paid anything in hospital costs after her accident.

“Really after that, I was not worried about something catastrophic” that would exceed the $25,000 cap, she said.

(Others might look at this story and decide she was unusually fortunate that the hospital, confronted with a patient who had inadequate coverage for the surgery, decided to eat the difference.)

Meanwhile, lupus can result in very high medical expenses, but that is not the case with Lamb. She said her out-of-pocket costs, for doctor visits and drug costs, amounted to just $1,000 a year.

“I have very good doctors who have helped me manage my condition,” she said. “I was comfortable with the risk of having this limit.”

To put her expenses in context, the American College of Rheumatology says that average cost per patient with lupus is between $14,000 and $28,000, though patients with one form of lupus have significantly higher costs – ranging from $29,000 to $63,000.

Once Lamb was required to go on Obamacare, she discovered she qualified for a $15-a-month subsidy, which could be applied to nearly 40 different options. She chose one of the more expensive options—a Platinum plan – because it limited out of pocket expenses to $1,500, as her doctor fees and blood tests would be higher under the Obamacare plans. She also considered a plan with a lower premium, but it would have meant higher out of pocket expenses. “Instead of paying $6,000 a year, I would have been paying $10,000 a year” with the plan with a lower premium, she said.

Anyone with a chronic condition would have opted for the plan with the lowest out of pocket maximum, even with a higher premium, so Lamb’s choice makes sense. But it did mean she faced sticker shock, going from $52 a month to $373 a month, even after her subsidy.

In other words, AFP has managed to highlight a very unique case—someone with a chronic condition who did not face high annual costs.

One Lupus sufferer, Erin Kotecki Vest, blogged that she was amazed at Lamb’s tale of woe after she researched the coverage provided by CoverTN. “Just ONE of my treatments ALONE wipes out everything CoverTN had to offer me,” she wrote. “I would hit CoverTN’s $25,000 annual limit the first week of January.”

In contrast to Lamb, this Lupus sufferer is thrilled to be on Obamacare. Kotecki Vest gleefully wrote in November that her family ditched her husband’s employer-provided plan after they discovered they would save nearly $19,000 a year by switching to a plan offered on healthcare.gov.

For some reason, Kotecki Vest was not asked to appear in an AFP ad. AFP did not respond to a request for comment.

I have hope that this will all sort itself out to the point at which a majority of Americans fully understand and accept that the health insurance system has been improved overall by the reforms. But I think we have to face the fact that everything that’s wrong with the American health care system writ large will now be attributed to Obamacare by a large number of Americans. And there will be no convincing them that they were not better off before. The fight is not going to magically go away once the Republicans fail to repeal or lose some more elections.

Maybe in a generation or two this will change. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. After all, we’re still fighting off those who want to get rid of Social Security and that’s been in place since 1938. Government welfare state programs are ground zero for the ideological battle in American politics.

And anyway, even the Fact Check is so vague and equivocal in can’t help but make people throw up their hands and believe what they want to believe:

We can’t quibble with the ad’s words–we certainly would not call it a “lie”–but the lack of context is going to earn it Pinocchios. We wavered between One and Two, but ultimately settled on Two because this is really an exception that proves the rule.

Whatever …

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by digby

Here’s a response to that lawsuit by Exxon’s CEO against fracking in his backyard — from a former CEO of Mobil Oil:

Open Letter to Rex Tillerson, Chairman, ExxonMobil

From Lou Allstadt 

Dear Rex, 

We have never met, but I worked for your company for six months immediately after the ExxonMobil merger, the implementation of which I coordinated from the Mobil side. That was after thirty years with Mobil Oil Corporation, where just prior to the merger I had been an Executive Vice President and Operating Officer for Exploration and Producing in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. I now live in upstate New York. 

For the past five years, I have been actively trying to keep your company and the rest of the industry from fracking here. I understand from several press articles that you have fracking issues of your own, with a fracking water tower and truck traffic possibly detracting from your view and the value of your home. 

In response to the prospect of fracking ruining our communities, many New York towns have passed zoning laws that prohibit heavy industry, including any activities associated with drilling for oil and gas. Those laws, along with very little prospect for economic gas production in New York, mean that we probably will not have to look at fracking water towers, let alone live next to fracking well pads. I say probably, because your industry is still fighting those zoning laws in the courts. 

Ironically, your reasoning at the Bartonville, Texas town council meetings is virtually identical to the reasoning that I and many other citizens used to convince our local town councils to pass laws that prohibit the very problem you have encountered, plus all of the other infrastructure and waste disposal issues associated with fracking. 

No one should have to live near well pads, compression stations, incessant heavy truck traffic, or fracking water towers, nor should they have their water or air contaminated. You and I love the places where we live, but in the end, if they are ruined by fracking or frack water tanks, we can afford to pack up and go someplace else. However, many people can’t afford to move away when they can no longer drink the water or breathe the air because they are too close to one of your well pads or compressor stations. 

My efforts to prevent fracking started over water — not the prospect of having to see a water tank from my home, but rather regulations that would allow gas wells near our sources of drinking water, in addition to well pads next to our homes, schools, hospitals and nursing homes. These issues are legitimate, but they are localized. I am now much more concerned with the greenhouse gas impacts of fossil fuels in general, and particularly the huge impact of methane emissions from natural gas production and transportation. These are global problems that local zoning cannot protect against. Only a major shift toward renewable energy sources can begin to mitigate their catastrophic climate impacts. 

Before closing, I should explain why I have referred to ExxonMobil as “your company.”
For several years after retiring I thought of ExxonMobil as “my company.” I thought that the company’s rigor and discipline in investing in sound projects was as good as it gets, and ExxonMobil was my largest single investment. I no longer own any shares of ExxonMobil or any other fossil fuel company. I would prefer to be an early investor in alternative energy for the 21st century rather than hanging on to dwindling prospects for investments in 19th and 20th century fossil fuels. 

It is time that ExxonMobil started shifting away from oil and gas, and toward alternatives — both for environmental reasons and to protect the long-term viability of the company. Many large energy producers and consumers, including ExxonMobil, are building a carbon fee into their long-term planning assumptions. Actively supporting the phase-in of a carbon fee would be one way to move the company into the 21st century. Recognizing that methane emissions disqualify natural gas as a “bridge fuel” is another. 

Good luck with that fracking water tank. I hope you don’t have to move, and also that you will help a lot of other people stay in the homes they love. 

Regards, 

Lou Allstadt

So the lesson is, go ahead and become a CEO or a Master of the Universe — become a member of the 1% or even the .001%.  This man proves there’s no law that says you must also be an asshole.

Via Bradblog

QOTD: Ian Haney López

by digby

Via Moyers:

“[D]og whistle politics doesn’t come out of animus at all. It doesn’t come out of some desire to hurt minorities. It comes out of a desire to win votes… It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered, it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.”

Ain’t that the truth. All you have to do is go back to Lee Atwater’s famous statement from 1984 to see it laid out in black and white (no pun intended):

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

Rick Perlstein wrote a fascinating piece during the 2012 election about this with an exclusive publication of Atwater’s full taped interview provided by James Carter IV, the same fellow who disseminated the famous 47% video (and grandson of Jimmy Carter). Perlstein gives the background on Atwater and this interview and then writes:

He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he’d absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).

“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won’t have anything to do with it.

That’s what he said but he was either deluded or lying. (I vote for the latter …)

Perlstein:

Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters…the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn’t preening before political scientists, knew fully well—which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated goal to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make “Willie Horton his running mate.” The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the National Security Political Action Committee—which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying “ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.”

Which brings us back to the quote ‘o the day. That interview, linked here, discusses just how much these “47%” comments are not merely appeals to the 1% donors but also racist dogwhistles. And none were more cynical and patently opportunistic about using them than Mitt Romney. True, he was talking to bunch of rich white people who apparently feel they are being taken advantage of when they are asked to kick in what amounts to pocket change to create a decent society. But he also had no problem slipping in the other kind of dogwhistles to make it clear he knew who his core voters were going to be:

Now I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born,” Mr. Romney said, standing alongside his wife, Ann, and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan. “Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital. No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”

Yes, it’s more abstract than chanting the “N” word. But still very, very clear to the people who are tuned to that frequency.

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Job seeking in a sellers market

by digby

This is what happens in a sellers job market — people get treated like dirt:

Kelly Blazek is kind of a big deal: she runs a Cleveland Job Bank House and has gone off on anyone who has dared to try and make a professional connection with her that they are too “green” to have. As explained to the blog CleveScene, jobseekers reach out to her to get on her members-only “NEOHCommJobs” listserv. According to her, the listserv boasts over 7,300 subscribers and breaks job openings before they are posted elsewhere. It sounds like a great resource for Cleveland-ites looking for communications connections and jobs.

Perhaps it’s too great a resource. See, it seems Kelly Blazek has let running some rinky-dink Ohio listserv get to her head. Read this email from a jobseeker, followed by Blazek’s response:

Yikes. She goes after millenials who are often treated like they are spoiled children for simply wanting to work for a living, but a friend of mine who is in her 50s has a similar story in which she was told at a recent interview that they prefer not to work with older people because they’re depressing. I think the problem isn’t the age of the job seeker. If you give small minded people power they will inevitably abuse it. And our job market for the past five years has been a laboratory for worker abuse. Not that workers are in a position to complain, mind you. When there are people lined up around the block ready to take your job you’re not inclined to make trouble.

And to think that all these businesses are making record profits. Oh wait …

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The inflation bears get another sharp stick in the eye, courtesy WhatsApp

by David Atkins

Do you hear that deafening silence? That’s the sound of the sky-is-falling inflation bears’ embarrassment by events that have totally contradicted their every prediction. The destruction of the middle class, the rise in income inequality, and continued wage declines have produced an extremely low-inflation economy, much to the chagrin of conservative “experts.”

Now you can add another woe to the pile of mockery for the inflation hawks:

Larry Summers gave a speech today at the National Association For Business Economics (NABE) conference in Arlington Virginia.

In his speech he said some really sharp stuff about the significance of WhatsApp — the messaging company being purchased by Facebook for $19 billion.

Here’s the exact language, via Bloomberg:

Ponder for example that the leading technological companies of this age, I think for example of Apple and Google, find themselves swimming in cash and facing the challenge of what to do with a very large cash hoard. Ponder the fact that WhatsApp has a greater market value than Sony with next to no capital investment required to achieve it. Ponder the fact that it used to require tens of millions of dollars to start a significant new venture. Significance new ventures today are seeded with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the information technology era. All of this means reduced demand for investment with consequences for the flow of – with consequences for equilibrium levels of interest rates.

In other words, if you hardly need any cash to start huge companies, then cash just piles up in investor bank accounts with nowhere to go. And if cash isn’t moving, because there’s no demand or use for that money, then interest rates will fall.

Summers notes that there are other factors putting downward pressure on real interest rates, including the aftermath of the deleveraging, the declining rate of US population growth, the unequal distribution of income, resulting in a lot of wealthy people who have a high propensity to save, and a global trend towards putting money into safe assets, especially dollar denominated ones.

It’s almost as if allowing obscenely rich people to have all the money, and creating a world in which companies requiring little startup capital and employing only 53 people can make $13 billion, might produce deflationary economic results with little circulation and growth.

Who knew? Aside from anyone with an ounce of sense, that is?

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Can we get an amen?

by digby

Keith Alexander in congressional hearings today:

General Keith Alexander, testifying before the Senate armed services committee for what could be the final time as head of the NSA, told senators that one option under consideration in the Obama administration’s deliberations about revamping the NSA’s surveillance programs was to “get only that data” relating to terrorist communications.

Imagine that.

Mark me down as +1 on that. And let’s also talk about what a “terrorist” is.

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Today’s weepy billionaire

by digby

Oh boo-fucking-hoo:

Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of Koch Industries Inc. in Wichita, is used to being criticized.

Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) went on the attack against Charles and David Koch on Wednesday calling them “un-American” during a speech on the U.S. Senate floor.
According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, Reid took issue with what he called “lies” in new ads from opponents of the Affordable Care Act.

Charles Koch told me that criticism comes with the territory in today’s political environment.

“When you start attacking cronyism and people’s political interests, it gets nasty,” he said, during a Feb. 18 interview. “We’ve been called every name under the sun.”

Interesting that he says this is an attack on cronyism as if there’s something wrong with doing that. Maybe someone should clue him in that most people think cronyism is a bad thing. Even weepy billionaires very rarely defend it.

Update: It’s been pointed out to me on twitter that he’s likely referring to himself as the scourge of cronyism and people’s political interests which is probably right but equally absurd. I don’t know what he’s referring to but he’s the ultimate crony capitalist. And his political interests are quite obvious.

Also too, I don’t think he’s known as someone who’s on some crusade against crony capitalism is he? Not that it isn’t something he’d be perfectly willing to launch without any sense of irony, of course. He is a conservative.

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Why is Andrew Cuomo trying to elect Republicans?

by digby

So Andrew Cuomo is trying to dissuade Republicans from nominating a far right candidate to run against him. Why on earth would a Democrat do such a thing in a Blue state like New York where he would be bound to benefit by running against a far right crank?

It’s almost beyond belief that he would actually tell people this, but apparently he has:

A number of people who have spoken to Mr. Cuomo say he also has expressed his desire to ensure that his eventual opponent is not far to the right on social issues. This, he has argued, could alienate moderate Republicans and other voters so much that Republican candidates for the State Senate could suffer too, potentially costing Republicans control of the chamber.

Why, you may ask, would a Democratic Governor be worried about the Republicans losing control of the State Senate?

Such concern for the Republican Party’s fortunes may seem counterintuitive for a heavyweight in the national Democratic Party who is often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. But Mr. Cuomo actually has a friendly working relationship with many Senate Republicans. He and those senators have been at odds on social issues, but he has relied on their backing for his fiscal agenda, which has focused on issues of great importance to Republicans, like restraining government spending and cutting taxes.
[…]
The Republicans now control the Senate in a coalition with a small group of breakaway Democrats. Mr. Cuomo has expressed concern before about the main caucus of Democratic senators, citing the “dysfunction” and chaos that defined their time in the majority in 2009 and 2010, and has conspicuously remained on the sidelines as the two parties have battled for control.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more perfect example of the “dysfunction” of the Democratic Party elite. It’s bad enough that a leader with presidential ambitions even thinks this way. But to go so far as to publicly stab his own party in the back so that he can enact a conservative economic agenda says everything you need to know about where the center of the Democratic Party is today.

Andrew Cuomo is a shoo-in to win no matter who the Republicans nominate. And he has come right out and said that he doesn’t want to have to run against a real social conservative because a campaign around gay rights or abortion might make Democrats vote for other Democrats than just him. And that would mean he wouldn’t have all those nice Republicans to help him cut “deals” to screw Democrats.

And there’s every reason to believe that he is not the only one …

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Using religious “liberty” as an excuse to hate on others is as American as apple pie

by digby

Over the years I’ve posted about the direct through line from racism to anti-abortion zealotry, using the manipulation of religion, particularly the Southern evangelical churches, to get the job done. Today, they are pushing a “religious liberty” strategy to roll back abortion rights and allow discrimination against gay people.
Here, Ian Millhiser goes back to the Jim Crow era to show how religious “liberty” was used as an excuse for racism in the first place:

[W]hile LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”

Theodore Bilbo was one of Mississippi’s great demagogues. After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate seat campaigning against “farmer murderers, corrupters of Southern womanhood, [skunks] who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms” and a host of other, equally colorful foes. In a year where just 47 Mississippi voters cast a ballot for a communist candidate, Bilbo railed against a looming communist takeover of the state — and offered himself up as the solution to this red onslaught.
Bilbo was also a virulent racist. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n[*]ggers away from the polls,” Bilbo proclaimed during his successful reelection campaign in 1946. He was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Meet the Press that same year that “[n]o man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” During a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill, Bilbo claimed that the bill:

… will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.

For Senator Bilbo, however, racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that “[p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” Allowing “the blood of the races [to] mix,” according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the “Divine plan of God.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God.”

There were many more like him, including the infamous Bob Jones.

Bigots have used their religious “freedom” as an excuse to discriminate and force their beliefs on others forever. One of the great advances of the American system, screwed up as it is, was the idea that the government would stay hands off of religious disputes. (500 years of bloody religious wars will do that to you.) The idea that the government should allow a particular church’s dogma to be used as an excuse to violate civil rights is a violation of that concept and can only lead to the very kind of trouble the Enlightenment thinkers who founded this country (and decent people ever since then) were getting away from.

Milhiser’s whole piece is well worth reading if you have the time. One thing you cannot say is that this nefarious use of “religious liberty” is UnAmerican. Shamefully, it’s been as American as apple pie.

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