Month: June 2017

QOTD: A coupla Trump voters

by digby

I don’t understand the resistance to accepting what we see right in front of our eyes. But there is a ton of resistance from all directions to this very simple observation.

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Megyn Kelly’s choice

by digby

Media expert Jay Rosen tweeted about the hazards of Megyn Kelly’s interviews with Vladimir Putin and Alex Jones. He repeats this “fable” he wrote some time back on his blog Press Think:

There is a story I heard once about the press in Bosnia. I tried to verify it numerous times with people who might know, but I never succeeded. (Possibly I will with this post.) My informants always told me they knew of things like it that had happened in the former Yugoslavia.

Let’s say then that it is not a true story, but a fiction about a journalist set in Sarajevo sometime between April 2, 1992, when the Siege of Sarajevo began, and February 29, 1996, when it was declared over.

During the siege a correspondent from a Western news agency is contacted by an intermediary, someone he knows, who has an offer: to go out one night with Bosnian Serb snipers and see for yourself what they do.
A deal is struck, and he accompanies the men to one of their perches in the hills above the city, where they train their rifles on civilians, who might be trying to cross the street. This is where the siege “happens,” in a sense. This is the action itself.

“Come here,” says one of the men, after he has located a target. The sniper motions to take a look. The reporter, who in his own mind had come to see, leans over and peers for a second or two through the lens of the rifle.

He sees two people who think they are out of range standing in an alley, completely vulnerable. That is when the sniper, retaking the lens, says: which one, left or right?

This alarms the reporter. “I have no answer to that,” he says. “I didn’t come to be involved in what you do.” The sniper throws back his head to laugh, and returns to his rifle. There is a pause. In two quick bursts he kills both people just seen through the lens.

“You should have answered,” the sniper says to the Western correspondent. “You could have saved one.”

That’s the story I heard. As I said, I don’t know if it ever happened, or if it did, whether it happened that way. Maybe it’s a story told about journalists in every war, and only the details change. What I do know is that, treated as parable (not a truthful account of what went on in the hills above Sarajevo one night, but a fiction invented from shards of fact) this story, which I have not been able to verify or forget, is about something very real and alive today.

It is the problem of publicizing evil, and of when you become a part of things by observing them.

The reporter went “only” to observe. But the sniper changed the observer into a culpable person, a participant in the criminal siege of the city from above. This was done against the journalist’s will, and so a kind of mind rape goes on within the prism of the story.

Back home, in a moral zone he can recognize, the reporter can always say: “the sniper intended to kill both of them anyway, so I had no role…” but in fact a truthful correspondent will always know that the man may well have been speaking truthfully when he said, “you could have saved one.” Those who have the power to kill, arbitrarily, can also let live on a whim, an act which equally enhances their power.

Show me what you do is the clearly implied contract for the climb into the mountains with the snipers. (And they delivered on their end.) That explains what the reporter thought he was doing: witnessing a terrible reality that nonetheless should be told to the civilized world. Sniping against civilians is a war crime, and he will be a witness to how it happens.

And of course criminal gangs and killing squads everywhere have their ways of making newcomers and by-standers into instant accomplices, because when everyone around is spread with guilt that lessens the guilt of each one. This too may explain why the reporter was brought there.

Finally, there is the moment where he peers into the lens. The abyss of observation. But the fatal step into moral involvement has the appearance of a further form of inquiry: come see what I see.

Should we turn our eyes from what bad men with guns do? Refuse to see as they see? In one of the great works of Sixties Journalism, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which is about a reporter trying to think clearly in Vietnam, there is a passage specifically about this:

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.
“You had to be able to look at anything.” This is the kind of reasoning on trial in my fable.

“Don’t look into the face of evil, you may be changed by it.” As far as I know, correspondents don’t have any kind of rule like that.

When I have told the story to people a first reaction is usuallly, “That was a crazy thing to do. He should never have agreed to go.” But what grounds would a professional news person have for dismissing the opportunity to see how the criminal snipers above Sarajevo operate? It’s part of the siege, often called the longest in the twentieth century, and the siege is responsible for the reporter’s presence in Bosnia to begin with. How can the snipers not be a part of the story?

To me it is plausible to imagine a Western journalist “going out,” because there are no clear grounds for not going. There are clear grounds for not taking bribes, for not making up quotes. But not for this.

Nor would the fruits of “snipers at work”—video footage, for example—be shunned by the global marketplace for news and documentary. On the contrary, a value would instantly be placed on it and once the uplink is made the video would start moving (and publicizing evil.)

Which might be exactly what a faction among the Bosnian Serb forces wanted.

There would be many reasons to go, if journalism alone, or let’s say professionalism in news, is permitted to supply the values. And if the marketplace does it, no problem. One goes, gets video of the snipers, gets a story, gets paid.

I believe there are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional “role” that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don’t trust journalists. They don’t trust that abyss.

[…]

Michael Herr, who like the late Hunter Thompson is a Sixties figure, said something in the part I quoted from him that crashes the ethical system of mainstream journalism, turning it upside down: You were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. It was a lesson he learned from covering Vietnam.

That’s not the way most journalists think; they say pretty much the opposite. For example: We’re not responsible for what we saw in campaign 2004, only for what we did in reporting it. That’s common sense in the profession. Herr contradicts it. So, in a way, does my fable.

To wrap up, I give you Michael Getler in his current column for the Washington Post:

The ombudsman’s perch is an interesting spot from which to watch all this angst unfold. The attacks on the mainstream media, and the attempts to undermine them, are indeed escalating. More and more e-mails have a nasty, threatening, ideological tone.

From their perch, the ombudsmen of America all report this escalation, but they do not report much progress in the hunt for ideas that would explain it. I suggest that, when there is a moment, they look into the abyss of observation alone.

I somehow doubt that Kelly has given this sort of thing much thought. She’s just trying to get ratings, I’d guess, and her reputation as a right wing TV host has given her entree to certain people. But she needs to think this through more carefully than she has.

This is a delicate time and it’s not so much that nobody should ever interview Vladimir Putin or Alex Jones. Indeed, they should. But they need to understand what these people are doing and recognize that they are playing a role in the dissemination of their ideas and they have to find a way to deal with that. It’s hard for the best of journalists to do.

This piece by Yashar Ali at Huffington Post show is isn’t one of the best. They saw the unedited footage of Kelly’s interview with President Putin. It isn’t pretty.

In the full, unedited discussion, obtained by HuffPost, Kelly repeatedly fails to interrupt the Russian president while he rambles in his responses. She also asks Putin questions he can easily dispute.

The last question Kelly asked Putin, which was not aired, was startling in its pandering. “We have been here in St. Petersburg for about a week now. And virtually every person we have met on the street says what they respect about you is they feel that you have returned dignity to Russia, that you’ve returned Russia to a place of respect. You’ve been in the leadership of this country for 17 years now. Has it taken any sort of personal toll on you?”

A former CIA Russia analyst who spoke to HuffPost was taken aback by the last question Kelly asked. “I can’t begin to tell you what this did for Putin’s ego, and I wouldn’t put it past the Kremlin to use it for propaganda purposes. Putin’s obsession is, by his definition, making Russia great again. He’s obsessed with the idea that he has returned the country to what he sees as the glory days of the USSR. He feels that since the breakup of the USSR, Russia has too often ceded ground where it shouldn’t have. And he’s obsessed with people seeing him as the one who brought dignity back to Russia.”

…Kelly had just 20 minutes with the de-facto dictator. If a reporter interviews a subject for hours, he or she might ask more personal questions in order to get the subject to relax. But Kelly needed to hit key questions quickly.

She didn’t.

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Death Spiral: We’re gonna need a storyboard
by Tom Sullivan

Death spiral sounds like a film Seinfeld‘s Kramer might want to bootleg. President Donald Trump has promoted it pretty heavily since entering the race for the White House. Like “death panels,” it has a certain ring, but one that doesn’t ring true.

2 million more people just dropped out of ObamaCare. It is in a death spiral. Obstructionist Democrats gave up, have no answer = resist!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2017

Politifact took issue with that characterization, providing more detail than I will recount here. But in summary:

In a tweet, Trump linked 2 million people dropping coverage on the Obamacare exchanges to a “death spiral.” The figure is plucked out of context. The pattern of people signing up and then dropping coverage has been steady over the past few years. One reason people do so, experts and government data say, is because they find coverage someplace else, most often by getting a job.

The current government report behind Trump’s figure suggests the percentage of people letting their policies lapse has gone up, but this year, the government changed when it counted those lapsed policies. According to experts, that change created the appearance of a trend that might not exist.

Mostly False, Politifact judges.

Claxons announcing Obamacare’s demise sound regularly around Republican offices in the capitol. But they don’t tell the full tale either, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar wrote for the Associated Press last week. Vice President Mike Pence rolled out a chart explaining the programs woes to federal employees:

“Back when Obamacare was first passed, just over seven years ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 23 million Americans would be covered by now,” Pence told Health and Human Services Department workers. “That’s the blue line on the far left,” he added, referring to his chart. “It quickly became apparent that this was farfetched — to put it mildly.”

True, only 10.3 million people are enrolled this year in the subsidized health insurance markets, not the 23 million projected by the budget office for 2017.

But Pence — and the chart — omitted any mention of the other major coverage arm of Obama’s law, a Medicaid expansion estimated to cover 12 million low-income people this year. More would be covered, but 19 states have refused the expansion because of opposition from Republicans.

Together, the Medicaid expansion and subsidized private health insurance have reduced the number of uninsured by about 20 million people, bringing the uninsured rate to a historic low of about 9 percent, according to the government.

Pence was referring to this chart released Tuesday showing insurer participation in the Obamacare exchanges:

“The American people have fewer insurance choices and in some counties no choice at all,” said Seema Verma of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing Obamacare:

The map’s release comes a week after big insurer Anthem said it was effectively abandoning Ohio’s Obamacare market in 2018, leaving 18 counties there with potentially no insurer, and after Washington’s insurance commissioner revealed that two counties could be “bare” of Obamacare insurers next year in that state.

Anthem had cited the uncertainty about the Trump administration’s funding of so-called cost-sharing reduction subsidies in its decision.

But it might be instructive to compare that map with a map showing the 19 states where states have refused the Medicaid expansion. There is a lot of overlap:

What has received less attention is the number of new insurers moving into areas as competitors pull out. The Hill reported:

An ObamaCare insurer will move into three new states while expanding its footprint in six existing markets.

Centene announced Tuesday it would enter Kansas, Missouri and Nevada in 2018, while expanding its presence in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Texas and Washington.

It’s unclear which counties Centene will sell plans in, but the move could mean they are filling “bare counties” in these states that are slated to have no marketplace insurers for 2018.

Forbes reports that as the Senate met in secret to repeal Obamacare with a bill similar to the House-passed American Health Care Act:

Obamacare had a good week, capping with announcements by Oscar Health and Medica that they would join Centene in launching individual products in states where other insurers have left public exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

Medica said it will file with regulators to sell individual insurance statewide in Nebraska under the ACA. Medica is a big name health plan in the Upper Midwest, which is good news for 100,000 Nebraskans who have bought ACA plans in the past.

[…]

The ACA expansion plans from Medica, Oscar Health and Centene come despite the unknown of what will happen to the individual insurance market if Republicans in Congress and the Donald Trump White House repeal the law. Insurers are raising rates because there is yet to be a commitment on critical cost-sharing reductions and the Republican-led U.S. Senate has yet to make its legislation public as it races to come up with an ACA repeal and replacement plan by July.

Pence heard complaints in Iowa where state officials asked for federal help as insurers Aetna and UnitedHealth Group abandon the state. State officials would use “$352 million in federal money to provide backup funding for insurers and overhaul Obamacare’s subsidies for consumers next year. The state would also create a single standardized plan that insurers would offer.”

Medica may enter the Iowa market but has made no commitment. Oscar Health, co-founded by Joshua Kushner (brother to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law), announced on Thursday a partnership with the Cleveland Clinic to provide insurance in five counties in northeast Ohio. But this won’t help consumers elsewhere in Ohio left in the lurch by the loss of Anthem on the state’s exchange.

The Republican argument is that Obamacare is in a death spiral (say it with me in a low, guttural voice) because, in addition to the rising private premiums, people in many states have only one choice of for-profit insurer. Presumably, Senate Republicans’ double secret replacement would provide more choices if not lower costs. But if Iowa lawmakers are preparing to create their own “single standardized plan,” there really is no need. Medicare For All would do the job nicely without the uncertainty and middle-man markups.

But that just won’t do for Republicans. The Market would be angry.

The last picture show

By Dennis Hartley

6/11/17: Miyazaki sky courtesy of my chintzy Android

This is the song at the end of the movie
When the house lights go on
The people go home
The plot’s been resolved
It’s all over
– Joan Baez

“How tall was King Kong?” asks Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), the larger-than-life director of the film-within-the-film in Richard Rush’s 1980 black comedy, The Stunt Man. Once you discover that King Kong was but “three foot, six inches tall”, it’s clear Cross’s query is code for a bigger question: “What is reality?” Or perhaps he’s asking “What is film?” Is film a “ribbon of dreams” as Orson Welles once said? Those are questions to ponder as you take Rush’s wild ride through the Dream Factory. Because from the moment that its protagonist, a fugitive on the run from the cops (Steve Railsback) tumbles ass over teakettle onto Mr. Cross’s set, where he is filming an art-house World War I drama, his (and our) concept of what is real and what isn’t becomes diffuse.

Despite lukewarm critical reception, it is now considered a classic. A 43-week run at the Guild 45th Theater in Seattle (booked by Rush himself, out of his frustration with the releasing studio’s lackluster support) is credited for building word of mouth and assuring the film’s cult status. There is symbiosis in that story (recounted in Rush’s 2000 documentary, The Sinister Saga of Making the Stunt Man); for as surely as The Stunt Man is a movie for people who love movies, the Guild is the type of “neighborhood theater” that people who love movies fall in love with.

The Guild’s buff-friendly vibe stems from the ethos established by former owner-operator Randy Finley. As Matthew Halverson writes in his 2009 Seattle Met article, “The Movie Seattle Saved”:

Randy Finley didn’t like to take chances when booking movies for the Guild 45th Theatre. He took it so seriously that during his 18 years as owner of Seattle’s Seven Gables Theatres chain, he recruited a small cadre of film-buff confidantes who would join him at screenings and then debate whether what they’d seen met Seven Gables’ standards: Could it generate compelling word of mouth? Would it get great critical support? Did they like the people behind the picture? He took a lot of pride in having run movies like The Black Stallion and Harold and Maude in his theaters when others wouldn’t. And he took even more pride in turning them into art house hits. “If you went to the Guild 45th when I was booking it,” Finley says, “you would walk out thinking you’d just seen one of the best pictures of the year—if not the best.”

The Guild originally opened circa 1920; it was called The Paramount until the Seattle Theater (downtown) adapted the name in 1930. It went through various ownerships (Finley bought it in 1975, adding them to his Seven Gables chain). In 1983, Finley added a smaller auditorium two doors down (The Guild II). In 1989, both theaters (along with the rest of the Seven Gables properties) were sold to Landmark, who have run them ever since. That is…until this happened:

[From The Stranger Slog]

On Monday afternoon, Griffin Barchek, a rising junior at UW, headed to Wallingford to work a shift at the Guild 45th, as he had been doing roughly 30 hours a week for the past year-and-a-half. He heard the bad news before he even stepped inside. “I was the second person to get there,” Barchek said. “I was told immediately by a disgruntled co-worker outside. Then there was a sign on the counter that said ‘We’re closed for renovations.’” 

Though he had no hard evidence to support the hypothesis, he believes the sign is a pipe dream. “Renovations are very unlikely,” he speculated. “It’s probably just closed for good.” 

Once inside, Barchek said a representative from Landmark’s corporate office was on hand to inform him and his co-workers that both the Guild and the Seven Gables would be closed indefinitely (“for renovations”), that their services were no longer required, and that they’d all be receiving three weeks’ severance. Barchek said he earned the $15/hr minimum wage for his work as an usher, in the box office, and behind the concessions counter.
“She just kept saying ‘I’m sorry’ and kind of making a duck face,” he said of the Landmark representative. (As has been the case with all press inquiries regarding the sudden closure of these theaters, Landmark has refused to comment beyond saying they are closed for renovations.)

I was blindsided by this myself. Last Sunday, I was checking the listings, looking for something to cover for tonight’s weekly film review (preferably something/anything that didn’t involve aliens, comic book characters, or pirates), and was intrigued by Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled. Being a lazy bastard, I was happy to discover that the exclusive Seattle booking was at my neighborhood theater (the Guild 45th!), which is only a three-block walk from my apartment.

Imagine my surprise when I went to their website for show times and was greeted by this message: “The Seven Gables and Guild 45th Theaters have closed. Please stay tuned for further details on our renovation plans for each location. During the down time, we look forward to serving you at the Crest Cinema Center.” The Crest (now Landmark’s sole local venue open for business) is another great neighborhood theater, programmed with first-run films on their final stop before leaving Seattle (and at $4 for all shows, a hell of a deal). But for how long, I wonder?

It’s weird, because I drive past the Guild daily, on my way to work; and I had noticed that the marquees were blank one morning last week. I didn’t attach much significance to it at the time; while it seemed a bit odd, I just assumed that they were in the process of putting up new film titles. Also, I’ve been receiving weekly updates from the Landmark Theaters Seattle publicist for years; last week’s email indicated business as usual (advising me on upcoming bookings, available press screeners, etc.), and there was absolutely no hint that this bomb was about to drop.

Where was the “ka-boom”?! There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering “ka-boom”. Oh, well.

It would appear that the very concept of a “neighborhood theater” is quickly becoming an anachronism, and that makes me feel sad, somehow. Granted, not unlike many such “vintage” venues, the Guild had seen better days from an aesthetic viewpoint; the floors were sticky, the seats less than comfortable, and the auditorium smelled like 1953…but goddammit, it was “my” neighborhood theater, it’s ours because we found it, and now we wants it back (it’s my Precious).

My gut tells me the Guild isn’t being “renovated”, but rather headed for the fires of Mount Doom; and I suspect the culprit isn’t so much Netflix, as it is Google and Amazon. You may be shocked, shocked to learn that Seattle is experiencing a huge tech boom. Consequently, the housing market (including rentals) is tighter than I’ve ever seen it in the 25 years I’ve lived here. The creeping signs of over-gentrification (which I first started noticing in 2015) are now reaching critical mass. Seattle’s once-distinctive neighborhoods are quickly losing their character, and mine (Wallingford) is the latest target on the urban village “up-zoning” hit list. Anti-density groups are rallying, but I see the closure of our 100 year-old theater as a harbinger of ticky-tacky big boxes.

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Some of my fondest memories of the movie-going experience involve neighborhood theaters; particularly during a 2 ½ year period of my life (1979-1981) when I was living in San Francisco. But I need to back up for a moment. I had moved to the Bay Area from Fairbanks, Alaska, which was not the ideal environment for a movie buff. At the time I moved from Fairbanks, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on first-run features (it took us nearly a year to even get Star Wars).

Keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and VCRs were a still a few years down the road. There were occasional midnight movie screenings at the University of Alaska, and the odd B-movie gem on late night TV (which we had to watch in real time, with 500 commercials to suffer through)…but that was it. Sometimes, I’d gather up a coterie of my culture vulture pals for the 260 mile drive to Anchorage, where there were more theaters for us to dip our beaks into.

Consequently, due to the lack of venues, I was reading more about movies, than actually watching them. I remember poring over back issues of The New Yorker at the public library, soaking up Penelope Gilliat and Pauline Kael; but it seemed requisite to live in NYC (or L.A.) to catch all of these cool arthouse and foreign movies they were raving about (most of those films just didn’t make it out up to the frozen tundra). And so it was that I “missed” a lot of 70s cinema.

Needless to say, when I moved to San Francisco, which had a plethora of fabulous neighborhood theaters in 1979, I quickly set about making up the deficit. While I had a lot of favorite haunts (The Surf, The Balboa, The Castro, and the Red Victorian loom large in my memory), there were two venues in particular where I spent an unhealthy amount of time: The Roxie and The Strand.

That’s because they were “repertory” houses; meaning they played older films (frequently double and triple bills, usually curated by some kind of theme). That 2 ½ years I spent in the dark was my film school; that’s how I got caught up with Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Peter Bogdanovich, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Wim Wenders, Michael Ritchie, Brian De Palma, etc.

Of course, in 2017 any dweeb with an internet connection can catch up on the history of world cinema without leaving the house…which explains (in part) why these smaller movie houses are dying. But they will never know the sights, the sounds (the smells) of a cozy neighborhood dream palace. Everybody should experience the magic at least once. C’mon-I’ll save you the aisle seat.

More reviews at Den of Cinema

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—Dennis Hartley

Heartbreak

by digby

I can’t stand this:

Justin Martin, 21, is in many respects a typical junior at Kenyon College. He lives in an off-campus apartment, which he shares with six other guys. He’s majoring in English, helps run a student improv group, and last semester he took five courses instead of the usual four ― a “terrible idea,” he now concedes. Sometimes he pulls all-nighters to write papers or study for exams, drawing sustenance from soda and chocolate-covered almonds. And sometimes he stays up late just to have long arguments with his roommates ― like over whether it’s OK to ban campus speeches by white supremacists (Martin says no) or whether the seventh Harry Potter novel was the worst (Martin says yes).

But in one respect, Martin is unique on the Kenyon campus and rare among college students in general. He has cerebral palsy, the disease that severely impairs muscle movement. Martin cannot walk or care for himself without assistance. His life in college ― getting to room with his fellow students, carrying a more-than-full course load ― is a testimony to many things, including supportive administrators and his own stubborn determination. But, Martin says, none of this would be possible if it wasn’t for the help of government programs. And perhaps the most important among them is Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that provides coverage to the needy, including people with disabilities.

Most people think of Medicaid as a program for able-bodied, non-elderly adults and their children ― a form of “welfare” that some Americans tolerate and others resent because they think, rightly or wrongly, that it’s subsidizing people too lazy to work. But one-third of the program’s spending is on people with disabilities. Although they account for a much smaller fraction of Medicaid enrollees, there are roughly 9 million people in this category, and almost all have unusually severe health care needs. On average, Medicaid spends more than four times on somebody with disabilities than it does on an able-bodied adult.

ALISSA SCHELLER/HUFFPOST
Martin is living at his family’s home on the outskirts of Columbus for the summer. When I visited him there recently, he pointed out some of the places that Medicaid money goes. There is the lift-and-pulley system that operates along a track in the ceiling, similar to the one in his campus apartment. It takes him from his bedroom into the bathroom when he needs to use the toilet or take a shower. To get around, he uses a motorized wheelchair that can change its shape in order to stretch out his legs or make him stand. For longer trips, there’s a van with a lift for the wheelchair. Martin can’t be truly alone, because he requires help with some basic functions ― a list, he frequently notes, that includes “wiping my butt.” That means paying for caregivers who, at school, must be on call around the clock.

Buying and installing the equipment costs many thousands of dollars. Paying those caregivers costs many thousands more, on an ongoing basis. Martin’s father, who lost his factory job several years ago, drives trucks for a living. His mother, who used to work in state government, now has a job at a university. That position provides health insurance, but the plan, like most commercial insurance policies, wouldn’t cover the array of equipment and services Martin needs ― especially the ones that allow him to live independently. Medicaid, in combination with some other government programs, does. And now some of that coverage is at risk because of Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The American Health Care Act, the bill that the House of Representatives passed in May and that the Senate is now using as the basis for its repeal legislation, would cut approximately $1 trillion from federal health plans over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Although few people realize it, a portion of that cut has nothing to do with “Obamacare” per se. It’s the creation of a different funding formula for Medicaid that would affect the entire program. The purpose of this change is to limit the money Washington sends to the states in order to finance their programs. Conservative lawmakers want to scale back the funding even more, either in the repeal bill itself or in subsequent legislation.

The champions of this legislation, including Trump administration officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Republican leaders in Congress like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), deny that these cuts would hurt people like Martin. They say eliminating recent Medicaid expansions and putting the program on a tighter budget would ultimately make it more financially sustainable. And they say that states, given more flexibility over how to manage Medicaid within their borders, would respond by finding ways to innovate. “We believe strongly that the Medicaid population will be cared for in a better way under our program,” Price said during a CNN interview in May.

It’s impossible to disprove these claims. But Medicaid’s history offers reason to be highly skeptical. Funding for the program is already threadbare. And plenty of state officials ― mostly, though not exclusively, Republican ― already want to reduce their share of Medicaid appropriations even more. Cuts at the federal level could embolden these officials, or merely force them to respond in kind because of how the program’s financing works. Either way, coverage for disabilities would be a likely target for cuts, in part because that coverage represents such a large fraction of program spending now.

Read on …

We are such a rich country that cretinous imbeciles like Donald Trump can have a gold plated toilet. But these Republicans are about to ruin the lives of millions of people like this so that these greedy bastards can have even more money. It’s all they care about. They think people like this will find help “in the churches” or something.

Right.

Here’s an interview with Mike Pence back when the Tea Party was protesting the Town Halls and screaming in the faces of people with health problems. He didn’t think that was nice. But he was very upset that the health care plan was being put together in secret. Of course it wasn’t. They had months and months of hearings and open discussions. He’s a liar just like his current boss and no amount of unctuous brow furrowing changes that.

Those are Trump and Pence’s constituents. They don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves and for some reason we’re all supposed to feel sorry for them. I wish I understood why.

Look at those people screaming at a man with Parkinson’s disease telling him that he has to “work” for everything he gets. There is no excuse for such cruelty. None. They have agency. They don’t have to act like barbarians.

Fuck those people.

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Shakespeare is Degenerate Art

by digby

Let’s just burn all books but the Bible and “The Art of the Deal” and get it over with:

According to the Boston Globe, theater companies across the country that perform Shakespeare are getting death threats over a New York Public Theater play in Central Park that depicts the death of Ceasar — but who looks like President Donald Trump.

The senders of these death threats are “outraged over the Public Theater’s controversial staging” of Shakespeare’s “Caesar” that features the infamous stabbing scene with a character inspired by Trump — but they appear to have gotten the locations a little off.

One such theater is Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, who have been “inundated with a flood of venomous e-mails, phone messages, and social media posts condemning them for the Central Park production.”

One sender told the management of the Lenox theater that they wish “the worst possible life you could have and hope you all get sick and die.” Another told them their “play depicting the murder of our President is nothing but pure hatred.”

The Lenox Shakespeare company is far from the only Shakespeare-performing theater who’ve gotten these kinds of threats. Raphael Parry, the director of Shakespeare Dallas in Texas, told the Globe that his theater “has received about 80 messages, including threats of rape, death, and wishes that the theater’s staff is ‘sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives.’” Theaters in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in New York said they’ve received threats as well.

“We just got slammed,” Parry said. “It’s pretty amazing the vitriol, the wishing we would die and our family would die. A whole lot of them say that we should burn in hell.”

I just … can’t.

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He lies about everything so this is probably a lie too

by digby

Trump released a “disclosure form” that supposedly tells us all about his finances:

President Trump earned $598 million in income last year, according to his personal financial disclosure report released by the Office of Government Ethics on Friday evening. The financial report captures a mixed financial performance for the president’s assets over the last year.

The documents show that Trump has a minimum net worth of $1.1 billion, including more than $320 million in debts. Trump has five liabilities worth $50 million or more, such as the lease on his Washington D.C. hotel.

While Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Fla. country club he’s dubbed the “Winter White House,” saw a nearly $8 million increase in revenue — a 25 percent increase from last year — other golf courses had unchanged revenues. Mar-a-Largo has also doubled the amount a person must pay to be a member over the past year.

Unlike his other Florida club, Trump’s Miami golf club, the Trump National Doral, lost money over the last year. In 2015, it brought in $132 million. During 2016, though, it saw revenues fall to $115 million.

But Trump Corporation, the president’s management company, jumped from a revenue of $6.5 million in 2015 to about $18 million during 2016.

Although royalties for his book “Art of the Deal” also at least doubled, revenues for condo sales in his swanky properties decreased.

At Trump Park Avenue, for example, condo sales in 2015 totaled $44.3 million. Last year, those sales only reached $29.9 million — a 33 percent decrease — documents say.

In the last year, Trump opened the doors to his Washington D.C. hotel in the historic Old Post Office building. His financial disclosure says that he made nearly $20 million in revenue.

In 2015, Trump’s airline — Tag Air — which leases a 757 from one of his businesses, earned $3.7 million in revenue. The next year, it reported earning $7.7 million in revenue and travel reimbursements. Trump used Tag Air to travel during the campaign.

Trump also sold off all of his stocks, except for the ones held in private funds controlled by an independent trustee.

The 98-page report that covers the last year is slightly shorter than the one he filed in 2016 as a presidential candidate. Those financials clocked in at 104 pages.

In that filing, Trump claimed his net worth was more than $10 billion. His minimum net worth calculated from the numbers on the form, however, came in at $1.15 billion.

“President Trump welcomed the opportunity to voluntarily file his personal financial disclosure form; while this filing is voluntary (as no report was due until May 2018), it has been certified by the Office of Government Ethics pursuant to its normal procedures,” according to a statement from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Friday night.

The financial disclosure reports list Trump’s various assets, liabilities and some income, but it is difficult to determine a person’s wealth based on their financial disclosure forms because the values are listed in vast ranges.

For example, some of Trump’s assets are listed as having a value of between $100,000 and $1 million. Some are just labeled as bringing in “more than $5 million” in income.

I don’t know why we should even read this, to tell you the truth. It might as well be fiction. Whatever.

Anything can happen

by digby

This is a great analysis of the current state of play in the Russia investigation by Betsy Woodruff, Lachan Markay, Asawin Suebsaeng and Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast. There’s a lot to it, but I thought this was particularly interesting:

Former Justice Department officials said that Trump’s tweet has put Rosenstein, who just months ago enjoyed a sterling reputation, in an untenable position. At the minimum, Rosenstein is likely to come under overwhelming pressure to recuse himself from his role overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump.

A former senior DOJ official said Trump’s tweet accuses Rosenstein of lying to Congress. Trump claims Rosenstein “told me to fire the FBI Director!” Shortly after Comey was fired, Rosenstein said in a statement to Congress that the memo said was “not a statement of reasons to justify a for-cause termination,” even though he “thought it was appropriate to seek a new leader” for the FBI.

“The question is, is this a bridge too far for Rod?” the former official said.

The last time the White House characterized Rosenstein as the hatchet man, he “drew a line in the sand,” as the official put it, and reportedly threatened to resign. Shortly after, Trump told NBC News that he would have fired Comey regardless of Rosenstein’s memo.

Still, it’s undeniable that Rosenstein’s memo aided Trump in firing Comey. That means the senior Justice Department official responsible for Mueller’s investigation is also a likely witness in that investigation.

“It’s long seemed to me that Rosenstein would inevitably have to recuse himself in this investigation, because he was a witness to the events surrounding the firing of James Comey and may have participated in the firing of Mr. Comey,” Mariotti continued.
“This latest statement by the president may hasten Rosenstein’s recusal or put pressure on Rosenstein to step aside or step down.”
Rosenstein has quietly acknowledged that he may need to step aside, according to ABC News. He has already testified to a House panel that he is in consultation with Justice Department ethics officials to determine if his recusal is necessary.

“You don’t recuse yourself from an investigation because a subject of the investigation is accusing you of misconduct,” said Ed Dowd, a former U.S. Attorney who helped run the special counsel investigation of the Waco raid. “This may be putting pressure on Rosenstein to say, ‘Do I really need this?’ It may be putting pressure on him to get out, but that is not a proper reason to recuse himself, there’s no question about that.”

“It should not have an effect on him in terms of recusing himself. He should not recuse himself based on tweets by someone who’s under investigation”

It has been a spectacular fall for Rosenstein. As recently as February, pillars of the legal establishment breathed a sigh of relief when the highly respected prosecutor became deputy attorney general. Instead, they have watched in horror as he wrote a legal memo in May at Trump’s request that was widely seen as a pretext for firing the FBI chief. Brookings Institution scholar Ben Wittes, editor of the influential legal blog Lawfare and a friend of Comey’s, has speculated that Rosenstein might have given Trump the “loyalty” assurance the president sought unsuccessfully from the ex-FBI director.

As respected as Rosenstein was, he also has a reputation for ambition. The view of him in legal circles, according to a former Justice Department official who wished to remain anonymous, is, “he’s wanted to be the DAG [deputy attorney general] for a long, long time.”

Should Rosenstein recuse himself—or lose his job—the next Justice Department official in line to oversee the Mueller probe is Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, who was legal-policy chief in the George W. Bush-era department and more recently served on the government’s privacy watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The conservative Brand has a reputation, former colleagues say, for extreme intelligence and integrity. Of course, the same used to be said of Rosenstein.

This whole thing just goes to show how much we’ve always relied on our leaders having a certain level of respect for the institutions of our government and the presidency in particular. If a president and his party don’t give a damn about that, they can get away with murder.

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Maybe Ted could talk to these guys

by digby

Nugent, of course, now that he’s taken a vow of non-violence. I know he’s most worried about all the liberal violence that’s breaking out all over the country. But perhaps he might have more credibility with fine fellows like this:

A federal document filed by prosecutors this week alleges that a Florida-based neo-Nazi planned to kill civilians by planting explosives at targeted sites ranging from synagogues to power lines to nuclear reactors.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that prosecutors are alleging Tampa resident Brandon Russell had bombmaking materials at a garage adjacent to his apartment that he planned on using for the mass killing of civilians.

Officers arrested Russell after finding explosives in the garage at the same time they were investigating Russell’s roommate, Devon Arthurs, who is himself a former neo-Nazi who allegedly murdered his two other roommates after they mocked his conversion to Islam.

Russell admitted to police that the explosives in the apartment were his, and prosecutors say that Arthurs described Russell’s plans to plant them at nuclear reactors while being interrogated by police.

Prosecutors presented this new evidence in a fresh bid to get U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas B. McCoun to deny Russell bail. McCoun ruled last week that Russell was entitled to bail, although he still hasn’t set the specific amount.

I’m not sure what kind of crime would add up to not granting bail, but planning to blow up nuclear plants seems like a good candidate.

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Terms of en-Deere-ment
by Tom Sullivan

A line from a recent book review keeps churning around upstairs:

We have failed, he argues, to see clearly the poisoned seed at the core of modernity, which is the way that capitalistic, individualistic society has turbocharged the tension between our desire for wholeness and the incapacity of the world to fulfill it.

Daniel Oppenheimer in his review of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger uses ads for Google’s new phone, the Pixel, as an example of how these “sixty-second desire bombs” sell us on “the fantasy that with the right stuff we can all have material security, creative fulfillment, control over our destinies, a tribe of cool friends, and a sense of belonging and place in the world.” It helps that I watch little television. I had to find the ads online.

But it is the need for control over our destinies that drives Americans to buy guns in staggering quantities, one suspects. For those without money, political connections or other means to power, guns are the shortcut to short-circuiting a gnawing sense of powerlessness a new cell phone will not dent. Oppenheiner writes:

For these souls, lost and spinning in the space between what capitalism, industrialization, and liberalism have promised and what these forces of modernity have in fact delivered, what does the Pixel commercial provoke? Not just yearning and anxiety, but also rage, envy, anger, self-loathing, a deep sense of loss and humiliation—the whole toxic brew that Friedrich Nietzsche, back in the nineteenth century, diagnosed as ressentiment.

Oppenheimer was not addressing gun culture or the shooting this week in Alexandria, Virginia, but it is related. People like James Hodgkinson don’t buy guns to attack politicians. They attack politicians with guns because they feel helpless, adrift in the world described above. Guns make them feel powerful again. Al Qaida? ISIS? Similar reasons, one suspects.

Knives, sticks or fists will do in a pinch. Jeremy Joseph Christian seen screaming at two young women he perceived as Others on a Portland light rail train stabbed three men who intervened. He probably couldn’t obtain a gun. The live-action-role-playing protests and counter-protests in Portland in the aftermath? Manifestations of the same angst.

Jane Mayer notices, as have others, that people like Hodgkinson often have a history of domestic violence. Rebecca Traister made the connection last year:

Recent research done by Everytown for Gun Safety has found that of the mass shootings in the United States between 2009 and 2015, 57 percent included victims who were a family member, spouse, or former spouse of the shooter. Sixteen percent of attackers had been previously charged with domestic violence. A recent piece in the New York Times suggested that the impulse toward domestic, gendered violence may be the thing that draws a few terrorists toward the Islamic State, since ISIS’s practices include sexual slavery and a fidelity to traditional gender norms as recruiting tools for young men.

“Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass shooter,” Mayer writes. “But it’s clear that an alarming number of those who have been accused of domestic abuse pose serious and often a lethal threats, not just to their intimate partners but to society at large.”

Not to minimize the misogyny at work or the problem of gun proliferation, but the growing sense of powerlessness underlies much of the violence. Gun store shelves across America don’t empty after the election of a Barack Obama because gun owners fear confiscation. They empty because gun owners feel a renewed sense of powerlessness purchasing new guns helps assuage. Temporarily.* It’s not just government encroachment on their freedoms that makes people form militia groups or organize alt-right rallies. From reports so far, Hodgkinson was connected with neither. Guns and anger and a sense of powerlessness are the common threads. Hodgkinson was unemployed and living out of a gym bag. Powerlessness and paranoia are turning liberals into conspiracy theorists.

But returning to “the poisoned seed at the core of modernity,” I’d argue that underlying the felt sense of powerlessness is real powerlessness. Violence towards family members, politicians, and society at large is an outgrowth of an economic system that relentlessly transfers not only wealth upward, but democratic and personal power. Metastasized capitalism threatens to turn anyone above below a certain net worth (that is, most of us) into 21st century serfs.

An article from Jim Hightower this week points to just how relentless and insidious the process is. Through “End User License Agreements,” manufacturers are attempting to keep a nation of tinkerers from working on the products they’ve bought. The absurdity of insisting a tractor owner must haul his broken John Deere to the nearest dealership as crops rot has Hightower fuming. You might call the new arrangement indentured ownership:

But while planned obsolescence has long been a consumer expense and irritation, brand-name profiteers are pushing a new abuse: Repair prevention. This treacherous corporate scheme doesn’t merely gouge buyers. Using both legal ruses and digital lockdowns, major manufacturers are quietly attempting to outlaw the natural instinct of us humanoids to fiddle with and improve the material things we own. Indeed, the absurdity and arrogance of their overreach is even more basic: They’re out to corporatize the very idea of “owning.”

Hightower concludes:

As awareness of this attempt by manufacturers to steal such a basic right spreads across grassroots America, so will people’s understanding of the rapacious nature of the unrestrained corporate beast–and that knowledge will fuel the people’s determination to rein the beast in.

High-capacity firearms have just replaced the peasants’ torches and pitchforks. Any repairs to the societal problem of firearms and misdirected anger will first require properly diagnosing the disease expressing itself in violence.

* Before God invented semi-automatic rifles, horses and hoods served a similar function.