Month: June 2017

If you’re satisfied with your health care, rattle your jewelry
by Tom Sullivan

There are no cheap seats here.

Vice President Mike Pence yesterday visited a Republican National Committee retreat in Chicago. He meant to rally his party’s support for the Obamacare repeal bill coming to a vote in the Senate this week.

“This is our moment. Now is the time. Every moment Obamacare survives is another day America suffers,” the designated staffer posted to his Twitter account.

This is our moment. Now is the time. Every moment Obamacare survives is another day America suffers. pic.twitter.com/pChSEEkLE9— Mike Pence (@mike_pence) June 24, 2017

“Before summer’s out, we’ll repeal/replace Obamacare w(ith)/system based on personal responsibility, free market competition & state-based reform,” read another accompanied by a photo of a ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel.

“That’s the Republican way. That’s the American way,” he added. “And that’s the way we’re going to reform health care in the 21st Century.”

Not likely a John Lennon aficionado, Pence did not invite his audience instead of clapping to rattle their jewelry.

Hullabaloo’s Heather Digby Parton tweeted, “Seriously, any kid who gets leukemia needs a big lesson in personal responsibility.” There will be plenty of lessons to go around should the bill pass this week.

Before summer’s out, we'll repeal/replace Obamacare w/ system based on personal responsibility, free-market competition & state-based reform pic.twitter.com/JzCyxX9kJb— Mike Pence (@mike_pence) June 24, 2017

I’ve heard plenty of conservative talk-show tirades about liberal coastal elites. But proclaiming in this upscale Midwest venue that Republicans plan to make medical treatment contingent on “personal responsibility, free market competition & state-based reform” is about as coded and vaporous as anything a left-leaning, unpaid college intern might conceive. Except infinitely more cold-blooded. This kind of Kool-Aid for the commoners takes decades of right-wing-billionaire-funded messaging research to synthesize. Drink enough over time and even a Bible-believing vice president doesn’t know his soul has been poisoned.

How poisoned? Former North Carolina Democratic congressman Brad Miller was not on the committees that formulated Obamacare. He admits it’s flaws, but notes in a Facebook post this morning that Democrats failed on the atmospherics:

Democrats blew the politics by letting Republicans say it was all just about helping the poor and nobody else, just like something Democrats would do. I’m all for helping the poor, but expanding health insurance coverage and requiring standard benefits helps everyone, including the people who already have insurance. The cost of treatment for the poor, usually emergency care when they’re really sick or hurt rather than care to keep them healthy, gets shifted to everyone else in their insurance premiums. I asked the Tea Party delegation that visited me about the ACA what they would do about the uninsured who come to the emergency room with life-threatening illnesses or injuries. They said let them die.

According to the right’s ghoulish orthodoxy, the uninsured sick should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more. Dying will be a lesson to others of their kind in personal responsibility, and as a bonus decrease the surplus population.

If Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues get their way, those lessons may come swiftly and painfully. In Illinois alone, “650,000 residents could lose Medicaid coverage under the Senate bill, and subsequent effects of state law, in 2021,” the Chicago Tribune reckons.

Back up and look again at the Pence tweet, at the lies, lies, and more lies, and consider that the country is not only in the hands of an emotionally stunted man-child, but in the grasp of a political cult.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Trees are important: After the Storm ****

By Dennis Hartley

 

Back in February of this year, my dear mother passed away, at the age of 86. While she had been weathering a plethora of health issues for a number of years, the straw that ultimately claimed her (pancreatic cancer) was diagnosed mere weeks before she died. In fact, her turn for the worse was so sudden that my flight to Ohio turned into a grim race; near as I could figure, my plane was on final approach to Canton-Akron Airport when she slipped away (I arrived at her bedside an hour after she had died). And yes, that was hard.

Since I obviously wasn’t present during (what turned out to be) her final days, I asked my brother if she had any “final words”. At first, he chuckled a little through the tears, recounting that several days prior, she had turned to him at one point and said “I wish I had some wisdom to impart. But I don’t.” I laughed (Jewish fatalism-it’s a cultural thing).

Then, he remembered something. The hospice room where my mother spent her last week had a picture window facing west, with a view of a field, a pond, a small stand of trees, and an occasional deer spotting. Two days before she was gone, my mother, my father, and my brother were quietly enjoying this pastoral scene with the bonus of a lovely sunset. My mother broke the silence with 3 simple words: “Trees are important.”

I’ve been mulling over those words. What did she mean? Indeed, trees are important. They are, in a literal sense, the very lungs of the Earth. As a metaphor, I must consider the foundational significance that The Tree of Life holds in Judaism. Was she “imparting wisdom” after all? Had she, at the end her journey, reached what Paddy Chayefsky once called a “cleansing moment of clarity” about The Things That Really Matter? Granted, it may not be as cinematic as “Rosebud”, but it’s at the very least a kissin’ cousin to a Zen koan. If I’d been there, I might’ve responded with something profound, like “Nicely put.”

I believe that is why, only three minutes in to writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s elegant new family drama, After the Storm, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly choking up over an exchange between a mother and a daughter during the opening scene. Perhaps I should say that my reaction was all at once unexpected…yet immediately understood.

“You’ll go senile being alone all the time,” a middle-aged woman named Chinatsu (Satomi Kobayashi) admonishes her recently-widowed mother (Kirin Kiki), “Go out and make friends.” Not missing a beat as she merrily bustles about the kitchen, Mom wryly rejoins “New friends at my age only mean more funerals.” Then, returning to stirring the simmering pot on the stove, the mother muses softly (half to herself), “The flavor sinks into the ingredients, if you cool it down slowly and let it sit overnight. Just like people.”

“Nicely put,” says a visibly surprised Chinatsu, with a smile.

“Nicely put” is how I would, in general, describe Kore-eda’s flair for dialogue throughout this wise, quietly observant and at times genuinely witty take on the prodigal son story.

The prodigal is Chinatsu’s younger brother Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), who has been drifting away from his sister and their mother in the wake of his divorce from Kyoko (Yoko Maki). While he is basically good-hearted, Ryota is a classic man-child who seems to be his own worst enemy. He works as a private detective, which he insists is not a “job”, but rather, “research” for a novel he is allegedly formulating. He actually is a published writer; his debut novel earned him a (relatively obscure) book award. However, that was some time ago, and his literary license for reveling in past glories has definitely expired. 

He has also long ago squandered any monies earned, due to his compulsive gambling habit. This propensity also keeps him in arrears on child support payments for his 11 year-old son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa). He treasures his weekly visitations with Shingo; however Kyoko is threatening to cut them off if he doesn’t stay caught up on payments.

Ryota still carries the torch for his ex-wife; he enlists his partner at the detective agency to help do a little extra-curricular surveillance on Kyoko, and is distressed to see that she appears to be happily ensconced with a new boyfriend. His partner indulges him, but wisely counsels that perhaps it is time to let go, just as Kyoko seems to have moved on.

But fate and circumstance conspire (I’m saying it) one dark and stormy night to force an awkward family reunion; Ryota, Kyoko and Shingo hunker down to ride out a typhoon in his mother’s cramped apartment. This sets the stage for the third act, which is essentially a chamber piece about love, late-blooming “maturity”, and the renewal of family bonds.

It’s inevitable to draw comparisons here with the work of one of the masters of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose name has become synonymous with such quietly observant family dramas. That being said, Kore-eda, while no less subtle than Ozu-san, is slightly less formal in his approach. In this respect, his film reminds me more of contemporary director Mike Leigh, another film maker who specializes in narratives regarding modern family dynamics, imbued with a seldom-matched sense of authenticity.

All the performances are beautifully nuanced; particularly when Abe and scene-stealer Kiki are onscreen. Kudos as well to DP Yutaka Yamazaki’s painterly cinematography, and Hanargumi’s lovely soundtrack. Granted, some could find the proceedings too nuanced and “painterly”, but those with patience will be rewarded. It may be true, as Tom Waits says, that “things are tough all over, when the thunderstorms start”, but after the storm, all is renewed. Kore-eda’s film reminds us that families, like trees, are important.

For my mother

Previous posts with related themes:

The Tree of Life
More reviews at Den of Cinema
On Facebook
On Twitter

–Dennis Hartley

Is this America?



by digby

Sadly, yes. The inauguration protests were met with major excessive force by the DC police. All of that’s being litigated right now, with some protesters, including at least one journalist, charged with felonies and facing serious jail time.

But this is something else:

But the experiences of the lawsuit’s four plaintiffs — independent photojournalist Shay Horse, volunteer legal observer Judah Ariel, and peaceful protesters Elizabeth Lagesse and Milo Gonzalez — suggest that MPD sought physical and emotional retribution on the hundreds of people kettled, the ACLU alleges.

An officer ordered Horse, fellow plaintiff Milo Gonzalez, and three others to take their pants off before grabbing their testicles and then inserting a finger into their anuses while “other officers laughed,” the complaint alleges. Horse is a photojournalist, one of six reporters initially arrested and charged whose cases have been dismissed.

“It felt like they were trying to…break us so that even if the charges didn’t stick, that night would be our punishment.”

“I felt like they were using molestation and rape as punishment. They used those tactics to inflict pain and misery on people who are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty,” Horse said. “It felt like they were trying to break me and the others — break us so that even if the charges didn’t stick, that night would be our punishment.”

In a statement responding to the lawsuit on Wednesday, the MPD defended its reputation and maintained that all its arrests were proper.

“Each year, the men and women of MPD protect the rights and ensure the safety of thousands of First Amendment assemblies, demonstrations and protests,” the department said. While thousands demonstrated peaceably on Inauguration Day, the statement went on, “there was another group of individuals who chose to engage in criminal acts, destroying property and hurling projectiles, injuring at least six officers. These individuals were ultimately arrested for their criminal actions.”

The department also pledged that “all…allegations of misconduct will be fully investigated.” Michelman said the ACLU welcomes that promise but doesn’t exactly trust it.

“We have significant concerns that that won’t be sufficient, in light of repeat problems MPD has had with arresting law-abiding demonstrators and responding…with excessive force,” Michelman said.

This isn’t the first time that the MPD has overreacted to scattered violence and rounded up peaceful protesters, subjecting them to extremely harsh treatment:

By dint of geography, MPD responds to far more mass demonstrations than any other police department. Marchers without permits regularly take over streets, sit in at organizational buildings, and even chain themselves to physical structures in protest without prompting the sort of crackdown that followed the Antifa provocations on Inauguration Day.

But MPD’s reputation for high standards on protester civil liberties coexists with a less-prominent and darker track record in cases like this one, Michelman said.

“When there are groups of people who protest only peacefully, demonstrations that go off without a hitch, MPD does tend to handle those pretty well. They tend to be prepared and respectful, and we commend them for that,” he said. “The problem is when there’s a little bit of lawbreaking at a mostly peaceful demonstration, the response from MPD is massive, it’s excessive, it’s unjustified, and it’s unconstitutional. That’s what we saw on January 20.” 

The indiscriminate targeting of reporters, legal observers, and peaceful protesters along with those who had broken windows and assaulted officers is not a one-off, he said. MPD reacted similarly to a World Bank protest in 2002 that went sideways. The city later paid $8.25 million to settle civil rights cases brought by nearly 400 protesters. That case, known among local lawyers as Pershing Park, was not the first multi-million-dollar payout by the District over an episode that broke from MPD’s broader pattern of high-road protest management.

You have to wonder if that isn’t their instruction. If one person or group smashes a window, bring the hammer down on everyone in the vicinity no matter who and make sure they feel your authority as harshly as possible. Guilt by association.Of course the peaceful protesters have no way of knowing advance that there will be violence or have any capacity to stop it. But they must pay too.

The rape stuff seems like a natural evolution of such a policy. Remember Abu Ghraib and the “enema punishment” at Bagram and Guantanamo? Once they take the gloves off someone’s fingers always seem to find their way into a prisoner’s anus.

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Trolling, trolling, trolling, can’t hide

by digby

So, Trump is trolling Obama hard now for not stopping the Russian interference in the election on his behalf. The interference he says is a hoax designed to excuse Clinton’s loss.

President Donald Trump questioned former President Barack Obama’s response to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election in an interview airing Sunday morning, saying Obama didn’t do enough to address the situation.

“Well I just heard today for the first time that Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it,” Trump said in an excerpt of his interview on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” released Friday. “But nobody wants to talk about that.”

“The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before they even — before the election,” Trump said. “And I hardly see it. It’s an amazing thing. To me, in other words, the question is, if he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don’t read that. It’s quite sad.”

Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?

Dear Mr. President,

Now that you have finally acknowledged that the Russian government did interfere in the presidential election on your behalf, are you honored by their endorsement and hard work for your campaign? Since they are obviously your enthusiastic followers, can we expect them to “help” you more in the future? Should we, perhaps, set up a system whereby Russian citizens can vote directly in our elections rather than have to go through all this subterfuge? It would be a little more transparent and give the Russian people the assurance that our system is on the up and up and their choice has been legitimately elected.

One thing though. They Russians obviously don’t fear you or hate you as much as they feared that sick old woman you were running against for some odd reason. So what did they expect from you in return?

Sincerely yours,

a citizen

He screwed the pooch again

Ivanka needs a tax cut

by digby

Arizona cut Medicaid before the ACA was enacted. Look what happened:

Swollen, throbbing, and pale purple, Beatrice’s left leg looked less like a limb and more like an oversized, striated eggplant.* But her breathing—or lack thereof—is what caught my attention first.

Beatrice was suffering from deep vein thrombosis, a condition that occurs when blood flowing through veins in the calf and thigh unexpectedly clots and obstructs the flow of blood to the rest of the body. Left untreated, the clot can dislodge and travel to blood vessels in the lungs—known as a pulmonary embolism. There’s a risk of sudden death.

The doctors dissolved the clots and stabilized her. Beatrice was clinically safe for now. The anxiety spreading over her face told me a different story.

Beatrice had been feeling throbbing pains in her leg for the past week. Afraid of the cost of urgent care, she hoped the pain would pass with time. Beatrice and her two children were constantly moving apartments every few months, and her Medicaid renewal paperwork had accidentally been sent to an old address, leaving her without coverage. Without insurance, she had been forced to choose between her rent and her leg. For the sake of her family, she had chosen her rent. Now she feared she no longer had a choice.

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A college volunteer at a Phoenix hospital, I stood on the sidelines watching in shock. I hoped to explore the practice of medicine, the doctor-patient relationships, and the miracles of treatment. Instead I discovered patients more frightened by dollars than disease. It was 2012.

In 2011, following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, then–Arizona Gov. Janet Brewer cut the state’s Medicaid funding and froze enrollment. Arizona blocked new enrollment in Medicaid and only allowed existing enrollees to continue receiving benefits if their income remained below the federal poverty line and they turned in their annual renewal paperwork on time. A family that received a raise that lifted their income even slightly above the poverty line lost Medicaid coverage permanently, even if their income dropped below the line again the following year.

Between 2011 and 2013, 150,000 adults on Medicaid in Arizona, nearly two-thirds of the childless adults in the program, lost coverage. Over those months I spent at the hospital, many of the patients presented their own horror stories after losing Medicaid.

A farmworker had his right foot amputated, lost to gangrene because he had been putting bandages on ulcers on the bottom of his feet to avoid paying for clinic visits. A truck driver with Type I diabetes was driving across the border to Mexico every other week to buy insulin, a life-or-death drug, because he could no longer afford the price in the U.S. The last patient I saw in the hospital was a landscaper who showed up with his hand shattered from a construction accident and wrapped in duct tape. He hoped his simple fix meant he wouldn’t need, or have to pay, for a cast.

Congress can—and should­—learn from Arizona’s mistake.

The Senate’s health care bill freezes Medicaid enrollment, preventing new poor families from signing up. We’ll know more after it receives a score from the Congressional Budget Office next week, but it is also likely to cut Medicaid funding by hundreds of billions of dollars. Like Arizona’s 2011 freeze, if a patient goes off Medicaid, she’s barred from re-enrolling in later years, regardless of her financial or medical status. In particular, the federal cap on Medicaid spending will place more financial pressure on the states to rein in costs. The end result is that, like Arizona, more states will be forced to restrict Medicaid eligibility, cap enrollment, and cut health benefits. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 14 million Americans would lose Medicaid coverage over the next 10 years under the House GOP bill. Now that we’ve seen it, the Senate version of the bill doesn’t offer a much different result.

Congress can—and should­—learn from Arizona’s mistake. The U.S. health care system faces significant challenges. Rising premiums, high deductibles, and fewer insurers to choose from each year have been both difficult and frustrating for Americans to manage. But Arizona knows, better than any other state or the federal government, the catastrophic effects of taking health care coverage away from people entirely.

Arizona expanded Medicaid coverage in 2013 following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Commenting on Arizona’s decision to expand Medicaid, Brewer said “It saved lives, it insured more people, it brought money into the state, it kept rural hospitals from being closed down. And today there are tens of thousands of people that are very, very grateful.”

Yeah well, fuck ’em. Ivanka needs a tax cut.

By the way, just so you know, Medicaid’s costs rise much, much more slowly than all the other programs in the health care sector. But whatever.

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They welcomed the interference

by digby

It’s hard not to be angry at President Obama for failing to adequately sound the alarm over the Russian meddling in the election. But we have been told for many months now that all blame for the outcome rests with that horrifying candidate who did everything wrong and nobody could stand, Hillary Rodham Clinton. So, that’s that. I’m uninterested in relitigating all that at the moment. It’s gets tiring.

If you really want to look at a man who will be remembered in history as a true patriot, look to Mitch McConnell who dismissed the warnings and refused to join the president in sounding the warning since Vladimir Putin was helping his team. Hey, they were fighting the world’s most heinous Feminazi so it makes sense that the Republicans would ally with Russians. Worked for FDR and Stalin, amirite?

Anyway, this is the truly fatuous response from the administration:

“We made the judgment that we had ample time after the election, regardless of outcome, for punitive measures.”

Ok, so they thought that Clinton would win. Fine. But it was only 16 years ago that we had a close election that went to the Republicans by dubious means through the electoral college. It never occurred to them that it could happen again? That’s ridiculous.

More importantly, if any of them even entertained the thought that Trump would do anything about this if he won, Mitch McConnell’s reactions should have been enough to disabuse them of that fact.

The simple truth is that the Republicans welcomed a foreign government interfering in the election on their behalf. They knew and they were happy about it and they are now doing everything in their power to cover it up. There is no other way to look at it.

Republican leaders were so hungry to kill people on Medicaid, bankrupt the middle class and give tax cuts to their millionaire friends that they knowingly allowed a foreign government to help that corrupt, incompetent imbecile into the White House. Think about that.

I feel sick.
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The art of growing a spine
by Tom Sullivan

The Obama administration received an “eyes only” CIA report last August that the Russian hacking attacks were far much more extensive than the DNC and Guccifer 2.0 episodes already known to the public. A bombshell report yesterday from the Washington Post claims the report “drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government … detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.” The reporting is based on the accounts of over three dozen current and former senior officials from the White House, the State and Defense Departments, U.S. intelligence services and other agencies. Because of the sensitivity of these matters, most spoke only on condition of anonymity. The report makes clear that second-guessing at the highest levels of the Obama administration and political concerns by the leadership of both major parties in the midst of a presidential campaign quashed a more decisive response:

In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy. It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin’s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences.

It is a stunning and lengthy report you simply must read.

Over at the Post’s Plum Line blog, Paul Waldman highlights how Democrats’ timidity in dealing with the crisis helped elect Donald Trump. Granted, in August no one expected Trump to win:

What comes through again and again is that the Obama administration was terrified of looking partisan or doing anything that might seem like it was putting a thumb on the scale of the election, and the result was paralysis. This is a manifestation of what some years ago I began calling the Audacity Gap.

I’ve been doing riffs on this for years, but none this clean.

Democrats are forever worried about whether they might be criticized, whether Republicans will be mean to them, whether they might look as though they’re being partisan, and whether they might be subjected to a round of stern editorials. Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t care. What they’re worried about is winning, and they don’t let the kinds of criticism that frightens Democrats impede them. It makes Republicans the party of “Yes we can,” while Democrats are the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

I’ve watched older (older than me anyway), local Democratic leaders second guess themselves this way for years instead of taking bold action, “But what will the Republicans do [to us] if we…?” “If we do that, we’ll be handing Republicans a campaign issue,” etc. And don’t get me started on how Republicans made Sen. Dick Durbin cry in the Senate during George W. Bush’s term. Democrats behave like abused spouses then wonder why voters won’t elect them.

Even if they vote for them at the local and state level, voters often will not vote for Democrats when national security is on the line because Americans at heart want leaders, doers not thinkers. They want candidates they can trust to fight for them, not arbitrate for them. People who will take a stand, not negotiate a compromise (even though that is how much in representative government gets done).

Democrats’ greatest weakness is they need people to like them, and they are easily hurt if people don’t. Republicans know this. So they deploy their patented hissy fits regularly to get Democrats to back down, just as Waldman writes. Anat Shenker Osorio wrote, “Democrats rely on polling to take the temperature; Republicans use polling to change it.”

Much as I hate to admit it, this quote from Margaret Thatcher captures that even more succinctly: “Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.” That’s leadership.

Last November 8th’s debacle wasn’t caused by this thing or that, but by what Lemony Snicket would call a series of unfortunate events. This week, this awful week is the outcome of that. Until Democrats stop cowering and start leading, they’ll be stuck following.

Update: Edited for clarity.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Grab a cocktail and watch these vids.

This dancing gorilla is the best goddamn thing I’ve seen on the Internet this year https://t.co/i0T13d1NLA

— Joel Pavelski (@joelcifer) June 22, 2017

Now watch this:

I added some music to this. pic.twitter.com/UwjhTKpaeu

— Bob Hagh (@BobHagh) June 22, 2017

Now have another cocktail and watch them again. You’ll feel better…:)

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Trump interviews lawyers

by digby

Sounds right to me:

His impression is just uncanny …

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