Monday, May 14, 2012 5:11:33 AM
Sabotage: The new GOP plan
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock)
Paul Ryan and the Republicans' latest tactic is outright treachery: They want to break the government
By Andrew Leonard
Friday, May 4, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
Paul Ryan is nothing if not indefatigable. On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Republican introduced yet another budget bill [ http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/224767-ryan-introduces-legislation-to-replace-12-trillion-sequester ]. The targets of his cuts — a long list of Democratic priorities — are painfully familiar. But this time around Ryan wrapped them up in a new package of urgency: preserving national security!
Ryan and his fellow Republicans (and a not inconsiderable number of Democrats) are desperate to find a way to avoid the dreaded ”sequester” — a package of around $600 billion in defense spending cuts that are scheduled to start kicking in at the end of this year. Never mind the holy grail of deficit reduction: When the beggar with his hand stuck out is the Pentagon, “entitlement” isn’t such a dirty word, after all.
As usual, the suffocating stench of Washington kabuki permeates the whole affair. The only reason defense cuts are on the table in the first place dates back to the failure of Republicans and Democrats to come to a real agreement on long-term deficit reduction at the end of last summer’s debt ceiling debacle. The threat of looming defense cuts that would automatically take effect in 2013 was supposed to force a bipartisan agreement before that dire day arrived. But the chances that Ryan’s newest salvo will get through the Democratic-controlled Senate during an election year are even more unlikely now than they were a year ago. The most realistic scenario? After the election, a lame-duck Congress will kick the can forward, again, to the new Congress and whoever inhabits the White House in 2013.
But a close look at the insidious nature of proposed cuts is still revealing, even in the midst of all the posturing. Ever since the midterm elections of 2010, House Republicans have been honing a new approach to government. Forget about old school “starve the beast” politics, the simple-minded belief that lowering taxes and depriving the government of revenue will ultimately topple the social welfare state. The new school tactic is sabotage. Break the government. Pour sugar into the gas tank. Steal the spark plugs.
Ryan’s new package of cuts takes aim at the heart of the two biggest pieces of legislation Democrats passed during the Obama administration, bank reform and healthcare reform. The details are wonky, but the goal is clear. By defunding crucial mechanisms designed to ensure that the laws actually work as intended, Republicans achieve two goals simultaneously: They avoid the anathema of cuts to defense spending, while rendering the legislation that they hate so much not just toothless, but incapacitated.
Machiavelli would applaud. Republicans may have lost the 2008 presidential election, but their insurgency-style guerrilla tactics ever since have ensured that the war is far from over. In 2012, the politics of sabotage rule Washington.
Ryan’s new bill, the Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012 [ http://budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/budget_reconciliation.pdf ], is constructed from recommendations formulated by six different House committees. The targeted cuts reflect familiar GOP priorities. One of the ways the Agriculture Committee, for example, proposes to save $33.2 billion over 10 years is by slashing food stamp assistance. The House Judiciary Committee put forward medical malpractice liability reforms that would theoretically cut federal reimbursements for spending on “defensive medicine” — such as medical tests ordered by doctors simply to protect against lawsuits. And so on.
But for our purposes the two most provocative proposed cuts are the House Financial Services Committee’s plan to defund the “orderly liquidation authority” mechanism in the Dodd-Frank bank reform act, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s effort to defund federal support for the construction of the health insurance exchanges at the heart of the Affordable Care Act.
Let’s break it down. The “orderly liquidation authority” — also known as the “resolution authority” — is the mechanism by which the Dodd-Frank Act aims to avoid the bailout chaos [ http://www.thenation.com/article/167083/ryan-budget-takes-aim-resolution-authority ] of the financial crisis of 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act includes a vast array of new rules for the financial sector, some of which are more far-reaching than others. But the resolution authority is crucial: it’s the law’s primary attempt at solving the Too Big To Fail problem — the frustrating reality that our biggest financial institutions are now so large that their failure routinely threatens to crash the entire U.S. economy. As was demonstrated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, simply standing by and watching as a major Wall Street financial firm collapses into bankruptcy is an untenable solution. But mindlessly injecting billions of taxpayer dollars without accountability into the likes of Citigroup or the Bank of America or A.I.G. is equally irresponsible.
The Dodd-Frank Act set up a process for determining whether the collapse of a financial institution posed a systemic threat to the economy, putting that company into federal receivership, and guiding it through a government-managed liquidation process. The cost would be recouped by asset sales after the fact. A crucial point: The funding for the resolution authority can only be used to liquidate a financial firm, not to preserve it.
It’s probably worth noting here that the “savings” envisioned by getting rid of the resolution authority are entirely illusory. The Congressional Budget Office determined the cost of the resolution authority as around $30 billion over 10 years [ http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/HFSreconciliation.pdf ]. But that’s contingent on whether there are financial firms that require liquidation. The $30 billion price tag is what the CBO thinks the government would have to pay if it was forced to liquidate “one or more” financial institutions sometime in the next decade.
So if Wall Street manages to avoid disaster over the next 10 years, there would be no government outlay. Win win! But the nasty little secret here is that, with or without the liquidation authority in place, the government will still be forced to take action if Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase is on the verge of collapse. Because there’s one thing we know for sure: No matter how much House Republicans claim to revere the autonomously acting free market, when push comes to shove, if the alternative is widespread economic collapse, Wall Street will get its bailout.
It’s also important to point out that the Dodd-Frank bill originally pre-funded the liquidation authority with $50 billion in assessments that would be levied on Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions. But after much screaming from financial sector lobbyists, that provision was dropped at the insistence of Senate Republicans. So what’s really going on here is that after first ensuring that Wall Street was not liable for paying the costs of its own government rescue ahead of time, now Republicans are intent on making sure that Wall Street won’t have to pay after it gets bailed out.
One can certainly question whether the Dodd-Frank resolution authority will work as planned in the heat of another crisis. But what’s the alternative? Republicans have put forth no other plan other than to simply watch as the economy crashes and burns. Instead, under the cover of budget cuts, they are taking aim at one of the core parts of the bank reform laws intended to prevent a repetition of the 2008 catastrophe. We shouldn’t label that fiscal restraint: We should call it vandalism.
The attack on health insurance exchanges [ http://energycommerce.house.gov/news/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=9486 ] is, in some ways, even more reprehensible. If Republicans are supposed to believe in anything, it’s the virtue of free-market competition. And that’s exactly what the health exchanges [ http://www.healthcare.gov/law/features/choices/exchanges/index.html ] are supposed to provide. As set forth in the Affordable Care Act, starting in 2014, the health exchanges [ http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7908.pdf ] are where Americans who can’t get employer-provided insurance will go to compare and contrast the costs and benefits of different health insurance plans.
Way back in 2009, Ezra Klein called the exchanges “the most important, unnoticed part of health reform [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/health_insurance_exchanges_the.html ].”
And what happens when you introduce productive competition, efficiencies of scale, more innovation and increased consumer power into a market as dysfunctional as the current situation for health insurance? In theory, you get lower prices and higher quality. And if the Health Insurance Exchange has lower prices and higher quality, more individuals will use it and more companies will buy into it. And if that happens, then the efficiencies of scale should increase, and so should the pace of innovation (as the rewards will be greater with more customers), and so the Health Insurance Exchange should further outpace the other markets, thereby attracting yet more customers, thereby further accelerating the virtuous cycle. Eventually, it could become the country’s primary insurance market.
The Affordable Care Act includes federal funding to help set up the exchanges. The “Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act” zeroes out that funding. How much will this save taxpayers? Hard to say — the language of Ryan’s bill simply orders the repeal of the provision in the ACA that allows the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to make financial aid grants to states at his or her discretion. As of February 2012, 33 states and the District of Columbia had received about $610 million in grants so far [ http://www.nasbo.org/publications-data/washington-report/hhs-announces-health-insurance-exchange-establishment-grants ].
The attack on funding for exchanges is just one of half a dozen jabs at healthcare reform included in Ryan’s new bill. (Indeed, picking away at healthcare reform has become the GOP’s go-to move for funding any new government expense, as demonstrated, yet again, by last week’s House vote to fund an extension of low interest rates on government student loans by raiding so-called Obamacare slush funds.) And as a deficit-reduction measure, the exchange defunding doesn’t offer anything close to the largest savings. For example: The provision for repealing the Prevention and Public Health Fund, an effort to reduce healthcare costs in the long run by spending more on prevention, would save $16 billion over 10 years. In the big scheme of things, a billion here or a billion there for the exchanges won’t make that much progress toward $600 billion worth of defense cuts.
But as a targeted cut designed to cripple the long-term efficacy of the Affordable Care Act, Ryan could hardly be wielding his scalpel with more precision. It’s brilliant. The part of the ACA that one might imagine most Republicans would be ideologically predisposed to agree with — the use of free market competition to provide consumers with more choice and lower costs — is the part that Republicans want to go after.
But that’s what the politics of sabotage are all about. If Republicans really cared about the federal budget, they wouldn’t insist that tax cuts or wars did not need to be paid for. The point, now, of the budget showdown is not to ensure fiscal restraint, but to disembowel the legislation that a duly elected president and Democratic Congress passed. Starve the beast, so far, has failed. But making sure that government doesn’t work at all? That’s much more doable.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/sabotage_the_new_gop_plan/singleton/ [with comments]
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(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75469106 and preceding and following
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Christie Vetoes Health Insurance Exchange
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: May 10, 2012
In a swipe at President Obama’s signature health care legislation, Gov. Chris Christie [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/christopher_j_christie/index.html ] of New Jersey vetoed on Thursday an online marketplace that the Legislature created to help residents and small businesses buy health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/health/policy/the-abcs-of-the-health-care-law-and-its-future.html ], the federal law passed in 2010, requires most Americans to have health insurance and mandates states to have health care benefits exchanges [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/health/policy/a-wait-and-see-approach-for-states-on-insurance-exchanges.html ] to help them buy it. With the Supreme Court debating [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/affordable_care_act/index.html ] whether the health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] is constitutional, Mr. Christie said in his veto message [ http://nj.gov/governor/news/news/552012/pdf/A-2171_AV.pdf ] that the exchange, approved in March, was “premature” and could impose “unnecessary obligations upon the state’s citizens.”
“Indeed, the very constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is cloaked in uncertainty, as both the individual mandate to procure health insurance as well as the jurisdictional mandate to establish an exchange may not survive scrutiny by the Supreme Court,” he wrote.
“Because it is not known whether the Affordable Care Act will remain, in whole or in part, it would be imprudent for New Jersey now to create an exchange before these critical threshold issues are decided with finality by the court,” he added.
Mr. Christie was the second governor to veto such a law, following Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, who is also a Republican. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, took the opposite tack last month: after the Legislature declined to create an exchange, he established one by executive order [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/nyregion/cuomo-orders-health-insurance-exchange-in-new-york.html ].
Ultimately, Mr. Christie’s veto is largely symbolic. The federal law requires states to offer health care exchanges by January 2014, but provides that Washington will step in to administer them in states that fail to make progress by January 2013. In either case, the state pays to set up the health care exchange, but states that fail to create the exchanges lose the ability to oversee them.
Democratic lawmakers accused the governor of playing politics with the needs of the most vulnerable residents.
“It’s clear from his actions that he is more focused on winning praise from national Republican pundits than protecting New Jersey families’ access to health care,” said Assemblyman Louis Greenwald of Camden, the leader of the Democratic majority in the State Assembly.
The Democrats warned that the governor’s veto would leave the state scrambling to comply with the federal law and could jeopardize future grant money. New Jersey had already received two federal grants, totaling $8.7 million, to prepare the exchange.
Assemblyman Herb Conaway of Burlington, a doctor who was the lead sponsor of the legislation in the chamber, said the governor was sending a message that “he doesn’t care” about the 1.3 million state residents without health insurance.
“By vetoing this bill, Governor Christie has failed New Jersey’s uninsured residents, hurt New Jersey’s chances of fully benefiting from federal health care reform and ignored the need to provide relief to hospitals for uncompensated care,” Dr. Conaway, a Democrat, said.
Democrats in the Legislature had billed the exchange as one-stop shopping for people or businesses seeking health insurance, allowing consumers to compare the benefits and the costs of participating plans.
The Web site it proposed would have also allowed people to apply for tax credits or other subsidies toward the cost of insurance.
In his veto message, the governor said he was concerned about the potential costs of the exchange.
The bill passed by the Legislature would have established a Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ]-like plan for people with incomes between 133 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Mr. Christie argued that it was unclear whether there would be federal financing to support such a plan.
In addition, he argued that the mechanism the bill set up to approve plans would limit the number of companies that could participate, which he said would both reduce options and increase costs.
“In all, with basic issues regarding the future of the Affordable Care Act unresolved, it is impossible to know whether this legislation best suits the interests and needs of all New Jerseyans who will be required to finance these policy choices,” the governor wrote.
Mr. Christie said that if the federal law was upheld, he would oversee the state’s compliance “in a responsible and cost-effective manner.”
But while the governor cited the cost of putting the exchange into effect, Democrats in Washington and Trenton argued that the bigger cost was allowing so many residents to remain uninsured.
“New Jersey taxpayers are on the hook every time someone without coverage shows up in an emergency room, whether it’s for life-threatening treatment or routine medical care,” United States Senator Robert Menendez said.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/nyregion/christie-vetoes-health-insurance-exchange-for-new-jersey.html
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Budget Cuts Hurt Washington State’s Response to Whooping Cough Outbreak
May 12, 2012
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — Whooping cough, or pertussis, a highly infectious respiratory disease once considered doomed by science, has struck Washington State this spring with a severity that health officials say could surpass the toll of any year since the 1940s, before a vaccine went into wide use.
Although no deaths have been reported so far this year, the state has declared an epidemic and public health officials say the numbers are staggering: 1,284 cases through early May, the most in at least three decades and 10 times last year’s total at this time, 128.
The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts.
Here in Skagit County, about an hour’s drive north of Seattle — the hardest-hit corner of the state, based on pertussis cases per capita — the local Public Health Department has half the staff it did in 2008. Preventive care programs, intended to keep people healthy, are mostly gone.
The county’s top medical officer, Dr. Howard Leibrand, who is also a full-time emergency room physician, said that in the crushing triage of a combined health crisis and budget crisis, he had gone so far as to urge local physicians to stop testing patients to confirm a whooping cough diagnosis.
If the signs are there, he said — especially a persistent, deep cough and indication of contact with a confirmed victim — doctors should simply treat patients with antibiotics. The pertussis test can cost up to $400 and delay treatment by days. About 14.6 percent of Skagit County residents have no health insurance, according to a state study conducted last year, up from 11.6 percent in 2008.
“There has been half a million dollars spent on testing in this county,” Dr. Leibrand said late last week. “Do you know how much vaccination you can buy for half a million dollars?” And testing, he added, benefits only the epidemiologists, not the patients. “It’s an outrageous way to spend your health care dollar.”
State health officials estimate that because of incomplete testing and the assumption that many people with mild cases are not seeking medical treatment, perhaps as few as one in five pertussis cases is being recorded and tracked, suggesting that the outbreak is far more widespread than the numbers indicate.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/health/policy/whooping-cough-epidemic-hits-washington-state.html [with embedded links]
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U.S. Moms Die at Higher Rate than Irish, Italian
Scandinavian nations continue to dominate the annual healthy motherhood rankings by Save the Children. This year Niger came in last, just behind Afghanistan. The United States rose six spots because of girls’ access to education, not better health.
May 8, 2012
(WOMENSENEWS)–Pregnancy and motherhood can bring joy and or apprehension, medical complications and even death, depending on where one lives in the world.
That’s according to a May 8 global ranking of motherhood by Save the Children, the Westport, Conn., group that works in the United States and worldwide to improve the lives of children through food, medical care, education and more.
The United States rose six spots from 2011 to 25th place, largely due to a 10-percent increase in female enrollment in pre-kindergarten programs, as well as a one year increase in the average number of years girls spend in school. But it still lags far behind other wealthy nations in overall status of women, said Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children.
“A woman in the U.S. is more than seven times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause in her lifetime than a woman in Italy or Ireland,” Miles said in a press statement. “When it comes to the number of children enrolled in preschools or the political status of women, the United States also places in the bottom 10 countries of the developed world.”
[...]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/womensenews/2012/05/08/u-s-moms-die-at-higher-rate-than-irish-italian/ [no comments yet]
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Mississippi puts radical politics ahead of women's health
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
May 2, 2012
Dr. Carl Reddix, an OB-GYN based in Jackson, Mississippi, talks with Rachel Maddow about why his confirmation has been blocked and he has been removed from serving on Mississippi Board of Health despite his obvious qualifications, because of a remote tie to a women's health clinic even though he doesn't perform abortions.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47272369#47272369 [links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/02/11511789-links-for-the-52-trms ]
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The Real Republican Real Women of Real America
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House GOP lends Statuary Hall to religious extremists
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
May 8, 2012
Reverend Welton Gaddy, pastor for preaching and worship at the North Minister Baptist Church and president of the Interfaith Alliance, talks with Rachel Maddow about the religious extremists and revisionists granted the use of the Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol by House Speaker John Boehner.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47347504#47347504 [links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/09/11608411-links-for-the-58-trms ]
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The Struggle to Vote
Editorial
Published: May 11, 2012
It was nearly 10 p.m. on Wednesday when Paul Broun i][ http://broun.house.gov/ ], a Republican congressman from Georgia, rose on the House floor to propose that no more money be spent enforcing a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The act is one of the most momentous laws ever passed by Congress, removing the discriminatory barriers that had blocked generations of African-Americans from the polls. Yet a Southern representative tried to slip in an amendment [ http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/clip.php?appid=601666404 ] to an appropriations bill that would prevent the Justice Department from supervising election-law changes in his state and in 15 others where there has been a history of discrimination.
Moments later, Representative John Lewis [ http://johnlewis.house.gov/ ], a Democrat of Georgia, strode to the microphone with a furious denunciation [ http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/clip.php?appid=601666462 ]. Mr. Lewis, whose skull was fractured by a police baton in Selma, Ala., during a 1965 voting rights march, said it was “unbelievable” that a fellow Georgia lawmaker could offer such an amendment.
“It is shameful that you would come here tonight and say to the Department of Justice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” he said, his voice loud and trembling. “People died for the right to vote! Friends of mine, colleagues of mine! Speak out against this amendment — it doesn’t have a place.”
On the floor, Mr. Broun’s explanation for getting rid of Justice Department supervision was that it had become “antiquated” and unfair. But he also said he wanted the Justice Department to back off because it has raised objections to a voter identification law in his state and several others. Those laws are the Republican Party’s modern attempt to disenfranchise minorities, the poor and older Americans for political gain.
After being confronted by Mr. Lewis, he withdrew his amendment, condemned discrimination and apologized “for any hurt feelings anyone has.” The issue, however, is far bigger than hurt feelings. Mr. Broun owes an apology to history.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/opinion/the-struggle-for-voting-rights.html
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Rep. John Lewis Speaks Out Against GOP Voter Suppression Efforts
it is hard and difficult and almost unbelievable that any member, especially a member from the state of georgia, would come and offer such amendment. there's a long history in our country, especially in the 11 states that are -- of the old confederacy from virginia to texas, a discrim -- of discrimination based on race. on color. maybe some of us need to study a little contemporary history dealing with the question of voting rights. just think, before the voting rights act of 1965, it was almost impossible for many people in the state of georgia, in alabama new york virginia, in texas, to register to vote, to participate in the democratic process. the state of mississippi, for example, had a black voting aged population of more than 450,000 and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. one county in alabama was more than 80% but not more than -- but not a single registered african-american voter, people had to pass a literacy test. one man was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar. it's shameful to come here tonight and say to the department of justice you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of section 5 of the voting rights act. we should be opening up the political process and letting all our citizens come in and participate. people died for the right to vote. friends of mine. colleagues of mine. speak out against this amendment. it doesn't have a place. i yield to the chairman. this is -- i agree with the chairman. this is not the place. i will not yield. i urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORYcSjJaQt0
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Tea Party Congressman Leads Charge To Abolish Survey That's Needed By Just About Everybody
If you don't care for tea, you could at least make polite conversation!
By Susie Madrak
May 13, 2012 12:00 PM
Well! The Republicans and their corporate paymasters wanted their little Mad Hatter's Tea Party, and they certainly got it. The thing is, when you hand over the keys to the crazy people, they do things that give the "adults" conniptions. This is just one example of Austerians Gone Wild.
Now the Senate will have to see if they can untangle this mess [ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/killing-the-american-community-survey-blinds-business ].
On May 9 the House voted to kill the American Community Survey, which collects data on some 3 million households each year and is the largest survey next to the decennial census. The ACS—which has a long bipartisan history, including its funding in the mid-1990s and full implementation in 2005—provides data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are spent annually. Businesses also rely heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits.
Initially, it looked like the House might simply repeal the survey’s mandatory requirement, something the Census Bureau has said would just make it more expensive since they’d have to send more agents into the field to collect the data manually, rather than being able to legally require people who receive the survey to fill it out. Representative Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) went a step further, leading the charge to dismantle the ACS entirely on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Webster gained his seat as part of the 2010 Tea Party revolution that won Republicans control of the House. A press release on his website criticizes the ACS for invading people’s privacy by requiring them to answer questions such as what time they leave for work, how long their commute is, and whether they need help going shopping. Those who receive a survey and fail to respond are subject to fines of as much as $5,000.
The fight over cutting funds for data-gathering agencies has opened up a rift in the deficit-hawk crowd. A handful of organizations that generally support big fiscal spending cuts have voiced their support for fully funding the three main data-gathering agencies: Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The Chamber of Commerce, for example, strongly advocates funding them, since its members rely so much on the information they provide on basic things such as household spending, per capita income, and population estimates. The ACS is of particular value to them, says Martin Regalia, Commerce’s chief economist. “It is especially important to some of our bigger members for trying to understand geographic distinctions and other granularity in the economy.”
Tom Beers, executive director of the National Association of Business Economists, says that without good economic data, businesses would be “flying blind.” He adds: “You end up in a guessing game about what’s going on in the economy. The types of losses that result are far worse than what you end up spending to fund these surveys.”
Don't they see what they're doing?
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
Contacted last week, economists at conservative think tanks Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation all expressed support for the data-gathering agencies since all three rely heavily on the statistics they produce to study the economy. “Those agencies are essential,” says Phillip Swagel, an economist and nonresident scholar at AEI. “The data they provide really tell us what’s going on in the economy. This shouldn’t be a political issue.”
Ah, but when you give sharp knives to children, you have to expect these things.
©2012 Crooks and Liars (emphasis in original)
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/tea-party-congressman-leads-charge-ab [with comments]
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Jeff Flake’s plan to politicize the National Science Foundation
Rep. Jeff Flake wants to tell the National Science Foundation what is and isn’t science.
(CHARLIE LEIGHT/THE REPUBLIC)
Posted by Ezra Kleinat 01:25 PM ET, 05/12/2012
On Thursday, on a mostly party-line vote, the House passed an amendment by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to prohibit the National Science Foundation from funding political science research. And, in doing so, it politicized one of the main ways this country funds scientific research.
“My amendment does not reduce funding for the NSF,” he explained [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/10/congressman-flakes-remarks/ ]. Rather, “this amendment is simply oriented toward ensuring, at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.” Well, what Flake considers a meritless program, anyway.
As Christopher Zorn writes [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/11/how-to-engage-the-flake-amendment/ ], the NSF runs a widely respected peer-review program that decides what science to fund. If Flake wanted to reduce the funding available to the NSF in total, that would be one thing (and, to be fair to Flake, he has proposed that in the past). But what he’s doing here is telling the NSF what is and isn’t acceptable science to fund. That’s not how scientific decisions are supposed to work. And the effect could be chilling.
Flake was quick to give examples of the “waste” that motivated his amendment. There was the “$700,000 to develop a new model for international climate change analysis” and the “$600,000 to try to figure out if policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do.” In other words, Flake didn’t like the kind of research that the NSF was funding in the political science arena, and so he barred the NSF from funding political science at all.
Now imagine you’re part of a discipline that isn’t political science, but that relies on NSF funding. Or imagine you’re on one of the NSF panels that funds those disciplines. Think you’ll be a bit more careful about submitting or greenlighting work on climate change? Of course you will.
If Flake had cut NSF funding, that would be one thing. Instead, he inserted politics — and his personal preferences — into the NSF’s funding-review process. That’s a much more dangerous precedent to set.
I have conflicted feelings about the public money that goes to academic research — including political science — in this country. I admire and rely on the work that comes out of these disciplines. But for all the public money that goes to support them, there’s a decided lack of public-spiritedness in how they act.
The research is often locked away in pricey journals. There’s a premium placed on unnecessary convoluted rhetoric that confuses and dissuades interested outsiders. There’s almost no effort put into connecting research with the public debate — and academics who try and engage in it often risk professional and social sanction. If it were up to me, any research that took even a dollar of taxpayer funds would have to be in an open-access journal and stored in a publicly searchable repository. While much of this research deserves public support, the prevailing mores in academia don’t.
But I have no conflicted feelings about wanting scientific decisions to remain free from meddling congressmen. Perhaps there’s some process by which the NSF could do a better job judging research proposals. But I’m quite sure that process doesn’t include Jeff Flake looking over the NSF’s shoulder, telling it which subjects he likes and which he doesn’t.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/jeff-flakes-plan-to-politicize-the-national-science-foundation/2012/05/12/gIQAVuddKU_blog.html [with comments]
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock)
Paul Ryan and the Republicans' latest tactic is outright treachery: They want to break the government
By Andrew Leonard
Friday, May 4, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
Paul Ryan is nothing if not indefatigable. On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Republican introduced yet another budget bill [ http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/224767-ryan-introduces-legislation-to-replace-12-trillion-sequester ]. The targets of his cuts — a long list of Democratic priorities — are painfully familiar. But this time around Ryan wrapped them up in a new package of urgency: preserving national security!
Ryan and his fellow Republicans (and a not inconsiderable number of Democrats) are desperate to find a way to avoid the dreaded ”sequester” — a package of around $600 billion in defense spending cuts that are scheduled to start kicking in at the end of this year. Never mind the holy grail of deficit reduction: When the beggar with his hand stuck out is the Pentagon, “entitlement” isn’t such a dirty word, after all.
As usual, the suffocating stench of Washington kabuki permeates the whole affair. The only reason defense cuts are on the table in the first place dates back to the failure of Republicans and Democrats to come to a real agreement on long-term deficit reduction at the end of last summer’s debt ceiling debacle. The threat of looming defense cuts that would automatically take effect in 2013 was supposed to force a bipartisan agreement before that dire day arrived. But the chances that Ryan’s newest salvo will get through the Democratic-controlled Senate during an election year are even more unlikely now than they were a year ago. The most realistic scenario? After the election, a lame-duck Congress will kick the can forward, again, to the new Congress and whoever inhabits the White House in 2013.
But a close look at the insidious nature of proposed cuts is still revealing, even in the midst of all the posturing. Ever since the midterm elections of 2010, House Republicans have been honing a new approach to government. Forget about old school “starve the beast” politics, the simple-minded belief that lowering taxes and depriving the government of revenue will ultimately topple the social welfare state. The new school tactic is sabotage. Break the government. Pour sugar into the gas tank. Steal the spark plugs.
Ryan’s new package of cuts takes aim at the heart of the two biggest pieces of legislation Democrats passed during the Obama administration, bank reform and healthcare reform. The details are wonky, but the goal is clear. By defunding crucial mechanisms designed to ensure that the laws actually work as intended, Republicans achieve two goals simultaneously: They avoid the anathema of cuts to defense spending, while rendering the legislation that they hate so much not just toothless, but incapacitated.
Machiavelli would applaud. Republicans may have lost the 2008 presidential election, but their insurgency-style guerrilla tactics ever since have ensured that the war is far from over. In 2012, the politics of sabotage rule Washington.
Ryan’s new bill, the Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012 [ http://budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/budget_reconciliation.pdf ], is constructed from recommendations formulated by six different House committees. The targeted cuts reflect familiar GOP priorities. One of the ways the Agriculture Committee, for example, proposes to save $33.2 billion over 10 years is by slashing food stamp assistance. The House Judiciary Committee put forward medical malpractice liability reforms that would theoretically cut federal reimbursements for spending on “defensive medicine” — such as medical tests ordered by doctors simply to protect against lawsuits. And so on.
But for our purposes the two most provocative proposed cuts are the House Financial Services Committee’s plan to defund the “orderly liquidation authority” mechanism in the Dodd-Frank bank reform act, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s effort to defund federal support for the construction of the health insurance exchanges at the heart of the Affordable Care Act.
Let’s break it down. The “orderly liquidation authority” — also known as the “resolution authority” — is the mechanism by which the Dodd-Frank Act aims to avoid the bailout chaos [ http://www.thenation.com/article/167083/ryan-budget-takes-aim-resolution-authority ] of the financial crisis of 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act includes a vast array of new rules for the financial sector, some of which are more far-reaching than others. But the resolution authority is crucial: it’s the law’s primary attempt at solving the Too Big To Fail problem — the frustrating reality that our biggest financial institutions are now so large that their failure routinely threatens to crash the entire U.S. economy. As was demonstrated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, simply standing by and watching as a major Wall Street financial firm collapses into bankruptcy is an untenable solution. But mindlessly injecting billions of taxpayer dollars without accountability into the likes of Citigroup or the Bank of America or A.I.G. is equally irresponsible.
The Dodd-Frank Act set up a process for determining whether the collapse of a financial institution posed a systemic threat to the economy, putting that company into federal receivership, and guiding it through a government-managed liquidation process. The cost would be recouped by asset sales after the fact. A crucial point: The funding for the resolution authority can only be used to liquidate a financial firm, not to preserve it.
It’s probably worth noting here that the “savings” envisioned by getting rid of the resolution authority are entirely illusory. The Congressional Budget Office determined the cost of the resolution authority as around $30 billion over 10 years [ http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/HFSreconciliation.pdf ]. But that’s contingent on whether there are financial firms that require liquidation. The $30 billion price tag is what the CBO thinks the government would have to pay if it was forced to liquidate “one or more” financial institutions sometime in the next decade.
So if Wall Street manages to avoid disaster over the next 10 years, there would be no government outlay. Win win! But the nasty little secret here is that, with or without the liquidation authority in place, the government will still be forced to take action if Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase is on the verge of collapse. Because there’s one thing we know for sure: No matter how much House Republicans claim to revere the autonomously acting free market, when push comes to shove, if the alternative is widespread economic collapse, Wall Street will get its bailout.
It’s also important to point out that the Dodd-Frank bill originally pre-funded the liquidation authority with $50 billion in assessments that would be levied on Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions. But after much screaming from financial sector lobbyists, that provision was dropped at the insistence of Senate Republicans. So what’s really going on here is that after first ensuring that Wall Street was not liable for paying the costs of its own government rescue ahead of time, now Republicans are intent on making sure that Wall Street won’t have to pay after it gets bailed out.
One can certainly question whether the Dodd-Frank resolution authority will work as planned in the heat of another crisis. But what’s the alternative? Republicans have put forth no other plan other than to simply watch as the economy crashes and burns. Instead, under the cover of budget cuts, they are taking aim at one of the core parts of the bank reform laws intended to prevent a repetition of the 2008 catastrophe. We shouldn’t label that fiscal restraint: We should call it vandalism.
The attack on health insurance exchanges [ http://energycommerce.house.gov/news/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=9486 ] is, in some ways, even more reprehensible. If Republicans are supposed to believe in anything, it’s the virtue of free-market competition. And that’s exactly what the health exchanges [ http://www.healthcare.gov/law/features/choices/exchanges/index.html ] are supposed to provide. As set forth in the Affordable Care Act, starting in 2014, the health exchanges [ http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7908.pdf ] are where Americans who can’t get employer-provided insurance will go to compare and contrast the costs and benefits of different health insurance plans.
Way back in 2009, Ezra Klein called the exchanges “the most important, unnoticed part of health reform [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/health_insurance_exchanges_the.html ].”
And what happens when you introduce productive competition, efficiencies of scale, more innovation and increased consumer power into a market as dysfunctional as the current situation for health insurance? In theory, you get lower prices and higher quality. And if the Health Insurance Exchange has lower prices and higher quality, more individuals will use it and more companies will buy into it. And if that happens, then the efficiencies of scale should increase, and so should the pace of innovation (as the rewards will be greater with more customers), and so the Health Insurance Exchange should further outpace the other markets, thereby attracting yet more customers, thereby further accelerating the virtuous cycle. Eventually, it could become the country’s primary insurance market.
The Affordable Care Act includes federal funding to help set up the exchanges. The “Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act” zeroes out that funding. How much will this save taxpayers? Hard to say — the language of Ryan’s bill simply orders the repeal of the provision in the ACA that allows the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to make financial aid grants to states at his or her discretion. As of February 2012, 33 states and the District of Columbia had received about $610 million in grants so far [ http://www.nasbo.org/publications-data/washington-report/hhs-announces-health-insurance-exchange-establishment-grants ].
The attack on funding for exchanges is just one of half a dozen jabs at healthcare reform included in Ryan’s new bill. (Indeed, picking away at healthcare reform has become the GOP’s go-to move for funding any new government expense, as demonstrated, yet again, by last week’s House vote to fund an extension of low interest rates on government student loans by raiding so-called Obamacare slush funds.) And as a deficit-reduction measure, the exchange defunding doesn’t offer anything close to the largest savings. For example: The provision for repealing the Prevention and Public Health Fund, an effort to reduce healthcare costs in the long run by spending more on prevention, would save $16 billion over 10 years. In the big scheme of things, a billion here or a billion there for the exchanges won’t make that much progress toward $600 billion worth of defense cuts.
But as a targeted cut designed to cripple the long-term efficacy of the Affordable Care Act, Ryan could hardly be wielding his scalpel with more precision. It’s brilliant. The part of the ACA that one might imagine most Republicans would be ideologically predisposed to agree with — the use of free market competition to provide consumers with more choice and lower costs — is the part that Republicans want to go after.
But that’s what the politics of sabotage are all about. If Republicans really cared about the federal budget, they wouldn’t insist that tax cuts or wars did not need to be paid for. The point, now, of the budget showdown is not to ensure fiscal restraint, but to disembowel the legislation that a duly elected president and Democratic Congress passed. Starve the beast, so far, has failed. But making sure that government doesn’t work at all? That’s much more doable.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/sabotage_the_new_gop_plan/singleton/ [with comments]
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(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=75469106 and preceding and following
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Christie Vetoes Health Insurance Exchange
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: May 10, 2012
In a swipe at President Obama’s signature health care legislation, Gov. Chris Christie [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/christopher_j_christie/index.html ] of New Jersey vetoed on Thursday an online marketplace that the Legislature created to help residents and small businesses buy health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/health/policy/the-abcs-of-the-health-care-law-and-its-future.html ], the federal law passed in 2010, requires most Americans to have health insurance and mandates states to have health care benefits exchanges [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/health/policy/a-wait-and-see-approach-for-states-on-insurance-exchanges.html ] to help them buy it. With the Supreme Court debating [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/affordable_care_act/index.html ] whether the health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] is constitutional, Mr. Christie said in his veto message [ http://nj.gov/governor/news/news/552012/pdf/A-2171_AV.pdf ] that the exchange, approved in March, was “premature” and could impose “unnecessary obligations upon the state’s citizens.”
“Indeed, the very constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is cloaked in uncertainty, as both the individual mandate to procure health insurance as well as the jurisdictional mandate to establish an exchange may not survive scrutiny by the Supreme Court,” he wrote.
“Because it is not known whether the Affordable Care Act will remain, in whole or in part, it would be imprudent for New Jersey now to create an exchange before these critical threshold issues are decided with finality by the court,” he added.
Mr. Christie was the second governor to veto such a law, following Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, who is also a Republican. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, took the opposite tack last month: after the Legislature declined to create an exchange, he established one by executive order [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/nyregion/cuomo-orders-health-insurance-exchange-in-new-york.html ].
Ultimately, Mr. Christie’s veto is largely symbolic. The federal law requires states to offer health care exchanges by January 2014, but provides that Washington will step in to administer them in states that fail to make progress by January 2013. In either case, the state pays to set up the health care exchange, but states that fail to create the exchanges lose the ability to oversee them.
Democratic lawmakers accused the governor of playing politics with the needs of the most vulnerable residents.
“It’s clear from his actions that he is more focused on winning praise from national Republican pundits than protecting New Jersey families’ access to health care,” said Assemblyman Louis Greenwald of Camden, the leader of the Democratic majority in the State Assembly.
The Democrats warned that the governor’s veto would leave the state scrambling to comply with the federal law and could jeopardize future grant money. New Jersey had already received two federal grants, totaling $8.7 million, to prepare the exchange.
Assemblyman Herb Conaway of Burlington, a doctor who was the lead sponsor of the legislation in the chamber, said the governor was sending a message that “he doesn’t care” about the 1.3 million state residents without health insurance.
“By vetoing this bill, Governor Christie has failed New Jersey’s uninsured residents, hurt New Jersey’s chances of fully benefiting from federal health care reform and ignored the need to provide relief to hospitals for uncompensated care,” Dr. Conaway, a Democrat, said.
Democrats in the Legislature had billed the exchange as one-stop shopping for people or businesses seeking health insurance, allowing consumers to compare the benefits and the costs of participating plans.
The Web site it proposed would have also allowed people to apply for tax credits or other subsidies toward the cost of insurance.
In his veto message, the governor said he was concerned about the potential costs of the exchange.
The bill passed by the Legislature would have established a Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ]-like plan for people with incomes between 133 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Mr. Christie argued that it was unclear whether there would be federal financing to support such a plan.
In addition, he argued that the mechanism the bill set up to approve plans would limit the number of companies that could participate, which he said would both reduce options and increase costs.
“In all, with basic issues regarding the future of the Affordable Care Act unresolved, it is impossible to know whether this legislation best suits the interests and needs of all New Jerseyans who will be required to finance these policy choices,” the governor wrote.
Mr. Christie said that if the federal law was upheld, he would oversee the state’s compliance “in a responsible and cost-effective manner.”
But while the governor cited the cost of putting the exchange into effect, Democrats in Washington and Trenton argued that the bigger cost was allowing so many residents to remain uninsured.
“New Jersey taxpayers are on the hook every time someone without coverage shows up in an emergency room, whether it’s for life-threatening treatment or routine medical care,” United States Senator Robert Menendez said.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/nyregion/christie-vetoes-health-insurance-exchange-for-new-jersey.html
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Budget Cuts Hurt Washington State’s Response to Whooping Cough Outbreak
May 12, 2012
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — Whooping cough, or pertussis, a highly infectious respiratory disease once considered doomed by science, has struck Washington State this spring with a severity that health officials say could surpass the toll of any year since the 1940s, before a vaccine went into wide use.
Although no deaths have been reported so far this year, the state has declared an epidemic and public health officials say the numbers are staggering: 1,284 cases through early May, the most in at least three decades and 10 times last year’s total at this time, 128.
The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts.
Here in Skagit County, about an hour’s drive north of Seattle — the hardest-hit corner of the state, based on pertussis cases per capita — the local Public Health Department has half the staff it did in 2008. Preventive care programs, intended to keep people healthy, are mostly gone.
The county’s top medical officer, Dr. Howard Leibrand, who is also a full-time emergency room physician, said that in the crushing triage of a combined health crisis and budget crisis, he had gone so far as to urge local physicians to stop testing patients to confirm a whooping cough diagnosis.
If the signs are there, he said — especially a persistent, deep cough and indication of contact with a confirmed victim — doctors should simply treat patients with antibiotics. The pertussis test can cost up to $400 and delay treatment by days. About 14.6 percent of Skagit County residents have no health insurance, according to a state study conducted last year, up from 11.6 percent in 2008.
“There has been half a million dollars spent on testing in this county,” Dr. Leibrand said late last week. “Do you know how much vaccination you can buy for half a million dollars?” And testing, he added, benefits only the epidemiologists, not the patients. “It’s an outrageous way to spend your health care dollar.”
State health officials estimate that because of incomplete testing and the assumption that many people with mild cases are not seeking medical treatment, perhaps as few as one in five pertussis cases is being recorded and tracked, suggesting that the outbreak is far more widespread than the numbers indicate.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/health/policy/whooping-cough-epidemic-hits-washington-state.html [with embedded links]
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U.S. Moms Die at Higher Rate than Irish, Italian
Scandinavian nations continue to dominate the annual healthy motherhood rankings by Save the Children. This year Niger came in last, just behind Afghanistan. The United States rose six spots because of girls’ access to education, not better health.
May 8, 2012
(WOMENSENEWS)–Pregnancy and motherhood can bring joy and or apprehension, medical complications and even death, depending on where one lives in the world.
That’s according to a May 8 global ranking of motherhood by Save the Children, the Westport, Conn., group that works in the United States and worldwide to improve the lives of children through food, medical care, education and more.
The United States rose six spots from 2011 to 25th place, largely due to a 10-percent increase in female enrollment in pre-kindergarten programs, as well as a one year increase in the average number of years girls spend in school. But it still lags far behind other wealthy nations in overall status of women, said Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children.
“A woman in the U.S. is more than seven times as likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause in her lifetime than a woman in Italy or Ireland,” Miles said in a press statement. “When it comes to the number of children enrolled in preschools or the political status of women, the United States also places in the bottom 10 countries of the developed world.”
[...]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/womensenews/2012/05/08/u-s-moms-die-at-higher-rate-than-irish-italian/ [no comments yet]
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Mississippi puts radical politics ahead of women's health
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
May 2, 2012
Dr. Carl Reddix, an OB-GYN based in Jackson, Mississippi, talks with Rachel Maddow about why his confirmation has been blocked and he has been removed from serving on Mississippi Board of Health despite his obvious qualifications, because of a remote tie to a women's health clinic even though he doesn't perform abortions.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47272369#47272369 [links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/02/11511789-links-for-the-52-trms ]
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The Real Republican Real Women of Real America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZXv2hdDA8Y [original at http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/87be7156f5/republicans-get-in-my-vagina ]
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House GOP lends Statuary Hall to religious extremists
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
May 8, 2012
Reverend Welton Gaddy, pastor for preaching and worship at the North Minister Baptist Church and president of the Interfaith Alliance, talks with Rachel Maddow about the religious extremists and revisionists granted the use of the Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol by House Speaker John Boehner.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47347504#47347504 [links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/09/11608411-links-for-the-58-trms ]
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The Struggle to Vote
Editorial
Published: May 11, 2012
It was nearly 10 p.m. on Wednesday when Paul Broun i][ http://broun.house.gov/ ], a Republican congressman from Georgia, rose on the House floor to propose that no more money be spent enforcing a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The act is one of the most momentous laws ever passed by Congress, removing the discriminatory barriers that had blocked generations of African-Americans from the polls. Yet a Southern representative tried to slip in an amendment [ http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/clip.php?appid=601666404 ] to an appropriations bill that would prevent the Justice Department from supervising election-law changes in his state and in 15 others where there has been a history of discrimination.
Moments later, Representative John Lewis [ http://johnlewis.house.gov/ ], a Democrat of Georgia, strode to the microphone with a furious denunciation [ http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/clip.php?appid=601666462 ]. Mr. Lewis, whose skull was fractured by a police baton in Selma, Ala., during a 1965 voting rights march, said it was “unbelievable” that a fellow Georgia lawmaker could offer such an amendment.
“It is shameful that you would come here tonight and say to the Department of Justice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” he said, his voice loud and trembling. “People died for the right to vote! Friends of mine, colleagues of mine! Speak out against this amendment — it doesn’t have a place.”
On the floor, Mr. Broun’s explanation for getting rid of Justice Department supervision was that it had become “antiquated” and unfair. But he also said he wanted the Justice Department to back off because it has raised objections to a voter identification law in his state and several others. Those laws are the Republican Party’s modern attempt to disenfranchise minorities, the poor and older Americans for political gain.
After being confronted by Mr. Lewis, he withdrew his amendment, condemned discrimination and apologized “for any hurt feelings anyone has.” The issue, however, is far bigger than hurt feelings. Mr. Broun owes an apology to history.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/opinion/the-struggle-for-voting-rights.html
*
Rep. John Lewis Speaks Out Against GOP Voter Suppression Efforts
Published on May 10, 2012 by waysandmeansdems
it is hard and difficult and almost unbelievable that any member, especially a member from the state of georgia, would come and offer such amendment. there's a long history in our country, especially in the 11 states that are -- of the old confederacy from virginia to texas, a discrim -- of discrimination based on race. on color. maybe some of us need to study a little contemporary history dealing with the question of voting rights. just think, before the voting rights act of 1965, it was almost impossible for many people in the state of georgia, in alabama new york virginia, in texas, to register to vote, to participate in the democratic process. the state of mississippi, for example, had a black voting aged population of more than 450,000 and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. one county in alabama was more than 80% but not more than -- but not a single registered african-american voter, people had to pass a literacy test. one man was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar. it's shameful to come here tonight and say to the department of justice you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of section 5 of the voting rights act. we should be opening up the political process and letting all our citizens come in and participate. people died for the right to vote. friends of mine. colleagues of mine. speak out against this amendment. it doesn't have a place. i yield to the chairman. this is -- i agree with the chairman. this is not the place. i will not yield. i urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORYcSjJaQt0
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Tea Party Congressman Leads Charge To Abolish Survey That's Needed By Just About Everybody
If you don't care for tea, you could at least make polite conversation!
By Susie Madrak
May 13, 2012 12:00 PM
Well! The Republicans and their corporate paymasters wanted their little Mad Hatter's Tea Party, and they certainly got it. The thing is, when you hand over the keys to the crazy people, they do things that give the "adults" conniptions. This is just one example of Austerians Gone Wild.
Now the Senate will have to see if they can untangle this mess [ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/killing-the-american-community-survey-blinds-business ].
On May 9 the House voted to kill the American Community Survey, which collects data on some 3 million households each year and is the largest survey next to the decennial census. The ACS—which has a long bipartisan history, including its funding in the mid-1990s and full implementation in 2005—provides data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are spent annually. Businesses also rely heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits.
Initially, it looked like the House might simply repeal the survey’s mandatory requirement, something the Census Bureau has said would just make it more expensive since they’d have to send more agents into the field to collect the data manually, rather than being able to legally require people who receive the survey to fill it out. Representative Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) went a step further, leading the charge to dismantle the ACS entirely on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Webster gained his seat as part of the 2010 Tea Party revolution that won Republicans control of the House. A press release on his website criticizes the ACS for invading people’s privacy by requiring them to answer questions such as what time they leave for work, how long their commute is, and whether they need help going shopping. Those who receive a survey and fail to respond are subject to fines of as much as $5,000.
The fight over cutting funds for data-gathering agencies has opened up a rift in the deficit-hawk crowd. A handful of organizations that generally support big fiscal spending cuts have voiced their support for fully funding the three main data-gathering agencies: Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The Chamber of Commerce, for example, strongly advocates funding them, since its members rely so much on the information they provide on basic things such as household spending, per capita income, and population estimates. The ACS is of particular value to them, says Martin Regalia, Commerce’s chief economist. “It is especially important to some of our bigger members for trying to understand geographic distinctions and other granularity in the economy.”
Tom Beers, executive director of the National Association of Business Economists, says that without good economic data, businesses would be “flying blind.” He adds: “You end up in a guessing game about what’s going on in the economy. The types of losses that result are far worse than what you end up spending to fund these surveys.”
Don't they see what they're doing?
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
Contacted last week, economists at conservative think tanks Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation all expressed support for the data-gathering agencies since all three rely heavily on the statistics they produce to study the economy. “Those agencies are essential,” says Phillip Swagel, an economist and nonresident scholar at AEI. “The data they provide really tell us what’s going on in the economy. This shouldn’t be a political issue.”
Ah, but when you give sharp knives to children, you have to expect these things.
©2012 Crooks and Liars (emphasis in original)
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/tea-party-congressman-leads-charge-ab [with comments]
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Jeff Flake’s plan to politicize the National Science Foundation
Rep. Jeff Flake wants to tell the National Science Foundation what is and isn’t science.
(CHARLIE LEIGHT/THE REPUBLIC)
Posted by Ezra Kleinat 01:25 PM ET, 05/12/2012
On Thursday, on a mostly party-line vote, the House passed an amendment by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to prohibit the National Science Foundation from funding political science research. And, in doing so, it politicized one of the main ways this country funds scientific research.
“My amendment does not reduce funding for the NSF,” he explained [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/10/congressman-flakes-remarks/ ]. Rather, “this amendment is simply oriented toward ensuring, at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.” Well, what Flake considers a meritless program, anyway.
As Christopher Zorn writes [ http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/05/11/how-to-engage-the-flake-amendment/ ], the NSF runs a widely respected peer-review program that decides what science to fund. If Flake wanted to reduce the funding available to the NSF in total, that would be one thing (and, to be fair to Flake, he has proposed that in the past). But what he’s doing here is telling the NSF what is and isn’t acceptable science to fund. That’s not how scientific decisions are supposed to work. And the effect could be chilling.
Flake was quick to give examples of the “waste” that motivated his amendment. There was the “$700,000 to develop a new model for international climate change analysis” and the “$600,000 to try to figure out if policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do.” In other words, Flake didn’t like the kind of research that the NSF was funding in the political science arena, and so he barred the NSF from funding political science at all.
Now imagine you’re part of a discipline that isn’t political science, but that relies on NSF funding. Or imagine you’re on one of the NSF panels that funds those disciplines. Think you’ll be a bit more careful about submitting or greenlighting work on climate change? Of course you will.
If Flake had cut NSF funding, that would be one thing. Instead, he inserted politics — and his personal preferences — into the NSF’s funding-review process. That’s a much more dangerous precedent to set.
I have conflicted feelings about the public money that goes to academic research — including political science — in this country. I admire and rely on the work that comes out of these disciplines. But for all the public money that goes to support them, there’s a decided lack of public-spiritedness in how they act.
The research is often locked away in pricey journals. There’s a premium placed on unnecessary convoluted rhetoric that confuses and dissuades interested outsiders. There’s almost no effort put into connecting research with the public debate — and academics who try and engage in it often risk professional and social sanction. If it were up to me, any research that took even a dollar of taxpayer funds would have to be in an open-access journal and stored in a publicly searchable repository. While much of this research deserves public support, the prevailing mores in academia don’t.
But I have no conflicted feelings about wanting scientific decisions to remain free from meddling congressmen. Perhaps there’s some process by which the NSF could do a better job judging research proposals. But I’m quite sure that process doesn’t include Jeff Flake looking over the NSF’s shoulder, telling it which subjects he likes and which he doesn’t.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/jeff-flakes-plan-to-politicize-the-national-science-foundation/2012/05/12/gIQAVuddKU_blog.html [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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