Paul Krugman at The New York Times talks again of how right-wing predictors not only get lots wrong, they also keep coming up with new wrongnesses, as in the case of Obamacare Fails to Fail:
it’s a remarkable thing — an immense policy success is improving the lives of millions of Americans, but it’s largely slipping under the radar.
How is that possible? Think relentless negativity without accountability. The Affordable Care Act has faced nonstop attacks from partisans and right-wing media, with mainstream news also tending to harp on the act’s troubles. Many of the attacks have involved predictions of disaster, none of which have come true. But absence of disaster doesn’t make a compelling headline, and the people who falsely predicted doom just keep coming back with dire new warnings.
Consider, in particular, the impact of Obamacare on the number of Americans without health insurance. [...]
And as I suggested earlier, people in the media — especially elite pundits — may be the last to hear the good news, simply because they’re in a socioeconomic bracket in which people generally have good coverage.
For the less fortunate, however, the Affordable Care Act has already made a big positive difference. The usual suspects will keep crying failure, but the truth is that health reform is — gasp! — working.
Desmond Tutu at
The Guardian says in his column
[A] dignified death is our right—I am in favour of assisted dying that Nelson Mandela was treated disgracefully at end of his life:
This takes me to the question of what does it mean to be alive. What constitutes quality of life and dignity when dying? These are big, important questions. I have come to realise that I do not want my life to be prolonged artificially. I think when you need machines to help you breathe, then you have to ask questions about the quality of life being experienced and about the way money is being spent. This may be hard for some people to consider.
But why is a life that is ending being prolonged? Why is money being spent in this way? It could be better spent on a mother giving birth to a baby, or an organ transplant needed by a young person. Money should be spent on those that are at the beginning or in full flow of their life. Of course, these are my personal opinions and not of my church.
What was done to Madiba (Nelson Mandela) was disgraceful. There was that occasion when Madiba was televised with political leaders, President Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa. You could see Madiba was not fully there. He did not speak. He was not connecting. My friend was no longer himself. It was an affront to Madiba's dignity.
More excerpts from pundits can be found below the fold
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes Bordering on heartless:
Let’s stipulate: This is a difficult problem. Unless the United States is willing to open its borders to all comers—a goal of only the purest libertarians and a very few liberals—we will face agonizing choices about whom to let in and whom to turn away.
Moreover, it’s clearly true, as The Post editorialized, that “there is nothing humanitarian in tacitly encouraging tens of thousands of children to risk their lives, often at the hands of cutthroat smugglers, to enter this country illegally.”
But instead of dealing with this problem in a thoughtful way reflecting shared responsibility across party lines, President Obama’s critics quickly turned to the business of—if I may quote Beck—seeking political gain. Last week, the only issue that seemed to matter was whether Obama visited the border.
Dan Schnur, a former Republican consultant who ran in the California top two primary as a No Party Preference candidate and came in 4th with 8.9 percent of the vote, writes at the
Los Angeles Times,
For better politics, it's time for some raging moderates:
Like more than 20% of my fellow Californians, I am now classified as a no-party-preference voter, registered to vote but with no affiliation to any of the state's political parties.
I am for lower taxes and for marriage equality. I am tough on crime and I am pro-choice. I believe that a pathway to citizenship is a necessary part of immigration reform and that student test scores should be a critical component of teacher evaluations.
Given the nature of modern-day politics, I'm not sure either party would have me.
Those of us who consciously choose not to ally ourselves with a party are the fastest-growing portion of the electorate. The millennial generation has the highest percentage of independents, suggesting that nonpartisan voters are poised to play an increasingly influential role in shaping state politics and government in the future.
But these statistics tell only one small part of the story. Because independents' dissatisfaction with party politics tends to make them less engaged than their partisan counterparts, the result is an electorate in which the most motivated liberals and most devoted conservatives wield a disproportionate influence over an election's outcome.
Danny Vinik at
The New Republic writes
Here's Definitive Proof That Republicans Don't Care About the Long-Term Unemployed:
n March 26, House Speaker John Boehner effectively killed the Senate deal to renew unemployment insurance before it had even passed the upper chamber. “I told the president I would consider this, as long as it was paid for,” he said, adding that his demand had “not been met." Boehner was right: The Senate deal contained a budget gimmick, known as pension smoothing, as a spending offset. It wasn’t truly paid for.
Three and half months later, House Republicans are set to use that exact budget gimmick as a spending offset to an infrastructure bill—and Boehner’s not complaining this time around. [...]
Pension smoothing is a timing shift that allows companies to backload their pension contributions, boosting profits in the short term and increasing government revenues. But companies must make the full pension contributions eventually, reducing profits and government revenues in those years. In other words, it creates no savings in the long-run [...] In fact, pension smoothing increases the risk that a company will be unable to cover its future pension obligations, potentially requiring a government bailout and costing the government money.
Trevor Timm at
The Guardian writes
The Senate is giving more power to the NSA, in secret. Everyone should fight it:
One of the most underrated benefits of Edward Snowden's leaks was how they forced the US Congress to shelve the dangerous, privacy-destroying legislation– then known as Cispa – that so many politicians had been so eager to pass under the guise of "cybersecurity". Now a version of the bill is back, and apparently its authors want to keep you in the dark about it for as long as possible.
Now it's called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), and it is a nightmare for civil liberties. Indeed, it's unclear how this kind of law would even improve cybersecurity. The bill was marked up and modified by the Senate intelligence committee in complete secrecy this week, and only afterward was the public allowed to see many of the provisions passed under its name.
Cisa is what Senator Dianne Feinstein, the bill's chief backer and the chair of the committee, calls an "information-sharing" law that's supposed to help the government and tech and telecom companies better hand information back and forth to the government about “cyberthreat” data, such as malware. But in reality, it is written so broadly it would allow companies to hand over huge swaths of your data – including emails and other communications records – to the government with no legal process whatsoever. It would hand intelligence agencies another legal authority to potentially secretly re-interpret and exploit in private to carry out even more surveillance on the American public and citizens around the world.
Lisa Graves at
The Progressive writes
The Koch Brothers: The Extremist Roots Run Deep:
Some women and men spend their lives rebelling against their father or mother, but others follow in their footsteps or yearn for their approval. Some become friends.
A few spend millions to make their parents' vision a reality.
Charles and David Koch are among those few.
Raw ideas that were once at the fringes have been carved into 'mainstream' policy through their wealth and will.
According to the lore, a lawsuit against his company by big oil companies forced their dad, Fred Koch, into helping Stalin build refineries, fueling his anti-communist/anti-government views.
The truth is less tidy.
A company called Universal Oil Products sued Fred Koch’s company for patent infringement in 1929.
Kevin Drum at
Mother Jones writes
Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days:
Via James Hamilton, the Atlanta Fed is now making its GDP forecasts publicly available. As you can see, they've gotten steadily more pessimistic since April and are now predicting a growth rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter.
Now, there are two way to look at this. The glass-half-full view is: Whew! That huge GDP drop in Q1 really was a bit of a blip, not an omen of a coming recession. The economy isn't setting records or anything, but it's back on track.
The glass-half-empty view is: Yikes! If the dismal Q1 number had really been a blip, perhaps caused by bad weather, we'd expect to see makeup growth in Q2. But we're seeing nothing of the sort. We lost a huge chunk of productive capacity in Q1 and apparently we're not getting it back. From a lower starting level, we're just going to continue along the same old sluggish growth path that we've had for the past few years. All told, GDP in the entire first half of 2014 hasn't grown by a dime.
John Nichols at
The Nation Against Austerity in Detroit: ‘Water Is a Human Right’:
The United Nations formally “recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”
A new European Citizens Initiative declares, “Water is a public good, not a commodity.”
Former President Jimmy Carter writes, “Clean water is a basic human right. Without it, the other rights may not even matter. Human societies cannot be healthy, prosperous and just without adequate supplies of clean water. What could be a more basic right than clean water?”
So why are children in Detroit marching through that battered city’s downtown with signs reminding officials that “Kids Need Water to be Healthy” and “Kids Without Water Can’t Brush Their Teeth”?
Why are religious leaders being arrested when they seek to prevent the shutoff of water services to families who cannot afford to pay bloated bills?
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
‘The Buck Stops With Me’—Boehner’s Empty Charge Against Obama:
This president is a habitual blame-taker. This is the anti-George W. Bush. The fess-upper in chief. He is the antidote to the eight previous years of obfuscation, fault-dodging and flat-out denial.
This is one of the traits that made Obama an attractive candidate, and it is one of his best traits as a president.
But taking his share of responsibility does not mean he must acquiesce to his opponents and absolve them of guilt, particularly not an intransigent Congress that would rather do nothing than something, particularly not Republican leaders who envision opportunity in opposition. The president has a duty to himself and the country to call them out for the part they play in our problems.
The real question, Mr. Boehner, is not when the president will take personal responsibility for something. He has. Many times. The real question is, When will you?