Month: November 2013

Some people think Dante de Blasio’s afro won the mayoral race for Bill de Blasio.

Can it really be as simple as that?

Republicans hate people who use Medicaid, and they really hate the expansion of Medicaid that allows the near-poor to get health insurance. If you talk about some of ObamaCare’s successes, e.g., in Kentucky, Republicans will respond contemptuously that most of the people who signed up are getting Medicaid. The funny thing is that they think we see that as a bad thing.

The entire point of the health care reform push is to make medical care available to people who cannot afford it. I really don’t give a crap if people who can afford health insurance have slightly lower premiums or modestly better coverage. I care that people can see a doctor who could not see a doctor before.

Arkansas is lucky to have a Democratic governor. As a result, they accepted the Medicaid expansion and set up their own exchange. As Arkansas Online (subscription) reports, the near-poor in Arkansas are enjoying a massive benefit:

Notices went out Tuesday to more than 40,000 food-stamp recipients informing them that they have been automatically assigned to a private health-insurance plan under the state’s expanded Medicaid program, the state Department of Human Services announced.

The automatic enrollments take the number of newly eligible people who have been added to the Medicaid program for coverage that will start Jan. 1 to 53,462.

That includes 49,151 who chose or were assigned to a private plan and 4,311 who were assigned to the traditional program because of they were deemed to have exceptional health needs…

…The expansion of the Medicaid program, authorized by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and approved by the Legislature this year, extended eligibility for coverage to about 250,000 adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level – $15,860 for an individual or $32,500 for a family of four.
Most of those who enroll are expected to be able to sign up for a private plan on the state’s health-insurance exchange and have their premium paid by Medicaid. About 10 percent – those identified as “medically frail” because of their health-care needs – will be assigned to the traditional Medicaid program.

The 40,405 who were assigned to a plan Tuesday are among 145,000 recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program who received letters from the department in September informing them that they are eligible for coverage under the expanded program.

Those who responded and said they wanted coverage were sent a notice giving them 12 days to visit a state website, insureark.org, where they would be asked to complete a questionnaire designed to identify the medically frail. Applicants who are not found to be medically frail can then use the website to sign up for a plan.

The automatic assignments affect 38,376 people who indicated that they wanted coverage but did not visit the website, as well as 2,029 who completed the questionnaire but failed to select a plan after it was determined they were not medically frail.

How many of those 53,000 people who will now be receiving free health insurance are typical white Obama-hating southerners who listen to Glenn Beck and Mark Levin on their way to work?

What are they going to think about all this clamor about the malfunctioning federal website that they don’t have to use? What are they going to think about the people who are supposedly losing insurance plans that they like and are not allowed to go to the doctors that they prefer?

It’s going to seem like bullshit to them because their experience is that they got free health care without any problems.

ObamaCare was built to help them, and it is helping them in a massive way.

But the same people are not being helped here in Pennsylvania or throughout the rest of the Deep South. That’s because Republican governors and legislatures are standing in the way.

Maybe will have to wait until we have a new president, but the Bubba vote is ours. It’s just a matter of time.

I am going to get myself in trouble talking about Chris Christie and New Jersey. First, you have to understand what it was like for a New Jerseyan to see the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, particularly down at the shore. I don’t know what to compare it to, except maybe to how New Yorkers (and New Jerseyans) felt when the Twin Towers were suddenly missing from the Manhattan skyline. Maybe if Fenway Park were lifted up and thrown into Boston Harbor, then Bostonians would know how it felt.

So, when Governor Christie started his “Stronger Than the Storm” ad campaign, it was a very feel-good moment. There he was, down at the shore, assuring us that we are going to rebuild it, that we’d get through it, that we were strong enough to overcome the devastation. It’s what we wanted to hear. It’s what we needed to hear. And it made everyone, including Christie’s ardent political opponents, feel more favorably disposed to him. He wasn’t talking about birth certificates and ACORN and Solyndra and Benghazi. He was working with the administration to get shit done.

That’s what Charles Pierce doesn’t get. But he’d feel the same way about Governor Mitt Romney if he was rebuilding Fenway Park. That’s why so many self-described liberals voted for Christie. But it’s also why the ad campaign was ethically dubious. Because it was financed with federal disaster-relief dollars. And Rand Paul is correct to raise questions about the appropriateness of a politician appearing in those kinds of ads in an election year. I think Paul opposes the ads regardless of who appears in them, because his tiny brain cannot understand the valuable role of marketing in reviving a destroyed tourism industry. But I agree with him that Christie got an unfair advantage in his reelection campaign by featuring himself and his family in feel-good advertisements that he didn’t have to finance.

Apparently, New York State has a law that would have prohibited Gov. Andrew Cuomo from appearing in the same kinds of ads. That sounds like a good law.

But, regardless, even though I know pretty much every sordid detail of Christie’s sad, pathetic life in public service, I still feel an affinity for him because he is pure Jersey. And because he was the guy in charge when my birth-state got knocked on its ass, and he was the one who told me it would be okay.

People beat up on Jersey all the time, and I think some folks think it makes New Jerseyans defensive. It really doesn’t. We think you’re too stupid to care about your opinion.

Chris Christie’s reelection wasn’t about the Establishment vs. the Tea Party or moderates vs. conservatives or any of that. It’s a small state recovering from total devastation. The election was a family affair. Outsiders don’t understand. Believe me, I live forty miles west of the Delaware River, and no one around here knows how I felt when I saw the damage from the storm. No one around here felt the way I did when I saw Gov. Christie talking about the rebuilding effort and promoting tourism. So, how is someone from hundreds or thousands of miles away going to understand the bond Christie made with New Jerseyans during that time?

They won’t understand it.

But, here’s the thing. New Jerseyans told exit pollsters that they vastly prefer Hillary Clinton to Chris Christie as a presidential candidate. That’s because the love affair with Christie only extends so far. It’s visceral and personal, but it won’t last any longer than New York’s love affair with Rudy Giuliani lasted after the thousandth time he evoked his leadership on 9/11.

When you are there for people in a crisis, those people will be there for you in your time of need.

For a while.

Until you milk that cow dry.

My question for Carter Eskew is, what is about Chris Christie that causes you to label him a “moderate”? Is it his anti-choice position on reproductive rights? Is it his opposition to gay marriage? His hostility to teachers? Was it his refusal to create a health insurance exchange for ObamaCare?

I don’t think you should label someone as a moderate if the only moderate thing they have done is accept federal emergency relief funding.

I don’t understand why the Russian team said that Yassir Arafat had not been poisoned with polonium-210 and the Swiss team just said that he probably was. Here’s the reporting from October 15th:

Polonium-210 did not cause the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Vladimir Uyba, the physician at the helm of the Russian Medical-Biological Agency which carried out tests on the remains of the Nobel Peace prize laureate, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday.

Arafat was 75 when he died in 2004 at a French military hospital in Percy. He suffered abdominal pain prior to dying of unknown causes.

‘Russian experts who conducted the test did not find traces of this substance’, said Uyba.

And here is the reporting from today:

The Swiss scientists who tested Arafat’s remains after the exhumation of his body in November discovered levels of polonium at least 18 times higher than the norm in Arafat’s ribs, pelvis and in soil that absorbed his leaked bodily fluids…

…The Swiss report said that even taking into account the eight years since Arafat’s death and the quality of specimens taken from bone fragments and tissue scraped from his decayed corpse and shroud, the results “moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium-210”.

Since we know that the Russians killed Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 in London just two years after Arafat died, their denials here strike me as enormously suspicious. What I don’t know is what was going on in October 2004 between the Russians and the Palestinians that might have constituted a motive for the Russians to kill Arafat.

Naturally, the Israelis will be under suspicion, too, but the Russians are the only ones known to use this method to kill.

I’m generally skeptical about allowing the people to legislate by referendum, but I am also unimpressed with the federal government’s inability to let the minimum wage grow to reflect depreciation in its value due to inflation. So, good for New Jersey, which just raised its minimum wage by a dollar, and good for SeaTac, Washington, which just raised its minimum wage to $15/hour.

I am glad that Portland, Maine decided to decriminalize marijuana. I believe they are the first city in the East to do so. That doesn’t mean you should smoke pot, kids, but you also shouldn’t get a criminal record just for spleefing up.

There is a ton of spin going on with respect to the election results last night. That’s understandable, but it’s not very interesting. What you want is not spin, but analysis.

I haven’t had a chance, yet, to really look at the turnout in Virginia, but I do have some preliminary observations. I think the best race to examine is the Attorney General race because the governor’s race had a significant third-party candidate who drew almost seven percent of the vote, and the Lieutenant Governor race featured a lunatic who underperformed. The Attorney General race is still too close to call and will probably involve a recount. While the Democrats are crowing that they succeeded in getting 2012 levels of black turnout, that wasn’t necessarily enough to win them a two-way race between two decent candidates. They also left, barely, as many as seven House of Delegates seats on the table because, while they held the incumbents below 52%, they couldn’t get over the hump.

We can argue all day long about whether the results are best explained by Cuccinelli’s weaknesses or McAuliffe’s weaknesses, but the chances are that both presidential candidates in 2016 will be stronger. I may change my mind once I have a chance to delve into the returns and exit polls, but it appears that Virginia is still a toss-up state. If the Democrats’ turnout had been worse last night, I’d actually feel better about our prospects going forward.

Kudos to Trapper Ivan McIntyre for having the best wrap-up of the Novoyork Autonomous Okrug Administrator race. Watch the revanchists retreat.

We enjoyed big wins in the mayoral race in Boston, too, as well as in Toledo, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Greensboro, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

And, this morning, Rep. Jon Runyan (R-NJ) announced that he will not seek reelection to a seat in a district that Obama narrowly carried in 2012.

The Republicans have little to celebrate, although Chris Christie did set himself up nicely to have a strong rationale to be the party’s 2016 presidential nominee. The Establishment is happy about that, and they are also happy that Cuccinelli lost and that a Tea Party lunatic lost in a Alabama special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. It was a bad night for the Republicans, but a worse night for their Tea Party wing.

Interpreting the election results tonight is going to be a complicated endeavor. I’m still looking at numbers as they come in. From a progressive point of view, the biggest victory appears to be in the Boston mayoral contest, where Martin Walsh pulled out a narrow victory. It isn’t necessarily a bigger deal than our giant victory in New York City, but we already knew that Bill de Blasio was going to win. Progressives can also celebrate mayoral wins in Charlotte, North Carolina and Toledo, Ohio.

The biggest disappointment may be in the Virginia Attorney General race, where Democrat Mark Herring is down by 1,500 votes with 99% reporting. Narrow losses in the Virginia House of Delegates were also a theme tonight, where numerous candidates are losing with 49% of the vote.

Personally, I am happy that Terry McAuliffe barely won. It will prevent the Republicans from agreeing about what they’re doing wrong, which will keep them fighting each other and they will continue to alienate the electorate. It will also prevent the Democratic establishment from thinking that politicians like McAuliffe are attractive. I almost wanted McAuliffe to lose, so a narrow win is satisfying except in the sense that it cost us seats further on down the ballot.

Chris Christie had a big win and gave a pretty good speech. But the theme he took was about cooperation. The reality is that Christie won big because he wrapped his arms around the president and the Democrats rewarded him by standing down. What kind of message does that send to the rest of the Republican Party?

In any case, it was a pretty good night, but it could have been better. I’ll have more to say in the morning.

You want the definition of putting partisanship before country? Check this out:

As a two-term chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Pete Sessions has never been known for reaching across the aisle.

In the year since relinquishing that gig and taking the gavel of the Rules Committee, the Texas Republican is still focused on politics and elections — and scoring points for the GOP.

And right now, he’s got one target in his sights.

“Everything we do in this body should be about messaging to win back the Senate,” he said. “That’s it. If you don’t want Benghazis to happen or you want an investigation for Benghazi, if you want an investigation on the IRS as opposed to the excuses that [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid is all about, if you do not like what’s happening at the [National Security Agency], then you gain the Senate.”

It’s kind of breathtaking in it’s assholishness.

I also heard reports that Pete Sessions recently told the president that he couldn’t even stand to look at him. I don’t know if those reports are true, but they seem plausible.

This is not a joke.

Man brings his 12 year old son to the Phoenix Airport. Son is carrying a semiautomatic firearm. Dad was packing a rifle. Coming on the heels of the LAX shootout, some people waiting to board planes were not amused:

ABC15 spoke to a woman who saw them both. She’s asked to remain anonymous.

She was there when a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder showed up with his young son, who had a handgun holstered to his hip at Terminal 3.

She said she was very uncomfortable and was not the only one.

“I was outraged by it and others around me were outraged,” she said.

But not to worry. It’s perfectly legal to carry guns into airports in Arizona. Besides, the local law enforcement had it covered:

The Phoenix Police Department confirmed that the man and his son were at the airport waiting for a passenger on one of the flights. The man reportedly told police that he brought the weapons because he feared for his family’s safety while at the airport.

“The vibe that I received from them was that they were rather smug about what they were doing that they knew the law. They knew what they could and could not do,” the woman who witnessed the incident explained. “I think there are circumstances where people should be able to carry guns and have guns, but I don’t think this is one of the good ones.”

Police escorted the two out of the building after their passenger arrived. Authorities said that no laws were broken because Americans have the right to carry guns in unsecured areas of the airport.

You know, one of these days two or more of these idiots in Phoenix or Tuscon are going to bring fully loaded guns to the same airport, and one of them is going to get the wrong idea about the other “man (or woman) with a gun over there.” Or maybe a law enforcement official will get the wrong idea about these idiots’ intentions. And that’s when a gunfight at the Sky Harbor International Corral is going to break out. Sadly, when that day comes (and these gun “enthusiasts seemed determined to make sure it does), many innocent people will be caught in the crossfire. All because some bozos think its the “cool kid” thing to do to parade their AK-47 knockoffs and Glocks at a public facility filled with thousands of people. Mark my words.

Is this really the kind of society you want to live in, America? Most of us say “hell no!” even in Kansas. Unfortunately, a few cowardly and/or well paid politicians and the NRA lobby insist that we all must live in fear of incidents like this one, or shootings at schools, malls or anyplace else (even where we vote) where large crowds of people gather. And this isn’t limited to the wild, wild west. Just ask the good folks of Kentucky.

Firearms that are openly displayed can now be carried into facilities that are owned by municipalities.

That means people can openly carry weapons into facilities owned by municipalities, such as libraries, parks, the zoo and city halls.

I guess this is a one way to get people to buy body armor for their personal use. You know, as a Christmas present for that frequent flyer in your family. Or Mom when she goes shopping at the local mall. Or for the school teacher in your family. Or maybe just for yourself, because – you know, Guns = FREDUM! The freedom to be shot in particular by people exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t made it about as easy as it can be to allow criminals, domestic violence offenders and mentally disturbed individuals to buy guns thanks to the private sale loophole and non-enforcement of straw purchases, etc.

In fact, in states like Kentucky, Kansas, Florida, Arizona and many other states where anyone can carry their “personal protection device” openly in public I highly recommend you invest in body armor. Just remember, as the body armor manufacturers will tell you none of their products are completely bullet proof. Still, when your government at all levels, state, local and federal, continues to allow itself to be bullied into allowing the authorized carry and use of guns in public, what other option is available to you? Sure you can carry your own gun around, but statistically speaking, owning a firearm increases your risk of being wounded or killed, not lessens it.

The first anniversary of the Newtown shootings is rapidly approaching. Can anyone say we, collectively, as a nation, as a people, as human beings living in our society, have learned any lessons from that tragedy? That our lives have been changed for the better? That our children, teachers, travelers and shoppers have been made safer. Sadly, my answer to those questions must be a resounding no.

Just ask Mr. “I can parade around with my rifle and my son can carry a pistol at Sky Harbor International Airport and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me” guy. Or ask George Zimmerman, the man who saved us all from a hoodied black kid armed with Skittles and a can of Iced tea. Arizona Ice Tea. Now that is ironic.

Somewhat strangely, the contemptuous hatred so many Republicans feel for the president lacks the classism they heaped on Bill “Bubba” Clinton. Yes, there is often a racial tinge to Obama-hate that feels even nastier than their contempt for backwater Arkansas, but it basically evens out. With Bill and Hillary Clinton, they were obsessed with TrooperGate and the White House travel office, and Whitewater, and Vince Foster’s suicide, and with Obama they talk about his birth certificate, his religion, and his secret plan to Europeanize the country. But, look at how Republicans treat Clinton now that he’s been out of office for 13 years. He’s seen as a moderate who they could negotiate with.

How will they treat Obama thirteen years after he leaves office?