We have a relatively brief TWiA this week, not because nothing happened in the news, but because we didn't have time to write about it. And we're still behind on our detailed looks at declared presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio. Maybe we'll catch up soon...
This Week in History
The 83rd Attorney General of the United States is an African-American female--and a fierce fighter for the law. Welcome to the DOJ, Loretta Lynch. And thank for your service, Eric Holder.
This Week in Health Care
J.D. Power just did a survey of health insurance customers, and the results aren't good news for people who hate the Affordable Care Act (ACA):
"Obamacare customers nationally also tended to be more satisfied with their plans bought in 2014 than people who primarily have traditional job-based health coverage—the majority of those with insurance—the study by the J.D. Power market research company found."
...
"People most satisfied with their plans bought them on HealthCare.gov, the federally run marketplace.
"HealthCare.gov customers tended to be more satisfied with their plans if their state had partnered with the federal government to conduct enrollment, as opposed to if they were states that opted out of running their own exchanges."
A new Kaiser poll finds the ACA in positive territory, too.
In 2013, Dr. Ben Carson, who is inexplicably considered a legitimate potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said, "You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control."
He's never retracted that statement, despite plenty of opportunities. We suppose Americans could be happy with Obamacare in the same way that deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy and Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson think blacks were happy and better off under slavery and Jim Crow--but we tend to think the likelier explanation is that Carson, Bundy, and Robertson are ignorant hatemongers who appeal to the worst strain in the American character.
This Week in Inequality
Wealth and income inequality are getting to be such major issues that even Republican presidential candidates are talking about it (albeit while promoting policies that would exacerbate the problem rather than fixing it).
This Washington Post piece explains, in just a few short paragraphs, what it means, how it led to the Great Depression, how a combination of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and WWII created a middle class where there hadn't been one before, and how today inequality is once again one of the central factors threatening the country's fiscal health. It's a concise little history lesson, complete with an easy-to-read chart that shows the growth of inequality. If you're wondering what it all means or why it's a problem--or why conservative economic policies can't fix it--this is worth a read.
This Week in Austerity
We've argued, since the beginning of the Great Recession, that austerity was the wrong way to fix it, and would only have thrown us further into recession and maybe into depression. Believers in the magical thinking of conservative economic theory argued otherwise--cutting government spending and hence lowering the deficit, they said, would grow the economy.
They were wrong. Economists, historians, and ordinary observers like us have known that since the 1930s (well, we haven't known it since the '30s, but it has been known since then). The conservative argument in favor of austerity has nothing to do with wanting to grow the economy, it has to do with the fact that conservatives don't like government and they don't like most of the things--like the social safety net--that it spends money on (but they're cool with military spending, and they like having infrastructure but don't like paying for it). In order to justify their ideological goals, they turn to economic theories that reasonable people have long known just don't work.
Anyway, that's been our argument for years. This week, Matt O'Brien (who explained inequality above) delves into the same argument, a little deeper, in the Washington Post. His piece is easy to read and comprehend, even for non-economists. If only conservatives would pay attention--or give up their opposition to government spending, especially when it's most needed. As O'Brien writes, during the Great Recession, "government threw one fiscal hurdle after another in front of the recovery out of fealty to some defunct economists."
Wondering why the economic recovery has been slow, and we're still not where we need to be? There's a big part of your answer (though there are also systemic issues involved--an aging population, technological change, the paucity of well-paid work that doesn't require a college degree, etc.): Republicans in Congress who blocked every meaningful attempt to spend government money, after the initial, too-small stimulus package. By letting their ideology getting in the way of pragmatism, they kept Americans unemployed or underemployed, forced thousands into poverty and deepened the misery of those already there, shuttered businesses and hampered entrepreneurship. Heck of a legacy, folks. Good to know where you stand. And it's a blessing that we had a Democratic president, and a Democratic Congress for the first couple of years, or we'd be Europe right now.
Happy Earth Day!
Photo of Earth taken from Apollo 17
This Week in 2016
Serial plagiarist Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY) still doesn't seem to understand intellectual property rights. (Also, the piece has easily the best headline of the week.)
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Rick Hasen is one of our foremost experts on election law, and his Election Law Blog is an indispensable resource. He reports that presidential non-candidate (so far) Jeb Bush (R/FL) is doing his level best to shred whatever campaign finance laws the Supreme Court has left us. "Bush is more than lying about his intentions to become a presidential candidate. He’s undermining what little law we have left to stop the super wealthy from having even greater influence over our elections and politics. It’s something to consider as Jeb Bush gets his audition before the Koch brothers, who have promised to have their network spend up to $889 million on the upcoming elections."
There's never a gyrocopter around when you need one.
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Well, this is a surprise, he said sarcastically. The Republican-led House's umpteenth "investigation" of Benghazi--a tragedy in which the only scandal is the ongoing effort of Republicans to use the deaths of four Americans for political advantage--won't release its report until 2016, in the midst of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
And Speaker of the House John Boehner's (R/OH) purported explanation, in the story linked above, is BS. She's been trying to testify, but she wants to do it in public, televised hearings--possibly so when Republicans convene their future anniversary hearings, she'll be able to tell them to just watch the video of the previous ones. Or maybe she just wants the world to see how absurd this whole exercise is. This week, the committee's chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R/SC) finally agreed.
This Week in Gun Safety
Mother Jones has put a lot of effort and resources into a broad-scale study of the financial costs of gun violence in America. It ain't cheap, and it depends in part upon where you live. In TWiA's home state of Arizona, it comes out to about $800 per person, per year. Mother Jones reports, "Our investigation also begins to illuminate the economic toll for individual states. Louisiana has the highest gun homicide rate in the nation, with costs per capita of more than $1,300. Wyoming has a small population but the highest overall rate of gun deaths—including the nation's highest suicide rate—with costs working out to about $1,400 per resident. Among the four most populous states, the costs per capita in the gun rights strongholds of Florida and Texas outpace those in more strictly regulated California and New York. Hawaii and Massachusetts, with their relatively low gun ownership rates and tight gun laws, have the lowest gun death rates, and costs per capita roughly a fifth as much as those of the states that pay the most."
And it's going up all the time. "Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise."
These, of course, are just the dollars-and-cents costs. There are other, less quantifiable costs, having to do with quality of life, psychological ramifications, and more. The introductory piece--in part profiling an Arizona woman (a gun owner and shooter, even now) confined to a wheelchair by random gun violence, who has made advocacy on behalf of gun and disabilities issues her crusade--is well worth reading, and there are more links from that piece, including charts and survivors' stories.
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Researcher David Hemenway, Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, has been polling the scientific community on the topic of gun violence, and finds that--as with climate change--the scientific consensus is well established. Having a gun in the home makes it a more dangerous place, not less (especially for women). Guns are used for crime more often than for self-defense. A gun in the home increases the risk of suicide. More permissive gun laws don't lower crime rates. And on and on. Everything the pro-gun death enthusiasts at the NRA and other groups tell us is wrong. They've managed to block many scientists from studying the issue, but the vast majority of those who do support these conclusions.
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The Practical Ethics blog offers an intriguing analogy: If the right to own guns is in part predicated on the right to have a weapon with which to defend oneself in a violent world, because law enforcement can't be wherever they might be needed all the time, wouldn't it make sense to let prisoners have guns so they wouldn't have to rely on prison guards for protection?
We won't spoil his take--it's brief and worth a read--but we will share a possibly surprising insight: "...in the US, people are more likely to be murdered than they would be if they were in prison."
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Fox "New" is "reporting" facts about gun background checks that aren't actually facts. It's almost like they're deliberately trying to persuade people of something that isn't true. It's cute the way they still call themselves a news organization. It's like Halloween every day over there, with everybody dressing up as journalists.
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Back to Mother Jones for the news that Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) wants to be known as the most pro-gun death candidate in the Republican presidential field. Immediately after the massacre of children at Newtown, he co-sponsored a bill to make it easier to buy and transport guns across state lines, and he's hammering other candidates for not standing up for that piece of insanity.
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In similar insanity, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips of Colorado lost their daughter in the Aurora theater massacre. They sued websites that sold ammunition and gear to the clearly troubled James Holmes, but they lost because of state and federal laws that protect gun dealers from liability for the acts their products are used for. Now, thanks to those laws, they might owe more than $250,000 in legal fees to the companies whose wares killed their daughter.
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Did we mention that pro-gun death groups like the NRA are a huge racket? Here's another way.
(Thanks to TWiA special correspondent Marcy (Deadeye) Rockwell for the tip.)
This Week in Arizona
Speaking of Arizona, this week the civil contempt proceeding for America's Most Corrupt SheriffTM began in federal court, with first-day testimony from one of said corrupt dirtbag's sergeants that AMCSTM personally instructed him to ignore a federal court order.
Later in the week AMCSTM himself testified, and more details about his shady practices came to light, especially with regard to his habit of investigating--at taxpayer expense--his many critics and political foes (including the office and the wife of the judge presiding over this hearing. This Arizona Republic article details some of AMCSTM's previous "investigations."). "The implications of Snow's questioning were not immediately clear, but testimony offered a murky glimpse into some of the Sheriff's Office's alleged secret pet projects, with Arpaio conceding that the agency employed unreliable informants, private investigators and an unknown amount of public funds to investigate Arpaio's political enemies."
This is a civil proceeding, so sadly won't end up with AMCS in his own tent city prison, but it could still lead to criminal charges. Here's hoping.
This Week in Bears
Does a bear dance in the woods? Of course!
"And it's a blessing that we had a Democratic president, and a Democratic Congress for the first couple of years, or we'd be Europe right now."
I first read that as "we'd be IN Europe right now," and I was trying to figure out why that was bad. I'd love to be in Europe right now. Especially France. ;)
Posted by: Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell | 04/24/2015 at 09:03 PM
Being IN France would be wonderful. Being the economy of most European countries, not so much.
Posted by: Jeff Mariotte | 04/24/2015 at 09:15 PM