TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.
This Week in Health Care
This year marks the half-century anniversary of Medicare, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965. Medicare is, of course, hugely popular, and has been very successful at doing what it was meant to do. As the Huffington Post reports, "But if some seniors still struggle with medical bills, the situation is far better than it was five decades ago, when half of the elderly population had no insurance at all. Studies have shown that Medicare has meant substantially smaller out-of-pocket spending for seniors and maybe (though not certainly) longer lives. The financial protection that the program provides to beneficiaries helps explain why just one in 10 seniors now lives in poverty. That’s roughly a third of what it was in the mid-1960s."
The same law birthed Medicaid, recently expanded to provide health insurance to millions of Americans who couldn't otherwise afford it. Is it socialized medicine? In the same sense that the VA system is, yes. Does it work? Yes. Do we care about the elderly and the poor in this country? We hope so.
Republicans have been trying to get rid of Medicare since before it became law, and they haven't stopped yet. They couch their plans in all kinds of language, but the net result is always the same. They're ideologically opposed to government "interference" in the free market, even when the private insurance market--for people without employer-provided health insurance, is a chaotic nightmare to navigate, and the prices for even basic plans are out of reach for the working poor and the non-working elderly.
So happy birthday, Medicare (and Medicaid)! We here at TWiA are glad you're out there.
This Week in Gun Safety
The most recent mass shooting in the country (as of this writing) was in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA. Two women were killed, nine wounded, and the shooter killed himself.
Louisiana governor (and presidential candidate) Bobby Jindal (R) declared that it wasn't the right time to talk about gun laws, saying, "There will be an absolute appropriate time for us to talk about policies and politics." Just not now.
He was, however, happy to blame other states for not providing mental health information to the federal background check database. He's right about that--it should be standard across the nation, and it's not. But he's wrong to focus on that as the only solution.
There is an undeniable connection between mental health issues and mass shootings. Mass shootings, though, make up a tiny minority of gun deaths. Far more common are suicides, accidental shootings, shootings within the home, and criminal violence. Mental health issues rarely play a part in those. The one thing those have in common with all mass shootings is guns. (And research has shown that for gun violence in general, alcohol use is a much better predictor than mental health. After guns, alcohol is what most shootings have in common.)
And Louisiana has some of the most lax gun laws in the country. Not coincidentally, Louisiana has the highest per capita number of gun deaths and gun homicides. According to The Trace: "More than half of Louisiana’s 8,552 gun deaths over that period were homicides. Its gun homicide rate is more than 2.5 times the national average and approximately 25 percent higher than that of the state with the second-highest rate, Mississippi."
No wonder Jindal doesn't want to talk about it. When your state's economy is in the toilet and your citizens are killing each other all the time, "Let me do for the country what I've done for my state" isn't the easiest sell for a presidential candidate. It's unlikely that Jindal will be in the race long enough for it to be much of a problem, and that's part of the reason why.
What Jindal and other conservatives refuse to recognize is the simple truth: where there are more guns, there's more gun violence. To reduce gun violence, reduce the number of guns.
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Although the common argument in favor of guns is that people need them for self defense, the truth is that they're rarely used that way. FBI data show that in 2012, for every "justifiable" gun homicide, there were 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and 2 accidental gun deaths.
And people who aren't trained in self-defense are really bad at it.
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Richmond, CA had a serious problem with gun violence, so the city tried a novel approach. They identified the 50 people most likely to shoot someone, approached them, and offered them "a spot on a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around." And it worked. Gun violence dropped significantly. 94% of the people in the program are still alive, and 79% "have not been arrested or charged with gun-related offenses."
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Mass shootings, we said, are rare, but they're becoming less so. If you define a mass shooting as four or more people injured by gunfire in a single event, we've had an average of one per day in 2015. Here's a comprehensive set of resources for individuals, organizations, schools, churches, etc., on active shooter incidents. And here's the FBI's study of active shooter incidents from 2000-2013. Of note to the pro-gun death crowd who thinks more people should go around armed because of active shooters: Of the 160 incidents covered, one was ended by the involvement of an armed civilian. Every other one that was ended by someone pulling a gun on the shooter involved law enforcement professionals or professional security guards.
We say all the time that untrained, gun-carrying civilians just don't stop active shooters, and statistically that's true, even if there is a single incident once every couple of decades. They're more likely to either not factor in at all, or to make matters worse. At the shooting that wounded friend of TWiA Rep. Gabby Giffords, a civilian with a gun heard the gunfire and came out with his own gun. When he reached the scene, people were struggling for the shooter's gun, and the civilian identified the wrong person as the gunman. Fortunately, he holstered his weapon without using it, or he'd have shot yet another innocent person and perhaps allowed the real shooter to escape or to continue his massacre.
The NRA likes to throw around statistics showing that people often use guns to defend themselves against violence. Those statistics mostly come from this guy, who's a notoriously dishonest "researcher" who even other pro-gun researchers admit is a phony. Among real gun researchers, only 9% claim that more guns = less crime.
Below the fold: campaign craziness, cutting taxes, busy doin' nothin', scandal, and bears.
The first Republican presidential debate--aka Fox "News" trying to determine who gets to run and who doesn't--takes place on Aug. 6. Conventional wisdom says that national polling is meaningless this early in the race--even polling in the early primary states is relatively pointless, albeit more meaningful than national polls. But Fox is only letting the 10 candidates who poll highest in unspecified national polls onto the stage, so every candidate is busy trying to make as much noise as Donald Trump.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) showed that his cruel and tasteless comments have no bounds. He used to come across as a "nice conservative," but he gave up that charade a few years ago. This week, discussing the Iran nuclear deal, he said, "It is so naive that he [Obama] would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”
First, Huck, the whole point of the deal is that nobody trusts the Iranians--that's why the most intrusive inspections regime in history, which remains in place forever, is part of it. NOT doing the deal means not inspecting anything, and therefore either trusting them or going to war. The deal is what it is precisely because we and the other nations that took part don't trust them.
Second, invoking the Holocaust in this context is not only over the top, it's disgusting, and you should apologize immediately, to the president and the country. Then you should go to your room and close the door and not come out until you learn some basic human decency.
Instead, he refused to apologize, and doubled down. We know he's trying to generate attention so he'll make it to the first debate, but this isn't some bogus diabetes cure he's selling, it's a presidential election. There should be some measure of respect for the voters, and for the truth.
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There's another new Republican in the race this week, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore. That makes 17, if you're counting. Gilmore has run for president before, but never really caught fire. TWiA doesn't expect him to this time, either.
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Who sucks at raising money? Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley (D) has raised only $2 million for his campaign, and the super PAC supporting him has raised a measly $289,000. O'Malley has said he would rather not have a super PAC at all, and would prefer that nobody else did, either. By comparison, Hillary Clinton's campaign raised $47 million in the last quarter, while outside groups supporting her raised $24 million.
On the Republican side, Sen. Rand "Crybaby" Paul has raised just $7 million in 2015, and his super PAC has raised $3.1 million, 2/3 of which came from two people. Jeb Bush's super PAC has raised $103 million. Money raised now can only be used for the primaries, not for the general election. In other words, expect to see the airwaves blanketed with Jeb Bush ads.
Paul's campaign is struggling badly. Part of the job of a presidential candidate is management--even though he or she has a campaign manager, the candidate is effectively the CEO of the campaign, and has to manage the managers. Paul is either unwilling to or unable to manage--not a surprise to those of us who think he's been highly overrated, and while he may or may not be a good eye doctor, he's definitely not good at much else. Except this campaign to fade early, probably after the New Hampshire primary.
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Remember the big story in the New York Times last week about how Hillary Clinton was potentially facing criminal charges related to the emails on her private server? Scandal!
Or, not so much. Now it's looking like somebody on the House Select Committee on Benghazi--taking a page from Rep. Darrell Issa's underhanded playbook, leaked false "information"--to the NYT, and the NYT ran with it, running a big front-page story that turns out to be not even remotely true. It's an embarrassment to the Times--which really should reveal who provided them the bogus tip; all they've admitted to is unnamed sources. Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek dissects the NYT disaster, point by point, and shows how far off-base it is.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the Times was played by "reporter" Judith Miller, who was taking disinformation handed to her by administration sources and writing it up. The Times then ran major stories about Iraq's WMD programs that turned out to be utterly false. You'd think they would have learned their lesson, but apparently that's asking too much.
Side Note: Lest anybody think we're too harsh on Judy Miller, she went from the NYT to Newsmax, a propaganda organization for which the the word "News" is nothing but an ironic punch-line.
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Another good reason--as if more were needed--not to vote for Donald Trump: he's promised that a certain half-term governor and failed vice presidential candidate, whose name won't be mentioned here until she apologizes for conflating the national debt with the horror of slavery, would have a place in his administration, and possibly in his cabinet. Why? "Because she really is somebody who knows what’s happening and she’s a special person.” No, Donny, she doesn't know what's happening; that was part of her problem in 2008. If Trump thinks she does, that's a good indicator--as if more were needed--that he doesn't know what's happening, either. Ignorance is drawn to ignorance.
Despite early predictions by those of us who remember the brief rises and sudden falls of a series of ridiculous frontrunners in the 2012 Republican primaries (Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, some guy named Trump...), this time out, Trump is holding onto and even expanding his lead in most national polls. (See the note above about national polling this early in the race. It's not determinative, but it drives media coverage, and this time, drives who Fox "News" allows in the first debate.) The only reasonable conclusion is that the Republican electorate has collectively lost its mind. Word is that the crew and moderator of the Fox "News" debate will all carry sidearms loaded with tranquilizer darts, in case Trump refuses to stop talking.
Trying to make sense of the senseless, Bloomberg Politics held a focus group of Trump supporters in New Hampshire. Their fawning descriptions of Trump are mind-boggling, to say the least. And at least one of them has no idea what our southern border is like. Somebody named Roger said, “Specifically, he said he'll put a wall on the southern border. When you talk about common sense, that's a common-sense thing to do.”
No, it's really not. It's an insane pipe dream. We recognize that it's a long way from New Hampshire to the border, but we've traveled farther distances. Perhaps Roger should come and take a look.
When asked what a Trump administration would be like, a woman named Cheryl said "Classy." That's an adjective we can't imagine ever applying to Donald Trump. Rich, loud, and ignorant, Cheryl, does not translate to "classy" in our book.
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) has joined the cacophony of gullible right-wing yahoos who want to lecture Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz--one of the nation's premier nuclear physicists, who also sports a Stanford Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so no dummy--about the dangers of electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMPs). Somehow, it's not scary enough to raise the absurd threat of Iran using nuclear weapons against us (which they would never do, because they know our response would be to annihilate them). Now they're trying to get the populace worked up about the sheer impossibility that Iran would be able to get a giant warhead to the altitude of the International Space Station and detonate it over the US.
Even if that were an intellectual leap that could reasonably be made--which it's not--one still has to overlook the leap in logic that says that a deal that prevents Iran from getting nuclear weapons for at least a decade, and probably much longer, somehow makes it more likely that Iran will get nuclear weapons than no deal. No deal, we want to remind those people, is what we had before the deal. Only then we had the world's major powers on our side and were devastating Iran's economy with sanctions, in order to force them to the negotiating table. If we were worried that they were only minutes away from having a bomb then, why didn't we take more decisive action?
Oh, that's right, because there isn't any that will solve the dilemma, except possibly a major ground war against Iran. Which--like bombing raids--would simply solidify their desire to get nuclear weapons. So far, all conservatives have done is complain about the deal, without offering any serious alternatives. You know, kind of like they do with the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, to worry about EMPs you have to imagine at least two impossible scenarios happening in concert: a negotiated deal and an invasive inspection regime somehow makes the country more likely to get a bomb, instead of less, and then somehow the country comes up with a vessel that can take a warhead 500 miles up and detonate it in precisely the right spot. Even if they did that all perfectly, chances that the EMP would have the desired effect range from about 5% to 70%, depending on several variables.
We've known about EMPs for a long time. Secretary Moniz has, too. They're not, at this time, anything resembling a real threat. Climate change? That's real, but Republicans pretend it's not. At the same time, they pretend that EMPs are.
Can we please have a sane Republican Party? Anybody?
This Week in Tax Cuts
If you listen to the economic prescriptions of just about every Republican in the presidential race (and almost every elected Republican everywhere), you'll hear the mantra that what the economy needs are tax cuts. Tax cuts are magical--even though they seem to reduce revenue, in conservative ideology, somehow they increase revenue or at least pay for themselves.
That doesn't really happen. Never has. Never will. Not at the federal level, not at the state level, not in other countries. It's a fairy tale with no connection to reality.
William G. Gale writes for Brookings:
"Ever since the 1970s, when Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer came up with the ideas that are now referred to as supply-side economics, conservative politicians have been unable to resist the siren song of tax cuts for big earners. In recent years, this enthusiasm has spread to state governments led by conservatives, offering new tests of a proposition that has generated scant evidence of success elsewhere.
"In the extreme versions that thrived through the early Reagan Administration years, supply-siders argued tax cuts would pay for themselves by increasing growth substantially. After decades in which lower tax rates generated less revenue rather than more, today’s supply-siders usually make more the modest claim that tax cuts will spur growth that makes up for part of the revenue losses. However, some proponents still can’t help themselves and lapse into the more hyperbolic claims.
"But the record is clear that tax cuts have not boosted growth. When growth is (appropriately) measured from peak to peak of the business cycle, the vaunted Reagan tax cuts in the early 1980s produced a period of average growth. Indeed, research by Martin Feldstein, President Reagan’s former chief economist, and Doug Elmendorf, the former Congressional Budget Office Director, concluded that the 1981 tax cuts had virtually no net impact on growth.
"Virtually no one claims the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts stimulated growth. Despite cuts in tax rates on ordinary income, capital gains, dividends, and estates, economic growth remained sluggish between 2001 and the beginning of the Great Recession in late-2007. The growth that did occur, however, is generally attributed to the Fed’s easy money policy."
What do tax cuts do? A couple of things: they exacerbate income inequality, which is harmful to the long-term health of any economy. And in the short term, when they're too extreme they can wreck an economy [ask presidential candidate Sam Brownback (R), governor of Kansas--oh, wait, he's not running this year, because his state is a fiscal disaster].
It's time that conservatives jettisoned this destructive fantasy. There was a time when they saw themselves as hard-nosed realists. That time is long gone, and we'd all be better off if it came back.
This Week in ISIS
The next time someone says President Obama has done "nothing" about ISIS, you might want to point out that so far that "nothing" has been thousands of air strikes, and we've spent more than $3 billion doing it. Meanwhile, the Republican-led Congress continues to dodge their Constitutional responsibility. The New York Times editorial board writes, "Having failed to reach a consensus over the scope and nature of an authorization of war that would have set parameters for Washington’s involvement in Iraq and Syria, lawmakers appear resigned to allowing the Obama administration to slide ever more deeply into a complex war."
This Week in "Scandal"
The Washington Post reports, "Twenty-one House Republicans on Monday called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John A. Koskinen after they said he failed to cooperate with their inquiry into the targeting of conservative groups by tax investigators."
A little context. Koskinen was appointed to clean up the damage done to the IRS by the first set of House investigations--the ones that determined that, in fact, there was no "targeting of conservative groups." Or more accurately, there was targeting of every kind of group--liberal, conservative, nonpartisan, etc.--because it was the IRS's job to look into groups claiming tax deductions as nonpolitical entities, to see whether they really were nonpolitical.
Or, as Rep. Elijah Cummings (D/MD) puts it, "Calls for Commissioner Koskinen to step down are nothing more than a manufactured Republican political crisis based on allegations that have already been debunked."
It's absurd that House Republicans keep hanging onto a thoroughly discredited narrative, spending tax dollars chasing a story they all know to be untrue.
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In what could be a considerably more genuine scandal, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D/PA) has just been indicted on 29 criminal counts, including bribery, fraud, money laundering, and more. The allegations sound bad. Whether he'll serve time is an open question--he hasn't been tried yet, much less convicted. But we have a feeling his political career is over.
This Week in Arizona
America's Most Corrupt SheriffTM continues to find himself in legal trouble, this time for a refusal to abide by court orders and an apparent attempt to hide evidence. According to the Arizona Republic:
"U.S. marshals raided the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on Friday in search of evidence after a court-appointed special monitor said the agency had withheld hundreds of documents a federal judge had ordered to be turned over months ago.
"Nearly 1,500 identification cards seized by sheriff's deputies had been marked for destruction in direct violation of U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow's February order that the cards be turned over, the monitor said in a hearing Friday.
"Further, the monitor said, sheriff's officials had been instructed not to volunteer information to the monitors that the evidence existed."
AMCSTM had hired a con man to "investigate" Judge Snow. Said con man took Maricopa County taxpayers for at least $120,000 and provided 50 to 60 hard drives he said "could prove the federal government was 'colluding' against Arpaio." Snow demanded that all the hard drives be turned over to the court. In response, AMCSTM's office turned over one hard drive.
TWiA hopes that AMCSTM faces criminal charges for his continued insistence that obeying the law is for other people, but not for him. It would be nice if he were ordered to pay the taxpayers back for the millions and millions of dollars his corruption has cost them, but that's unlikely. Nothing would serve the cause of justice more than for this long-time thug to end his life behind bars.
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In possibly but not necessarily unrelated news, Chicago, IL holds the record for fatal shootings by police officers over a 5-year span, but Phoenix, AZ is number 1 when you adjust that number for population. Phoenix had 57 fatal shootings by cops in that time, which comes to 3.77 per 100,000 residents.
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AMCSTM will have some competition in his next reelection bid. He looks vulnerable, given his continued legal challenges and the attention being paid to the huge amounts of money his corruption is costing county taxpayers. The latest poll from Public Policy Polling (generally, in national polls, a slightly left-leaning organization, but with a good reputation) shows that a majority of Maricopa County voters disapprove of AMCSTM. Of course, in any article about such a corrupt weasel, it's not a surprise to see a sentence like this: "The 2008 campaign was marked by a scandal in which a group run by Arpaio aides gave $100,000 to the Arizona Republican Party, which gave some of the money to another group that ran a TV ad attacking Saban [a fellow Republican]." Abiding by the rules, AMCSTM and his compatriots think, is for chumps.
(Thanks to TWiA special law enforcement correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)
This Week in Bears
Dentist Walter James Palmer has become notorious for killing Cecil the Lion. What seems to be lost in the outrage is that Palmer already has a felony conviction in his jacket, for illegally killing a black bear. Apparently Palmer thinks his "right" to kill unarmed animals is more important than any laws meant to protect them. He got probation and a $3,000 fine; maybe a stint in the slammer would have taught the lesson he seems not to have learned.
Golfer Jack Nicklaus's nickname is The Golden Bear, and Tiger Woods is often seen on golf courses. Neither of them are as adorable as these golfing bears, though. They'll even pull the pin so the other can putt into the hole.
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