Glenn Kessler, the so-called "fact checker" for the Washington Post has awarded the Preznit three Pinocchios for his statements on the Keystone XL pipeline, on or around the time the Senate failed to bail out soon to be ex-Senator Mary Landrieu. Specifically he objected to the repeated statements that the oil brought to the Gulf by the pipeline would not be used in the US, and would be exported:
“I won’t hide my opinion about this, which is that one major determinant of whether we should approve a pipeline shipping Canadian oil to world markets, not to the United States, is does it contribute to the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change?” – President Obama, news conference at G-20 summit, Brisbane, Australia, Nov. 16, 2014
“Understand what this project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” – Obama, news conference, Rangoon, Burma, Nov. 14
Twice during his recent overseas trip, President Obama asserted that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline was designed to take Canadian crude oil to the world markets. The implication of the president’s words is that the United States would be simply a conveyor belt for the oil.
Sounds pretty unequivocal to me. Glenn goes on to show rather convincingly that the US would export approximately half the oil products (primarily diesel), while importing some from Europe, primarily gasoline.
It turns out the US uses a higher proportion of gasoline to diesel than Europe, so when oil is refined in the US, we have diesel fuel to spare, while Europe, which relies more on diesel, has gasoline to spare. In other words a fair exchange.
In other words, at least half of the oil that is refined on the Gulf Coast stays in the United States. Market conditions could change, of course, but there is little basis to claim that virtually all of the product would be exported. (The Fact Checker has previously noted that, contrary to the claims of advocates of the project, Keystone XL is unlikely to have much impact on gasoline prices.)
Now, given that the Preznit has the entire resources of the federal government at his disposal to get his facts right, I'm inclined to hold him to the strict interpretation of his words, and say that he knowingly flat out lied. But of course, being a liberal shill, Glenn couldn't quite make it that far:
The president seriously overstates the percentage of Canadian crude that might be exported if the Keystone XL pipeline is built. He suggests all of it would be exported, without mentioning that it first would almost certainly stop on the Gulf Coast to be refined into products. On top of that, current trends suggest that about half of that refined product would be exported. That is not insubstantial, but it is certainly much smaller than 100 percent.
All of this is laid out in the extensive report issued by the State Department earlier this year. The president might want to study it before he addresses the Keystone question again. In the meantime, he earns Three Pinocchios. We nearly made it Four Pinocchios, but it is correct that at least some of the product would be exported, based on current market conditions.
I wonder if he will give the next Republican he grades the same latitude with the facts.
There is so much buildup on Elias Isquith’s chin that he’s kind of incoherent (emphasis mine):
While there are no doubt many changes ideologues like Ryan would like to see the CBO make, reports indicate that the main reason GOPers want to install a right-wing hack as its chief is in order to make the agency integrate“dynamic scoring” more fully into its estimations. “Dynamic scoring,” for those who don’t know, is a phrase conservatives like to use to give a tenet of their anti-tax religion — lower taxes lead to more revenue! — an intellectual gloss. More importantly, dynamic scoring is generally the special sauce right-wing “wonks” put into their projections in order to claim that massively cutting taxes on the rich won’t lead to fiscal ruin. Remember the absurd claim that Bush’s tax cuts wouldn’t explode deficits? Thank dynamic scoring for that.
So this proposed idea of Ryan’s (the only guy I’ve ever heard of even trying to propose a way to balance the budget) appears to have gone back in time and exploded deficits. Such is the power of cheeseheads! Or maybe Isquith could have explained it all better.
Yes, dynamic scoring predicts increased revenue, and that normally follows a tax cut. But what isn't normally predicted, but should be, is that liberal politicians take all that revenue, and a bit more, about 15%, and spend it
So where does Obamacare Schadenfreude come in?
But wait:
Yes, this is where “Grubergate,” the most recent of the GOP’s seemingly endless supply of manufactured outrages, comes in. If you’re not familiar with this tempest in a teapot, I recommend you catch up by reading my colleague Joan Walsh. But for our purposes here, all you need to know is that Republicans have been devoting a ton of energy toward making MIT’s Jonathan Gruber’s admission, that the White House designed Obamacare with the likely political ramifications of the CBO score in mind, equivalent to the 18-minute gap in the Nixon tapes.
Did you get that, everyone? Grüberdammerung is like an 18 minute tape gap, or something.
It sounds to me like he just reached back into his memory for a random Republican outrage, and had to go back to 1973 to find one that matched his level of outrage. But we could do worse than electing a Time-traveling Paul Ryan. In fact, we have.
In a Friday afternoon filled with document dumps, HHS announced that its controversial auto-enrollment plan would be significantly changed in 2016. This year, enrollees who allowed their plans to auto-renew risked running up big tax bills, thanks to annual recalculation of subsidies and base rates. To solve that problem, HHS wants people to allow the Obama administration to auto-enroll them into the lowest-cost plan in their 2016 tier, regardless of what the coverage or deductibles will be:
. . .
“We are considering alternative options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no action might be defaulted into a lower-cost plan rather than their current plan.”
Although CMS said it is considering allowing state-run Obamacare exchanges to implement that default option in 2016, the agency is eyeing using that option on the federal Obamacare exchange HealthCare.gov starting only in 2017.
While the defaulted option could protect customers from sticker shock once their now-pricier plan renews, the option also increases the likelihood that people will find themselves in a plan that doesn’t include their preferred doctors or hospitals.
The ObamaCare sales pitch has really progressed, has it not? We started at If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, which Politifact belatedly called the Lie of the Year once ObamaCare rolled out in 2013. After that, the White House line was If you liked your plan, it’s because you were too stupid to know what’s good for you, but you’ll like what you can pick now. Finally, we’ve arrived at You’re still too stupid to choose your own plan, so you’ll like what we tell you to like.
I had a number of odd pets as a teenager. I worked at a "tropical fish" store in Los Angeles, had such unusual things as Electric Catfish, Piranha, Caiman, Sidewinders, Timber Rattler and Mudskipper. But I never had a giant snail. But if I did, I probably would have let hem crawl on me. That was then.
Two men suspected of buying explosives they planned to detonate during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, once a grand jury decides the Michael Brown case, were arrested on Friday and charged with federal firearms offenses, a law enforcement official told Reuters.
Word of the arrests, reported by a number of media outlets Friday, came ahead of the grand jury’s widely anticipated decision on whether the white police officer who fatally shot Brown, an unarmed black teenager, should be indicted on criminal charges. . . .
[T]wo men described as reputed members of a militant group called the New Black Panther Party, were arrested in the St. Louis area in an FBI sting operation.
As initially reported by CBS News, the men were suspected of acquiring explosives for pipe bombs that they planned to set off during protests in Ferguson, according to the official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the case.
The official said the two men are the same pair named in a newly unsealed federal indictment returned on Nov. 19 charging Brandon Orlando Baldwin and Olajuwon Davis with purchasing two pistols from a firearms dealer under false pretenses.
Both men were arraigned on Friday in federal court, the law enforcement source said.
Having survived the 1960s and ’70s, I never thought American society would regress backward to that era of chaos and despair.
Hope and Change . . .
Couldn't we just bring back the music without the violence?
Last night was our coldest yet, 26 F. By this afternoon, it was back up to 45 F. With a southwest wind at 10-15, it was pretty nice at the beach. We hit it at dead high tide, though, so tooth hunting was awful, one each.
In the shadow of the cliffs ice still hung on.
But the big news is that the commonest of our "winter" duck, the Buffleheads, are back. I only saw this one group, but I expect more soon.
There was also a small group of sea gull, accompanied by a couple of Brown Pelicans, working a ways off the beach. Most likely there was also a school of stripers helping to force fish to the surface.
Finally, a boring old cormorant (probably a Double Crested) was hanging out on the south jetty.
The Grubnado, the swirling mass of lies studded with sharp toothed economists and politicians appears to be subsiding, at least temporarily. For the first time since the scandal broke, the daily Obamacare Schadenfreude is not dominated by poor Dr. Jonathon Gruber. But first, the continuing swirls:
For the moment, it’s an invitation. Will Darrell Issa turn it into a subpoena? It depends on whether ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber decides to accept the invitation to the December 9th hearing, which will probe not just the attempts to deceive the CBO during the original debate but the shifting standards on enrollment data exposed this week (via The Daily Caller):
Last night, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sent letters calling on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber to testify on Tuesday, December 9th before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on repeated transparency failures and outright deceptions surrounding ObamaCare.
“From the outset, the health law has been the poster child for this Administration’s broken transparency promises,” Chairman Issa said in a statement. “Americans were told if they liked their plans and doctors, they could keep them. They were told the individual mandate wasn’t a tax. None of these were true. Jonathan Gruber, one of ObamaCare’s chief architects, publicly lauded the ‘lack of transparency’ that was necessary to pass the law and credited ‘the stupidity of the American voter’ that allowed the Administration to mislead the public. CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner testified before our Committee that the Administration met its goals by enrolling 7.3 million individuals, however we now know that wasn’t the case. The numbers provided by CMS were deceptive and obscured the number of Americans running from exchange plans. The American people deserve honesty, transparency and respect from those who forced the federal government into their healthcare. I expect Mr. Gruber and Administrator Tavenner to testify publicly next month about the arrogance and deceptions surrounding the passage and implementation of ObamaCare.”
Pass the popcorn. Looks like Gruber is going to need to spend some of that sweet government money hiring a good lawyer.
The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. It’s one thing to downplay unpalatable choices made in the law; it’s another to never disclose the consequences of legislation until it’s too late for anyone to react. Combine that with the moustache-twirling of a Jonathan Gruber, saying that the idiots should be happy for what they got, and you have basically every conservative stereotype about liberal elites confirmed.
The sad part is that this was all known four years ago. You could see that Gruber was the world’s worst spokesman, and that his style of selective disclosure would get him in trouble. And you could see that a Rube Goldberg health care reform, turning patients into shoppers and relying on them to negotiate the maze, could lead to serious problems for individual customers, even if you didn’t know exactly how. It must sound good to neoliberal technocrats to avoid charges of socialism by routing policies through the market. But voters care about results, and price spikes and clawbacks will highlight how markets create losers as well as winners.
The whole thing demanded extreme amounts of transparency, which we never got. And the price paid, not just for Obamacare, but for Democrats in general, will be enormous.
Here's a Friday Obamacare news-dump for you: In a 300-page regulatory proposal released late this afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is considering changing Obamacare's auto-renewal rules so that, within the health law's exchanges, instead of being automatically renewed into your current health plan, you'd be moved into the lowest cost plan from the same service tier. From the attached fact sheet:
Under current rules, consumers who do not take action during the open enrollment window are re-enrolled in the same plan they were in the previous year, even if that plan experienced significant premium increases. We are considering alternative options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no action might be defaulted into a lower cost plan rather than their current plan.(Fact sheet via Adrianna McIntyre; proposal first noted by Politico.)
States running their own exchanges could start doing this in 2016, and federal exchanges could start in 2017.
It's not just auto-reenrollment. It's auto-reassignment, at least for those who pick that option. Basically, if you like your plan, but don't go out of your way to intentionally re-enroll, the kind and wise folks at HHS or state health exchanges might just pick a new plan—perhaps with different doctors, clinics, cost structures, and benefit options—for you. And if you want to switch back? Good luck once open enrollment is closed. There's always next year.
What appears to have happened is that the administration belatedly realized that without auto-reenrollment, a lot of the people who initially enrolled in Obamacare would drop off, just because they weren't all that responsible in the first place. Then, as the lowest price plans which a majority of the enrollees selected became much more expensive (the usual response to losing money), the administration was faced with the likelyhood that many of the enrollees would face stiff price increases in the plans they had selected, inflating the statistics for Obamacare policies. The easiest way out was just to sneak them back into the cheapest plan.
In short, when the details got out, people didn’t like them, and they soured on the whole principle. Maybe Gruber had a point. He just phrased it stupidly.
House Speaker John Boehner said Friday he has sued the Obama Administration in federal court over its decisions to make changes to the President's health care law, which congressional Republicans argue were unconstitutional.
The move was expected for months -- the GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted to approve the lawsuit in July. But Boehner had trouble retaining a law firm that would take the case because of the political furor over the controversial health care law.
"Time after time, the President has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and re-write federal law on his own without a vote of Congress. That's not the way our system of government was designed to work," Boehner said in statement on Friday.
He added, "if this President can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action."
For those in and out of the administration who dismissed the House lawsuit against the president for unconstitutional and illegal action, the naming of Jonathan Turley as lead attorney means game on.
. . .
Though he is a supporter of Obama and his policies, Turley is not a party hack as Jonathan Gruber is. He is a respected constitutional scholar and Democrat who is not willing to stand by as the Constitution, the document that gave birth and life to the world's oldest representative republic, is shredded as part of Obama's fundamental transformation of America. Unlike some of his contemporaries and most of the mainstream media, he took the House lawsuit seriously.
The president's handling of ObamaCare is only one of the extralegal excesses of this administration that Turley warned about when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee. He called Obama's vow to rule by executive order "one of the greatest challenges to our constitutional system in the history of this country" and one that "threatens a fundamental change in how our country is governed."
"The question represented by this lawsuit," Turley wrote Monday on his blog, "is whether we will live in a system of shared and equal powers, as required by our Constitution, or whether we will continue to see the rise of a dominant executive with sweeping unilateral powers. That is a question worthy of review and resolution in our federal courts."
The Department of Homeland Security has just released new "Policies for the Apprehension, Detention, and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants." Designed to fill in the details after President Obama's announcement that at least four million currently illegal immigrants will be given work permits, Social Security numbers and protection from deportation, the DHS guidelines are instructions for the nation's immigration and border security officers as they administer the president's directive.
The new priorities are striking. On the tough side, the president wants U.S. immigration authorities to go after terrorists, felons, and new illegal border crossers. On the not-so-tough side, the administration views convicted drunk drivers, sex abusers, drug dealers, and gun offenders as second-level enforcement priorities. An illegal immigrant could spend up to a year in prison for a violent crime and still not be a top removal priority for the Obama administration.
Are they telling us they hadn't been focusing on terrorists, felons and illegal border crossers (aren't they all illegal boarder crossers) to date, and are switching their focus to them? That's seems a little late?
The fact is, there has been essentially no meaningful enforcement on the border for years. Obama announcement of the various letters to agencies represents a solidification of the policy of doing nothing.
This is the new policy:
If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes – you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily...
I'll be curious to see how that registration goes.
This week's Saturday Rule 5 extravaganza is dedicated to PETA Wilson, the Australian star of TV and movie best known as the star of "La Femme Nakita" in 1997 -2000. Not a bad run for a spy show.
Among the movies she has starred in are "The Sadness of Sex" (1995), "Naked Jane" (1995), "Mercy" (2000) (NSFW link) and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003), where she played the virtuous vampire Mina Harker, and "Superman Returns" (2006).
She started in modelling before she took up acting, and did a photoshoot for Playboy in 2004. NSFW links here, here, here, and here.
Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.
The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system.
“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.
Committees in the House and Senate are seeking the emails, which they believe could show Lerner was working in concert with Obama administration officials to target conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status before the 2012 presidential election.
The next time a government functionary tells you the sky is blue, run out and check.
The owner of the Conowingo Dam may lose a key permit to generate electricity from the dam in the years to come because of "insufficient information" about the dam's impact on the state's water quality.
The Maryland Department of the Environment said in a statement they intend to deny Exelon Corp.'s application for a license to continue operating the 500-megawatt dam, claiming Exelon has provided "insufficient information ... regarding the impacts of the activity on State water quality standards."
Exelon received a one-year operating extension from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission while federal and state agencies reviewed how sediment and nutrient runoff from the dam was affecting the Susquehanna watershed and the Chesapeake Bay.
While the corporation filed its application to obtain the operating license on Jan. 31, Exelon is required to demonstrate to the Maryland Department of the Environment its ability to meet standards outlined by the federal Clean Water Act.
Since 1928, Conowingo Dam has been helping the Chesapeake Bay by intercepting suspended sediments, and their associated nutrients and toxics, and sequestering them in the sediments behind the dam. The pool behind the dam is filling with mud, and can no longer hold all the sediment, which tend to wash out of the pool into the Bay during extreme flood events producing a pulse of pollution.
When I arrived in Maryland in 1985, one of the first conferences I attended featured the head of the EPA Chespeake Bay Program who told us that the greatest single challenge to the Bay was the imminent end of Conowingo's sediment capacity. Since then, nothing has been done.
Now that the time has finally arrived, all the regulators can do is point to the people who actually saved them from some 86 years of polluted sediment running down into the Bay, and demand that they somehow save them. And they've decided that dredging is no long one of the options. I'm sure what they are angling for is some form of "reparations", a bit of environmentalist extortion.
If Exelon were to walk away from the dam today, the sediment would continue to pour down from the dam during storms, and the region, already low on power supplies, would lose 500 MW of renewable. If I ran Exelon, I would be strong tempted.
Two donors to Republican and Democratic causes have been in the news in the last couple of days. Guess who the Washington Post chose to put on the front page today:
The first:
Given the more than $100 million that Sheldon Adelson has donated lately to Republican causes, the billionaire casino tycoon is well-positioned to get what he wants from a GOP-dominated Congress.
But it turns out that the item on top of Adelson’s wish list — a ban on Internet gambling — is encountering resistance. And it’s not Democrats who stand in his way but a small group of fellow conservatives.
At issue is whether the proposed change in federal law sought by Adelson would violate a core conservative principle of states’ rights, which has been an animating issue for many tea party activists.
Terry Bean and Barack Obama
The second:
On Wednesday, Portland, Ore. police arrestedTerrence Patrick Bean, who has been charged with two felony counts of having sex with a minor last year. This man is not just any old guy accused of having sex with a 15-year-old – he's a big-money Democratic donor and liberal political activist with connections inside the Obama White House. Bean raised more than a half-million dollars for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
"Bean has been one of the state's biggest Democratic donors and an influential figure in gay rights circles in the state," reports oregonlive.com. "He helped found two major national political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and has been a major contributor for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama."
If you guessed that the Washington Post published a front page story about a GOP donor because he disagrees with some of the party's activists, and failed to cover the story of a major democratic donor being charged with child molestation, you'd be right.
Over the past ten nights, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC’s Nightly News haven’t just buried the story in some throwaway segment late in their respective programs; they haven’t mentioned Gruber or the controversy in any capacity. Some could argue the decision to omit has been made because the news cycle has been heavy on the breaking news front. Except that hasn’t remotely been the case.
Ebola went from being the media’s modern version of the Black Death to as non-existent as CNN’s Bill Weir (whatever happened to that guy, anyway?). ISIS is still menacing but until it attempts to take Baghdad or pulls off some kind of terror attack against a Western target, it will remain a relatively stagnant story (compared to the attention it gained following the beheading of James Foley). And with Ferguson, until a grand jury decision is made, it’s simply all speculation.
We’ve been locked in a relatively standard news cycle since the midterm elections, thereby giving ABC and NBC nothing resembling cover for spiking the Gruber story.
It isn't deemed worthy of coverage if it can't be spun for the democrats.
No, what really disturbs me is the sight of so many journalists acting like insiders.
I don't subscribe to the mythical ideal of journalist-as-crusader, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted." There's a lot of necessary journalism that doesn't fit that model, for one thing; for another, when people do adopt this motto, the targets for afflicting and comforting tend to map a little too easily onto the cultural preoccupations of the journalist demographic. But I do subscribe to the ideal of journalism as fundamentally responsible to readers, not to the governments, businesses or organizations they cover. When it comes to the policy process, we're ultimately supposed to be outsiders, not insiders.
. . .
So when I see journalists saying that Gruber's revelations don't matter because he's just kind of awkwardly saying something that everyone knew, I get a little jittery. I am not "everyone," and neither are any of those journalists. We're a tiny group of people with strange preoccupations who get paid to spend our time understanding and explaining this stuff. The fact that we may have mentioned it once to our readers, in the 18th paragraph, does not mean that readers read it and understood what it meant. (In fact, if you actually interact with your readers, you'll be astonished at how little they remember of what you told them, especially if you didn't go out of your way to headline it. Their minds are already crammed full of information that they need to, you know, live their lives. So they tend to take away a few big bullet points, not the piddling details.)
The public opinions described as “incoherent” to justify deceit are not in fact incoherent at all.
Barro argued, “Jonathan Gruber was right. Public opinion on health care policy is just completely incoherent. People think we ought to have health care plans that are cheap, that provide high quality coverage to everyone, that everyone should see whatever doctor they want, they don't want their premiums to go up, they don’t want to pay for anything through taxes.” He then concluded: “The public puts politicians in a position where the only thing they can do to make the public happy is lie and so, people lied.”
Barro is wrong here. There is nothing incoherent about the views he lists. Imagine a healthcare market in which most of our routine health expenditures were not purchased through insurance, and that insurance instead primarily protected people against catastrophic health events threatening their financial security. In such a market people would be able to choose their own doctors, plans would offer cheaper premiums, and there would be no inherent reason it must be financed through taxes.
Contradictions only arise when we combine Barro’s public wish list with certain existing policy phenomena, including:
Requiring everyone to carry comprehensive health insurance covering various routine services, irrespective of whether this makes sense for them;
Substantial and opaque income redistribution through the healthcare system;
Financing seniors’ health services through federal taxes;
Maintaining the tax preference for compensation in the form of health benefits over wages;
Securing the political support of health insurance companies.
Liberals think the voters are stupid because they often disagree with their plans. See executive amnesty.
Republicans are asking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to defend a multimillion dollar grant given to ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber in light of his controversial comments on the law’s passage.
“Recent developments related to Dr. Gruber raise questions about his objectivity and judgment, and thus the utility of his research,” Reps. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) and Andy Harris (R-Md.) wrote in a letter to NIH Director Francis Collins Wednesday.
“Further, the award of this grant causes major concerns regarding NIH’s funding priorities,” they wrote.
Pitts leads the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health, and Harris serves on the Appropriations Committee.
The letter stated that Gruber has received $1.5 million from the National Institute on Aging to study how seniors choose between plans in Medicare Part D. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor is “on pace” to receive more than $2 million for the project, Republicans said.
At this point, employing Gruber is tantamount to admitting you wish to deceive your citizens.
Invoking a secret computer model is more suasive in today’s Washington than the tricks Merlin the magician practiced in King Arthur’s court. Econometrics has long been a tool to sanctify almost any half-witted intervention politicians favored. For instance, the farm lobby has never lacked arcane models crafted by government agricultural economists proving that America benefits from paying farmers more than their crops are worth.
I strongly agree; the more we hear from Gruber and those like him, whose cynical lies were essential to the passage of Obamacare, the less likely voters are to trust those legislators in the future.
The Obama administration included dental plan sign-ups in a recent report of Obamacare enrollment numbers, Bloomberg News reported Thursday afternoon.
The White House had previously said in September 7.3 million people were enrolled in insurance coverage through the marketplaces. An analysis of those enrollments, provided to Bloomberg by the House Oversight and Government Committee, shows that as many as 400,000 of those plans were just for dental coverage and not medical plans.
Health and Human Services has issued a statement saying the numbers were included by "mistake" and that, without including dental plans, Obamacare enrollment is currently at 6.7 million:
This is only important because the administration set it benchmark for enrollment success at 7 million. Without counting teeth, their were short of their mark by 10%.
Allan Douglas has been selling insurance since the 1980s, and as the owner of an independent insurance agency in Omaha he had a front row view of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
Not only because he helps clients navigate the health care law, commonly called ObamaCare, but because he also had to navigate it himself, since he buys his own insurance. As enrollment began Saturday for the second year of the program, people on ObamaCare plans began getting letters from their insurance companies explaining rate changes.
“Our phones are starting to light up,” said Douglas, who owns Pioneer Interstate Insurance. “Most (rates) are doubling.”
He also got a letter from his insurance company informing him his premium will double next year, from $594 to $1,204 per month, if he qualifies for a $260 monthly federal tax credit again.
But who cares what happens to people out in fly-over country, as long as the people who live and work along the bank of the Charles River are still getting their big consultant fees.
Despite reports that the world's supply of cocoa is running thin, you may not need to worry about stockpiling your chocolate reserves quite yet.
Candy manufacturers Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut recently warned that consumer demand for chocolate will exceed cocoa supply by 2020, creating a gap in supply and demand of 1 million metric tons, according to a Bloomberg report.
The predicted shortage is attributed to myriad factors such as "disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber," Bloomberg reported.
However, the International Cocoa Organization, a global group made up of cocoa producing and consuming countries, told USA TODAY Network that the prediction is not correct.
While acknowledging there are problems that could affect production, small deficits and surpluses in cocoa supply are normal, according to Michael Segal, spokesman for the organization, which forecasts cocoa supply and production. The organization is not predicting anything out of the ordinary for the next five years.
Pacificorp — an energy company owned by Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway — is suing Obama's Interior Department.
The surprising reason: Interior is going to follow the Freedom of Information Act and disclose to an Associated Press reporter how many birds are killed by Pacificorp's wind farms. Pacificorp is suing to block the disclosure.
Wind energy companies objected to the AP's efforts to uncover more information about the numbers of bird deaths. The companies said the information was confidential, submitted voluntarily and should not be revealed under the government's open records law.
Wind power is heavily subsidized, and could not compete with more conventional power (coal, gas, nuclear and hydro) if it were protected from the market. The fact that it kills a large number of birds, particularly the large charismatic raptors, as well as vast numbers of insectivorous bats, already threatened by disease and habitat loss needs to be publicized while the public is being made to support it. If the law as written does not permit that, the law should be amended.
On Tuesday, lawyers representing American Farm Bureau Federation and Pennsylvania Farm Bureau began presenting oral arguments before the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. At issue is whether U.S. EPA has the authority to mandate specific means and timeframes to achieve Total Maximum Daily Load goals for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
Those mandates, known as "backstops," would remove about 600,000 acres of Pennsylvania cropland from production, according to EPA projections.
Given 640 acres per square mile, that's almost a thousand square miles of farmland that will be taken out of production for the TMDL. Who is going to produce the food that those farms produce? Not China.
Farm Bureau doesn't dispute that EPA has the right to set general TMDL goals. But the farm organizations contend that the federal Clean Water Act clearly recognizes that states, not EPA, are responsible for deciding the best means and timeframes to meet the watershed implementation plan goals.
"EPA calculates that about 600,000 acres of cropland will have to be converted to grassland or forest in order to comply with the agency's regulatory requirements for the Bay watershed," says PFB President Carl Shaffer.
"The lawsuit isn't about giving farmers a free pass," he adds."It's about making sure a government agency is correctly following the law and that the government gets it right, when imposing regulations to improve the Bay."
The Farm Bureau's fight here is with the process, not the need to cut pollution. Could the same cuts in pollution be achieved in other ways? Sure. Require the cities in the watershed to reduce the equivalent of 1000 square miles worth of shit production. Or let the states decide what part of their economy they wish to stifle (which is what the Farm Bureau claims to want).
The farmers would rather take their chance with the politics within their own states. In Maryland, I doubt it matters. The urban/rural division is stacked rather heavily in favor of the urban, who will vote through their representatives to stick it to the farmers rather than accept the burden themselves. It may be otherwise in the more rural Pennsylvania.
My guess is that state politicians would prefer to defer to EPA, so they can avoid pissing off half their constituents.
Vermont had been paying Gruber major bank to advise them on how toimplement deceive their citizens into implementing a single payer health care system.
The videos of Gruber's boastful mendacity have made these payments a hot potato of a political issue -- and now Vermont is stopping further payments.
On Wednesday, Lawrence Miller, chief of health care reform for the Gov. Peter Shumlin administration, announced that Vermont would stop payment of Gruber’s $400,000 contract with the state.
As of this week, Vermont has paid Gruber $160,000 on a contract that began July 21 and was expected to continue until Feb. 15.
Searching the name of the M.I.T. economist who's been talked about so much lately, I ran across a 2006 NYT Magazine article by David Leonhardt titled "What Makes People Give?"
... Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has conducted a mischievous experiment on the relationship between religious giving and religious observance. His inspiration was a comment his father made after he was elected treasurer of his synagogue in New Jersey. “Good,” Gruber’s father told him, with some amount of irony, “now I don’t have to go.” Somebody thinking purely about the temple might have decided that the treasurer should attend services even more often than an ordinary congregant. After all, he would need to set an example as a community leader. But someone who wanted to attain a certain commitment level — who wanted do enough to feel the warm glow of being involved in the life of the temple — would consider regular attendance and synagogue duties to be substitutes for each other.
To see how typical his father was, Gruber dug into surveys that ask people about how they spend their money and their time. Sure enough, his dad was typical. When the tax code changed in the early 1990s and made the deduction for charitable giving more valuable, the average churchgoer gave more money — and attended services less often. Gruber called his research paper “Pay or Pray.”
I'm presenting this to you as interesting on its own, but I also think it sheds light on the mind of Gruber, if that matters — does it? — in the current swirl of excitement around Gruber.
I have a little sympathy for Gruber, An academic doing pretty well by hitting his nail with his hammer, enjoying the secrets of his craft with what he thought were fellow carpenters, and rubbing shoulders with the rulers. Then came the video that told the bill payers what he thought of them.
The Beltway media’s predominant bias is that, for every issue, Washington politicians should do something. The simplest explanation for this bias: it gives reporters something to write about. Inaction is bad for readership.
Democratic politicians’ uncontrollable urge to do something is tied up with their view of government’s role as the champion of justice, the wise arranger of the economy and shaper of culture.
But there’s a deeper motivation to do something, and the Republican leadership shares it: When government takes a more active role in the economy, it creates private-sector employment opportunities for the policymakers — and for their advisors, like Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber.
Gruber, the MIT professor who won almost $400,000 in contracts from the Obama administration in a non-competitive contract process, came into the spotlight again this month when a new video surfaced in which he admitted that “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare.
My colleague Byron York pointed to a more interesting Gruber detail: After the bill passed, Gruber won hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with state governments setting up the exchanges under Obamacare.
Gruber, then, had to mislead Americans (or maybe just their senators) in order to pass Obamacare, and that opened a gusher of lucrative contracts for him. There is no doubt that Gruber sincerely thought the country needed health-care reform. But still, his financial interest in the bill ought to have raised some skepticism about the numbers he was peddling.
When in doubt, do nothing. The problem in question is often caused by other factors and will disappear when those change.
Rattner led a White House auto-industry task force in 2009 — the same year that Gruber helped the administration craft what would eventually become Obamacare. “Jonathan Gruber was — back in the day, in 2009 — the guru on health care,” he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday. “I remember that when I was in the White House, he was certainly viewed as an important figure in helping put Obamacare together.”
Paul Krugman’s Feb. 4, 2008 New York Times column cited MIT professor Jonathan Gruber’s analysis as evidence that Obama’s plan, with its lack of mandates, was inferior to Clinton’s plan.
“Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year,” Krugman wrote. “An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700…And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.”
After Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, he added Gruber to his transition team. The New York Times later reported that Gruber became “Mr. Mandate” on the Obama health care reform team. Obama finally announced his support for the mandate in July 2009, the very same month that he met personally with Gruber in the Oval Office. Obama’s decision was made during a series of Obamacare-designing White House meetings, of which Gruber was present at five.
Stewart first rejoiced in the fact that Obamacare’s website is “better” this year, as it allowed for 100,000 individuals to sign up for 2015 health insurance Saturday when the exchanges opened.However, as Stewart lamented, the improvement of HealthCare.gov has been completely eclipsed by Gruber’s comments that were recorded in multiple videos over past years.
Though he poked fun at Gruber’s voice and labeled him a “super egghead,” Stewart certainly didn’t reserve all of his criticism for the MIT professor.
The comedian also expressed his disappointment in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said of Gruber during a press conference last week that she doesn’t “know who he is” despite specifically naming him and touting his work in 2009.
“That’s pretty lousy,” said Stewart.
He also suggested that Democrats “come clean” and admit that they disguised the fact that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is a tax, an action that Gruber speaks of in the recently surfaced videos.
Stewart labeled this action by Democrats “pretty slimy.”
For years, economists would have said that actions speak louder than words. Whatever smokers say about quitting, they are rationally deciding that the pleasure they derive from cigarettes exceeds their cost.
Jonathan Gruber was one of these economists when he worked in the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration. Mr. Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, remembers telling other policy makers that economic theory says they should not increase cigarette taxes. People should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to smoke, he told his colleagues. Those who smoke may hurt themselves, but they will not drain the country's resources because so many of them will die before running up large Medicare bills.
Mr. Gruber called it his most embarrassing moment in government, and his discomfort with his own argument caused him to begin researching the issue when he returned to academia.....
So, there was an argument for taxation based on the costs that smokers impose on all of us because of the health problems caused by smoking, and Gruber undercut that argument with a truth. Smokers don't cost more overall because they dieearlier. Why was that so embarrassing? Well, "embarrassing" is the reporter's word, not a quote from Gruber. . .
I thought it was pretty common knowledge, but then I ran in a pretty statistically savvy crowd. If that was his most embarrassing moment, he was doing pretty well. Until now,
To be fair, he'd have to be stupid to make anymore "off the cuff" comments.
Also from the same article:
Chris Cillizza has a pretty good analysis of what’s driving Gruberama among conservatives, and why this story will have legs despite a near-blackout in the news media:
The first point is somewhat obvious. Ever since then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), way back in March 2010, said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” conservatives have been convinced that Democrats either (a) don’t know what really was in the law or (b) more nefariously, Democrats knew exactly what was in the ACA and pushed it through Congress to keep the public from finding out.
If you believe “b” — as does virtually every member of the Republican base — then you see Gruber’s comments, made in a panel discussion in 2013, as the smoking gun that proves you were right all along. …
The second point is slightly more subtle but, I think, even more responsible for why Gruber and his comments have conservatives seeing red. Nothing makes conservatives more angry than the belief, which they think is widespread among liberals, that they are stupid. That if only conservatives read as much as the left or had the intellectual capacity of the left, they would see things the way the left sees them.
Cillizza calls this “conservative catnip.” This display of contempt and arrogance should really beAmerican catnip. Maybe if this got the coverage it deserves in the media, it might, which could be why most mainstream news outlets have stayed away from it. Kudos to Cillizza for reporting on it in the Washington Post.
It took nine days before network NBC News broke the embargo on Gruber videos, and it wasMeet the Press that broke it. It is interesting then that MTP moderator Chuck Todd, the only host of one of his network’s numerous platforms to address the explosive revelations involving one of the designers of the sweeping health care reform law, would defend his colleagues’ silence.
In an appearance with NewsmaxTV host Steve Malzberg, Todd questioned the value of the Gruber story. “I’m not saying it’s not a story,” he told Malzberg, “but what is the news today of that?”
“It’s a political story” he added. “Network news, in general, hasn’t been covering the political back and forth of Washington a lot lately.”
“I don’t think this has to do with Gruber, specifically,” Todd concluded. “I would just caution people on that.”
If you think of them as democratic operatives with by-lines, you can't go wrong.
The Washington Free Beacon reported in August on an effort by progressive judicial activists to fill the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia bench with left-leaning judges, funded in part by a dark-money network of Democratic donors called the Democracy Alliance.
Since then, the D.C. circuit court has been at the frontlines of several contentious debates over Obamacare, including the court’s September decision to rehear a case challenging a tax credit provision in the health care law.
But last Friday’s ruling is the latest indication of how newly appointed Democratic judges are impacting policy through the D.C. circuit court.
A three-judge panel upheld a provision backed by the Obama administration that would have the federal government pay for contraception coverage for employees of religious nonprofit groups that are opposed to funding the coverage directly through their insurance providers.
Some religious employers object to this plan, arguing that they would still be facilitating the purchase of contraception that they are religiously opposed to by offering insurance coverage to their employees.
The three-judge panel included Judge Cornelia Pillard and Judge Robert Wilkins, both recent Obama appointees who were opposed by Senate Republicans. The third member, Judge Judith Rogers, was appointed by President Clinton in 1994.
My advice to Mitch McConnell; go nuclear early and often.
Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight, opened the hearing by accusing Park and the White House of avoiding congressional scrutiny.
"I find your and the White House's lack of transparency intolerable," Broun told Park, "and an obstruction of this committee's role of conducting oversight."
"That begs the question: what are you hiding, Mr. Park? I have some ideas. Perhaps it is because you knew there were serious problems with HealthCare.gov prior to the launch but you did not communicate them up the chain during your meetings with the president," Broun said.
Park stated repeatedly that while he was in contact with project managers for HealthCare.gov within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), he was not responsible for the site's functionality.
"I was not a project manager who was managing and executing the day-to-day operational work of building HealthCare.gov," Park told lawmakers. "I didn't have the kind of comprehensive, detailed, deep knowledge of that project that a manager would have."
Republican lawmakers grew heated in several instances.
"You [were] the nation's CTO appointed by the president to assure the safety and the security of our networks," said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio). "You can't just say this was CMS's responsibility … You can't delegate accountability. You are responsible."
Though, to be fair, he looks like he deserves it, just on general purposes. What a dorky looking set of tats!
A stick-thin model was arrested for beating up her clothing- and shoe-designer boyfriend in the couple’s luxurious Manhattan apartment over the weekend, law enforcement sources said Monday.
Natalie Suarez, who has done photo shoots for magazines such as Glamour and Vogue, punched and kicked Jordan Adoni, 31, in their pad at a West 42nd Street high-rise Friday, according to court records.
The 5-foot-10, 125-pound Suarez, 24, also pulled Adoni’s hair and dug her nails into his face, leaving him with scratch marks and bruises, court papers say.
Eat a hamburger or two!
5' 10" and 125 lbs? How does she stay on the ground? Stretch some paper across that frame, and she'd make a pretty kite.
“I’m f–king getting you arrested!” she yelled at Adoni, who waited until Saturday to report the domestic spat, sources said.
Police showed up to the Silver Towers apartment complex Sunday and cuffed Suarez, who was charged with misdemeanor assault and aggravated harassment.
She was released without bail at Manhattan Criminal Court, where she appeared wearing black skinny jeans and a long top coat.
I'm glad we got the fashion report to go along with arrest report.
She is a skinny little thing, but you know, a lucky punch can kill anyone, and fingernail in the eyeballs isn't that good either.
There is a basic asymmetry between the capability of the two sexes regarding violence. Men are generally larger, more muscular and frankly, ready for violence hormonally. However, Female on male crime is surprisingly common, rarely reported, and even more rarely seriously punished. The usual attitude by women is that the men had it coming, and men tend to take the attitude that it's not serious, and any man who gets hurt wasn't worthy anyway.
Sounds pretty unequivocal to me. Glenn goes on to show rather convincingly that the US would export approximately half the oil products (primarily diesel), while importing some from Europe, primarily gasoline.
.jpg)
