Harvard/CUNY Study: Thousands Of Deaths Will Be Attributable To States Refusing To Expand Medicaid

Dylan Scott at TPM:

As many as 17,000 Americans will die directly as a result of states deciding not to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, according to a new study.

Researchers from Harvard University and City University of New York have estimated that between 7,115 and 17,104 deaths will be "attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states" in a study published in Health Affairs.

"The results were sobering," Samuel Dickman, one of the authors, said, according to the Morning Call. "Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal."

They projected that 423,000 fewer diabetics would receive medication to treat their disease. If opt-out states had expanded Medicaid, 659,000 women who are in need of mammograms and 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears would have become insured, the study found.

"Low-income adults in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion will forego gains in access to care, financial well-being, physical and mental health, and longevity that would be expected with expanded Medicaid coverage," the authors wrote.

...

Texas is such a state. Any of us here could be among the misfortunates. How about your state?

This man...

...implements this policy...

...killing THOUSANDS of these people.

Hunger — In America

Stella works a half-day on Thursday. (Really? that's what you think? You try to find a full-time job with full benefits in America today.) When she got home, she was pretty hungry, and said, I assume you've already had lunch? No, said I, but I'm not quite hungry yet. Stella went on to prepare something for herself; after a while, I finally felt the urge and heated up some veggie chili (who knew Hormel made a decent non-meat product as well). Now neither one of us is hungry.

That conversation, and that conclusion, are by no means universal in American households today: lunch or no‑lunch is often enough a big deal. Congress just axed food stamps (part of SNAP) for everyone, to save the taxpayers' money... $8 billion of it, as I'm sure Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Hunger) would tell you. That's biiiig bucks, right? Wrong! As Laura Clawson at Daily Kos finds, using CEPR's Responsible Budget Reporting Calculator, that's 0.04 percent of federal spending. A micro‑drop in the feral budget bucket... but all the food some families get to eat. A great trade, eh? Maybe if you're a well-off GOPer it's a great deal, but if you've been pounding pavement for months on end looking for work, that might not be the way you'd put it. These days, cruelty has a name, and its acronym is G‑O‑P.

When I think of hunger due to poverty, I think of my sainted father. Now he and his family experienced genuine hunger in the Great Depression. Dad's father was part of a road‑building crew in Arkansas; Dad used to say that to the extent technological facility is inheritable, mine came from my granddad: reputedly he could disassemble a piece of road equipment in situ on the job, fix it, put it back together and get things going again in a hurry. Unfortunately, I never met my paternal grandfather: he skipped out on his family, his wife and three growing boys. All the boys took part-time jobs at night, but even that was barely enough. Dad described meals at home: if you wanted two chops, not just one, you'd better take both the first time the platter was passed, because the platter was always empty after one time around. Dad got a lot of grief from his brothers (particularly the youngest) for going to college, even though Dad saw to it that the family was never out one penny for his doing so. (As a consequence of his college degree, Dad, when W.W.II came along, entered the Navy at officer level, for which the youngest brother again gave him grief. Some people cannot be pleased.)

Dad gave up his football scholarship after his sophomore year. After that, he skipped a lot of meals in his junior and senior years... and, as he told it, made his best grades ever in that period. That notwithstanding, when he married and started a family of his own, he was determined to see to it that we never went hungry. And we never did. And so far, I still haven't missed any meals for lack of means to pay for them. But who knows what this Great Recession, even if it's truly over, will spell for my declining years. As President Obama ought to understand, but seems not to, hunger is an ever-present danger for a family in an alleged free-market economy, and we have the Koch Brothers and their Tea Party doing their damnedest to make sure that's exactly what we experience.

Here's to food. May you never lack it! May no one ever starve!

A Lot Of Reading Today To Inspire You And To Exasperate You

Pete Seeger
before HUAC

First, via BOHICA at Daily Kos (you all know what BOHICA stands for, right?), we have the late great Pete Seeger's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1957. The result, which BOHICA takes from the wiki, was this:

Seeger's refusal to testify led to a March 26, 1957, indictment for contempt of Congress; for some years, he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York. He was convicted in a jury trial of contempt of Congress in March 1961, and sentenced to 10 years in jail (to be served simultaneously), but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

And now let's sing a rousing rendition of "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?" I must answer "no"; the late lamented Mr. Seeger could have answered an emphatic "YES"!

Amber, Wendy, Dru Davis

Next, Kos brings us a pair of letters from Wendy Davis's daughters regarding Wendy's parenting skills, much-maligned by... can you believe it?... Bristol Palin. Not surprisingly, Davis's daughters not only love her but have immense respect for her and her parenting. Here's a sample from Dru Davis:

I love that my mom went to law school and was dedicated to both her work and us. Watching her work so hard to achieve something great has been one of the most important lessons in my life. To this day, I watch my mom greeted and hugged by people who love her and are thankful for things she has done for them. I am proud of her for that. Both of my parents made sacrifices to make education happen for all of us, my sister and me included. And both of them have been great role models for what it means to care about people in the world. ,,,

Considering what Bristol Palin turned out to be, specifically, a not-bright Republican daughter of an even-less-bright Republican governor prone to lying her a$$ off, I think the "parenting skills" allegation is being leveled at the wrong politician. Anyone who says Wendy Davis is a bad parent who abandoned her kids can now cease blathering and go straight to Hell.

(Daily Kos is on a roll today. I may have more from them; watch this space.)

Don't Watch The Speech: Read The Transcript

Neither of us in Our House plans to watch the SOTU speech. At his best, President Obama can be an enthralling speaker. But the moment you contemplate the original meaning of the word "enthrall," you'll understand why it is best not to watch the speech.

Forget your real-time response... it's not worth it. Don't be enthralled. Read the transcript and respond primarily analytically, not in the way Mr. Obama doubtless hopes you will respond. You'll notice more details, more choices of word or phrase, more deliberate obfuscations... in other words, you'll come closer to the true content of the speech. It may not be as much fun; it may not be a feel-good experience... but you'll learn something.

---

It's finally reliably, steadily cold here, by Houston standards, 30°F, with a forecast high of 34°F and a low tonight of 26°F. The seats, backs and arms of the patio chairs are visibly iced over right now. As recently as last weekend, we were comfortably sitting out there, wearing long sleeves, reading... and we probably will be out there again this weekend. But not right now, thank you...

'Angry Birds', Insufficiently Angry People

DSWright of FDL tells us how NSA uses the low security of games such as Angry Birds on cell phones to accumulate information about their users... probably mostly children. If you're worried about whether your neighbor's five-year-old is secretly an al Qaeda terrorist, relax... the NSA has the kid covered. If you think worrying about five-year-olds perpetrating terrorist acts is fucking nuts, you may have reservations about the NSA's "gather info, all of it, on everyone, all the time" attitude.

Pete Seeger (1919 — 2014)

I has a sad. :-( And yet... and yet... what a life he led!

Are you a young person who doesn't know about him? The wiki is a decent summary of his long and fruitful life. Believe me... you could do worse for a role model.

The 113th Congress: A Splendid Argument For MORE Government

Jon Walker of FDL:

Last year we experienced a truly do nothing Congress and it was awful. When Congress didn’t meet its bare minimum requirements the government shut down and the entire economy was threatened. Everything from planning ahead vacations to milk prices becomes problematic.

This year though is shaping up be a do almost nothing Congress. The government funding bill was passed with little fanfare. The farm bill is moving forward. It also looks like the debt ceiling with be raised with only moderate bellyaching and grandstanding from Republicans. Congress is set to do the minimum necessary to keep things running, but nothing more.

...

America's founders planned for as much as they could in framing our Constitution, but one thing I don't believe they anticipated is monkeywrenching: deliberate misfeasance on the part of one or another political party or faction. At present, the Republican-controlled Congress is in its second session of making government work as badly as possible, perceiving political advantage in the next election in doing so.

Back in the day when I had regular contact with Republicans... that is, when I was doing contract work in the "awl bidness" ... I suffered endless lectures over lunch from people who claimed to favor "less government." Occasionally I would ask them to give examples of the problem they were referring to. Without exception, no one ever mentioned the possibility of monkeywrenching of the sort we see today. But that has become the GOP's sole interpretation of "less government." Mitch McConnell stated at the beginning of Obama's first term that for his Congress, "job one" was to prevent Obama's second term. That having failed, his and other Republicans' "job one" now seems to be to punish Obama... and by proxy, the American people... for Obama's second term. And so they drag their feet (and their knuckles; see Alan Grayson's famous line above). That is the priority of Republican leadership, and far and away the primary source of America's economic problems today. (Obama is not helping matters, but as Stella often says, he's just a Republican in disguise.)

And so the very real economic and other challenges Americans face today continue unaddressed by our government. The clear answer to many of these problems is not less government but more. If Americans want more help from their government, they're going to have to dump the GOP in the next election, particularly the radicals in the House. I'm not placing any bets on that happening.

Enforce The Fourth Amendment Through NSA's Power, Water Supplies?

Norman Soloman at FDL says quite a few states are contemplating just that:

People Power!

...

Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s secretive outposts.

Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new bill in the legislature — the Fourth Amendment Protection Act — is a statutory nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the south-central part of the state.

The bill throws down a challenge to the NSA, seeking to block all state support for NSA activities violating the Fourth Amendment. For instance, that could mean a cutoff of electricity or water or other state-government services to the NSA site. And the measure also provides for withholding other forms of support, such as research and partnerships with state universities.

...

Ah, the good folks of the state of Washington; more power to them!

Congress will doubtless put an end to such bills, but they are a good way to send a defiant message: Americans really, really don't want their own government to spy on them, in bulk, without a warrant. And perhaps it is also a reminder to the NSA that their operation is more fragile than they may realize.

The Wealthy In America: Perception And Reality

Josh Marshall, editor of TPM, undertakes to explain the vast chasm between the reality of the lives of wealthy Americans and their own perceptions of themselves as put upon, unjustly condemned, morally superior to people of lesser means, the standard-bearers of the American economy, etc. Marshall addresses the fact that, while President Obama has, in real life, done almost everything the 1% could possibly have hoped for... bailed out their corporations even as those corporations engaged in the most destructive, ineffective economic behavior, declined to prosecute or even investigate those whose actions either verged on or actually engaged in outright illegality in pursuit of ever greater profits... but Obama himself is remembered by Wall Street almost entirely for a half dozen purely political declarations aimed at recapturing his base in election years and scarcely followed up on in his terms of office that followed. Marshall's essays on the subject are to be found in posts titled The Brittle Grip, part 1 and part 2. These can be read independently; if you have time to read only one, read part 2.

Marshall is an interesting middle-of-the-road Democrat, a former blogger who actually succeeded in his ambition to turn his blog into a small but sustainable media "empire" of sorts. Back when he was a blogger and I was a rank-and-file Democrat, I corresponded with him for a year or two. It was simultaneously a rewarding and exasperating experience, much as I imagine those who actually engage Mr. Obama experience when they face him. Marshall understands politics probably as well as Obama, but both seem to have little deep comprehension of the left side of the American political spectrum. Marshall is at least interested in understanding the left as a phenomenon even if he has no desire to participate in it; Obama, on the other hand, seems to perceive the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party as a force to be coped with and manipulated into supporting his own political aims. It is the nature of political analysis versus political office-holding that distinguishes the behavior of the president from even the most supportive journalists, which under ordinary circumstances I believe would include Josh Marshall. But apparently Obama is interested only in the functional support, not in the alignment of philosophical/political positions with his own. This is certain to bring him grief to one degree or another. Marshall's posts on the nature of both the positions and the inevitable conflicts are worth your time to read.

I still find myself not even a tiny bit more aligned with President Obama's sociopolitical views than I was before he was elected to a second term (with my vote, I admit). As surely as Obama will never have the ideological support of the Tea Party no matter what he does or says, he will also never fully gain the ideological support of what the late great Paul Wellstone used to call "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party": Obama is simply too conservative to capture their spirit.

And I am not sure that wing of the Democratic Party can survive the utter neglect it is experiencing in this peculiar Democratic-but-not-democratic administration. As for us unabashed liberals, the good Dog help us all, because Mr. Obama never will.

There! Snow Business, Like No Business, Like No Business I Know...

Remind me: what city am I living in? From NWS:

Tonight	Cloudy, with a low around 29. Wind chill values between 20 and 25. Northeast wind around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph.
Tuesday	Freezing rain and sleet likely before noon, then a chance of flurries and sleet. Cloudy, with a high near 33. Wind chill values between 20 and 25. North wind around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New ice accumulation of less than a 0.1 of an inch possible. Little or no snow accumulation expected.
Tuesday Night	A slight chance of snow, freezing rain, and sleet before 9pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 26. Wind chill values between 15 and 20. North wind 10 to 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 10%.
Wednesday	Mostly sunny, with a high near 44. Wind chill values between 15 and 25. North wind 5 to 10 mph becoming southeast in the afternoon.

Houston? Nah... yer bullshittin' me!

UPDATE about 10:20pm: it's looking a little better. Still, HISD is closing schools, HPL is closing city libraries; Her Honor the Mayor has voiced her fear that people will manage to get to work and then be unable to get home, and Stella's employer... still hasn't canceled, damn it.

Too Symbolic Of Our Times

Two children, standing next to Pope Francis in a window of the Apostolic Palace, release two doves as tens of thousands of people watch from St. Peter's Square. What happens next is not exactly a symbol of peace in our time...

The Silliest Sherlock Of Them All

If you missed tonight's episode of the BBC-PBS series Sherlock, "The Sign of Three," in Houston this week you have four more chances:

Monday, January 27, 09:00 am on SD8.2

• Monday 1/27 9:00am channel 8.2,
• Monday 1/27 9:00pm channel 8.2,
• Thursday 1/30 10:00pm channel 8.1,
• Friday 1/31 2:30am channel 8.1

(Episode approx. 1½ hours long; better record 2 hours.)

I kid you not: writers and cast (not least, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) clearly have a ball rendering this indisputably most ridiculous Holmes story ever written or acted. Dr. Watson's and Mary Morstan's wedding feast, at which Holmes is called upon to give the best man's speech, is transformed into a murder mystery, which Sherlock, through a seemingly endless series of flashbacks, eventually solves. Well worth your time. Take it as entertainment, not hardcore serious sherlockiana. Great fun!

Mary Morstan, Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes

Monday, January 27, 09:00 am on SD8

Monday, January 27, 09:00 am on SD8.2

Republican Response To SOTU To Be Delivered By Congresswoman Mom Holding Her Two‑Month‑Old

Just read about it; I don't feel like retelling the story. If the kid does what kids often do, we're going to see the truth about the Republican Potty... <grin_duck_run />

It Isn't Good, Norwegian Wood Warning

Dean Baker at Beat the Press (his blog at CEPR) passes on a warning from a Norwegian economist, University of Oslo Professor Marcus Hagedorn, whose study of employment records in North Carolina shows an utter disaster following the election of a Republican governor:

Brad Plummer calls our attention to a study by an economist at the University of Oslo showing that employment in North Carolina plummeted immediately following the election of Republican Governor Pat McCrory. According to the study, whose lead author is University of Oslo Professor Marcus Hagedorn, employment fell by 295,000 or 7.0 percent in the three months from November, 2012 to February, 2013. This plunge in employment was associated with a 5.3 percentage point drop in the employment to population ratio and a 6.3 percentage point decline in the labor force participation rate.

This falloff in employment is far sharper than even the worst period following the collapse of Lehman in 2008. In the worst three month period following the collapse the employment population ratio fell by just 1.1 percentage point, just over one-fifth of the drop seen following the election of Governor McCrory.

...

Vote for a Republican governor at your own risk!

Marcy Wheeler Offers More Analysis Of The PCLOB Report

Here. emptywheel's assessment begins thus:

PCLOB tells us that the FISA Court approved a new automated query system (versions appear to have been in development for years, and it replaced the automated alert system from 2009) in late 2012 that permitted all the 3-degree contact chains off all RAS-approved identifiers to be dumped into the corporate store at once where they can be combined with data collected under other authorities (presumably including both EO 12333 and FAA) for further analysis.

[extended quote from the PCLOB report; please read at emptywheel's site at the link above]

...

On December 27, 2012, Jeff Merkley gave a speech in support of his amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would push to make FISC decisions public. It referenced both the backdoor loophole (which John Bates extended to NSA and CIA in 2011, was implemented in 2012, and affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2012) and the language underlying the phone dragnet. Merkley suggested the government might use these secret interpretations to conduct wide open spying on Americans.

[another extended quote from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR).]

...

The point, in brief, is that we are being forced to live under a secret law, and that secret law may be in direct conflict with our constitutional rights in the powers it secretly grants to the intelligence agencies. Please note how Sen. Merkley is compelled to tiptoe around the whole issue by stating things as conditionals because he is probably prohibited from stating them outright in a public forum.

Sen. Jeff Merkley

This is not the America I grew up in. That America at least once rejected firmly the secret spying on American citizens undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for purposes that were never freely debated by Congress and authorized by the President, purposes whose constitutionality was highly questionable at best. Nearly five decades later, here we are again: different intelligence agency; vastly advanced technology... but the same old bullshit subverting the same rights and liberties of the American people. What is it going to take to put a stop to the American surveillance state? Will I... will any of us... live to see the day it is shut down for good?

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: To the best of my knowledge, I am no relation to Judge John Deacon Bates, or indeed to any other George W. Bush appointee.

Bruce Schneier: Income Inequality As A Security Issue

Here. Boy, do the tighty-righties poop in their drawers in the comment thread!

Weather Insanity

The temp in Houston, which was just barely freezing, just went down another degree F. The NWS extended the possibility of freezing precip from 9:00 A.M. to noon. Ice on roads is minimal now, but it isn't melting. Many overpasses, both freeways and city streets, are iced over. Houston ISD has closed all its schools, as have many other local school districts. METROlift isn't running. Many METRO buses are delayed. In short, most large institutions in Houston recognize we are simply not equipped to continue business-as-usual in this weather.

Stella's workplace refuses to shut down. It's in the Texas Medical Center. No, it's not a hospital or other medical treatment facility.

I admit this scares me. Stella and I just debated whether there's an overpass of any sort between here and there; I seem to remember one ground-level overpass. But it looks likely she will go in anyway. Keep your fingers crossed...

And it just dropped another degree F while I wrote this...

---

UPDATE 10:45 A.M. Stella is home. The one door at work that she is able to enter was blocked with yellow tape. She has since received a text that her boss, with whom she was to meet, was unable to come in because of frozen overpasses. I confess I'm very relieved she's home.

PCLOB Report: NSA Actions Not In Compliance With US Law, May Be Unconstitutional

I didn't know President Obama had created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) as an alleged watchdog over the intrinsic conflicts between the surveillance state (once primarily the FBI; now mainly the NSA) and our constitutionally protected civil liberties (including, at least implicitly, privacy) embodied, among other places, in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, until today, when PCLOB released a report (.pdf, 238pp). I say "alleged" because the Board voted 3-2 to release today's report along what can only reasonably be called partisan lines: the two NO votes were by former members of the Bush 43 Justice Department, which never met a civil liberty it didn't dislike.

Fortunately for my tired eyes, Bryan of Why Now? has collected, in one post, links to a number of important sources analyzing the report, and I am going to send you to him forthwith. Oh, maybe I'll suggest an order to read the posts and articles Bryan links: BBC, Lambert, Charlie Pierce, and last of all, emptywheel. It is rare indeed that I place emptywheel's material last, but it is a detailed indexed annotation of the report, and unless you read the report itself, you will have more context for EW's annotations if you read the other posts and articles first.

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CORRECTION: the PCLOB was created by statute, 42 U.S.C. § 2000ee(c)(1).

You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up — You Don't Have To; Mike Huckabee Does It For You

Daniel Strauss at TPM:

Huckabee: Gov't Shouldn't Help Women Who Can't Control Libidos

Daniel Strauss – January 23, 2014, 1:47 PM EST

Mike "Angel" Huckabee
—
I think i'd rather fuckabee
Than ever vote for Huckabee!

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said that the government shouldn't help women who can't control their "libido or their reproductive system" by providing co-pay-free birth control and that Democrats are encouraging women to be "victims of their gender."

Huckabee made the comments during a speech at the Republican National Committee's winter meeting on Thursday.

"If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it! Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be," Huckabee said.

...

... et cetera, ad nauseam...

Ah, yes, the GOP: the party of men who hate women and women who hate themselves; the party of men who deny the existence of spousal rape or pretty much any other kind of rape; the party of people who think of sin ceaselessly, but always only other people's sin; the party of men who, seeing anyone else in a bad situation, are just certain they (the other people) would behave worse than that GOPer in the same situation!

In short, the GOP is the party of arrogant scumbags... and Huckabee epitomizes them.

Bush Jr. Admin Officials Running For Office

Via ellroon, from Booman: you thought you were finally done with GeeDubya in 2008? Dream on. Doubtless counting on the American electorate's notoriously short memories, many former Bush administration officials are now running for office. I'll let Booman tell you about it; I'm still disinclined to spoil my day by thinking about it too hard.