red states 2
1215
SEE THREE 2025
ntbcw redstate.com
redstate2
see climate chaos weirding
see RAGA 3 team red morrisey ~ EPA
see 2 Am polarization red blue
SEE MEDICARE WORK REQ BS
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neglected esp re covid
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TRUMP REFUSE FEMA DECLS?
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texas measles
an 6 25
Two unvaccinated babies die of whooping cough in KY as disease rise is predicted to continue
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sn an 6 25
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is presenting himself as the rare Republican willing to fight for low-income Americans who will lose their health care or food assistance if his party makes massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. He has been rewarded with much credulous reporting suggesting he is sincere about that.
But as Missouri’s senior U.S. senator and former attorney general, it’s fair to expect Hawley to know what is happening on the ground here: an abject failure to administer federal benefits in compliance with current law.
There is absolutely no possibility that Missouri can handle additional red tape like the “work requirements” in both the House and Senate versions of Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” yet Hawley has endorsed them.
Missouri just isn’t capable of enhanced eligibility requirements. A lawsuit brought by disabled Missourians who were denied SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, proves this.
One plaintiff with cancer and COPD, lacking internet access, transportation — and, let’s not forget, food —used her prepaid cell phone minutes sitting on hold for days trying to get an application. When she gave up and paid for a ride to a benefits office, she got an application but couldn’t complete the required interview due to lack of staff. So she spent more days on hold before having her application denied for failure to complete the interview that she couldn’t get.
That lawsuit was filed when Hawley’s fellow senator from Missouri, Eric Schmitt, was our attorney general. Instead of fixing the problem, the state has defended the lawsuit for three years.
When the court found that Missouri was not complying with the law, current Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed a non-appealable order that merely requires monthly progress reports on call wait times. In January of this year, the lowest daily average call wait time was 58 minutes and the highest average was 2 hours. The maximum wait time was 5 hours, roughly 21,000 calls were dropped and 14,134 callers gave up (or ran out of cell phone minutes, or had to pick up their kids, or had to go to work, etc).
On the Medicaid front, Missouri was investigated and offered support by the Biden Administration to deal with our worst in the nation, legally non-compliant wait times for enrollment.
Individuals submitting their renewal information — online, in person, by fax, or even certified mail — regularly lose their coverage automatically because the state fails to process their documents in time.
A woman who already had coverage through MO HealthNet, Missouri’s Medicaid program, went months without prenatal care because she was unable to reach anyone to tell them she was pregnant.
When the pandemic freeze on Medicaid disenrollments expired, Missouri made a mess of the eligibility review process so families learned at the pediatrician’s office that their children had lost their health insurance despite still being eligible. Children who went without medications for manageable conditions like asthma ended up at emergency rooms.
Now imagine everyone has to navigate a dysfunctional system every six months to keep their health insurance as both versions of the bill would require. Or even once a month – as the bills would allow.
You have to take time off work to prove you are working. Or you have to use up time and cell phone minutes to try to prove you can’t work and qualify for an exemption. In a system as broken as Missouri’s, many people can’t jump through those hoops even when they treat it like a full time job.
If Missouri can’t or won’t run it’s SNAP program properly under current law – where the federal government pays all of the benefits and 50% of the cost of administering those food aid dollars that go straight into our local economies – there is no way food insecurity here won’t get significantly worse and our economy won’t take a serious hit with Republicans’ planned cuts.
Those proposed cuts include states losing at least 5% and up to 25% of their SNAP dollars depending on their “error rate” of under and over payments to households with SNAP. Missouri’s most recent error rate is 10.2%, which means we would lose 25% of our funding for being over 10%, like the majority of states. And the bill would also cut funding for administrative costs which will inevitably make our error rate worse. SNAP is an optional program, and I wouldn’t put it past our legislature to end it all together and let people starve.
As to Medicaid, instead of allocating the funding needed to run MO HealthNet properly, our legislators blame leadership issues or technology problems. Our legislature has done nothing to prepare for what the proposed Trump cuts would do to us, nor what the DOGE impoundments are already doing. They just keep passing tax cut after tax cut.
Given we are not currently capable of running our Medicaid or SNAP programs, there is no possibility that we can manage added expensive red tape.
But that’s the goal. Republicans know, because it has been widely documented, that work requirements don’t work even in more functional states. They don’t increase employment because people with Medicaid who can work are already working.
(I am setting aside the larger undiscussed issue of why working full time in the U.S. is not enough to afford health care, unlike in peer nations.)
The idea that there is $880 billion, or even a fraction of that, in “fraud, waste, and abuse,” in Medicaid is ridiculous. The savings Republicans are counting on would come from deliberately making it too burdensome for the struggling people these programs were intended to help to continue using them.
Look at Arkansas. The state implemented a work requirement and 18,000 people lost their insurance in the few months before a court determined the requirement had been illegally implemented.
Georgia enacted a program in lieu of Medicaid expansion that requires monthly eligibility paperwork. It has enrolled only 3% of Georgians with qualifying incomes, and the money spent on verifying eligibility has dwarfed that spent on providing actual medical care.
Republicans are counting on this happening on a much larger scale to offset their tax cuts. It’s an incredibly wasteful and dangerous strategy.
We burn money on processes to root out non-existent “fraud.” Then, when the people least equipped to navigate those processes can’t do so, they will lose their preventative health care and end up sicker and resorting to more expensive care at hospitals that are required by law to treat them regardless of ability to pay. Then all our premiums go up.
In Missouri, cuts will exacerbate our existing shortage of healthcare providers as more rural hospitals shutter due to lack of funds.
Hawley acknowledged that Missouri’s rural hospitals are in trouble when he opposed a different provision in the House bill, which would curtail a Republican-created and very popular state tax used to get federal Medicaid dollars to hospitals. (He has since caved on the House’s curtailment, and now only opposes the Senate’s significantly more drastic one.)
Rural Missourians will have particular difficulty navigating the work requirement due to lacking internet access, transportation, and job opportunities. And you know what makes it harder to keep a job? Losing your health insurance so you can’t manage your health conditions.
Despite there being no universe in which Missouri becomes capable of administering additional eligibility requirements anytime soon, Hawley doesn’t even object to Republicans moving the implementation deadline up from 2029 to next year. This is not a serious proposal for a functioning eligibility process. It’s a plan to take insurance from eligible people on purpose.
When Hawley was asked last week about people “inadvertently losing coverage,” he said: “We can sort that out.” How? If it’s so easy to sort, why didn’t Hawley or Schmitt sort it out when they were state officials or since?
Hawley is portraying himself as an advocate for the people by using the Trumpian tactic of telling us that up is down and a cut is not a cut. Presuming Hawley knows anything about the reality in Missouri, he knows better.
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.
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an 4 25
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their own Land, which explored the motivations and resentments of working-class conservatives in Louisiana, was named one of six books to help understand Donald Trump’s win by the New York Times when he was first elected president, in 2016. (Another was Hillbilly Elegy, by now vice president JD Vance, published just a few months earlier.)
Since then, Californian progressive sociologist Hochschild has been struggling to understand the appeal of Donald Trump: particularly to white, working-class men, once a strong Democratic constituency. No writer has worked harder to grasp the gut-level appeal that saw Trump win two elections – and in the process, convert the Republican Party into his personal fiefdom.
*Review: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right – Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press)
The puzzle is greatest when one contrasts the current billionaire cabinet with the fact much of Trump’s support comes from people who are objectively worse off under his policies – including tariffs. Last week, Oxfam America called them “an attack on the global working class” that will harm working-class families in the United States and “inflame inequality”.
In Strangers in their own Land, Hochschild called this “the Great Paradox”. Stolen Pride returns to many of that book’s questions, but in a different era – and a US that seems more fragmented, and far angrier than it was in 2016.
Hochschild explores the world of Pikeville, Kentucky, a poor, overwhelmingly white, Trump-supporting city in the heart of Appalachia: in the “whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country, a region that had rapidly shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party”.
The American dream’s broken promise
One of Hochschild’s subjects is James Browning, a recovering drug user whose hands are tattooed and covered in rings. “There you have it” he says, “I have a shame hand and a pride hand.” This sums up the basic argument of Stolen Pride.
“Pride and shame,” she writes, “signal the juncture between the identity we hold out to the world, and how the world responds to our identity.” The men she speaks to desperately need a sense of pride, but too often find their failures are the cause of deep shame. The American Dream, after all, teaches them every individual can make it, inherently implying failure is due to individual weakness.
Many of the men she speaks to have experienced unemployment, domestic breakups, jail, alcoholism and drug abuse. (She even manages to speak to one current jail inmate.) Kentucky has one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the United States – and despite Trump’s attacks on Mexico and Canada, the doctor-prescribed drugs some were addicted to appear to be domestically manufactured.
So many of the men Hochschild interviewed talk of the balance between shame and pride, I began to wonder if they were prompted. On reflection, I suspect this represents Hochschild’s careful selection from a series of very extensive interviews, conducted over roughly six years.
Her emphasis is almost entirely on the men in Pikeville, though a majority of white women also voted for Trump. I would love to see Hochschild explore this further. That so many women can support a convicted sexual predator in a country obsessed with sexual behaviour is one of the mysteries of contemporary American politics.
By 2021, many Americans – and most Republicans – believed Trump’s claims that he had really won the 2020 election. They saw the rioters at the Capitol on January 6 as heroes defending American democracy. In Trump’s claim the election was stolen, many of those Hochschild interviews saw parallels to what they believed had been stolen from them, by economic and cultural upheavals.
Importantly, many of her respondents saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites. When Hillary Clinton spoke of his supporters as “a basket of deplorables”, she reinforced the grievances of people consistently looked down on as “hillbillies” and “rednecks” by people they identified as Democratic elites.
How ‘deep stories’ inform politics
For Hochschild, there are underlying emotional narratives, which she calls “deep stories”, that inform our political positions.
In Strangers in their Own Land, these were identified as a sense of being overtaken by groups, usually educated women and Black people, who benefited from programs of affirmative action. The second Trump administration’s crusade against “DEI” is playing directly to these grievances. In Stolen Pride, this feeling is strengthened by the sense liberal elites are undermining both traditional values and the ability for individuals to succeed.
Eastern Kentucky is coal country, and Clinton’s ill-worded election-trail claim she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” was a major factor in swinging voters towards Trump. For men who took pride in their work, the collapse of the coal industry produced a sense of shame: strengthened by a strong belief individuals are to blame for their own misfortunes.
Pikeville was also the site of a neo-Nazi march in April 2017, the forerunner of the tragic Unite the Right march in Charlottesville later that year, which resulted in one death and multiple injuries.
Much of the book skilfully explores the preparations for and reactions to the Pikeville march, which seemingly passed without incident. Some 100 white nationalists turned up and were outnumbered by counter protesters, As Hochschild writes, “Very few Pikeville locals were involved on either side”.
Perhaps the most fascinating figure in Hochschild’s book, and evidence of her skill in persuading the most unlikely people to open up in interviews, is Matthew Heimbach, who led the 2017 Pikesville march, identified as a proud Nazi and co-founded the now-defunct neo-Nazi party, Traditionalist Worker Party.
He also co-planned the Charlottesville march, where he railed against “white genocide” and was sued (with other members of the TWP) for his role in it on behalf of Charlottesville victims. He was found guilty on charges of civil conspiracy in 2021.
“Some years later”, he reveals some of his core beliefs are shaken, especially his attitude toward Black Americans, whom he recognises as often sharing the same sense of dispossession that had fuelled his own anger. “I love Russia and I love Putin,” he told Hochschild, “so I looked into moving there.” As Hochschild remarks: “It seemed that Adolf Hitler was to be replaced in his pantheon by Vladimir Putin.”
Transcending the gulf?
Pikesville is also the home of America’s most famous family feud, between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud, which lasted many decades from the late 19th century, “began as a dispute over a stolen pig” and “ended as the longest and fiercest clan fight in the nation”. It has been the basis for a dozen movies, virtually all unmemorable. In 2017, a member of the reconciled clans said if they could settle their differences, “there has to be a way for Americans to get back together as one”.
In the last section of the book, Hochschild looks for ways to transcend the apparent gulf that separates blue and red America. Reading the book after Trump’s return to power, this felt sadly inadequate. Yes, as she points out, most voters are more moderate than the politicians on either side. Sadly, this is not sufficient protection against the rise of the authoritarian plutocracy that now seems to have a firm grip on Washington.
Hochschild wrote this book during the Biden administration and the lead-up to the 2024 elections. I assume she finished it before Trump named Vance as his vice president: a man who first came to prominence with his own account of Appalachian pride and shame. Hochschild doesn’t discuss his Hillbilly Elegy, though it is listed in her references.
Hochschild brilliantly captures the pain of men who feel left behind and conveys something of life in rural Kentucky that goes beyond easy stereotypes. I could feel empathy for many of the people she comes across. But I was unpersuaded there is much room for optimism that the appeal of Trump, and those who follow him, will easily be defeated.
Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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2nd kid kia 4 25
AN 2 25
Texas reports new measles outbreak in West Texas
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inspired by President Donald Trump’s call to round up immigrants who are in the country illegally, Republican governors would send their National Guard troops into Democratic-led states without those leaders’ permission.
It’s a scenario that was so concerning to Washington state Rep. Sharlett Mena that she introduced legislation that would make uninvited deployments of out-of-state troops illegal. Her bill cleared a committee last week and has the backing of Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, who pushed for the proposal in his inaugural address last month.
The legislation is about maintaining the state’s autonomy and authority, Mena, a Democrat, told her colleagues during last week’s hearing. “Without this bill, there’s nothing on the books to prevent this.”
Later, she added, “Other states may take matters into their own hands when they want to enforce federal laws.”
In December, 26 Republican governors — all but Vermont Gov. Phil Scott — vowed to assist Trump with deportations of immigrants “who pose a threat to our communities and national security.” Their pledge included the use of National Guard troops.
Mena has reason to be concerned, said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning New York-based pro-democracy institute.
“The Trump administration has made it quite clear that they intend to use the military to assist with immigration enforcement,” he said. “States who are opposed to that would be wise to take what measures they can to protect themselves and their states.”
This week, Texas signed an agreement with the Trump administration giving the state’s National Guard troops law enforcement powers to arrest and help detain migrants. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s four-year Operation Lone Star program has until now used the National Guard only for surveillance and logistical support for federal agents.
Other states opposed to Trump’s deportation program could be inspired by Washington’s legislation and introduce similar measures in the months ahead, Nunn said. And Mena pointed out that Idaho, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Texas have laws that prevent other states’ National Guard troops from entering without permission.
‘Anything we can do to help’: This Texas county is poised to play a key role in deportations
But, as she noted to her colleagues last week, if Trump were to federalize National Guard units, there’s nothing the state could do to prevent it; a presidential order preempts state authority.
Republican state Rep. Jim Walsh dismisses Mena’s concerns.
“I believe that legislation is unnecessary,” he told Stateline in an interview. “I think it’s what is generally considered a statement bill, but you have to treat it seriously. I’m not sure what they’re getting at here other than a swipe at Donald Trump.”
Washington state law prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement — which Walsh described as “horrible” public policy. Mena’s legislation would only add to that “dumb” approach to immigration enforcement, he said.
Federal law
While the National Guard is generally organized at and operates under state command using state funding, it can be called into federal service, operating with federal funding and placed under the president’s control. But there’s a murky middle ground in federal law that would make a measure like Washington’s relevant.
Under one federal statute, Title 32, a state’s National Guard can be commanded by the governor but operate using federal funding on a federal mission at the request of the president. While the policy was originally crafted in the 1950s as a way for Congress to pay for extensive training requirements, presidents have since expanded its use.
Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump, in his first term, all deployed National Guard troops to the southwestern border to assist with migration deterrence.
Trump’s mass deportation plan could rely on state cooperation
Trump also used the statute in 2020 to request that states send National Guard units to Washington, D.C., when he wanted to suppress the Black Lives Matter protests happening there. Eleven governors voluntarily sent troops, despite objections from the district’s mayor. The district does not enjoy the sovereignty of states.
“No state is more sovereign than another state, and their sovereignty is also territorially limited,” Nunn said. “Illinois’ sovereignty stops at the Indiana state line and vice versa. Indiana cannot reach into Illinois and exercise governmental power there without Illinois’ consent, even if the president asked Indiana to do this and even if Congress is footing the bill.”
Put simply: No state can invade another state.
‘An insurance policy’
Because of this, Washington state’s legislation might be redundant, said William Banks, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law who has studied and recently written about National Guard deployments and Trump’s rhetoric of a migrant “invasion.”
“It’s like an insurance policy,” he said of the bill. “It may be a very good idea to call attention to the independence of the state government and its perspective that they’d very much like to be in charge of their own internal affairs, including migration or whatever else might be going on.”
Banks said the measure, if passed as expected, could be something that state leaders point to if, for example, Idaho or Montana were considering deploying their National Guard units to Seattle to carry out Trump’s immigration enforcement.
However, he said, the whole discussion becomes irrelevant the moment Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, which would allow for federal military intervention in a nonconsenting state.
State, local officials plan for potential immigration enforcement at schools
The 1792 law has been used occasionally in response to unexpected crises that overwhelmed civilian authorities or when a state was obstructing federal civil rights laws or other constitutional protections. In theory, though, the president could frame one of his policy priorities, such as immigration, as a national emergency in need of a massive troop mobilization. Trump has already asked his deputies to study the use of the law.
“The Insurrection Act is a euphemism for when all hell breaks loose,” Banks said. “It’s an extreme measure for extreme times.”
Until that occurs, Washington lawmakers would be wise to adopt preventive measures, said Nathan Bays, deputy policy director for Washington’s governor. He told committee members during the bill’s hearing that it is “precautionary” and would not harm the readiness or training of the state’s National Guard.
“Washington will continue to be a strong partner with our other National Guard units across this nation,” he said.
But Republican state Rep. Rob Chase told Stateline that the legislation is a solution looking for a problem — wasting time when the legislature should be focused on real issues, such as public safety, homelessness, a housing shortage, fentanyl and education.
“This seems like more fear mongering by the ruling party in Olympia over what they perceive to be happening in the other Washington,” he wrote in an email.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
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AN 12 24
Billionaire Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was a major donor to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, and now that Trump is president-elect, he has picked Musk and MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to head a proposed new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Its goals, according to Trump and his transition team, include finding ways to cut federal spending and reducing the United States' federal deficit.
In an article published on December 11, Reuters reporters Andy Sullivan and Ally J. Levine examine possible areas in which Musk and Ramaswamy could recommend "deep cuts." And those cuts, they stress, could be the most painful in red states where Trump enjoyed the strongest support.
"Roughly two out of every three dollars is spent on pension, health care and other programs that provide tangible benefits to U.S. residents, meaning that any cutbacks could cause an outcry," Sullivan and Levine explain. "Consider the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare expansion that was the signature accomplishment of Democratic President Barack Obama. Republicans vowed to roll back 'Obamacare' when Trump was first elected in 2016, but they failed to do so. The program has dramatically grown since then."
READ MORE: Millions will see rise in health insurance premiums if federal subsidies expire
Like Musk and Ramaswamy, Russell Vought — Trump's choice for White House budget director and a major architect of Project 2025 — has, according to Sullivan and Levine, "called for tightening veterans programs." And this, the Reuters reporters note, "could have an outsize effect in Trump country."
A chart published with the article shows that 63 percent of the United States' "total spending on veterans' benefits" is in states that Trump won in the 2024 election — while only 37 percent is in states that went to Vice President Kamala Harris.
"Trump has ruled out benefit cuts to the two biggest safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare," Sullivan and Levine report. "The two programs, which provide pension and health benefits to seniors, play a bigger role in the states that backed his presidential bid. Other benefit programs aimed at low-income people may be easier for a Republican president like Trump to tackle."
The journalists continue, "Both the Medicaid health plan for the poor and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which helps pay for groceries, tend to play a bigger role in Democratic-leaning states. But cutbacks in these areas also would hit hard in poor, conservative states like Louisiana."
READ MORE:['About to cut my mic': Frustrated CNN host told to end segment amid fight with GOP guest
*Read Reuters' full report at this link.
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alternet-no lnx
Home | Republicans have been lying to their voters for years — and now those same voters are dying
Thom Hartmann June 14, 2024
This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.
As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it’s going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they’ve been screwed by the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons.
Severe weather in the United States is not only getting worse, it’s moving.
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
There’s a reason L. Frank Baum placed his 1901 novel The Wizard of Oz in Kansas: the worst and most frequent tornado activity in the world at that time was in the American Great Plains states — particularly Kansas.
Now that’s changing, as weather extremes are moving to the Midwest and the South. Recently, deadly tornadoes — some with wind velocities in excess of 200 mph — have ravaged Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana.
This new burst of unusually extreme weather is driven by global warming and its impact on the Arctic, our oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico.
And it’s going to be America’s new normal, although in all probability this is just the beginning and over time it will get a lot worse.
America has always had the most extreme weather of anyplace else on Earth, according to Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.
China has more people and a larger landmass than we do, but, Cutter told ABC News, “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather.”
The severity of America’s Great Plains states’ historically extreme weather was the result of geography.
While there’s a massive amount of land on either side of the European/Asian land mass, the United States is bracketed by two giant bodies of water, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We also have a huge mountain range — the Rockies — that helps determine where turbulent air from the west ends up, particularly as it encounters colder air from the north and warmer air from over the Gulf of Mexico.
As North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told ABC News, it’s because of “where we are on the globe,” adding, “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”
But now, as the Gulf of Mexico is heating up faster than the oceans on either side of us, combined with “bomb cyclone” cold weather coming down from Canada because melting ice in the Arctic is making the Jet Stream less stable, that severe weather is moving to the Midwest and South.
This appears to be one of the most consequential outcomes of climate change, severe weather-wise, for the United States.
As Victor Gensini, associate professor in the Earth, Atmosphere and Environment Department at Northern Illinois University, told The Chicago Tribune, the Midwest and South are replacing the Plains states as the epicenter of severe weather.
“That’s a really, really big deal for human exposure and vulnerability,” Gensini told Ezra Maille. “A tornado that goes through a wheat field in Kansas is not a big deal, but a tornado that goes through southern Cook County is a huge deal.”
He added that the Great Plains will probably continue to experience more and more severe drought while tornado activity is shifting toward the East and South.
The fossil fuel industry has known with a high level of certainty how severe weather was a probable outcome of America’s dependence on their products ever since the 1970s.
Yet for the fifty years since then — and continuing to this day — they fund phony “science” and shills to deny climate change or try to spin it as a positive, all while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of mostly Republican politicians.
We’re at least 40 years behind where we should be in dealing with the fossil fuel/global warming crisis because giant oil companies have run massive disinformation campaigns while funding the political careers of hacks in Congress willing to lie to the public for them.
President Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis in 1979 and proposed legislation to create “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”
FDR had sold bonds to the public to fund a government corporation that would develop synthetic rubber for fighter plane tires back in the day, and Carter wanted to do the same to end our dependence on fossil fuels:
“Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II,” Carter said, “so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.”
In that same July 15, 1979 speech, he proposed the government issue bonds that would fund:
“[T]he creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.”
But it all came crashing down 43 years ago when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter, killed the solar bank and the bond program, and even took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.
The big question now is how long the GOP will be able to keep up their climate change denial in the Red states currently being hammered by extreme weather before their citizens catch on to what’s happening and demand action to reduce our carbon emissions.
As Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), told me yesterday:
“It is rather ironic that many of the states that are seeing the worst climate change impacts—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—are red states, with governors and legislatures that are far more interested in doing the bidding of polluters than representing the people they’re supposed to be representing.
“Unsurprisingly, these states are all among the lowest when it comes to per capita spending on public education. The alliance of rightwing politicians and polluters prefers a poorly educated electorate, ignorant of the environmental health damage being done to them.”
So, what can be done other than offering subsidies for electric cars?
Number one on the list is to put a price on carbon, which will bend market incentives toward green and renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.
According to the World Bank, there are currently 70 carbon pricing programs in place around the world, covering a bit over 23 percent of all emissions. Some are outright carbon taxes, typically with a rebate program to low- and average-income consumers, and some are cap-and-trade type programs (like President George HW Bush put into place to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions).
Canada’s carbon tax, which they put into place in 2019, is working so well that they actually sped up the process of implementation this year.
The original plan called for the initial $10/ton carbon tax to go up $10 every year until it hit $170/ton. The money collected is then recycled back to low- and average-income consumers to compensate them for the extra costs they’ll incur driving and heating their homes. But the program has been such a success that Canada’s government announced this week they’re raising the carbon tax by a full $15 this year.
They can pull this off because the rebates represent, for most Canadians, far more money in their pockets than the cost of the carbon tax. The brunt of the tax is instead borne by Canadian businesses, which is the group that's been designed to push toward green -- and tax-free or even green-subsidized -- energy sources.
An average taxpayer in Alberta province, for example, now gets a $386 check or bank deposit from their government every three months. It’s $340 quarterly in Saskatchewan, $328 in Newfoundland, $248 in Nova Scotia, and $264 in Manitoba.
This is a system that could work very well here in the US, if only there was the political will to make it happen. And, as we cut emissions and figure out new and better ways to pull existing carbon out of the air and oceans, we may be able to dial back on the increasing severity of storms that are ravaging Red states.
The obstacle to pricing carbon in the US is widespread ignorance of how severe our problem is and its origins in fossil fuel emissions. Fully 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say climate change is “not an important concern” and a mere 17% believe human activities like burning fossil fuels “contribute a great deal to climate change.”
Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states now will wake up Republican voters and motivate them to demand their Republican politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires and do something now to stop climate change from getting any worse.
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alternet-no lnx
Home | Republicans have been lying to their voters for years — and now those same voters are dying
Thom Hartmann June 14, 2024
This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.
As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it’s going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they’ve been screwed by the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons.
Severe weather in the United States is not only getting worse, it’s moving.
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
There’s a reason L. Frank Baum placed his 1901 novel The Wizard of Oz in Kansas: the worst and most frequent tornado activity in the world at that time was in the American Great Plains states — particularly Kansas.
Now that’s changing, as weather extremes are moving to the Midwest and the South. Recently, deadly tornadoes — some with wind velocities in excess of 200 mph — have ravaged Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana.
This new burst of unusually extreme weather is driven by global warming and its impact on the Arctic, our oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico.
And it’s going to be America’s new normal, although in all probability this is just the beginning and over time it will get a lot worse.
America has always had the most extreme weather of anyplace else on Earth, according to Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.
China has more people and a larger landmass than we do, but, Cutter told ABC News, “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather.”
The severity of America’s Great Plains states’ historically extreme weather was the result of geography.
While there’s a massive amount of land on either side of the European/Asian land mass, the United States is bracketed by two giant bodies of water, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We also have a huge mountain range — the Rockies — that helps determine where turbulent air from the west ends up, particularly as it encounters colder air from the north and warmer air from over the Gulf of Mexico.
As North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told ABC News, it’s because of “where we are on the globe,” adding, “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”
But now, as the Gulf of Mexico is heating up faster than the oceans on either side of us, combined with “bomb cyclone” cold weather coming down from Canada because melting ice in the Arctic is making the Jet Stream less stable, that severe weather is moving to the Midwest and South.
This appears to be one of the most consequential outcomes of climate change, severe weather-wise, for the United States.
As Victor Gensini, associate professor in the Earth, Atmosphere and Environment Department at Northern Illinois University, told The Chicago Tribune, the Midwest and South are replacing the Plains states as the epicenter of severe weather.
“That’s a really, really big deal for human exposure and vulnerability,” Gensini told Ezra Maille. “A tornado that goes through a wheat field in Kansas is not a big deal, but a tornado that goes through southern Cook County is a huge deal.”
He added that the Great Plains will probably continue to experience more and more severe drought while tornado activity is shifting toward the East and South.
The fossil fuel industry has known with a high level of certainty how severe weather was a probable outcome of America’s dependence on their products ever since the 1970s.
Yet for the fifty years since then — and continuing to this day — they fund phony “science” and shills to deny climate change or try to spin it as a positive, all while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of mostly Republican politicians.
We’re at least 40 years behind where we should be in dealing with the fossil fuel/global warming crisis because giant oil companies have run massive disinformation campaigns while funding the political careers of hacks in Congress willing to lie to the public for them.
President Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis in 1979 and proposed legislation to create “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”
FDR had sold bonds to the public to fund a government corporation that would develop synthetic rubber for fighter plane tires back in the day, and Carter wanted to do the same to end our dependence on fossil fuels:
“Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II,” Carter said, “so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.”
In that same July 15, 1979 speech, he proposed the government issue bonds that would fund:
“[T]he creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.”
But it all came crashing down 43 years ago when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter, killed the solar bank and the bond program, and even took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.
The big question now is how long the GOP will be able to keep up their climate change denial in the Red states currently being hammered by extreme weather before their citizens catch on to what’s happening and demand action to reduce our carbon emissions.
As Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), told me yesterday:
“It is rather ironic that many of the states that are seeing the worst climate change impacts—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—are red states, with governors and legislatures that are far more interested in doing the bidding of polluters than representing the people they’re supposed to be representing.
“Unsurprisingly, these states are all among the lowest when it comes to per capita spending on public education. The alliance of rightwing politicians and polluters prefers a poorly educated electorate, ignorant of the environmental health damage being done to them.”
So, what can be done other than offering subsidies for electric cars?
Number one on the list is to put a price on carbon, which will bend market incentives toward green and renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.
According to the World Bank, there are currently 70 carbon pricing programs in place around the world, covering a bit over 23 percent of all emissions. Some are outright carbon taxes, typically with a rebate program to low- and average-income consumers, and some are cap-and-trade type programs (like President George HW Bush put into place to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions).
Canada’s carbon tax, which they put into place in 2019, is working so well that they actually sped up the process of implementation this year.
The original plan called for the initial $10/ton carbon tax to go up $10 every year until it hit $170/ton. The money collected is then recycled back to low- and average-income consumers to compensate them for the extra costs they’ll incur driving and heating their homes. But the program has been such a success that Canada’s government announced this week they’re raising the carbon tax by a full $15 this year.
They can pull this off because the rebates represent, for most Canadians, far more money in their pockets than the cost of the carbon tax. The brunt of the tax is instead borne by Canadian businesses, which is the group that's been designed to push toward green -- and tax-free or even green-subsidized -- energy sources.
An average taxpayer in Alberta province, for example, now gets a $386 check or bank deposit from their government every three months. It’s $340 quarterly in Saskatchewan, $328 in Newfoundland, $248 in Nova Scotia, and $264 in Manitoba.
This is a system that could work very well here in the US, if only there was the political will to make it happen. And, as we cut emissions and figure out new and better ways to pull existing carbon out of the air and oceans, we may be able to dial back on the increasing severity of storms that are ravaging Red states.
The obstacle to pricing carbon in the US is widespread ignorance of how severe our problem is and its origins in fossil fuel emissions. Fully 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say climate change is “not an important concern” and a mere 17% believe human activities like burning fossil fuels “contribute a great deal to climate change.”
Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states now will wake up Republican voters and motivate them to demand their Republican politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires and do something now to stop climate change from getting any worse.
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3/24
wASHINGTON (AP) — A new Biden administration rule that sets tougher standards for deadly soot pollution faced a barrage of legal challenges Wednesday, as 25 Republican-led states and a host of business groups filed lawsuits seeking to block the rule in court.
Twenty-four states, led by attorneys general from Kentucky and West Virginia, filed a joint challenge stating that new Environmental Protection Agency rule would raise costs for manufacturers, utilities and families and could block new manufacturing plants and infrastructure such as roads and bridges. Texas filed a separate suit, as did business groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.
“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President (Joe) Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment, said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who is leading the joint lawsuit along with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.
The EPA rule “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” Coleman said.
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The soot rule is one of several EPA dictates under attack from industry groups and Republican-led states. The Supreme Court heard arguments last month on a GOP challenge to the agency’s “good neighbor rule,” which restricts smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas.
Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.
In opposing the soot rule, Republicans and industry groups say the United States already has some of the strictest air quality standards in the world — tougher than the European Union or major polluters such as China and India.
Tightening U.S. standards “wouldn’t improve public health, but it would put as many as 30% of all U.S. counties out of compliance under federal law, leading to aggressive new permitting requirements that could effectively block new economic activity,’' Coleman said.
The EPA rule sets maximum levels of fine particle pollution — more commonly known as soot — at 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms established a decade ago under the Obama administration.
Environmental and public health groups hailed the rule as a major step to improve the health of Americans, including future generations. EPA scientists have estimated exposure at previous limits contributed to thousands of early deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, along with other health problems.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new soot rule, finalized last month, would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. The rule will especially benefit children, older adults and those with heart and lung conditions, Regan said, as well as people in low-income and minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution.
“We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ Regan said.
Biden is seeking reelection, and some fellow Democrats have warned that a tough new soot standard could harm his chances in key industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The EPA and White House officials brushed aside those concerns, saying the industry has developed technical improvements to meet previous soot standards and can adapt to meet the new ones. Soot pollution has declined by 42% since 2000, even as the U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 52%, Regan said.
The new rule does not impose pollution controls on specific industries. Instead, it lowers the annual standard for fine particulate matter for overall air quality. The EPA will use air sampling to identify counties and other areas that do not meet the new standard. States would then have 18 months to develop compliance plans for those areas. States that do not meet the new standard by 2032 could face penalties, although EPA said it expects that 99% of U.S. counties will be able to meet the revised annual standard by 2032.
Industry groups and Republican officials dispute that and say a lower soot limit could put hundreds of U.S. counties out of compliance.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the White House in January that 43% of total particulate emissions come from wildfires, and called the pollution standard “the wrong tool to address this problem.’'
The EPA said it will work with states, counties and tribes to account for and respond to wildfires, an increasing source of soot pollution, especially in the West, where climate change has led to longer wildfire seasons, with more frequent and intense fires. The agency allows states and air agencies to request exemptions from air-quality standards due to “exceptional events,” including wildfires and prescribed fires.
Besides Kentucky, West Virginia and Texas, other states challenging the EPA rule include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.
All three cases were filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
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an 4 24
rural white voters have, in many cases, far more political power than suburban or urban voters, and they’re using that outsized power to push our nation toward disaster. While they’re only 20 percent of the country, for example, because of gerrymandering they control fully 42 percent of seats in the House of Representatives.
The authors of new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy point out that rural whites are measurably more bigoted and xenophobic than suburban or urban voters, 13 points more likely to hate on queer people, 15 points more likely to support Trump’s Muslim ban.
They’re also far more likely to agree that setting democracy aside for a strongman like Trump or another Putin wannabee will “fix the mess and drain the swamp.” And fully 74% of the members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election represented rural districts.
The majority of rural white voters disagree with the statement (or have no opinion) that “diversity makes America stronger.” And while only 22 percent of city dwellers believe Trump won the 2020 election and Biden and Democrats “stole” it, a mind-boggling 47 percent of rural whites are certain Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House.
READ:Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances
The astonishing paradox, though, is how Republican politicians regularly crap on their own voters in rural America. Instead of offering help or solutions to rural problems, the GOP and conservative media instead feed them a steady diet of xenophobic and racist fear and hate.
And they eat it up! The racist buffoons among them are one and a half times more likely to be QAnon followers than people who live in cities or suburbs.
Democrats created — and Republicans opposed — virtually all the programs that are keeping rural America from sinking even farther into poverty and despair. Social Security, unemployment insurance, SS Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, over 60 farm subsidy programs that funnel billions in taxpayer dollars into rural communities, food stamps, the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program, anti-addiction programs, etc.
The only real accomplishment of the Trump presidency was passing a massive $2 trillion dollar tax cut for the morbidly rich that had virtually no effect on rural voters. Nonetheless, 71 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.
There are still 11 mostly rural states where hospitals are closing and people are dying younger than necessary because Republicans in those states have refused to expand Medicaid.
Republicans in Congress fought against legislation to expand rural broadband access. They constantly try to cut or gut rural health and nutrition programs, and fought against expanding Obamacare in a way that would help rural people.
gerry SUPERMAJORITY
Most of the Red State Republican politicians in America know their seats will never be in danger, so they take millions from special interest groups to write loopholes into the tax code, vote for larger fossil fuel subsidies, and vote against efforts to lower prescription drug prices or do anything about global warming.
They get rich while the people who put them into office struggle to get by. Ted Cruz escapes to Cancun with the $600,000+ in cash he just got for his podcast, laughing at Texas voters all the way. JD Vance, a multimillionaire Wall Street guy, lives in an elite townhouse and travels by first class while people in Ohio watch Republican politicians gut their public schools and try to outlaw abortion and birth control.
Republican members of Congress representing rural states went all the way to the Supreme Court to successfully block President Biden’s first attempt at reducing student debt while rural students carry 60% more student debt than urban students by age 25.
One of the most chilling quotes from the book is about how rural voters are willing to both abandon democracy and embrace a violent rightwing coup:
“[R]ural Americans are more likely to believe that ‘it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.’ Indeed, more than one out of four rural residents agree that Trump should be returned to office by force if necessary.”
White rural voters are more likely than any other demographic group — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans — to be willing to overturn our democracy, and the people who represent them are in the majority of legislators who voted to overturn the 2020 election the day after the January 6th attack on our capitol.
If, say, Black people held that view, rightwing media would be trumpeting it every day from coast to coast. But because it’s rural white people, the so-called “heartland Americans,” it gets largely ignored by American media.
After all, most mainstream outlets treat rural people as if they’re an exotic species who must be listened to: going to rural diners to interview people is so common it’s become a cliché. In the past month I’ve seen dozens of such interviews played on MSNBC and CNN, but not once have I seen those same reporters go into a city and ask why people are voting for Biden.
The Biden administration has done more for rural America than any president since Lyndon Johnson rolled out Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Biden’s American Rescue Plan provided specific tax breaks and credits targeted at rural poverty, subsidized mortgage payments, and provided rent assistance to tens of thousands of rural residents:
— Rural Americans are nine times more likely to lack access to affordable child care, so Biden’s program allocated $39 billion for subsidies for child care providers, with the money disproportionately going to rural communities. There was also $350 billion specifically allocated for small towns in rural areas to help them run basic government functions and upgrade their infrastructure. He even put up $198 million in funding for rural colleges and universities.
— Biden and Democrats delivered a 15% increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits that have a huge impact in rural areas, reaching “2.9 million people in rural areas, including 800,000 children, reducing rural poverty by 11 percent and rural child poverty by 20 percent.” Biden’s USDA, over Republican objections, also put a billion dollars into rural food banks.
— Biden and Democrats “invested a historic $3 billion in the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economic Development Administration (EDA) to build local [rural] economies that are resilient to future economic shocks, including a $300 million Coal Communities Commitment.”
— Biden and Democrats — over GOP objections — expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on 2.1 million acres of public lands, the largest such expansion in U.S. history, and provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. Another $2 billion went “for funding communities in the Rural Partners Network to spur job creation and build infrastructure.”
— They put $5 billion in “investments to help rural areas update infrastructure, boost high-speed internet access, and aid agricultural producers and small businesses in implementing climate-focused practices” and “$1.7 billion in funding to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in adopting techniques to adapt to the changing climate, such as cover crops, nutrient management, and carbon storage.”
And that’s just the beginning: for a full list of the ways the Biden administration, over the objection of Republicans in Congress, has helped rural people click here.
Not one single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for any of the things listed above: in fact, almost all voted against these helps to rural America.
Instead of concerning themselves with the well-being of rural people, they’re trying to block clean air standards that prevent rural communities from being poisoned, block clean water standards in rivers that supply water to rural communities, cut taxes on billionaires, and increase subsidies to the fossil fuel and banking industries.
All while taking huge campaign contributions, private jet rides, taxpayer funded junkets overseas, and the promise of million-dollar-a-year jobs when they leave Congress if only they vote the right way.
Because Republican politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than helping out the people they were elected to represent, rural Red states are massively subsidized by urban Blue states just to keep their heads above water. As the Associated Press recently reported:
“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.
“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”
It’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:
— Spousal abuse
— [Obesity — Smoking](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/10/1994653/-Decades-of-Republican-Mismanagement-Have-Left-Red-States-Mired-in-the-Past-at-the-Bottom)
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape — Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty — Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths
So, why do Red state voters tolerate being conned and ripped off by their own elected representatives? Are they just stupid?
One theory is that “they hate the same people we hate.” And, indeed, for a significant and measurable cohort of rural white voters, racial fear and hatred is a primary motivating factor in their embrace of the GOP, although that’s only, according to this new book, about 20% of rural people.
Others vote Republican because the party has been so effective at branding itself with county fairs, NASCAR, country music, and the overall rural lifestyle including a faux paean to rugged individuality and independence.
Having over 1500 radio stations daily broadcasting a rightwing Republican message to literally every nook and cranny of rural America is another large factor. As is the dominance of Australian billionaire Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox “News.”
Will rural voters ever wake up to how badly they’re being screwed now and have been screwed by Republicans ever since Reagan started the whole neoliberal austerity and free trade movement that shipped over 60,000 factories and 20 million jobs overseas?
Or is the GOP’s cynical manipulation of religion, gender, and race enough to keep them voting to hurt themselves and further enrich Republican fat-cats?
So far, all indications seem like that’s the case and will stay that way for at least the next election cycle.
While the media struggles with trying to “understand” the rural white voter every election cycle, instead they should be running stories on how the very real problems and crises of rural America are daily made worse by Republicans in Congress and at the helm of their Red States.
How to break through?
Democrats need to get smart and start using the “negative partisanship” strategies Rachel Bitecofer recommends in her new book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. They can do this by pointing out, with ad buys and media appearances, just how bad Red state Republicans politicians have been for rural people and their communities.
And they need to do it soon. As the authors of White Rural Rage point out:
“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators — past, present, and forever.”
Our mainstream media have made it clear, for over 40 years, that they won’t expose the damage Republicans are doing to rural areas because their TV programs will fail if Republican politicians boycott them.
So, the job falls to us and the Democrats. Can we do it? I believe so; we just need to get started.
NOW READ:GOP Senators back away from MTG's 'ridiculous' speaker threat
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alternet-3 24 NO LNX
How the GOP plans to drag America back to the 19th century
Thom Hartmann
March 22, 2024
“Moscow Mike” Johnson and his Republicans in the House are determined to continue to shorten the lifespans of Americans by forcing brutal Red State policies on the entire nation. It’s literally killing people, but they frankly don’t care so long as they can keep taxes on their billionaire owners low.
And now Republicans are officially saying they want to cut Social Security and gut Medicare.
Ronald Reagan is long gone, but a recent report shows how his policies and his party live on and are still hurting us: they’re responsible for millions of lost years of Americans’ lives. The study calls them “missing Americans.”
It wasn’t always this way.
In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation in the world.
While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow.
Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life.
Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.
That study, published by the National Academy of Sciences in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at “excess deaths” (they also called them “missing Americans”) in our country versus others around the world.
The researchers from Boston University School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School and TH Chan School of Public Health found:
“The United States had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s–1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the United States began experiencing a steady increase in the number of missing Americans, reaching 622,534 in 2019 alone.”
Those excess deaths, it turns out, are almost all entirely the result of Republican policies, both at the federal and state level.
The researchers found:
“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality. A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment.
“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people.”
And it’s worse in Red states:
“Increasingly divergent policies at the state level have resulted in widening health gaps across US states. In those geographic areas of the United States where excess mortality has increased the most, voters have turned towards policy-makers who have further undermined population health, e.g. through refusal to expand Medicaid or to implement firearm regulations.”
While not coming right out and saying that people live longer in Blue states than Red states, that’s largely what the study found. And it’s not a small effect:
“In 2021, there were 26.4 million years of life lost due to excess US mortality relative to peer nations…”
While President Eisenhower ran for re-election in 1956 by bragging about how on his watch millions more Americans had gotten good union jobs or signed up for Social Security, by 1981, when Reagan took office, the 1978 efforts of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to legalize political bribery were beginning to seriously take hold.
That’s when everything changed. Since 1981, millions of Americans have died unnecessarily because of neoliberal austerity policies: their lives were sacrificed on the altars of increased corporate profits and lower taxes for billionaires.
— Reagan told us that the “union bosses” were just out for themselves and the best thing American workers could do was to rely on their employers’ good will. He also claimed that the minimum wage actually hurt low-wage workers because, he said, it “prevented” employers from hiring more people.
Both were lies, as history has vividly shown, and both contributed to our epidemic of early and unnecessary deaths, as Red state minimum wages are still as low as $7.25/hour and Red “Right to Work for Less” states make it nearly impossible to unionize.
“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.
— The Republican backlash to Obamacare extending Medicaid to everybody in the country wasn’t limited to their lawsuit before the Supreme Court that ended up letting Red states opt out of coverage, or to the Astroturf “Tea Party” movement funded by rightwing billionaires.
— To this day, more than a decade later, there are still about a dozen Red states that have taken the five Republican justices up on their offer and refuse to expand the program. Those Republican-controlled states have also thrown hundreds of bureaucratic roadblocks to people getting any kind of state services, from food stamps to unemployment insurance to housing assistance.
“A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.
— A collaborative research project between the University of Texas and the University of Toronto published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the Red state preference for deregulation and a lack of oversight:
“…explained 9.2% of an enrollee’s odds of receiving prolonged opioids… The correlation between a county’s Republican presidential vote and the adjusted rate of … prolonged opioid use was 0.42 (P<.001). In the 693 counties with adjusted rates of opioid prescription significantly higher than the mean county rate, the mean Republican presidential vote was 59.96%, vs 38.67% in the 638 counties with significantly lower rates.”
— Cancer alley is alive and well in Texas and Louisiana thanks to Republican governments’ in those states refusal to enforce environmental regulations that would keep carcinogens out of the air and water.
— A child living in Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from gunshot than a child in Massachusetts because Republicans in Mississippi refuse to adopt rational, constitutional gun control regulations like Massachusetts has had for decades.
— Obesity and the diabetes, heart disease, and strokes associated with it are vastly more prevalent and thus more deadly in Red states than Blue states because so many more people are living in poverty in Red states and must eat junk food because it is cheaper than healthy food.
— Twenty-nine states, encompassing virtually all the nation’s Red states, have no state-level workplace safety agencies; those only exist in 21 mostly Blue states. As a result, Red Wyoming has 10.4 workplace deaths per 100,000 workers while Blue Rhode Island only has 1.0 deaths per 100,000 workers.
“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people” wrote the researchers about unnecessary/early deaths in America.
When The Washington Post looked into the differences between Red and Blue states, what they found was shocking.
For example, noted the authors:
“Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.”
While it would be easy and glib to say that Republican politicians want the citizens of their states to die young, the simple truth is that they don’t care: their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states and keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low.
Author Mark Jacob noted on Xitter:
“Voting for Republicans is like eating poison.”
In fact, eating poison is a choice. Most people trapped in Red states, though, don’t have the means or ability to move to a Blue state because they’ve been denied a good education, are saddled with medical debt, and/or haven’t made enough at their work to afford the transition.
Blue states, for their part, are fighting back on behalf of their citizens. As Bernie’s poverty advisor Nikhil Goyal wrote for The New York Times a few months ago:
“Fourteen [Blue] states have adopted a state-level child tax credit, with many featuring a fully refundable provision so that families with little to no income can benefit. This year, New Mexico has expanded free preschool seats and made child care free for families earning up to four times the federal poverty rate — roughly $120,000 for a family of four.
“In the upcoming fiscal year, Minnesota will pour more than $250 million of additional funding into early childhood education to reduce the costs of child care and create thousands of new preschool slots. This includes $10 million to supplement funding of the federal Head Start program, which serves children up to the age of 5 and should be bolstered by states.
“Today, nine [Blue] states have universal free school breakfast and lunch on the books. Just last month, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, established a $20 million initiative that will help fund grocery stores in food deserts.”
But every action draws a reaction, as Isaac Newton was quick to point out. Republicans are now trying to do to Blue states — to all of America — the same damage they’ve done to Red states over the past 40 years.
In the sixteen months since Republicans took control of the US House of Representatives, child poverty in America has doubled. This is because Republicans in the House refused to renew programs Democrats put in place providing health care, food assistance, housing support, the child tax credit, and subsidized child care: all have now expired.
In the past eleven months, since Republicans in Congress refused to act, 3.2 million children lost access to healthcare, 70,000 childcare and preschool programs have closed, and the child tax credit has expired. So have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments. As of last November, 10,046,000 Americans have been kicked off Medicaid, nearly all in Red states.
And it’s all intentional.
Republicans will proudly tell you it’s necessary to keep taxes low for their morbidly rich donors, and to prevent poor people from becoming “lazy.” Speaker “Moscow Mark” Johnson will tell you that it’s the Christian way, just like trashing queer people and forcing 10-year-old rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term.
Welcome to the 2024 GOP and their plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” so they can drag America back to the 19th century.
Mark Jacob was right about the poison part. But instead of Republican voters eating it, their politicians are determined to force it down the throats of all of us, our children, and our grandchildren.
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fla college profs leaVING? inflation rising?
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the imagery is dark. The words are defiant. The message is dystopian. An ad for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis‘s presidential campaign, currently “in turmoil,” features the First Lady of Florida, Casey DeSantis, issuing a warning: “They’re coming after our children.”
The ad never quite says who is coming after the kids, but the video (below) includes clips of President Joe Biden and former Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the war on COVID and the now-retired Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
While it was first released over the summer, it received little attention. Casey DeSantis on Friday reposted her “Mamas for DeSantis” ad. It comes in the wake of the alleged ménage à trois sex scandal involving an unnamed woman who has accused Christian Ziegler, the head of the Florida Republican Party of rape. His wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, who reportedly confirmed the consensual three-way sexual relationship, is Casey DeSantis’ “best friend,” according to Florida Politics publisher Peter Schorsch.
“In America, we’ve witnessed a lot and put up with enough,” Casey DeSantis says in a voiceover at the start of the two-and-a-half minute video.
“We’ve been forced into silence,” she charges, amid a baby crying and a COVID mask being put over a child’s face. “Into compliance.”
“Told that we must ‘trust the science,'” DeSantis continues, in a direct attack on Dr. Fauci, showing him speaking during the height of COVID in the Trump administration.
READ MORE: ‘Significant and Imminent Threat’: Trump Gag Order Largely Upheld by Appeals Court
And in an attack on LGBTQ children and adults, she says: “We’ve been told that we must deny truth. Back down. And look the other way.”
“Enough is enough. When you come after our kids, we fight back. Because there’s nothing we won’t do to protect our children,” she says.
Seconds later, the video shows President Joe Biden declaring, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”
“We will not allow you to exploit their innocence to advance your agenda. We are no longer silent,” Casey DeSantis declares. “We are united. We have finally found our fighter.”
Casey DeSantis praises her husband, saying he will do for America what he did for Florida: “Schools: opened. Parents’ rights: defended. School choice: universal. Critical race theory: prohibited. DEI: stopped. Child mutilation: illegal. Girls’ sports: saved. Communities: protected. Our economy: growing. VIA INFLATION? And freedom: guaranteed.”
READ MORE: ‘Dystopian’: Potential Trump Cabinet Picks Send ‘5-Alarm’ Shock Waves of Terror
In the section where President Biden says, “Our nation’s children are all our children,” Casey DeSantis doesn’t explain that those words came from a White House celebration honoring Teachers of The Year from across the country. The President was praising an Oklahoma Teacher of the Year whose district includes students who speak 62 different languages, so she had to work hard to ensure everyone felt included. She had said, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.”
Nor did DeSantis acknowledge that Governor DeSantis’ performance for children has been poor.
The Florida Policy Institute, which says it is “an independent, non-partisan, and non-profit organization,” in September warned “368,728 youth aged 20 and younger” have been cut from Medicaid. “Because Florida has not expanded Medicaid, the vast majority of those losing insurance during this time have been children, parents, young adults, and new mothers.”
Florida ranks 35th in child well-being (with 1 being the best), according WUSF, citing the Kids Count Databook from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Some critics on social media blasted Casey DeSantis’ remarks.
“Republicans refused to extend child tax credits that pulled 2 million children out of poverty. They resist the idea of free school lunches. Yet they come up with bullshit about their opponents ‘coming after our children.’ Yes, we’re coming after them, to give them a sandwich,” wrote former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob.
READ MORE: Jobs Report Forces Fox News to Admit Biden Economy ‘A Lot Stronger Than Anybody Understands’
Watch the Casey DeSantis video below or at this link.
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something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.
If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.
It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.
Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.
A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.
And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.
And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.
That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.
The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).
They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.
This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.
That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetent --> malicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”
Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:
“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”
And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.
None of this is new and none should be surprising.
In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology*published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:
“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”
The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:
“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”
It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.
Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for theJournal of Epidemiological Public Health(JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”
They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”
The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:
“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”
Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.
— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.
— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.
— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.
— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.
— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.
— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.
Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.
And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.
As my colleague Chauncey DeVegapoints out:
“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”
While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.
The Republican Party, as I noted lastyear, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.
This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.
America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.
And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.
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red state brain drain
many liberal and progressive pundits have been predicting a "brain drain" from red states — skillful, college-educated doctors, university professors and teachers leaving because of oppressive MAGA policies. OB-GYNs are worried about draconian anti-abortion laws; teachers and librarians are under attack from the far-right Moms for Liberty.
The New Republic's Timothy Noah, in an article published on November 22, emphasizes that the "brain drain" from red states isn't something that may or may not happen in the future — it's already underway.
"Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies," Noah reports. "Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of 'divisive concepts' about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers."
Noah continues, "The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas, but the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse."
Noah cites specific examples, including doctors Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint — a same-sex married couple who left deep red Oklahoma and moved to Washington, D.C. to get away from Republican anti-abortion and anti-contraception activities as well as book bans in their former state
"Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint are two bright, energetic, professionally trained, and public-spirited women whom Washington is happy to welcome — they both quickly found jobs —even though it doesn't particularly need them," Noah explains. "The places that need Kate and Caroline are Oklahoma and Mississippi and Idaho and various other conservative states where similar stories are playing out daily. These two fortyish doctors have joined an out-migration of young professionals — accelerated by the culture wars of recent years and pushed to warp speed by Dobbs — that's known as the Red State Brain Drain."
School teacher Tyler Hallstedt, according to Noah, left Tennessee for Michigan because of GOP education policies. And teachers in Texas, Noah notes, have been "quitting at a rate that's 25 percent above the national average," while South Carolina has "teacher shortages in 17 subject areas this school year, more than any other state."
READ MORE:Moms for Liberty are 'blaming everyone but themselves' for brutal election losses: columnist
"With the sole exception of Texas," Noah explains, "red states are bleeding college graduates. It's happening even in relatively prosperous Florida. And much as Republicans may scorn Joe and Jane College, they need them to deliver their babies, to teach their children, to pay taxes — college grads pay more than twice as much in taxes — and to provide a host of other services that only people with undergraduate or graduate degrees are able to provide. Red states should be welcoming Kate and Caroline and Tyler and Delana. Instead, they're driving them away, and that's already costing them dearly."
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Donald Trump could lose next year’s president election. He could be prosecuted. He could serve time in prison (though that part seems rather unlikely). But all things being equal, none of it will matter. His followers will simply move on. There’s always another demagogue ready to tell lies....
As long as the conditions remain the same, we can expect Republicans to mourn him, then forget him. Donald Trump, after all, was never a cause. He was always a symptom. The conditions will endure.
If you change conditions, however, you create opportunities to change the way that some Republicans – not all; don’t be daft – think about democratic politics. If you can change that, you’ve changed pretty much everything. You have, as they say, effected a “paradigm shift.”
For many Republicans, democratic politics isn’t a solution to shared problems. It’s a problem, the problem. It produced a Black president, after all. All things being equal, with a gap growing between the .1 percent and 99.9 percent, with 40 years of economic policies that have immiserated the middle class, what’s the point of democracy when autocracy could have prevented Barack Obama from happening?
If you change conditions, however, you create opportunities to change the way that some Republicans – not all; don’t be daft – think about democratic politics. If you can change that, you’ve changed pretty much everything. You have, as they say, effected a “paradigm shift.”
You can’t make a fascist less fascist. But you can buy him off.
That’s what Joe Biden is doing.
According to Tim Noah, of The New Republic, the people benefiting most from investments allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act live and work in states that, in 2020, went to Donald Trump by a mile.
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“In North Dakota, which Biden lost to Trump by 34 points, and where Biden’s net approval rating was negative 46 percent in March, according to a Morning Consult compilation, personal income during the first quarter of 2023 rose 11 percent over the previous year." He added:
“In Nebraska, which Biden lost by 20 points, and where Biden’s net approval rating in March was negative 36 percent, income rose 11.1 percent. In Montana, which Biden lost by 16 points, and where Biden’s net approval was negative 21 percent, income rose 8.3 percent. In South Carolina, which Biden lost by 12 points, and where Biden’s net approval was negative 23 percent, income rose 6.8 percent. All these increases in personal income exceeded the national average, which was 5.1 percent.”
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi did a segment based on Noah’s reporting. But, as I expect from his employer, he focuses on the wrong things.
“Republicans went looking for a pat on the back even after voting against the funding that made those projects possible,” Velshi said. “Republicans vocally dragging Biden’s economic policies yet bragging about funding and nationwide economic victories that happen does not make them hometown heroes. It simply makes them hypocrites.”
He’s missing the point.
That the Republicans are taking credit for Bidenomics tells us that they believe their constituents want it. Constituents want roads and bridges. They want higher incomes. They want prosperity. And if they want this much, they’ll want more, which is what we should pay attention to.
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YIKES SEE RED STATES 2 BILLS ON DARK MONEY, VOTER SUPPRESSION, PROPOSITION EG
sludge
in addition to an expansive push this year to restrict voting access, conservative lawmakers in at least 24 states want to make it more difficult for citizens to put initiatives on the ballot,according to a count from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a progressive nonprofit organization that supports ballot measure campaigns.
Voters across the country approved 39 citizen-initiated measures in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic posed unique challenges for initiative proponents, particularly regarding signature collection for measures to qualify for the ballot. In several states, lawmakers sought court opinions on electronic signature gathering, delaying or halting initiative efforts ahead of the general election.
The increased use of citizen initiatives to enact popular policies including codifying voting rights and ballot access, expanding Medicaid, decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana, and increasing the minimum wage has state lawmakers—primarily in Republican-controlled legislatures—working to prevent their constituents from voting on policies many elected officials oppose.
“Since 2016, we’ve seen a direct ramp-up of strategy, and a number of bills introduced to create barriers to accessing the ballot measure process or to increase restrictions,” Corrine Rivera Fowler, policy and legal advocacy director for BISC, told Sludge.
This year, lawmakers in Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, and several other states have introduced or are considering proposals to tighten statewide ballot measure laws. Most of the states where these bills have been proposed have legislatures controlled by Republicans.
The citizen initiative is a direct democracy reform born out of the Progressive Era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to counter government corruption, corporate monopolies, and concentrated power. Populist movements in the Midwestern and Western states that had coalesced around farmer and worker rights led the charge to give the people this check on their government in the early 1900s.
South Dakota was the first state to enact the process, followed by Utah, Oregon and Illinois. In recent years, lawmakers in some of these same Midwestern and Western states have worked to expand barriers to the citizen initiative process using a variety of tactics including increasing signature collection requirements, restricting time allotted to collect signatures, enacting single-subject rules that leave measures open to court interpretation, and increasing the voter approval threshold from a simple majority to a minimum of 60 percent.
Over the last decade, conservative politicians have escalated their efforts to limit citizen participation in the democratic process, largely in response to constituents approving policies that lawmakers refuse to consider.
This year, state representatives in Arkansas, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota introduced legislation that would raise the threshold for approval of ballot measures to three-fifths (60 percent), while Florida legislators hope to raise the bar to a 66 percent supermajority. Mississippi lawmakers have proposed a single-subject rule, and Republicans in Idaho, Utah and Virginia introduced other restrictive measures.
Idaho Lawmakers Respond with Restrictive Rules
Voters in Idaho approved a citizen-initiated ballot measure to expand Medicaid in 2018 with 62 percent of the vote. In every legislative session since, the Gem State’s most conservative lawmakers have proposed changes to the process, introducing more than a dozen legislative items since 2019.
Idaho already has one of the most restrictive ballot measure laws—in the more than 100 years since Idahoans gained the right to propose initiatives and referendums, only 37 measures made it to the ballot. Fewer have passed.
Following conservative education reform bills passed in 2011 by the Republican-controlled legislature, signed into law by Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and supported by Republican state schools Superintendent Tom Luna, teachers unions organized a successful effort to reject those laws via three citizen initiatives in 2012.
In 2013, GOP lawmakers wasted little time enacting legislation governing signature collection. Idaho’s current law reflects those changes, mandating petitioners gather signatures from 6 percent of qualified voters in 18 of the state’s 35 legislative districts.
On the heels of voters approving the Medicaid expansion initiative in 2018, Republican representatives again responded by further regulating the process with restrictions including reducing time allotted for signature gathering, increasing the percentage of signatures needed in each district, and nearly doubling the total number of districts in which signatures would be required. That legislation, passed by the state GOP-led House and Senate, would have all but killed the citizen initiatives in the state were it not for Reclaim Idaho, a grassroots, volunteer-led organization behind the Medicaid expansion ballot measure. The group successfully launched a bipartisan campaign calling on Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, to veto the bill.
Professing his support for the restrictive reforms, Little “reluctantly vetoed” the legislation, citing potential legal action were he to approve it while issuing a transphobic statement warning of “the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
This year, Idaho Senator Steve Vick, a Republican who has tweeted or retweeted election conspiracy theories, Covid-19 disinformation, and an invitation to supporters to “join me and 1,000,000 others” on the social media app Parler, a favorite of the GOP’s far-right, proposed new regulations for the state’s citizen initiative process. The State Affairs committee last week recommended passage, despite an outpouring of public testimony mostly against the restrictions.
“Let’s be clear: This bill is an attempt to make future grassroots initiatives virtually impossible,” Luke Mayville, co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, wrote in an op-ed published in newspapers around the state. Anticipating legislative approval of the measure despite public opposition, as was the case with the 2019 bill, Reclaim Idaho has once again launched a public awareness campaign urging Gov. Little to veto the bill.
Senator Vick’s proposal would amend the signature requirement from 6 percent of the qualified electors in 18 of the state’s 35 districts to 6 percent of electors in all 35 districts without increasing the timeframe for signature gathering. Additionally, SB 1110 has an emergency clause that would make the changes effective immediately, meaning it would directly impact initiative efforts for any upcoming elections.
“The bill is an unconstitutional restriction on the right of the people to control their government,” former Idaho attorney general and former state Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones, a Republican, wrote, following the committee’s approval of the bill. “After all, Article One of the Idaho Constitution solemnly proclaims that, ‘all political power is inherent in the people.’ It states that the people, ‘have the right to alter, reform or abolish’ the State government ‘whenever they may deem it necessary.’ How can the people possibly exercise that awesome power if they have to go through a power-hungry Legislature in every instance?”
Proponents of the measure—including the Idaho Farm Bureau, which advocated for the restrictive 2019 bill and against Medicaid expansion in 2018—argue rural voters are disenfranchised by the current process. But as Mayville pointed out, “Idaho’s Medicaid expansion initiative received signatures from all 44 counties. In fact, the entire campaign began in rural Bonner County and was bolstered by passionate teams of volunteers in rural communities across the state. The initiative received a majority of the vote in 35 of Idaho’s 44 counties, including dozens of rural counties.”
Mayville calls the current movement to restrict the initiative process a “red state assault” on direct democracy. Noting that conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—to which Senator Vick and at least 14 other acting Idaho state lawmakers have ties—have long pushed for more restrictive initiative laws, Mayville said what unites lawmakers against direct democracy is a variety of issues, not necessarily a party ideology.
“When you look at it nationally… there are all kinds of motives,” Mayville told Sludge. Whether it be citizens organizing initiatives and voting to expand Medicaid, legalize cannabis, or enact a $15 minimum wage, “there is something of a unifying trend. When you look at ALEC and you look at all these organizations, the ballot initiative is scary for them because it threatens to undermine their legitimacy.”
Editorial boards from at least two of the state’s major news outlets have come out in opposition of Senator Vick’s bill, acknowledging the anticipatory nature of the proposed restrictions.
“At least part of the motivation behind this bill is the fear that Idahoans might vote to legalize medical or recreational marijuana by ballot initiative,” the Post Register’s editorial board wrote.
Idaho Senator C. Scott Grow, a Republican, introduced a resolution in January that would effectively preempt both the state legislature and citizens from legalizing via ballot measure adult-use recreational cannabis or any other drug not already legal in the state and approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Not surprisingly, Senator Grow introduced the 2019 bill that would have drastically increased barriers to the initiative process in the Gem State. Senator Grow’s anti-drug measure passed the Republican-controlled Senate this month. Pending House approval, the resolution will appear before voters in 2022 per Idaho law.
“It is understandable that lawmakers don’t want the legalization of marijuana,” the Post Register’s editorial board wrote. “But it is intolerable for them to declare that the people should have no choice in the matter.
“And thinking these restrictions would prevent legalization from landing on the ballot someday is foolish. Marijuana is now a large, profitable national industry,” the board continued. “The marijuana industry can afford to pay an army of signature gatherers to spread out over Clark County and gather the required 6 percent. These restrictions will primarily target grassroots, poorly funded campaigns—the exact sort of campaigns which the ballot initiative is meant to support.”
Citizens, Advocates Fight to Protect Direct Democracy
“This really comes from a place where the ballot measure is a tool for our liberation,” Rivera Fowler said.“Initiatives are the people’s tool to create immediate and impactful change in their own lives, especially when their own leaders are refusing to act on these policies.”
In recent history, ballot measures were used to counter civil rights laws, Rivera Fowler said.
“If you look back at the history of ballot measures, before 2012, there was about a 20-year period of conservative ballot measures and attacks to the progressive community, attacks to labor unions and worker rights, attacks to civil rights, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, gender equality, racial equality, and taxes were all under attack,” she said.
But around 2010, progressive advocates began using the citizen initiative process to enact popular legislation lawmakers resisted.
“What we really like is that we’re seeing voters across all party lines and demographics voting for good policy at the ballot,” Rivera Fowler continued. “It’s not a partisan issue. It’s about making their lives better.”
Voters in Missouri approved Medicaid expansion in 2020, making the state the sixth to greenlight closing the “Medicaid gap” via citizen initiative. Between 1996 and 2020, state voters approved 25 of 27 ballot measures to increase minimum wage. As of 2020, 19 of the 35 states and Washington, D.C. that have legalized medical marijuana did so via ballot initiative.
“It’s clear to us that voters support good policy,” Rivera Fowler said. “We need to continue to protect ballot integrity, protect the ballot measure process by blocking bad legislation, and work to continue to run strong, bold progressive policy through ballot measures.”
Toward that end, Reclaim Idaho intends to pursue an education funding initiative similar to the one halted by the United States Supreme Court at the request of Gov. Little in 2020. Representatives in some states without initiative laws are looking to enact them as well. State legislatures in Hawaii, Kansas, New Jersey, South Carolina, Rhode Island and New York are considering granting their citizens the right to place measures before voters.
“It goes directly against democracy to diminish our power,” Rivera Fowler said. “And lawmakers are only showing their own colors by attempting to make the process harder to access. They’re really doing themselves a disservice because voters will respond.”
Idaho Senator Steve Vick did not respond to a request for comment regarding his proposed legislation.
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Joe Biden and the Democrats are desperately trying to salvage the Child Tax Credit expansion, which pulled millions of children out of poverty.
Reducing child poverty is especially beneficial to families in red states, where poverty is most entrenched. Yet opposition to the expansion has come from Republicans and from red-state Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Pundits and Republicans often claim that Democrats are out of touch with the working class and need to cater more to rural red-state voters. Yet it is red state politicians who are working tirelessly to impoverish children in their own states. In this, as in many things, the GOP is not the party fighting for red states. It’s the party fighting to immiserate them.
READ MORE: 'Absurd but also dangerous': WaPo Editorial Board torches Ron DeSantis' war on COVID-19 vaccines
A most hopeful policy
As I’ve said before in the Editorial Board, the Child Tax Credit — or Social Security for children — was one of Biden’s most successful and hopeful policies.
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) was instituted in 1997 in limited form. But the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 turned the program into what was essentially a sweeping basic-income provision for poor families with children.
Annual payments increased from $2,000 to $3,600 per child under 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6-17. A loophole excluding parents with the lowest incomes was closed. And checks were sent monthly, rather than at the end of the year in a lump sum.
READ MORE: Trans rights, anti-trans laws, and the American imagination
The program only lasted for six months. But in that brief time, child poverty cratered. Food insufficiency went down by a quarter. Three million children were kept out of poverty for each month the program continued.
Then the CTC ran out and could not be renewed because of opposition from Manchin and the GOP. Quickly, 3.7 million children fell back into poverty.
Manchin’s opposition is especially painful because West Virginia has the fourth-highest child poverty rate in the nation; 23.1 percent of children live below the poverty line.
Mississippi has the worst poverty rate for children at 27.6 percent. Louisiana is second with 26.3 percent. Others in the top 10 are Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee. The only blue state on the list is New Mexico, in third place at 25.6 percent.
Reducing child poverty is obviously good in itself. But there is reason to believe that the policy had strong additional benefits, especially in red states where child poverty is most entrenched.
The libertarian Niskanen Center projected that the expanded credit could increase consumer spending by $27 billion since families who received the money were not in a position to save it, but would quickly spend it on necessities. They estimated state and local tax revenues would rise by $1.9 billion.
The consumer spending boost would be greatest overall in large states like Texas, Florida and California. But the states that would benefit most proportionally were those with the lowest average incomes like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.
More like excuses
Despite the fact that red states would likely see disproportionate benefits, Republicans are still opposing the CTC while Democrats are attempting to find some way to renew it.
House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said that Democrats were trying to include the CTC in a bill intended to make it easier for businesses to get a tax write-off for research and development expenses.
Meanwhile, Biden has indicated a willingness to negotiate with Manchin, who has insisted he would block the CTC program unless it has work and income requirements.
Manchin says he’s worried the CTC will lead people to stop working and will encourage laziness. But it’s not clear why we should punish children because of the behavior of their parents. And in any case, there’s no evidence that the CTC reduced employment among those who received it.
On the contrary, employment declined after the CTC was withdrawn, possibly because parents could no longer afford to pay for childcare or lost access to transportation.
Manchin and Republicans have also expressed concerns about the possible inflationary effects of CTC. This is a case, though, where we know that the neediest people — children in poverty — are substantially helped by the policy. An increase in inflation seems like a small price to pay for pulling children out of poverty.
And if spending is a concern, we could couple the CTC with a tax on the wealthy in order to ensure revenue neutrality.
Republican objections sound less like reasons backed by evidence or strong moral principle, and more like excuses.
The politics of cruelty
We have a program that is proven to quickly lift millions of children out of poverty with virtually no downside. Why are people from states with the worst child poverty problems determined to kill that program?
The question answers itself.
Republican politicians have long devoted themselves to entrenching poverty and crushing those in need in their own states.
They oppose the CTC for the same reason that they have fought to prevent Medicaid expansion under the ACA, contributing to rural hospital closures and exacerbating the covid health crisis.
They oppose it for the same reason that they have repealed abortion rights, even though denying women abortion access impoverishes them and their children.
Manchin’s determination to keep children of West Virginia in poverty is in line with the longstanding and successful Republican effort to keep the people of Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and other red states poor, ill and desperate.
Republicans claim to speak for authentic rural America. But the policies they promote very deliberately keep rural people and their children in desperate circumstances.
The people in power in red states keep hold of it by enforcing a brutal hierarchy. Poor people, women and Black people must be constantly crushed and humiliated to keep Manchin and his GOP cronies in office.
The politics of cruelty have a stronghold, and Republicans are not likely to lose power in Mississippi anytime soon.
But we should be clear that their politics are not based on some sort of true understanding of the needs of working people. They’re built on refusing to help those who need help in their state, and on forcing children into poverty.
===
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an 10 22
:{:{In the 2022 midterms, countless Republican candidates — hoping to distract voters from the abortion issue — have been focusing heavily on violent crime and blaming Democrats for the crime rates in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia. Crime was one of the subjects that }:Democratic nominee Joy Hofmeister:{ and incumbent Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt debated on }:Wednesday, October 19:{, when Hofmeister reminded him how high the murder rates are in some red states.}:
Hofmeister told Stitt, “The fact is, the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma, under your watch, than in New York and California. That’s a fact.”}:
Stitt disagreed, not surprisingly. But when podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen tweeted video of that part of the debate, he illustrated her point by also tweeting a study released in March 2022 by the centrist Democratic think tankThe Third Way — which found that “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
READ MORE: How GOP nominees are attacking Democrats as 'soft on crime' with Fox News' help: report
The Third Way reported that “some ‘blue cities, like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have seen real and persistent increases in homicides.” But looking at states, The Third Way reported that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.”
According to The Third Way, “We found that murder rates are, on average, 40 percent higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates — like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas — are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states.”
The Standard Journal, on October 19, published an article attacking The Third Way’s study. But journalist Ronald Brownstein, in an article published by The Atlantic the following day, points to a new study by the Center for American Progress (CPA) that, Brownstein writes, “reinforces” what The Third Way had to say back in March.
Brownstein reports, “Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery…. The data, from CAP, a liberal think tank and advocacy organization, reinforces the message from a study released earlier this year by Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. That report found that per capita murder rates in 2020 were 40 percent higher in states that voted for Donald Trump than in those that voted for President Joe Biden.”
READ MORE: The crime-fighting policy Republicans refuse to acknowledge
According to Brownstein, “The CAP study represents probably the most comprehensive attempt yet to quantify the progressive prosecutors’ effect on crime rates. Looking at the period from 2015 to 2019, for instance, the study found that murder rates increased in a smaller share of cities with progressive prosecutors, 56 percent, than in those with traditional prosecutors, 68 percent, or prosecutors who fell in the middle, 62 percent. The study used a classification system for local DAs developed by a former federal prosecutor who is a critic of the progressive movement.”
READ MORE: Watch: Matt Gaetz's solution to gun violence is to perpetually arm everybody everywhere
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https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/03/new-report-destroys-gop-talking-points-blaming-dems-for-crime-trump-states-have-8-out-of-the-10-highest-murder-rates/
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New Report Destroys GOP Talking Points Blaming Dems for Crime: Trump States Have 8 Out of the 10 Highest Murder Rates
Published on March 16, 2022 By David Badash
Consider these explosive headlines from Fox News over the past several months: “Democrat-run cities overwhelmed by crime surge,” “Murder and crime rates spike in Democrat-run cities – is it a control play?” or, “Democrat-run cities experience record breaking homicide rates.”
Ten days before Christmas last year House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy falsely blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a “crime wave” that’s “spreading across the country.”
“Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror to see what caused the ‘attitude of lawlessness’ spreading across the country,” he wrote. “Democrat politicians defunded police, raised money for rioters, and pushed policies that are soft on crime. They own this crime wave.”
And here’s McCarthy just days ago, again lying, claiming crime is “created by Democrats.”
A new report from Third Way destroys all these GOP talking points – and points out that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.”
About that claim Leader McCarthy made? He should look in the mirror – and at his own district before pointing fingers.
The report notes that “the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”
In fact, in all of 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.”
It gets worse for the GOP.
“8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century,” the report reveals.
The actual facts blow away what an average Fox News watching die-hard Republican voter would think.
“We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts.”
“Mississippi had the highest homicide rate at 20.50 murders per 100,000 residents,” Third Way reports, “followed by Louisiana at 15.79, Kentucky at 14.32, Alabama at 14.2, and Missouri at 14. The national average was 6.5 per 100,000 residents, but the top five states had rates more than twice that high.”
These red states are not generating “murder is out of control” national headlines. They seem to generate no headlines at all. The rest of the top ten were filled out by South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee—all states rarely talked about in breathless media reports about rampant crime in Democratic strongholds.
The report does not even mention guns, which are a massive part of the problem, exacerbated by red state gun free-for-all policies.
And for those Fox News watching die-hard Republican voters who may say Third Way is a left-wing think tank, it’s actually been criticized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. And former bank regulator William K. Black has accused Third Way of being a “group that pretends sometimes to be center-left but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street.”
Read the full report here. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem
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mirror BS deflection an 921
**Donald Trump, Jr.** is falsely claiming President Joe Biden is responsible for the impending deaths of Americans sick with COVID-19 after the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services bought an additional 1.4 million doses of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatments. After discovering that 70% of all monoclonal antibody treatment doses were being ordered by just seven states, HHS announced it is taking over distribution of the life-saving drug.
Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana – states that have some of the highest per-capita cases of COVID-19 and some of the lowest vaccination rates, have been limiting the supply of monoclonal antibody treatments to the rest of the nation, CNN reports.
"Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some," an HHS spokesperson said.
"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."
"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."
That's akin to killing people, Donald Trump, Jr. is suggesting.
"Americans will die because of Biden's despicable decision to punish his political enemies in red states by restricting their ability to secure life-saving monoclonal antibody treatments for all that need them," the former president's son, who is not a medical expert, declared on social media. "Their blood is directly on Joe's hands," he added, disrespectfully refusing to address President Joe Biden by his elected position.
When his father was president Donald Trump, Jr. repeatedly praised the coronavirus vaccine and the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But after Joe Biden became President Trump Jr. switched tactics, repeatedly attacking any efforts to promote vaccination or help keep Americans safe through social distancing measures including masks. At least 17 times since Biden was elected Trump Jr. has railed against "vaccine passports" and other methods of protecting Americans' health from the coronavirus that has already killed over 650,000 people in the U.S.
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trump thinks he gets to be president of just the Republican states — but they’re a total mess
Bob Cesca / SalonSeptember 15, 2020
Donald Trump appears to be seceding from the Union, which is bizarre given his status as the president of it. Make no mistake: Trump appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/economist-paul-krugman-lays-into-the-clueless-gop-s-on-california/
no twt charts
California was a red state before the 1990s, but it has become increasingly Democratic since then and is now one of the states far-right Republicans love to demonize. A resident of the East Coast, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman lays out some of the reasons why Republicans are clueless about California in an informative Twitter thread posted on August 31.
Krugman posted the thread in response to a Politico article that was written by journalist Carla Marinucci and published on August 30. Marinucci’s piece outlines some of the ways in which “California-bashing” is part of the GOP’s strategy this election year — for example, trying to vilify the California native who 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden chose as his running mate: Sen. Kamala Harris, who served as California’s attorney general before becoming a U.S. senator.
“Not that rationality has anything to do with this, but the GOP attack on CA really involves denial of plain facts,” Krugman tweets. “The state has problems — but not the ones conservatives claim.”
While Republicans often attack California from a health care standpoint, Krugman points out that California has been “an enthusiastic and effective adopter of Obamacare, sharply cutting its number of uninsured.” And the economist backs that up with hard data, posting a graph that shows the number of Californians who lack health insurance compared to other states. Way too many Americans still lack health insurance, but as Krugman demonstrates, California’s willingness to fully embrace the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, is why, per capita, it has more people with health insurance than other states.
In other words, California still has a long way to go before it measures up to France, Germany or Italy in terms of access to health care, but it is way ahead of red states like Alabama and Mississippi.
Krugman, however, criticizes California for its lack of affordable housing, but argues that a Trump-like approach would make the crisis even worse.
“CA’s biggest policy problem is housing unaffordability, which can be traced to NIMBYism and hence restrictive zoning,” Krugman writes. “But those are exactly the policies Trump insists we keep, to preserve the Suburban Lifestyle Dream!”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-study-finds-republican-policies-lead-to-shorter-lives/
the United States trails many other developed countries when it comes to life expectancy, but how long one lives can have a lot to do with where that person lives in the U.S. and how conservative its policies are. And Michael Hobbes, in an article for HuffPost, discusses the connection between GOP policies and shorter life expectancy and a new study showing how destructive those policies can be.
“In 2014,” Hobbes notes, “American life expectancy fell backward for the first time in 21 years. U.S. lifespans slid lower for another three years straight before barely ticking upward in 2018.”
This month, the Milbank Quarterly published a study that breaks down the connection between where Americans live and how long they live.
“Conservative policies, the researchers found, are the driving force behind America’s declining lifespans,” Hobbes observes.
according to Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist at Syracuse University and the study’s lead author, “Across a huge range of issues, the more liberal version of state policies predicts longer life expectancy, and the conservative version predicts shorter life expectancy.”
Hobbes explains that the study published in Milbank Quarterly “illuminates the choice before Americans in the 2020 election. While the Republican Party has declined to release a national policy platform for the next four years, the GOP currently holds 29 state legislatures and 26 governorships and has spent decades enacting its preferred policies in conservative states. Over the last decade, a growing body of research has found that these policies are negatively affecting the health of constituents.”
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****
no lnx ya cheap bastard
Los Angeles Times
POLITICS
People live longer in blue states than red; new study points to impact of state policies
States that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have a longer life expectancy.
States such as California that have pursued more liberal policies in education, environment and civil rights have seen a swifter rise in life expectancy than more conservative states. Above, the California Capitol in Sacramento.(Los Angeles Times)
By NOAM N. LEVEY STAFF WRITER
AUG. 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — Weak environmental protections, safety rules and labor and civil rights protections may be cutting lives short in conservative states and deepening the divide between red and blue states, according to a new study on links between life expectancy and state policy.
:{
}:
The report, published Tuesday in the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly, finds that states where residents live longest, including California, tend to have much more stringent environmental laws, tougher tobacco and firearms regulations and more protections for workers, minorities and LGBTQ residents.
Since the mid-1980s, the gap among U.S. states in how long their residents live has widened, reversing decades of progress toward greater equality.
One group of states, mostly in theNortheast and the West, have seen average life expectancies rise relatively steadily, placing them on par with the wealthiest nations of Western Europe. Those states tend to have more stringent regulations.
By contrast, the life expectancy in states with more conservative health, labor and social policies — concentrated in the South and Appalachia — have stagnated in recent decades, according to the study, which adds to growing research on health and political disparities between states.
California has among the highest average life expectancies in the country, at 81.3 years. It also had the most liberal policies in the nation in 2014, the most recent year the study analyzed, according to the system the authors developed to rank states.
Although the study’s authors note that they can’t prove that state policies caused the gap in life expectancy, the correlation is a persistent one across multiple states and several decades.
“It’s disheartening to see another example of a missed opportunity by policymakers,” said David Radley, senior scientist at the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund who studies differences in state health policies and the effects on people’s health. Radley was not involved in Milbank report.
[pix Bakersfield, CA., March 4, 2020 - Jenny Morones, 26, of Bakersfield poses for a portrait on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 in Bakersfield, California. Morones is working mother struggling to raise three children on a low income. Morones fled an abusive relationship and though in her twenties, has dealt with health challenges.Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Morones had health insurance that protected her from financial ruin. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)]
Coronavirus widens healthcare divide between red states and blue states
May 25, 2020
The new report may help shape efforts to rethink government policy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed deep structural weaknesses in the U.S. as well as yawning gaps in many state safety nets.
“The overarching conclusion is clear: States that have invested in their populations’ social and economic well-being by enacting more liberal policies over time tend to be the same states that have made considerable gains in life expectancy,” the study’s authors wrote.
Even before the current public health crisis, life expectancy in the U.S. had been declining, setting America apart from most other wealthy nations. That decline has fueled tough questions about domestic policy.
The opioid epidemic, which has had a devastating impact on regions of the country already hit hard by economic stagnation, has been the focus of a lot of the discussion about that shift.
But Syracuse University sociologist Jennifer Karas Montez, the lead author of the new study, said the impact of opioids may be only part of the story.
“When we look at what is happening with life expectancy, the tendency is to focus on individual explanations about what Americans are doing,” she said, noting obesity and smoking behaviors as well as drug use. “But state policies are so important.”
To assess what role these policies may be playing, Montez and other researchers reviewed more than 120 policies enacted by states over the years and assessed whether each policy choice in each state was more liberal or more conservative.
Policies included housing rules such as rent control; health and welfare policies such as Medicaid eligibility and welfare limits; labor protections such as paid sick leave and minimum wages; and civil rights policies such as gender discrimination bans, hate-crime laws and same-sex marriage.
They also looked at state abortion restrictions, tax policy, education spending, immigration rules and gun control laws.
Each state was ranked by how liberal or conservative its policies overall have been, going back to 1970.
The researchers then compared these findings to trends in life expectancy in all 50 states.
Montez said the trends they saw were unmistakable. They also correlated with important points in the nation’s political history.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, for example, state life expectancies generally converged. That trend began to reverse in the mid-1980s, around the same time that a conservative movement, led by President Reagan and mirrored in many state capitols, became ascendant.
The gap between states accelerated further after 2010, when sweeping Republican victories in state elections shifted policies further to the right in many places.
By 2017, residents of the state with the highest life expectancy — Hawaii — were living on average seven years longer than residents of the state with the lowest life expectancy — Mississippi.
By contrast, the gap between the best- and worst-performing states in 1984 was less than five years.
The gap is not only about policy: States where people live longer tend to be wealthier and have better educated populations, for example.
But Montez noted that decisions by state leaders have helped shape those factors.
“States like Connecticut are investing in their population, investing in schools, setting an economic floor for their workers, discouraging behaviors like smoking that kill people,” she explained. “You have other states like Mississippi and Oklahoma that aren’t doing any of this.”
In Connecticut, whose policies have become steadily more liberal over the last half century, life expectancy increased 5.8 years between 1980 and 2017 to 80.7 years.
In Oklahoma, which has become markedly more conservative, life expectancy increased only 2.2 years over the same period, reaching 75.8 years in 2017.
Identifying which state policies may have the most impact on how long people live is difficult, the researchers concede. But the study points to a group of policies that appear to correlate most closely with longer lives.
These include some unsurprising candidates such as tougher environmental laws, which the authors note may protect people from toxic substances. The authors also found a correlation between longer life expectancy and labor policies that increase economic security, such as a minimum wage.
Tougher gun laws appear to track with longer life expectancies, the study notes, as do stricter tobacco controls.
The authors also point to civil rights laws, which they suggest may protect residents from ill health related to persistent stress.
And they found a correlation between longer life expectancy and better access to abortion, which the study notes may reflect other research that has linked abortion restrictions to women’s poverty and ill health.
Noam N. Levey writes about national healthcare policy out of Washington, D.C., for the Los Angeles Times. He covered passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and has written extensively about the landmark law and reported on its implementation from around the country. A former investigative and political reporter, he is a Boston native and a graduate of Princeton University. He joined the newspaper in 2003 and has reported from Washington since 2006.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/what-happens-when-red-states-pass-blue-states-in-19-cases-were-about-to-find-out/
...Around a week or so ago the Red states bypassed both the Swing and Blue states in cases per capita and are now running around 7% ahead in official COVID-19 cases per capita, with no sign of slowing down. In terms of mortality, the Blue states are still well ahead of both the Swing and Red states; there have been roughly 2.2x as many official deaths per capita in the Blue states than in the Red states. However, this trend line is also looking bad for the Red states as well, if at a slower pace:
- In early April, the death rate was nearly 7x higher in the Blue states.
- By early May that was down to 4.5x higher.
- In early June it was 3.8x higher.
- In early July it was 3.4x higher.
- This week it’s down to 2.2x higher.
Some folks have suggested that the shift might be due to the Red states massively ramping up their testing rates…after all, if the Red states suddenly start testing at twice the rate as the Blue states, it would be reasonable to see their positive COVID-19 case levels increase faster.
This is a fair question, so I decided to check.
...Assuming these are nominal factors, however, the trend is clear: COVID-19 is quickly becoming more of a Red State problem than a Blue State problem even though Blue States are testing residents at a higher rate....
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/guess-which-two-states-have-the-most-newly-unemployed-hint-its-the-two-worst-governors/
no lnx
Daily Kos July 26, 2020
152
There are a lot of awful Republican governors in this country, with only a handful (in Maryland and Massachusetts) taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously from the start. But most have been forced to reverse course in the face of this new wave of infections, even in places like Arizona and Texas, with the Trumpiest governors. Yet two states stand out in their continued refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the pandemic.
Guess which two states just reported the worst job numbers?
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis refuses to shut Florida down despite leading the nation in new cases and deaths. “We’re not rolling back,” DeSantis said. “The negative effects of that would far exceed any gains you’re getting. You have to have society function.” This is what’s happening in Florida:
Bar graph of daily deaths from coronavirus in Florida.
But, DeSantis says, “society has to function.”
Much the same is happening in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp isn’t just refusing to close the state down, but is suing municipalities (like Atlanta) that have done so locally. “It was never to keep our economy shut down until the virus is gone,” he said. “And if the virus comes back, I don’t see us shutting down our economy anymore. We’ve got to figure out how to live with the virus.”
Meanwhile, a lot of people aren’t living anymore because of the virus:
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/stealing-americas-democracy-one-vote-at-a-time/
bill moyers
...pvy setting can't seevid ]
voter Suppression in North Carolina | 'Slay the Dragon (2020) from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo]
in this clip, journalists Vann Newkirk, Ari Berman and others explain how, in 2013, the North Carolina legislature quickly and systematically began rolling back almost every provision that had been passed in the previous 20 years aimed at registering more voters in the state, and particularly African American voters. And it’s not just North Carolina. Across the country, 25 states have passed restrictive voting laws since 2010.
Bill Moyers talked with journalist Dave Daley earlier this year about gerrymandering and the 2020 election.
BILL MOYERS: You describe the United States as a country covered with, quote, “democracy deserts.” What’s a democracy desert?
DAVID DALEY: We talked about supermarket deserts sometimes, you know, places in which it’s really hard to find fresh food. What we are seeing across this nation is an outbreak of democracy deserts as well. Places where it is very, very difficult to ensure that you will have free and fair access to the ballot box or that a majority of citizens are able to translate their votes into a majority of seats.
What you see as you look around the country are blue states, largely coastal states, that are making it easier for people to vote. You see things like automatic voting registration taking hold or expanding days of early voting, [and] making it possible to register online. All of these things that make it simpler and easier for people to vote. None of which, by the way, are partisan. All of these reforms are deeply nonpartisan and the academic studies make it clear that they do not help voters of either party.
What we are seeing is an outbreak of democracy deserts. Places where it is difficult to ensure that you will have free and fair access to the ballot box .
And then you see all of these red states which are going the exact opposite direction. You see voter ID bills. You see toxic, extreme partisan gerrymandering. You see racial gerrymandering. You see purges of voter rolls, 16 to 18 million Americans knocked off of voting rolls in the last two years alone. You see precincts being closed, especially in minority neighborhoods. You see days of early voting being taken away and often those days of early voting are exactly the days that state legislatures know that minority voters are most likely to go to the polls.
You see all of these new voter ID requirements and that they have specifically chosen the forms of voter ID that they believe young and minority voters are least likely to have. I was able to obtain the files, tens of thousands of documents of Thomas Hofeller, the master Republican gerrymandering operative of the last 40 or 50 years after he died. And as I went through his files, and looked at his draft maps that he drew in North Carolina, he had on his computer the addresses of every single college-age voter in North Carolina along with whether or not they had a driver’s license. Because he knew that if they didn’t have a driver’s license they wouldn’t be able to vote. And he drew his districts knowing this. He drew these districts completely aware of who would and would not be able to vote.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/kentuckys-gravy-train-is-now-in-danger-thanks-to-mitch-mcconnells-heartless-greed/
no lnx
Kentucky’s gravy train is now in danger — thanks to Mitch McConnell’s heartless greed
Written by Daily Kos Staff April 26, 2020
As of 48 hours ago, few people knew that Kentucky was the nation’s leading recipient of federal largess, and certainly had no clue just how much the state received compared to the rest of the country. Then, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, started whining about “Blue state bailouts,” and the shit has hit the fan.
Andrew Cuomo
@NYGovCuomo
NY has given $116 billion more to the federal government than we received since 2015.
Kentucky *took* $148 billion more from the federal government than it gave.
Just give NY our money back, Senator McConnell.
Embedded video
Looks like it’s time to reexamine Kentucky’s privileged status.
Blue states have been happy to carry the burden of funding red states for … kinda forever. California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, in particular, have pumped untold hundreds of billions over the last several decades into mostly rural red states.
That dynamic carries forth in states themselves, with large urban centers paying for rural regions, like the upstate-downstate divisions in Illinois and New York, or Philly-central Pennsylvania.
And that would be fine! Liberals are okay with helping out those that are less well off. Liberals have no problem with the federal government subsidizing telephone and mail service to rural areas—services that would not be justified by capitalistic math. We’re okay subsidizing rural health care. We’re okay subsidizing rural education, or opioid treatments, or transportation networks (e.g. roads).
The problem here isn’t our willingness as liberals to help our disproportionately rural Conservative brothers and sisters. The problem is twofold: 1) the bullshit pretense that these same people are “anti-government” and that urban liberals are somehow feeding off the government trough, and 2) the refusal of these same assholes to help when blue states get hit with catastrophe. Instead, Mitch McConnells and his asshole buddies suddenly discover the evils of the budget deficit—a deficit that wouldn’t be so large if Kentucky wasn’t bleeding the country dry.
Still, once upon a time, liberals and Blue states were like “whatever, we’ve got it good, we’re the United States of America. We’ll help.” But McConnell’s toxic brew of greed and cruelty has shattered that pretense.
Conservatives have pretended for far too long that it is they, the “heartland,” the “real America,” that supposedly makes this country great, and it is the cities, the Brown and Black people, the feminists, the liberals, who are dragging it down. Yet it is us paying for their infrastructure, for their health care, for their Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and aircraft carriers and all the things that make their society functional.
They wouldn’t last a week without our assistance. Yet not only is there zero appreciation, but they act like they’re the ones being screwed over.
If Republicans want to finally acknowledge that we are all in this thing together, that we are a United States of America, then great, we can continue being generous.
But that’s not what’s happened. Quite the opposite. Their divisive up democratic talk, in fact, has sown the seeds for a national breakup.
And so now, Kentucky’s largess is firmly in the sights of Democratic lawmakers. No more flying under the radar. No more free ride. I’m going to embed this tweet one more time for effect:
No more red-state bailouts.
So every time Mitch McConnell mentions the deficit? Kentucky first.
Mitch McConnell doesn’t want state bailouts? Kentucky first. Return the $148 billion in extra money it received the last five years.
Mitch McConnell wants to rail against the evil federal government? Then by all means, Kentucky, return that evil tainted federal cash.
Mitch McConnell wants to rail against New York or California? Return the money paid by New York and California taxpayers.
The red-state anti-government scam is fully exposed. No more.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-august-20-2019/
Red State Blues bk argues no real gains b/c structural blocks and ppl bias for status quo
grossman, matt?
refers to website itself but also conserv states: THIS SHD MORPH TO LATTER ON ABORTION, ENERGY AND HEALTH CARE
also a conference
---
More States Join Northeast's Carbon Market
With Congress dormant thus far on climate and the Obama administration's attempted executive action legacy unraveling, the most durable climate policies so far in the United States have been crafted by the states—especially when working together.
The Northeast's carbon market, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), has helped to cut emissions from electricity generation in the nine states involved by 47 percent in the past decade. The revenue generated by the carbon market has also allowed the states to invest in energy efficiency and utility bill assistance for low-income families.
[nice map]
Building on the success of RGGI, a dozen northeastern states hope to finalize plans in early 2020 to launch a Transportation Climate Initiative, tackling their now-largest source of carbon emissions—cars and trucks. RGGI is now set to expand, with New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy bringing the state back into the fold in 2020, reversing the 2011 decision by his Republican predecessor Chris Christie. Partisan division in Virginia's state capital stalled the plan by Gov. Ralph Northam to join RGGI in 2019, but after Democrats flipped the Legislature in November, regional cap-and-trade is likely to extend its reach into the Old Dominion soon. The biggest development for RGGI is Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf beginning the process of joining, since his state's electricity market is larger than most of the other northeastern states combined.
Pollution allowances will be auctioned to fuel suppliers in the region, with a declining cap on the number of allowances each year and the proceeds invested in electric vehicle infrastructure, mass transit, and other improvements designed to curb carbon emissions. As with RGGI, three Republican governors are on board—Massachusetts' Charlie Baker, who is chairing TCI; Maryland's Larry Hogan and Vermont's Phil Scott.
"It's very bipartisan, and I think that it just shows you that rational behavior is still alive in dealing with the threat of climate change," said Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown Law School, which is providing research and other support for the TCI.
Several of those states joined California and Oregon in December in committing to accelerate the shift to zero-emissions trucks and buses. California's Air Resources Board is considering regulations that would require an increasing percentage of heavy-duty truck sales to be zero-emissions.
Who's Missing?
But can the United States fight climate change with only half the states engaged? America's Pledge stresses that, yes, it has the potential. The states, cities, businesses and other institutions in its coalition represent 68 percent of U.S. GDP, 68 percent of the population, and 51 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
But the most carbon-intensive economies in the U.S. are still not part of the fight.
Sixty-five percent of the remaining U.S. coal power capacity, for example, is located in the 25 states that arenot part of America's Pledge, led by Texas, Indiana and Kentucky. The America's Pledge analysis found that the U.S. could still make progress without the help of these states. It calculated that if just a handful of the states that have already shown some willingness to act adopted stronger policies, like those set by climate leaders like California, the U.S. could cut emissions up to 37 percent by 2030, even if the most carbon-intensive states and the federal government refuse to act. But that's not where the U.S. needs to be if it hopes to reach net zero emissions by mid-century, as the science says is necessary to stave off climate change's worst ravages.
"None of the states who are climate leaders would say that what they're doing is enough," said Arroyo. "But you've got to start to do what you can do, and prove the concept that you can do this without breaking the bank, and in fact you can do it while growing your economy, creating jobs and enhancing the quality of life."
RMI's Frisch said the real lesson of the state and local climate effort so far in the United States is that it is essential, but not sufficient.
"The states are the reason for the progress that we've had so far," she said. "And their effort will still be fundamental going ahead. But we can't get where we need to be without the federal government, and the federal government can't do it without the states. We need to have both."
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mirror/whataboutism BS on astroturf (actuLLY it's not even astro, l
just same op-ed in bunch of local papers, which is old RW ploy]
http://leftexposed.org/2018/01/lefts-latest-copy-paste-fake-grassroots-campaign/
pyle trade group?
The Left is notorious for runaway gangbuster campaigns with massive grassroots groundswell support – that are actually not runaway gangbuster campaigns with massive grassroots groundswell support.
The Left’s ideas are awful. Because of this awfulness, their ideas aren’t very popular with We the People. Thus the Left isn’t any good at generating support. But they are absolutely GREAT at making it look like they are generating support.
In these fraudulent endeavors – they have many massive built-in advantages over we who fight for Reality-based public policy solutions that garner actual public support.
The Left gets sympathetic uber-amplification from the hominoid absurdities who infest Hollywood. The late, inordinately great Andrew Breitbart rightly observed: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Our politics is positively polluted by the Leftist claptrap Tinsel Town has for decades been spewing.
The Left gets sympathetic uber-amplification – and social media game-rigging – from the hominoid absurdities who infest the Silicon Valley. Time and again mega-companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook have been caught slanting searches and warping “news” feeds Leftward – and banning and blocking Rightists.
The Left gets TONS of cash from Communist mega-donors. George Soros and Tom Steyer alone have been good for billions of dollars. You can run all sorts of fake campaigns and purchase a whole lot of fake protesters with that kind of coin.
And the Left has received hundreds of billions of dollars in in-kind contributions from their Fellow Travelers in the pseudo-“news” media. No Leftist message is too absurd, no Leftist campaign too fake, no Leftist policy demand too insane. The “news” media qualm-lessly, instantaneously parrots and amplifies. Whatever the Left needs – the media delivers.
Which brings us to Nicholas Pyle, his lobby shop – and the Independent Bakers Association (IBA). Nicholas Pyle’s lobby shop isn’t actually, originally, his lobby shop. It was his father’s, and he inherited it:
“Nicholas Pyle, President, joined his father at Pyle & Associates to expand and diversify the client portfolio. He is a specialist in the areas of trade association management, government relations, issue advocacy and representation in many functional areas of the food industry and strategic defense materials. Over nearly three decades, Nick leads Pyle & Associates’ representation of some of the world’s largest food and metal companiesas well as a national wholesale bakers trade association in government relations.”
For our purposes today, the key phrases therein are “issue advocacy” and “a national wholesale bakers trade association.” The latter is the IBA. In what types of “issue advocacy” is Pyle engaged on behalf of the IBA?
Well, just one kind and type, actually. Pyle – or someone for Pyle – penned a single, solitary editorial. Which was then copied and pasted with appropriate, pertinent Congressman or Senator name changes, over and over and over again. Into email after email after email. And then submitted to newspaper after newspaper after newspaper.
A brief, important aside: I buy groceries by writing for publications. What is almost a universal truth of the publication industry is the fact that just about every outlet wants exclusivity on what you submit. Meaning what you publish with them publishes only with them.
So how did Pyle get away with running the exact same editorial in forty-six different newspapers? Yes, they are mostly local papers, but come on. This is the Age of the Internet. All forty-six are available online. After, I don’t know, two dozen publishes, wouldn’t the subsequent “news”papers have executed a cursory Web search and rejected their versions of the exact same editorial?
You’d have to ask the newspapers if they searched. And if they didn’t, why they didn’t. And if they did, why they run the exact same thing over and over and over again. I can’t tell you what they were thinking (well, I can guess). I can’t think like a Leftist. When I try – my head hurts.
I can tell you that this overt rote repetition – duplicated time and again in the direction of elected official after elected official – creates a faux cacophony for Pyle’s fake messaging campaign. Our elected officials will talk with one another, and one may mention getting yelled at in their local paper about this fake campaign. Another responds “Gee, me too.” A third chimes in with “Wow, me too.”
The chances are pretty slim that these officials will check each other’s editorials – and thereby realize they are all being targeted by the exact same editorial from the exact same person. The chances are pretty good that it will leave all these officials with the false impression that this nonsense non-campaign is an actual campaign, with broad nationwide support.
So you all see how this phoniness works. Here’s hoping our elected officials do too.
Originally Published at [RedState]
===
big week for barr, squelch mueller (recall 19 pp audition memo, unitary exec BS can not obstruct just by def then walk back, then try kill ACA
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-want-to-do-vast-harm-on-health-care-because-its-only-a-right-for-the-rich/
This week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a Republican, announced that his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, just hadn’t gone far enough :{when he asked a federal judge to kill the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:—that is, stuff like asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Barr told an appeals court that he does not want it to merely murder that one provision but, instead, :{will insist that it massacre the ACA’s entire 1,990 pages:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:—death to every clause protecting patients from insurance company abuses, every portion devoted to containing costs, every phrase extending health care to the nation’s young adults and working poor.
It is essential, Barr contends, that the court rip insurance from :{21 million people:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: covered by the ACA health insurance marketplaces and Medicaid expansion; that the court deny insurance to :{2 million young adults:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: covered by their parents’ plans; that the court foreclose substance abuse treatment to :{800,000 Americans:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: suffering opioid addiction.
It is critical, Barr insists, to deprive the ACA’s guarantee of medical insurance access to:{133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:and toincrease medication and premium costs for :{60 million senior citizens on Medicare:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. Also, of course, Barr says, the court must restore the medical insurance caps that bankrupted and killed Americans who suffered diseases that are expensive to treat, like cancer, or whose babies were born prematurely requiring costly long-term care.
Barr is not an outlier. He is the face of a Republican Party that has done everything in its power to rob Americans of ACA benefits every minute of the nine years that the law has existed. :{GOP governors have vetoed the ACA extension of Medicaid:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, denying insurance to millions of low-income working people. When the U.S. House was controlled by the GOP, it voted more than :{50 times to repeal:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: all or parts of the ACA. :{Twenty GOP state attorneys general:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: asked a federal judge to overturn the law after Congress zeroed out its tax penalties for people who refuse to get insurance.
All of this is blatantly mean-spirited because the GOP never produced a plan to replace the ACA health insurance guarantees. In medical terms, it is the opposite of the physician mission to heal. It is Republican machination to harm.
People who drive a Mercedes, :{spend half a million bucks:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: to get their children into high-status universities and lull away weekends at :{$3 million Nantucket beach homes:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: will always have health care. The price is irrelevant to them. Even if denied insurance, they can afford chemotherapy, or the monthly bill for insulin or the cost of a leg broken in a sail-boating accident.
For everyone else, for coal miners and code writers, for registered nurses and Starbucks baristas, for Amazon warehouse workers and independent truck drivers, health insurance is vital. Workers, whether low-income or middle class, don’t have hundreds of thousands sitting around for a heart transplant or repeated cancer treatments or neonatal care.
Before the ACA, health insurance corporations took advantage of this situation. They raised premiums at :{twice the rate of inflation:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. They refused to insure sick people—the people who desperately need insurance, people with inherited conditions and chronic illnesses. Even some :{employer-based insurance plans excluded coverage:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: for certain medical conditions. Insurers dropped coverage when people got sick. They capped coverage—:{so that if $1 million or $2 million—or some other random amount—was spent to save the preemie’s life in the first 18 months:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, the still-fragile baby was uninsured after that.
Uninsured people died of treatable conditions because they couldn’t afford care. Inadequate insurance :{bankrupted families}:. Americans worried incessantly about whether they would be able to afford to maintain their insurance or whether an illness would cost them their coverage.
The ACA cured many of these problems in addition to :{lowering the rate at which the cost of health insurance rose.:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: As it accomplished those things, it became more popular. Its approval rating :{rose from around 40 percent:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: initially to :{51 percent now:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. That’s not great, but it sure as hell is better than the way people felt about insurance before the ACA.
The position of Republicans, however, is that some people just don’t deserve health insurance. It’s similar to saying some children just don’t deserve an education. Or some families just don’t deserve to have a fire department respond to a blaze at their home.
Republicans’ first effort to thwart the ACA was a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality.The U.S. Supreme Court :{ruled that most of the law complied:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: but that the federal government could not force states to expand Medicaid. Under the ACA, the federal government :{initially paid 100 percent, and later 90 percent:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, of what it cost states to extend :{Medicaid coverage to people who earned up to 138 percent of the federal poverty threshold:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, which is about $17,000 for an individual or $35,000 for a family of four.
As a result, Republican governors and lawmakers denied Medicaid to millions of eligible low-income working people and their families.Some Republican governors went so far as to defy the will of the people of their states. In Maine, for example, voters approved expanding Medicaid in 2017 in a :{binding referendum by 59-to-41 percent:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: after the Republican governor five times vetoed Medicaid expansion proposals. :{Even after the referendum and a court decision ordering expansion:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, the Republican governor refused to do it. Not until a Democrat took the governor’s seat this year did it happen. Similarly, Virginia and Kansas got Medicaid extensions only after they elected Democratic governors.
In Idaho and Utah, just like Maine, Republicans are defying the will of the people in their states who passed referendums to extend Medicaid. In Idaho, the Republican-controlled House :{decided to require those to whom Medicaid would be extended:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: to buy insurance on the ACA exchanges instead. The Republican-controlled :{legislature in Utah voted to expand Medicaid only to people earning up to 100 percent:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: of the poverty threshold, instead of 138 percent, and, at the same time, demanded that the federal government reimburse Utah at the 90 percent rate as if the state had properly expanded Medicaid.
In addition, in Idaho, :{the GOP-controlled House voted to require Medicaid recipients to prove they are working:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: to qualify. :{Arkansas was the first state where Republicans imposed this demand, and quickly 18,000 residents lost their insurance:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, either because they didn’t report work or failed to follow complicated rules, which include providing an email address in a state where less than half of residents of some counties have internet access.
Fourteen other states have imposed work requirements or want to, but a federal judge this week told :{Arkansas and Kentucky to stop it.:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:
They :{probably will appeal:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:—at the same time Republican Attorney General Barr is trying to blow up the entire health care law. The message is clear: to Republicans, health care is a right only for the rich; the rest can suffer and die. The GOP Hippocratic oath is: Do vast harm.
This article was produced by the :{:{Independent Media Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
==
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1118
Trump and Republicans in Congress love to demonize government handouts, which, in fact, their own supporters depend on and are increasingly financed by taxpayers in blue states.
The federal program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – what we used to call “welfare” – provides cash assistance to fewer than 1 percent of Americans.
But the Trump administration is proposing to lump many social programs under a new agency with the word “welfare” in its title.
A recent White House report on imposing work requirements, for example, put Medicaid, food assistance, and housing aid into a rebranded program called “noncash welfare.”
Defined this broadly, a large chunk of America relies on welfare. Add in disability benefits, unemployment insurance, and medical benefits, such so-called “welfare” amounts to 17 percentof the average American’s income.
Welfare has become especially unpopular in “red” states that vote Republican and support Trump.
But these same states are often the biggest beneficiaries of government assistance.
Include price supports for agriculture, subsidies for land management and forestry, and defense contractors, and you find that a large portion of the economies of red states depend on federal dollars.
Here’s the irony. Residents of “blue” states send more tax money to Washington than they get back in federal help, while residents of “red” states send less money to Washington than they get back in federal help.
In 2015, for example, New Jersey got back only 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar it sent to Washington. New York got back 81 cents, Connecticut: 82 cents, and Massachusetts: 83 cents.
But when you turn to the red states, it’s the opposite. Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar it sent to Washington. West Virginia: $2.07. Kentucky: $1.90. And South Carolina: $1.71.
Taking the Trump administration’s expansive view of the meaning of welfare to its logical conclusion to include all those benefiting from federal spending, blue states are sending welfare to red states – the same red states that say they don’t like welfare.
Under Trump’s new tax law, blue states will be giving even more welfare handouts to red states. That’s because the law set new limits to the amount of state and local taxes people can deduct from their federal taxable incomes. And since people in blue states pay much more state and local taxes than people in red states, blue-staters will be paying that much more in federal taxes.
Which means an even bigger transfer from blue state residents to all those red state Republican voters, whose party despises handouts.
Now, I should add that some of us here in blue states don’t mind giving red states a bigger helping hand. The vast majority of Americans also oppose cuts to programs that aid the poor, elderly and sick. Because most Americans figure we’re all in this together, and those of us who can do so ought to help out those in need.
We don’t regard it as welfare handouts. We call it social insurance. Indeed, social insurance is needed and used by almost all of us, when you include Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. And even programs relied upon mostly by the poor end up helping a large portion of us because roughly one-third of all Americans are poor at some point in their lives.
So remember, attacks on so-called welfare are just another means of attacking the things most of us need, and dividing the country into us and them.
In reality, voters in red states are as dependent on the federal government as voters in blue states, and, truth be told, even more dependent.
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no lnx
The States Attacking Obamacare Pre-Existing Condition Protections Would Be Most Harmed by Their Repeal
These efforts will disproportionately hurt the people of the states that are now suing to strike down the law's protection
By Joan McCarter / Daily Kos July 18, 2018, 6:15 AM GMT
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/states-attacking-obamacare-pre-existing-condition-protections-would-be-most-harmed
Gov. Mike Parsons of Missouri. The state's pre-existing condition rate is over 35 percent.
At some point you would think that the leadership in Republican states would just get over their hatred of President Barack Obama and realize that the Affordable Care Act has helped them. Or failing that, the people Obamacare has been helping would realize they have shitheads for leadership, and vote them out. Because here we go again—the efforts of Republican leadership in conservatives states will disproportionately hurt the people of the states that are now suing to strike down the law's protections, reports Kaiser Health News.
"These states have been opposed to the ACA from the beginning," said Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "They’re hurting their most vulnerable citizens."
Looking at data from insurance companies and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, KHN determined which states have the highest rates of adults with pre-existing conditions, and 9 out of the 11 have signed on to the lawsuit to strike down the ACA. West Virginia has the highest rate, with 36 percent of adults under age 65 living with preexisting conditions. Probably 1 in 3 of those would have a hard time buying insurance on the individual market of their state if Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who joined the legal challenge against the ACA, were to prevail. There's one more argument for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to oppose the nomination ofBrett Kavanaugh, who's proven hostile to the ACA, to the Supreme Court.
:{
}:
A reminder of who's at risk here: "Common conditions that led insurance companies to deny coverage included high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression, among many others. Some people were denied for having acne, asthma or for being pregnant." That encompasses at least a quarter of all adults who are under age 65—more than 50 million Americans.
That's just one reason so many people—three-quarters of Americans—say keeping these protections is "very important," including majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
If Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski want their refusal to go along with Obamacare repeal and their repeated claims that they want to see these protections maintained to mean anything at all, to have any lasting effect, they've got to oppose this nomination.
==
ref
https://khn.org/news/states-attacking-aca-would-hurt-most-if-shield-on-preexisting-conditions-were-axed/
If the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting medical conditions are struck down in court, residents of the Republican-led states that are challenging the law have the most to lose.
“These states have been opposed to the ACA from the beginning,” said Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “They’re hurting their most vulnerable citizens.”
Twenty Republican state attorneys generaland governors challenged the constitutionality of the ACA in federal court in February. Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Justice made the unusual decision not to defend key portions of the law against this legal challenge.
The states’ lawsuit argues that because Congress eliminated the Obamacare tax penalty for not having insurance coverage, effective next year, the entire law is unconstitutional. By extension, the suit calls on federal courts to find the health law’s protections for people with preexisting conditions unconstitutional — and Sessions agrees.
Nine of the 11 states with the highest rates of preexisting conditions among adults under 65 have signed onto the lawsuit to strike down the ACA, according to data from insurance companies and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2015 data, the most recent available, were analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Those who support the lawsuit contend that there are other means of protecting people with preexisting conditions.
“If a court strikes down the constitutionality of the ACA, there are ways to repeal and replace without Arizonans with preexisting conditions losing their coverage,” said Katie Conner, a spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
Conner said her boss, who is party to the lawsuit, believes preexisting conditions should “always be covered.” In Arizona, more than 1 in 4 adult adults under 65 have a preexisting condition, according to the data.
The state with the highest rate of adults with preexisting conditions is West Virginia — 36 percent of those under age 65. That means that about 1 in 3 of them could have a hard time buying insurance through the individual marketplace without the ACA protections.
The office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who joined the legal challenge against the ACA, declined to comment. But a spokesman for Morrisey’s re-election campaign told PolitiFact last month that “help should be provided to those who need it most, including those with preexisting conditions.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit “are paying lip service to these critical protections for people, but they are in fact engaged in a strategy that would get rid of those protections,” said Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “Frankly, it’s hard to square what they’re saying on the one hand and what they’re arguing in the courts on the other.”
According to a poll released in June, also by the Kaiser Family Foundation, three-quarters of Americans say that maintaining protections for people with preexisting conditions is “very important.” This includes majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
Before the health law was adopted, insurance companies routinely denied coverage to millions of people with preexisting conditions who purchased insurance through the individual marketplace. If they didn’t deny coverage outright, some health plans charged consumers exorbitant premiums, or offered policies that excluded coverage for pricey conditions. (Although many people got insurance through their employers or public plans that covered preexisting conditions, they could have been left vulnerable if their employment status or other circumstances changed.)
The ACA ended those practices.
Common conditions that led insurance companies to deny coverage included high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression, among many others. Some people were denied for having acne, asthma or for being pregnant.
The KFF analysis estimated that at least 27 percent of adults under 65 — more than 50 million Americans — had at least one preexisting condition that would have jeopardized their coverage pre-ACA.The foundation said its estimates were an undercount because some diseases that insurers cited when declining coverage are not in the survey data. Also, each insurance company set its own rules and conditions for denials, making accurate counts of those who could be affected hard to nail down.
Less precise estimates by other researchers and the Department of Health and Human Services show that up to half of all adults under age 65 have at least one preexisting condition.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/north-carolina-energy-bill-2435815592.html
Red States Lead on Renewables
A sweeping bipartisan bill to reform energy policies and encourage the growth of renewable energy was introduced by conservative lawmakers in the North Carolina legislature this week. The consensus bill, the result of months of negotiations, would grant utilities' request to reform various renewable energy laws, but includes incentives for the solar industry, including solar rebates and third-party leasing.
The bill will go to a full vote in the House this week, where it could face blowback from climate change skeptics despite its significant Republican support. North Carolina isn't the only red state pushing the envelope on renewable energy: as a new piece in the New York Times points out, "some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election."
The measure passed House Finance Tuesday, shortly before Gov. Roy Cooper issued a statement supporting it:
"This legislation will help North Carolina stay ahead with lower cost renewable energy that protects our environment and grows our economy. I urge the Legislature to pass it and I commend everyone who worked so hard to get this agreement," Cooper wrote.
Over the last four years, North Carolina has become the nation's second largest solar market, with California first.
As reported by WRAL:
"Among other things, the measure would lift the state's ban on third-party leasing, allowing customers to rent the equipment for rooftop and community solar arrays, substantially reducing the upfront cost. It would also promote net metering, which gives the owner of a residential or commercial property with solar panels a bill credit for the retail cost of energy he or she puts back onto the grid, and it would include a solar rebate program for residential customers. And it would mandate a study on energy storage technology for intermittent sources like solar and wind."
For a deeper dive:
NC bill: AP, WRAL, News & Observer, Charlotte Business Journal, North State Journal. Red states & renewables: New York Times
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10/16 fight, murray coal v musk and
A long-awaited campaign to rebrand fossil fuels called Fueling U.S. Forward made its public debut at the Red State Gathering 2016 on Saturday, where the organization's President and CEO Charles Drevna gave attendees the inside scoop on the effort, and confirmed that the campaign is backed financially by Koch Industries.
Back in February, Peter Stone first reported in the Huffington Post that a $10 million-a-year effort was proposed by a Koch Industries board member, James Mahoney, and Mr. Drevna, aiming “to boost petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles.” In early August, the Fueling U.S. Forward website launched, and on Saturday, the first public comments were made about the campaign by Mr. Drevna, and they revealed a lot about how the Koch-backed initiative is working to re-frame fossil fuels.
“We need a sustainable energy to ensure the future of the country,” Mr. Drevna told the audience.
The source of that energy? That which Mr. Drevna labeled “reliable, abundant, efficient and sustainable fuels.”
“Folks, that's of course the fossil fuels,” he immediately added.
Never mind that fossil fuels don't align with any dictionary definition of “sustainable,” as oil, gas and coal reserves are limited to what's buried in the ground, unlike renewable sources of energy. Technically speaking, fossil fuels are the opposite of sustainable energy sources — but that fact did little to slow Mr. Drevna down as he made what he called the “pro-human” case for burning fossil fuels.
The top line takeaway from Mr. Drevna's comments is that the Koch-funded Fueling U.S. Forward is an effort to rebrand fossil fuels, focusing on the “positive” sides of oil, gas and coal.
The new initiative comes at a time when the impacts of climate change are becoming more difficult to ignore. 2016 is already on track to be the hottest year ever recorded, a mid-year climate analysis from NASA reported, and unusual storms, like the torrential rainfall that struck the Gulf Coast over the past few days causing historic flooding, have become more frequent.
For its part, Fueling U.S. Forward wants to talk not about statistics, facts and figures, but to reach people's emotions.
“We've got to take this to the emotional and personal level,” Mr. Drevna, a former D.C. lobbyist and Sunoco executive, told the crowd. “Oil and natural gas, they're not the fuels of the past and maybe the present or a necessary evil. They are the future.”
In Peter Stone's investigation for Huffington Post, many familiar with the early workings of the project that would grow into Fueling U.S. Forwarddescribed it as an effort to bolster public opinion of fossil fuels and to combat electric vehicles.
Charles Drevna's new organization appears for now largely focused on the first half of that equation. Asked after his talk if Fueling U.S. Forward planned to campaign against electric vehicles, Mr. Drevna said that his organization was focused on the positives of fossil fuels. Drevna confirmed that he was working with Mr. Mahoney and that Fueling U.S. Forward had indeed received funding from Koch Industries.
Koch Vs. Clean
Koch Vs. Clean, a DeSmog microsite launched today, takes a closer look at the Koch network's efforts to promote the continued burning of fossil fuels and undermine clean energy innovations and electric vehicles, and the role that Mr. Drevna and a handful of others are playing in that offensive.
Throughout the day at Red State Gathering, panelists from Koch-linked organizations repeatedly cited Tesla Motors as an example of government subsidies gone awry, a talking point that seemed aimed to resonate with fiscal conservatives at the RSG 2016.
There's good reason for the oil industry to fear the rise of American electric vehicles. “Volkswagen AG, in an attempt to recover from its emissions-cheating scandal, has said it will create 30 new electric models within a decade,” E&E News recently reported. “General Motors Co. has invested $500 million in Lyft, the ride-hailing service, and intends for Lyft's drivers to pick up passengers in GM's new electric compact, the Chevrolet Bolt.”
The Kochs' newest effort doesn't openly oppose electric vehicles or renewable energy technologies, but tries to frame them as uniquely dependent on government subsidies (despite the fact that the fossil fuel industry benefits from quadruple the amount of government subsidies as the renewable energy industry, according to the International Energy Agency).
===
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opinion/despair-american-style.html?_r=0
...
been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.
Paul Krugman
Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the heartland.
But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?
If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.
For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.
You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.
==
http://www.alternet.org/print/10-republican-red-states-mooch-coastal-liberal-states
September 17, 2014 |
One of the most hilarious talking points coming from far-right Republicans and the Tea Party is that when “red states” like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are asked to bail out California or Massachusetts, that’s when they will finally become “fed up with socialism” and secede from the Union once and for all.
The problem with that meme is that it has no basis in reality: the more prosperous and Democrat-leaning areas of the United States are likely to be subsidizing dysfunctional “red states,” many of which are suffering from insufficient tax revenue and an abundance of low-wage workers who don’t have much to tax. Tea Party Republicans like to point out that poor cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Camden, New Jersey are run by Democrats, but they neglect to mention that some of the most affluent parts of the United States—from Manhattan to the Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to Cambridge, MA to Seattle to Chicago’s North Shore suburbs—are dominated by the Democratic Party. People in those heavily Democratic areas pay a lot of federal income taxes, and quite often, their tax dollars go to red states.
Earlier this year, the personal finance website WalletHub.com conducted an in-depth study of the amounts individual states are paying in federal taxes [3] compared to the amounts they are receiving. WalletHub analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Commerce Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. WalletHub’s research demonstrates that, as a rule, the states that are the most likely to rail against “big government” are the most likely to be benefiting from it.
A few of the states in WalletHub’s study that were receiving the most tax revenue from the federal government are states that President Barack Obama won in 2012 (most notably, New Mexico and Hawaii), but most were hardcore “red states.” And most of the states that, according to WalletHub, are taking less from the federal government than they are paying in are “blue states” that Obama won in both 2008 and 2012, including California, Massachusetts, Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Minnesota. WalletHub’s research bears out comparable figures released by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in the past: analyzing IRS data, Tax Foundation has found, more than once, that red states are likely to be the biggest recipients of federal tax money.
Below are 10 red states that take full advantage of the federal government and would be much worse off without the “coastal liberal elites” they love to complain about.
1. Mississippi: Mississippi is one of the most Republican states in the U.S.: Republicans dominate the state government, and not since Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 has a Democrat carried Mississippi in a presidential race. “Fiscal responsibility” is a recurring theme in Mississippi politics, where Democrats are often characterized as people who couldn’t balance a budget if their lives depended on it. Yet the reality is that Mississippi is one of the most blatant examples of a state receiving more federal tax money than it gives [4]: WalletHub finds that for every dollar in federal taxes Mississippi pays, it receives $3.07 from the federal government. A 2007 report from the Tax Foundation [5] found that Mississippi was receiving $2.47 from the federal government for every dollar it was paying in.
The fact that Mississippi has a hard time making ends meet without help from Washington, DC stems from being a so-called “right to work” state, meaning it has a very low rate of unionization and plenty of low-wage jobs. Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the country, and Republican policies in that state—hostility to unions, opposition to raising the minimum wage at either the federal or state level, tax breaks for the wealthiest 1% of Americans—will likely keep Mississippi from being a substantial contributor to federal income taxes.
2. Alaska: Alaska didn’t become part of the U.S. until 1959, and since then, it has gone Republican in every presidential race except 1964 (when Alaska favored Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater). A bastion of hard-right politics, Alaska is the state where Sarah Palin was elected governor in 2006. But when it comes to “small government,” Alaska Republicans don’t practice what they preach: according to WalletHub, Alaska receives $1.42 from the federal government for every dollar it contributes. Tax Foundation’s research showed Alaska receiving $1.93 from Uncle Sam for every dollar paid in. Alaska Republicans love to rail against the federal government, but the reality is that Alaska needs federal tax revenue badly [6] in order to function.
Alaska is infamous for its harsh winters, which put considerable wear and tear on the state’s infrastructure—and the money for that much upkeep and maintenance has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is Boston, Santa Monica, Brooklyn, Seattle and all the other places that are full of upscale Democrats Palin considers “un-American."
3. Alabama: Like Mississippi, Alabama is a state that hasn’t given a Democratic presidential candidate its electoral votes since 1976. Alabama is one of the most Republican-dominated states in the U.S., and it is also a state that is very reliant on the federal government. According to Wallet Hub’s study, Alabama receives 37% of its revenue from the federal government [7] and receives $3.28 for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. Tax Foundation’s data showed Alabama receiving $2.03 in federal tax money for every dollar it was paying in.
There are ways in which Alabama could become less reliant on Washington, DC: raising the minimum wage and having a more unionized workforce would generate more income tax revenue. So would raising income taxes on Alabama’s 1%. But Alabama is a so-called “right to work” state, and a workforce that is generally underpaid and overworked isn’t going to generate a lot of federal income tax revenue.
4. Louisiana: In Republican-dominated Louisiana politics, it is fashionable to bash “big government liberals” who live in San Francisco or New York City. But when Louisiana Republicans do that, they are biting the hands that feed them. According to Wallet Hub’s research, Louisiana receives $3.35 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in; 44% of Louisiana's funding, WalletHub says, comes from Washington, DC.
Louisiana, under Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, is another “right-to-work” state, and a state with so many underpaid workers is naturally going to have a lot less income to tax. So instead of hating the “limousine liberals” in Seattle or Boston for voting Democrat, Louisiana Republicans should thank them for all the federal income tax revenue they are getting from them.
5. Indiana: When Barack Obama won Indiana’s electoral votes in 2008, it was an anomaly: Indiana, which went Republican in every presidential election from 1968-2004, is one of the most conservative states in the Midwest and is much more Republican than Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois or Michigan. Pundits have often said that when it comes to politics, Indiana is “more southern than the South.” But the disdain that Indiana Republicans often express for “big government” rings false because according to Wallet Hub, Indiana receives $2.01 from the federal government for every federal tax dollar it contributes and receives 33% of its funding from Uncle Sam. Indiana Republicans can hate coastal Democrats all they want, but without the federal tax revenue Democratic areas generate, Indiana would have a hard time functioning.
6. Montana: Montana has a long history of going Republican in presidential elections. Between 1952 and 2012, Montana went Republican in every presidential race except 1964 and 1992. But for a state that is so conservative-leaning, Montana receives a lot of help from the federal government: WalletHub’s research shows that Montana receives $1.55 from the federal government for every dollar it contributes (the Tax Foundation’s 2007 report found that Montana’s intake from Uncle Sam was $1.92 for every dollar paid). Montana faces the same challenge as Alaska—long, harsh winters that can put considerable stress on its infrastructure—and the idea that Montana could function without tax revenue is pure fantasy.
7. South Carolina: The fact that South Carolina hasn’t gone Democrat in a presidential election since 1976 is a badge of honor to the state’s GOP. And Republican Gov. Nikki Haley once boasted, “I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country.” But that is nothing to be proud of, especially in light of the fact that non-union workers tend to have lower wages and therefore, contribute less tax revenue. The Tax Foundation found that South Carolina was receiving $1.92 from the federal government for every federal tax dollar it was contributing.
Haley doesn’t think much of liberals, but considering that Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota and New York State—all of which Obama won in both 2008 and 2012—aregiving more tax dollars [8] to the federal government than they are receiving, she might want to reconsider and start thanking them for their help.
8. West Virginia: Although West Virginia presently has a Democratic governor (Earl Ray Tomblin) and has a Democratic majority in its state senate (most of them center-right Blue Dogs), it is still a conservative-leaning state with a strong Republican influence. Republicans have carried West Virginia in the last four presidential elections (Mitt Romney won 62% of West Virginia’s vote in 2012), but that doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t receive a lot of help from the federal government: WalletHub described West Virginia as a state that receives $2.22 in federal tax revenue for every dollar it pays, and the Tax Foundation’s figure in its 2007 study was $2.57 received per dollar paid.
Poverty has a lot to do with that: West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the country, with 17.6% of its population living in poverty from 2008-2012 compared to 14.9% nationwide (according to the U.S. Census Bureau). And with so many West Virginians living in poverty, they simply aren’t going to be a major source of income tax revenue [8].
9. Tennessee: One of the ludicrous talking points from Republicans is that the poor aren’t paying enough taxes. Actually, the poor do pay a lot of taxes, from sales taxes to taxes on utilities. But according to Republicans, the poor are freeloaders because they aren’t paying enough federal income taxes—and one way to balance state budgets, they cluelessly argue, is to cut state services and raise state taxes on the poor. Republicans flunk math, however, because someone making $7.25 an hour is going to have a lot less to tax than someone making $30 or $40 an hour. And therein lies the budgetary problem for a so-called “right-to-work” state like Tennessee: too many of its residents are working low-paying, non-union service jobs that generate a lot less sales and other state tax revenue than the unionized jobs Republicans are so bitterly opposed to. Tennessee, according to WalletHub, receives $1.64 from the federal government for every federal tax dollar it contributes—and WalletHub notes that 41% of Tennessee’s funding comes from Uncle Sam.
10. Kentucky: Kentucky, despite having a two-term Democratic governor (Steve Beshear), leans Republican: although Bill Clinton won Kentucky’s electoral votes in 1992 and 1996, that state has gone Republican in every other presidential race since 1980. Mitt Romney carried Kentucky by 22% in 2012, and many of the Democrats who hold office in the Bluegrass State are center-right Blue Dogs. But as widespread as talk of “small government” and “fiscal responsibility” are in Kentucky, WalletHub’s research shows that Kentucky receives $2.39 from the federal government for every dollar it pays. According to WalletHub, 35% of Kentucky’s revenue comes from Washington, DC. And the Tax Foundation found that Kentucky was receiving $1.75 [9] from the federal government for every dollar paid.
===
lcv 2013: Lowest Senate Delegations:
Wyoming 0% · Oklahoma 4% · Idaho 8% · Kentucky 8% ·
Utah 8%
Senate Scores below 10:
Florida Rubio Idaho Crapo · Risch Kansas Roberts Kentucky
McConnell ohio Portman oklahoma Coburn · Inhofe
Pennsylania Toomey South Carolina Scott, T. South Dakota
Thune Texas Cornyn Utah Hatch · Lee, M. Wisconsin Johnson,
R. Wyoming Barrasso · Enzi
---
Lowest House Delegations:
Wyoming 0% · Arkansas 3% · Alaska 4% · Idaho 4% · Montana
4% · Nebraska 4% · North Dakota 4% · South Dakota 4% ·
Kansas 5% · Oklahoma 6% · Utah 9%
House Scores of 0:
Alabama Bachus, S. · Bonner · Roby · Rogers, M. Arkansas
Griffin · Womack California Calvert · Campbell · Issa · LaMalfa ·
McCarthy, K. · McKeon · Miller, Gary · Nunes · Valadao Florida
Buchanan · Crenshaw · Mica · Rooney · Southerland Idaho
Simpson Illinois Schock Indiana Brooks, S. · Walorski · Young,
T. Iowa King, S. Louisiana Cassidy Maryland Harris Minnesota
Kline, J. Mississippi Nunnelee Missouri Emerson North Carolina
Ellmers · McHenry Ohio Johnson, B. · Latta Oklahoma Mullin
Oregon Walden Pennsylvania Murphy, T. South Carolina
Rice Tennessee Black, D. · Blackburn, M. · Roe Texas Barton ·
Conaway · Farenthold · Hall · Olson Wyoming Lummis
===
chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U.S._states
=
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/19/red-states-rank-low-on-u-s-human-development-index/print/
=
alec (not defin)
- **Arizona****(PFAW/CC)** **(*****supplemental*****)**** (CMD/PFAW/CC/Progress Now)** ***NEW*****2013**** (CMD/PFAW/CC/Progress Now/AWF)**
- [New Hampshire(Granite State Progress)](http://www.granitestateprogress.org/sites/default/files/RELEASE%20EXPOSED%20-%20OUTSIDE%20SPECIAL%20INTEREST%20GROUP%20ALEC%20WROTE%20NEW%20HAMPSHIRE’S%20RIGHT%20TO%20WORK%20LEGISLATION.pdf) **(*****supplemental on "Right to Work for Less"*****)**
===
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/secrets_of_the_conservative_media_machine/
RedState.com was launched in 2004 as a**527** **political action committee**. In 2005 the name was changed from RedState.org to RedState.com "to create a for-profit entity that could accept advertising."[1]
In mid-December 2006[2], the "conservative community group site announced it had agreed to be purchased by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery Publishing, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club, among other movement conservative publishing enterprises."[3]
Contents |
Personnel
The following are listed as corporate officers by RedState Network:[4]
- Erick Erickson, CEO
- Clayton Wagar, CFO
- Mike Krempasky, President and Founder[5]
- Ben Domenech, Director and Founder
Contact information
Weblog: http://www.erickerickson.org/blog/
Web: http://www.redstatenetwork.com
Resources and articles
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑William Beutler, "Let The Eagle Soar: Behind The RedState Acquisition," Blog P.I., January 17, 2007.
- ↑Robert B. Bluey, "RedState, Eagle Publishing Join Forces," Human Events Online, December 20, 2006.
- ↑William Beutler, "Let The Eagle Soar: Behind The RedState Acquisition," Blog P.I., January 17, 2007.
- ↑About, RedState.com, accessed August 6, 2007.
- ↑Krempasky.com website.
External articles
- RedState in the Wikipedia.
- "RedState Blogger Boosts Wal-Mart For Bucks," PR Watch, September 21, 2005.
- Matt Stoller, "Redstate Racists," MyDD, February 7, 2006.
- "Domenech's defense distorted apparently plagiarized column," Media Matters for America, March 24, 2006.
- Ben Domenech, "Ben Domenech Resigns," Red America Blog/Washington Post, March 24, 2006.
- "RedState.com falsely claimed McCain 'confirmed' on *Hannity* that he was heckled by CNN's Ware," Media Matters for America, April 10, 2007.
- redstatehatemonitor, "REDSTATE a perfect example of Hypocrites in Denial," *The Daily Kos*, July 7, 2007.
WaPo Driving the "Right"
TheWashington Posthas hired Ben Domenech, co-founder of the conservative*:{RedState.com}:*, to write a new daily blog on its website called *:{Red America}:*,Editor & Publisherreported March 21, 2006.
"After a stint as chief speechwriter for Senator John Cornyn (R-Tx.), he co-founded [RedState.com] and became a book editor at Regnery Publishing, where he worked with Michelle Malkin and others," E&Pwrote.
"Almost immediately the liberal blogosphere exploded with outrage over Domenech's hiring by the Post. But by Thursday bloggers had more than ideological reasons to oppose the Post's move, as he plagiarized film critic Stephanie Zacharek, and Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing about television," Joe Conason reported in SlateMarch 24, 2006. "As a college student Ben Domenech lifted arts criticism; as a GOP henchman, he was accused of fabricating a Tim Russert quote."
Dan Froomkin "has spent a decade at the Post, and also worked for the Winston-Salem Journal, the Miami Heraldand the Orange County Register. Froomkin is also deputy editor of niemanwatchdog.org, the web site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University," E&Pwrote.
"Whatever Froomkin's political views may be, he is a veteran reporter with a long résumé of newspaper jobs, including a decade at the Post. Domenech is a partisan operative with no newsroom experience of any kind, no training in journalistic standards and ethics, and nothing to guide him except home schooling and Republican reflexes," Conason wrote.
===
- Utah (R + 30.768)
- Idaho (R + 27.018)
- Wyoming (R + 26.132)
- Nebraska (R + 22.606)
- Alaska (R + 20.946)
- Oklahoma (R + 20.567)
- Kansas (R + 16.892)
- North Dakota (R + 16.484)
- Alabama (R + 15.162)
- Texas (R + 14.920)
- Mississippi (R + 12.766)
- South Dakota (R + 11.920)
- South Carolina (R + 11.230)
- Montana (R + 9.668)
- Kentucky (R + 9.408)
- Indiana (R + 9.398)
- Georgia (R + 6.814)
- North Carolina (R + 6.086)
- Tennessee (R + 5.228)
- Arizona (R + 4.990)
- Louisiana (R + 4.824)
- Virginia (R + 3.252)
(combined 2012 Electoral Votes: 198)
sued on health care:
| Virginia | Virginia | [March 23, 2010](http://www.oag.state.va.us/PRESS_RELEASES/Cuccinelli/32210_Health_Care_Bill.html) |
|---|---|---|
| Florida | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| South Carolina | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Nebraska | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Texas | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Utah | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Louisiana | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Alabama | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Michigan | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Colorado | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Pennsylvania | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Washington | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| Idaho | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| South Dakota | Florida | [March 23, 2010](http://www.myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/2426DBDB65C843D7852576EF005DB3A4) |
| North Dakota | Florida | [April 5, 2010](http://www.ag.state.nd.us/NewsReleases/2010/04-05-10.pdf) |
| Arizona | Florida | [April 6, 2010](http://azgovernor.gov/dms/upload/PR_040610_BrewerJoinsHealthCareMandateChallenge.pdf) |
| Georgia | Florida | [April 13, 2010](http://sonnyperdue.georgia.gov/00/press/detail/0,2668,78006749_157126501_158683308,00.html) |
| Alaska | Florida | [April 20, 2010](http://gov.state.ak.us/parnell/press-room/full-press-release.html?pr=5349) |
| Nevada | Florida | [May 14, 2010](http://www.lvrj.com/news/gibbons-pushes-for-lawsuit-against-health-care-reform-93815294.html) |
| Indiana | Florida | [May 14, 2010](http://www.in.gov/portal/news_events/54062.htm) |
| Mississippi | Florida | [May 14, 2010](http://www.governorbarbour.com/news/2010/may/5.14.10mississippijoinshealthcarechallenge.html) |
| Wisconsin | Florida | [January 3, 2011](http://www.doj.state.wi.us/absolutenm/templates/template_share.aspx?articleid=2370&zoneid=18) |
| Oklahoma | Oklahoma | [January 7, 2011](http://www.oag.state.ok.us/oagweb.nsf/0/8723EA10351AAEE08625781400654082%21OpenDocument) |
| Wyoming | Florida | [January 7, 2011](http://governor.wy.gov/media/pressReleases/Pages/WyomingToChallengeHealthCareMandate.aspx) |
| Ohio | Florida | [January 11, 2011](http://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Briefing-Room/News-Releases/January-2011/Health-Care-Reform) |
| Kansas | Florida | [January 12, 2011](http://www.ksag.org/page/attorney-general-derek-schmidt-asks-florida-attorney-general-to-allow-kansas-to-join-lawsuit-against-obamacare) |
| Maine | Florida | [January 12, 2011](http://www.sunjournal.com/state/story/969440) |
---