Tuesday Reads
Posted: October 1, 2013 Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Barack Obama, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Fourteenth Amendment, health insurance exchanges, John Boehner, meteor, Obamacare, science, Tea Party Extremists 61 Comments
Good Morning!!
It’s October first in the good ol’ US of A, and one Senator, one ex-Senator, and thirty Republican House members, with the help of the weakest Speaker of the House in history, John Boehner, have managed to shut down the government. And yet, despite the concentrated efforts of these terrorist blackmailers, the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare, continues onward, with health care exchanges opening today. Wall Street is nervous, but still not really accepting that Republicans are really trying to crash the economy.
Despite the claims of John Boehner that he and the Tea Party Republicans are just “listening to the American people,” the American people don’t support what they are doing. Bloomberg: Americans by 72% Oppose Shutdown Tied to Health Care Cuts.
In a rejection of congressional Republicans’ strategy, Americans overwhelmingly oppose undermining President Barack Obama’s health-care law by shutting down the federal government or resisting an increase in the nation’s debt limit, according to a poll released today.
By 72 percent to 22 percent, Americans oppose Congress “shutting down major activities of the federal government” as a way to stop the Affordable Care Act from going into effect, the national survey from Quinnipiac University found.
By 64 percent to 27 percent, voters don’t want Congress to block an increase in the nation’s $16.7 trillion federal borrowing limit as a way to thwart implementation of the health-care law, which Obama signed into law in 2010 with a goal of insuring millions of Americans, known as “Obamacare.”
A majority of the public, 58 percent, is opposed to cutting off funding for the insurance program that begins enrollment today. Thirty-four percent support defunding it.
That’s pretty much it for national politics news today. As an American, I feel really embarrassed that a small number of wingnut terrorists have been permitted to take over the government of a nation of 300 million people. What else can you call it but a coup? And of course it won’t end here. We are approaching the debt limit, and a couple of weeks from now the GOP will most likely hold us all hostage again. At Policymic, Drew Mendelson writes:
I spent some time on the topic of the debt ceiling last year. I won’t repeat that except to note that we are approaching the limit of $16.7 trillion set last year on how much debt the federal government can maintain. Since government sending continues to outpace its income, we will need to borrow to pay some of our debts. Unless the debt ceiling is raised, once we hit it we will no longer be able to borrow and will likely default on some of that debt. The resulting catastrophe of frozen credit, climbing interest rates, and a stalling economy could bring a replay of the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Conservative icon Ronald Reagan once warned that “the full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar.”
I can’t imagine that even the hardest core in either party wants that. But the threat of it could give the Republicans (or maybe just its Tea Party faction) an opportunity for hostage-taking far more ominous than in the budget resolution battle. We went to the brink on the debt ceiling last year and ended up passing an increase but at the cost of maintaining most of the sequester cuts in the process.
This doesn’t have to happen. It’s time for President Obama to use the Constitutional option and raise the limit on his own. Back to Mendelson:
Does President Obama have to put up with this? Some say no. There is a range of opinion on whether or not the Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives the president the power to bypass Congress and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said earlier this year: “Well, you ask the Republicans …we always passed the debt ceiling. When President Bush was president, as he was incurring these massive debts, and the Republicans weren’t saying ‘boo’ at the time.… In fact, if I were president, I’d use the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the debt of the United States will always be paid.” [….]
Our cautious President obviously doesn’t want to do it. But experts say he has the power.
in a July 2011 New York Times op-ed piece, law professors Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule argue that even without the Fourteenth Amendment the president would have the power to override the debt ceiling based on “the necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
As Mendelson writes, we are going to find out pretty soon whether President Obama will use the power he has to stop Congress from holding the entire country hostage to the fantasies of a few extremists.
As of today, the President and Democrats in general are the winners in this ugly little drama, according to NBC News’s Michael O’Brien:
The shutdown of the federal government is poised to reshuffle U.S. politics, as Americans observe one of the starkest examples of political dysfunction since the last shutdown in the mid-90s.
That crisis reinvigorated President Bill Clinton and badly set back a then-resurgent Republican Party that had designs of retaking the White House in the 1996 elections. The GOP fell well short of expectations in that election, though some conservatives now argue that the party’s performance wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time.
Nonetheless, after two-and-a-half years of standoffs and gridlock, the fact that a shutdown has finally come to pass — 17 days before Congress must also raise the debt ceiling, no less — could upend politics with unforeseen consequences for many of this fight’s key players.
Read O’Brien’s take on the winners and losers in this battle as of today at the link. Spoiler: Obama is up right now, but he could hurt himself if he doesn’t step up and deal with the childish tantrums of the Tea Party Republicans over the debt ceiling.
Now I want to move on from the ridiculous and embarrassing battles in Washington DC to a story about women making a difference.
From PBS News Hour: World Pulse’s “web” of women keeps growing.
In her early 20s, Jensine Larsen was working as a freelance journalist in Burma and the Amazon region of South America, and learned that many of the stories affecting women weren’t being reported in the media. She then realized that women shouldn’t have to depend on the media to tell their stories.
“If we want to solve water issues and health care, the only way we can solve them is by listening to women,” she told the PBS NewsHour recently over the phone.
Larsen, a Portland, Ore., native, visualized a place where women could report for themselves, and founded World Pulse magazine, which came out with its first edition in 2004.
As technologies and social media evolved, so did World Pulse, and it launched an online component in 2007 with the goals of bringing women together and giving them a voice and the ability to improve their communities and their lives.
“We’re not about professional journalists, we’re more about that emerging woman leader who’s just coming online and has a powerful contribution to make,” Larsen said.
It’s an inspiring story–please go read the whole thing.
Finally, a little science news:
Ohioans who were outside late last night got a surprise from the Universe, according to the Columbus Dispatch: Meteor over central Ohio lights up night, phone lines.
The bright flash of light at 11:33 p.m. prompted some people to call Columbus police to ask what it was while officers chatted about the event over their radios.
“The initial trajectory suggests it passed over Columbus, Ohio, moving slightly north of west,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office told The Dispatch in an email. Cooke said there were some reports of sounds similar to sonic booms, which suggests some of the fireball’s fragments made it to fairly low altitudes.
NASA’s meteor camera in Ohio and Pennsylvania first detected it at 67 miles up, and it began breaking apart 41 miles above the earth. Cooke said it’s not yet certain, but it’s unlikely that the fireball produced meteorites on the ground given the “tremendous” speed at which it was moving.
“The fireball was so bright our meteor-detection software ‘went home to momma’ and thought it was seeing lightning,” Cooke wrote. “The fireball lit up the sky, so the detection software thought it was lightning and did not flag it as a meteor/fireball.”
According to the American Meteor Society’s website, Ohio was ground zero for the sighting. The society’s fireball coordinator, Robert Lunsford, said the fireball already had generated 900 reports to the society’s website, making it the third-most reported meteor event since the group began tracking them in 2005.
What was exciting was that this event happened at a time when lots of people were awake and looking up at the sky. I would just love to see a meteor! See a short video at the link.
Here’s another science story from The A Register: Egad! TUPPERWARE FOUND on ALIEN MOON: NASA shocker.
A NASA spacecraft sniffing the smoggy atmosphere of Titan has found traces of the chemical used to make plastic Tupperware boxes….
As if the place wasn’t nasty enough, space boffins now know that it is home to detectable quantities of propylene, which is a key ingredient in food containers as well as car bumpers.
NASA used Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) to scan the hazy atmosphere, measuring the heat radiation emitted as infrared light from the moon in a process that NASA described as being similar to “the way our hands feel the warmth of a fire”.
The first chemical the scientists discovered using the CIRS was propylene, which was identified in small quantities at various altitudes throughout the lower levels of the soupy hydrocarbon fog found in the moon’s noxious skies.
“This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene,” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper describing the findings.
“That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom – that’s polypropylene.”
Geographer Franck Lavigne of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and his research group believe they have solved an 800-year-old puzzle: Deadly 13th-Century Volcano Eruption: Mystery Solved?
One of history’s great disaster mysteries may be solved—the case of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 3,700 years. Nearly 800 years ago, the blast that was recorded, and then forgotten, may also have created a “Pompeii of the Far East,” researchers suggest, which might lie buried and waiting for discovery on an Indonesian island.
The source of an eruption that scattered ash from pole to pole has been pinpointed as Samalas volcano on Indonesia’s Lombok Island. The research team, led by geographer Franck Lavigne of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has now dated the event to between May and October of 1257. The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s been a long time that some people have been looking,” said Lavigne. After glaciologists turned up evidence for the blast three decades ago, volcano experts had looked for the origin of the eruption everywhere from New Zealand’s Okataina volcano to Mexico’s El Chichón.
The previously unattributed eruption was an estimated eight times as large as the famed Krakatau explosion (1883) and twice as large as Tambora in 1815, the researchers estimate. (Related: “Tambora: The Greatest Explosion in History.”) “Until now we thought that Tambora was the largest eruption for 3,700 years,” Lavigne said, but the study reveals that the 1257 event was even larger.
Those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following? Please share your links in the comment thread.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Have a terrific Tuesday, everyone!
Summer is returning to New England this week–we’re going to be in the mid-80s tomorrow!
That sounds wonderful…………………hope it does here too.
Enjoy it BB,
DREAM ACADEMY – INDIAN SUMMER LYRICS
What is occurring today throughout the nation is the primary reason why I have chosen to take my own “sabbatical” from politics and put myself on a self imposed leave of absence.
No question we are being harpooned by a small faction of nutjobs who have zero concept of the role of government or a grasp of historical knowledge.
When a lone senator with barely a year in office can decide for the majority in holding up much needed legislature to this degree there is no question that we are in serious trouble as a nation. Bear in mind that this moron is also a Harvard graduate who has no excuse for displaying his ignorance beyond the fact that he is pushing for a presidential nomination come 2016. It is his needs and wants that are directing this faction to get in line behind his self absorption and that spells disaster for the rest of us.
For the first time in my life I am faced with medical bills. One trip to the hospital via an ambulance service cost $978.00! After Medicaid my portion amounted to $100.00 for a 15 minute ride. Fortunately I can afford to pay that balance but unless I have another supplemental policy I am looking at paying off hospital and doctor visit costs for the next year.
If the insurance companies have their way, I would be paying premium costs each month which would cut into my already stretched income. The only answer to this conundrum is UHC but it will never happen in my lifetime even though other less populated countries enjoy that benefit.
Believe me when I say I am grateful for all the advances in medicine and medical technology. But the costs to some of us are almost prohibitive. We spend so much of our income on insurance coverage alone that it should be considered as a number one factor in how we grow our economy.
But I would be wrong again since the current slate of idiots representing the congressional GOP are nothing if not too stupid to take that into account.
Boy am I glad to see you, Pat! I have been thinking of you a lot lately and hoping you’re OK. Sorry about the medical bills, but so happy to “hear your voice” again.
How about those Red Sox!
It is the one topic of the day that kept me going! The beards are hilarious! Hope it gets them to the World Series since it looks like they itch a lot.
I have been thinking about you too, Pat, and missing your eloquence and wisdom.
I’ve been keeping up with the posts just not commentating.
Just seems so disheartening after awhile.
PAT…..Good to see you girl. !!!!!!!!!
Hi. Pat! good to see you. Be well soon.
Thanks, Ralph, feel much better but wholly discouraged over what has been happening the last couple of years with these lunatics being sent to congress.
Ignorant people, with small ideas and a bucket full of hate emanating from their closed minds.
Sometimes it is just easier to shut it out and at least “pretend” that it’s merely temporary.
Along with the rest of dancers, I too am glad to hear from you, and hope you can get some help with the medical bills. It’s a struggle so keep up the good work. We have missed you, and feel good hearing from you.
Hi Pat! I know what it’s like to have medical bills that keep you from doing much of anything else. Hope things and you mend!!
Hurray for Pat! Damn woman, been missing you too. So good to see you back…a couple of weeks ago, a Pat Johnson wrote a letter to the editor of our banjoville newspaper. Now, it was no way near your caliber of commentary (Fucking no way near as you will see.) But seeing the name in print made me miss you even more.
Ugh…cartoon in question:
Under the headline “House of Turds,” the latest cover of the New York Daily News shows Boehner seated at the Lincoln Memorial with blood dripping from his hands — a send-up of the popular Netflix series “House of Cards.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/house-of-turds-ny-daily-news-mocks-boehner-as-shutdown-arrives-photo
for anyone who would like to calculate the cost of health insurance with the ObamaCare subsidies here’s a calculator I found at NBC
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/53098438
Praise Bassets. the return of Tbogg ,,,
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/01/beach-blanket-boredom/
🙂
That was quick. Maybe he just wanted to escape from Firedoglake.
“I feel really embarrassed that a small number of wingnut terrorists have been permitted to take over the government of a nation of 300 million people. What else can you call it but a coup?”
You hit the nail on the head. I’ve not heard it said any better.
Multimillionaire Republican lawmaker says government shutdown ‘is my idea of fun’
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/01/multimillionaire-republican-lawmaker-says-government-shutdown-is-my-idea-of-fun/
Watching Ted Cruz on the Senate floor over the past few weeks I was reminded of
“A Face in the Crowd”. Cruz is perhaps the biggest demagogue since McCarthy and gives Lonesome Rhodes a run for his money.
I’m coming to the opinion that Obama should declare the shutdown a national security threat and immediately begin droning Cruz and the TP congresscritters. In the meantime, here are some idiot headlines …
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/10/01/2706821/media-government-shutdown-blame/
“Under the circumstances, Boehner has, in fact, been a raging success.” http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114940/mash-note-john-boehner …
I think most of Boehner’s emotional swings are likely an offshoot of his drinking. I grew up with a father who had multiple personalities depending upon his level of drunk. He could go from mellow to mean within a couple of hours. He could be gentle and kind and violent and cruel separated only by a few drinks and the inability of the people around him to gauge who he was at that moment. That’s Boehner, I think he spends time at the pub at the end of the 18th hole, better known as the 19th watering hole, than he does working for the American people.
I think The New Republic has hired a group of delusional douchenozzles.
They all thought “The New Coke” was a raging success, too. Under the circumstances, of course.
Seems to be a req for “journalists” these days
The nullification party
http://gawker.com/kimmel-asks-americans-to-choose-obamacare-or-the-affor-1433866673?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
Kimmel Asks Americans to Choose: Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act
http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/01/george-will-leaves-abc-for-fox-news/
Well, he oughta feel right at home
http://www.businessinsider.com/amid-shutdown-wwii-vets-enter-memorial-in-dc-2013-10
this is pretty amazing.
That is so cool!
Did you notice it’s the Mississippi contingent?
This crackpot christian minister is praying for a Military takeover of our government.
wtf
I just accidentally put on CNN for a couple of minutes and heard people talking–uncorrected about how the debt is so high that we shouldn’t raise the ceiling and this is what the Repubs have been talking about. We have to lower the deficit, etc, etc, etc, no one talking reality!
CNN is worse than useless! They misinform just like Fox just a bit less.
As of today, I no longer watch CNN………….bye bye………..Candy and Wolf.
Think the emoprogs can tell the difference? Or are they so upset with their petty butt-hurts they can’t see it?
The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans
A CA commenter,,,
Call me emoprog or whatever you want 🙂 but I see no evidence that today’s Democrats (as a collective whole) are trying to help the sick and fix the kinks. The only Democrat I’ve seen do a good job today messaging-wise on talking to her constituents about Obamacare and explaining the way to navigate was Texas’ Leticia van de Putte, supporting it, without overselling it as some Trojan pony for single payer. Yeah punish Texas men all you want, but our women tend to be FDR Democratic.
Also:
Senator Paul Douglas (who was hardly a lazy spoiled brat and who MLK Jr. called “the greatest of all senators”) in 1932:
“Back in 1932, the future Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas advised progressives not to expect too much from the Democratic Party. It was, he wrote, ‘maintained by the business interests’ as a kind of ‘lifeboat.’ Whenever the GOP ship sprung a leak—whenever Republicans were no longer willing or able to do business’s bidding—the interests simply piled into the other party and made their escape.”
So butt-hurt wins out. Emoprogs wouldn’t know an FDR Democrat if it bit them in the ass.
It’s going to be a wild ride to Wendy 2014 😉 I’ll be sure to send the preparation H to Texas men.
Yeah punish Texas men all you want, but our women tend to be FDR Democratic.
And we love you for it, the collective you and the individual you. You have no idea how much I’d like to punish some Texas men, but I’ll spare you ;)–and anyway I’m from MA and you most assuredly can and should blame us so who are we to talk?
I know you’ve posted the Douglas quote several times in different venues, and he’s a MA boy, too, one we’d happily claim if IL would let us. His entire career was about principle and I’m hard pressed to conceptualize that as a bad thing, a few or few hundred, thousand, million statesman-and-stateswomen with perception, vision, courage would not go amiss.
You have Liz Warren like NY has Kirsten Gillibrand like Texas has Wendy Davis 🙂
Love back at my sisters everywhere. Solidarity, forever.
If only Georgia had a sister of her own…
Frankly my dear, Georgia has you, and you’re our Georgia peach 🙂
ComputerWorld: Obamacare could help fuel a tech start-up boom
Would have worked for me earlier.
My brother just won his fourth Emmy for his work on PBS Frontline!! That’s four wins out of seven nominations in the last seven years. I’m so proud of him.
CONGRATULATIONS
Wow, BB, that is so impressive! It’s great to hear some good news.
BB that’s wonderful, tell us his story……………..
He’s my youngest brother. He moved out here to the Boston area about 12-13 years ago to work at WGBH. He’s a film editor. He does the promos and that kind of thing. Awhile ago I posted the promo he did for the NFL head injury story that’s coming up soon. I’ll see if I can find it again.
You can watch the promo he did here:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365067212/
This trailer caused ESPN to drop out of the project–too strong for them, I guess.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/08/espns-skipper-nixed-nfl-concussions-collaboration-after-viewing-trailer/68696/
Congrats to him and to you and yours! I see the investigative gene runs in the family 🙂
Holy shit! that is wonderful!!!!!
Wow, that’s amazing. Congrats!
Bravo to your brother. Excellence runs in your family.