Archive for Obama
Having It Both Ways
Posted by: | CommentsRepublicans want to fall in line, the saying goes, and Ann Coulter is falling in line now that Gov. Mitt Romney is back as Republican front runner. She even likes his healthcare plan: Three cheers for Romneycare — “a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles.” After paragraphs gushing about the individual mandate’s conservative roots in the Heritage Foundation, Coulter goes “tenther” calling the 2,000-page Affordable Care Act, not bad policy, exactly, just an illegal one: “If Obamacare were a one-page bill that did nothing but mandate that every American buy health insurance, it would still be unconstitutional…”
Of course, Heritage didn’t think so when in response to the Clinton health proposal, prominent Republicans in the congress included many of its ideas in a couple of health care bills, including the “Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993” (18 Republican cosponsors and a breezy 579-page read) and the “Consumer Choice Health Security Act of 1993” with multiple sponsors in the House. Or when Mitt Romney used the Heritage model in Massachusetts. Only when the Obama White House adopted Romney’s template did Heritage and Republicans balk, as Think Progress reminded them:
– Heritage On Romney’s Individual Mandate: “Not an unreasonable position, and one that is clearly consistent with conservative values.” [Heritage, 1/28/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Individual Mandate: “Both unprecedented and unconstitutional.” [Heritage, 12/9/09]
– Heritage On Romney’s Insurance Exchange: An “innovative mechanism to promote real consumer choice.” [Heritage, 4/20/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Insurance Exchange: Creates a “de facto public option” by “grow[ing]” government control over healthcare.” [Heritage, 3/30/10]
– Heritage On Romney’s Medicaid Expansion: Reduced “the total cost to taxpayers” by taking people out of the “uncompensated care pool.” [Heritage, 1/28/06]
– Heritage On President Obama’s Medicaid Expansion: Expands a “broken entitlement program,” providing a “low-quality, poorly functioning program.” [Heritage, 3/30/10]
With Coulter singing his praises, once again it’s springtime for Mitt.
CSI: Wall Street
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Several recent reports worth noting on the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group that President Obama announced in his State of the Union address. Rachel Maddow brought New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman onto her show [timestamp 4:40] to discuss the RMBS Working Group’s charge. Schneiderman and fellow AGs Kamala Harris (CA), Beau Biden (DE), Lisa Madigan (IL), Martha Coakley (MA), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) have bucked the Justice Department and fellow state AGs who worked to cut a deal on limiting bank investigations earlier this year. Schneiderman, et. al. weren’t about to hand out “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. This pressured the Obama Justice Department to get more serious about holding the banks accountable.
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What Has Obama Ever Done For Us?
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Medical Loss Ratio Bites Insurers
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On December 2, the Department of Health and Human Services released its rule on how health insurers comply with the Affordable Care Act’s medical loss ratio (MLR) provision. The rule is effective on January 1, 2012. Before you flip over to YouTube to watch the latest in cat cuteness, consider this headline from a contributor at Forbes : “The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!”
The MLR was one of those hotly debated provisions during the health reform fight two years ago that by now the public has forgotten, but insurers never did. The MLR requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of consumer premiums (85% for large group insurers) on actual health care for its customers. Insurers that fail to meet the standard each year will have to rebate their customers the amount by which they underspent on providing medical care. Plus, Bloomberg reports, “Consumers won’t have to pay taxes on rebates they get from health insurance plans that violate spending rules in President Barack Obama’s 2010 overhaul.” Forbes contributor Rick Ungar argues that the MLR ruling will kill off large parts of the for-profit health insurance business:
Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid. If they could, we likely would never have seen the extraordinary efforts made by these companies to avoid paying benefits to their customers at the very moment they need it the most.
Some Persons More Equal Than Others
Posted by: | CommentsAs cities around the country trade notes on how to crack down on peaceful Occupy protesters, a chant goes up: ‘Who do you protect? Who do you serve?’ As the empire strikes back, Chris Hayes offers a plausible answer. It’s the reason for Occupy in the first place.
Citing UCLA corporate law professor (and Republican) Lynn Stout, David Kay Johnston writes [emphasis mine]:
Against $15 trillion of mortgage bonds, Stout said, Wall Street marketed credit default swaps in 2008 with a notional value of $67 trillion. Worldwide, traded swaps at their peak equaled $670 trillion or $100,000 for each person on the planet, vastly more than all the wealth in the world. Those numbers make it a mathematical certainty that the swaps were mostly speculation, not hedging.
There is a reason people have taken to the streets — in London, in Madrid, in Athens, in Dublin, in Reykjavik, in hundreds of cities across the planet. In Europe, see IMF austerity measures that require the public to cover the gambling losses of a financial industry unaccountable for committing massive fraud in derivatives. In the U.S., see the deal to immunize banks from prosecution: With few exceptions, state attorneys general want to hand the banks “get out of jail free” cards and sweep the crimes under the rug. See Kelo v. City of New London or Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In literature, see Orwell: All “persons” are equal but some “persons” are more equal than others.
#Occupy is asking the right question — a dangerous question — not only of police, but of the entire system: ‘Who do you protect? Who do you serve?’
The crowds chant,“WHO DO YOU PROTECT, WHO DO YOU SERVE?”
President Obama in Asheville
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I’ve had the good fortune of meeting/witnessing a few presidents. I got to shake Jimmy Carter’s hand at the Tampa airport when I was seven years old. Bill Clinton I saw speak at the Brandenburg gate in 1994 and again in Belfast’s City Center in 1995. This morning I’ll get to be a part of the audience as President Barack Obama delivers an address to an Asheville-area audience. Welcome back, Mr. President. Asheville welcomes you.
The President is launching a bus tour to push the American Jobs Act, which is encountering resistance from all sorts of entrenched interests, both Democrat and Republican. The legislative proposal cuts payroll taxes; keeps teachers on the job; invests in highways, transit, rail and aviation; creates an infrastructure bank; expands access to high-speed internet; and more.
Welcome Back, President Obama
Posted by: | CommentsAC-T: President Barack Obama will start a three-day bus tour of North Carolina and Virginia here Monday, according to Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger.
Reisinger said he’s been communicating with a person in contact with Obama officials. The president will fly into Asheville, then make stops in Hickory and North Wilkesboro, Reisinger said.
Three You Need To See
Posted by: | CommentsA post from Dave Johnson at Campaign for America’s Future is making the rounds on the ‘tubes. It’s gone a little viral. It helps that the title is Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law. The rest explains itself:
Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about “Obama spending” and “Obama deficits” and how the “Stimulus” just made things worse. Solution: Here are three “reality-based” charts to send to him. These charts show what actually happened.
Spending
Read the rest here.
Whitewash
Posted by: | CommentsNY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been dogging the big banks over their handling of the mortgage mess: the robo signings, repeated presentation of faked legal documentation to state courts, etc. Per HuffPost:
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman asked a state judge to reject a proposed $8.5 billion settlement agreement over soured loans between Bank of America and a group of investors, claiming in court documents that a separate bank representing the investors committed fraud for failing to ensure that the mortgage securities were created in accordance with state law and for failing to act in the investors’ best interest.
Is FYW the new WTF?
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There’s a twitstorm arising. People have had enough of the kabuki theater in Washington. The act where despite all the melodrama everyone knows who is going to get screwed in the end. The hell if the so called Grand Bargain (which I hope is truly dead) was anything close to change we can believe in. It certainly ain’t yes we can! It’s the same-ol’ same-ol’ no we can’t because we’re doin’ it the same way we always done it.
The debate in Washington now is between killing grandma with ridiculously unnecessary cuts in social programs OR killing grandma by doing what is basically unthinkable: plunging this nation into an economic crisis far worse than the last one by defaulting on our fiat, debt-based currency. If there could just be bipartisan agreement to do one or the other we make some very happy pundits I’m sure. And if President Obama could just appease his opponents a little more by screwing over the people who voted for him, his memoir will be better than Marcus Aurelius. All Republicans have to do is stop being totally insane.
But there are 300 million more opinions on the subject and now we’re getting a pretty good sample.
Apparently the guy who accidentally lit the powder keg is Jeff Jarvis. Here’s a little of what he had to say:
The tweets that keep streaming in—hundreds an hour still—restore my faith not in government but in society, in us. Oh, yes, there are idiots, extremists, and angry conspiracy theorists and just plain jerks among them. But here, that noise was being drowned out by the voices of disappointed Americans—disappointed because they do indeed give a shit.
[...]
All I’m saying is that when I get to hear the true voice of the people—not the voice of government, not the voice of media, not a voice distilled to a number following a stupid question in a poll—I see cause for hope.
Some people might still have the audacity to do some things. So FUCK YOU WASHINGTON. Or in true twitterese #FuckYouWashington. Or to bring it a little closer to G rated for the family #FYW.
