I don’t want the world, I just want your half:
— Why do Chinese restaurants keep their best dishes hidden from white people.
— More on the secret Chinese menu.
— A grownup discussion on end-of-life care.
— Somebody doesn’t like Max Baucus.
— Socialism through the ages.
— Might the Rockets achieve mediocrity without any big-time scorers?
For some reason Pittsburgh reminded me of “Ana Ng”.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the coming month, ThinkProgress will be traveling to town hall events across the country to report on what we’re seeing on the ground. This is our fourth eyewitness report.
On Wednesday, during Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) town hall in Winterset, Iowa, an attendee proudly noted that the Senator brought his personal copy of Glenn Beck’s book “Common Sense.” Grassley responded stating that he has read the book and that he intended to “pass it on”:
TOWN HALL ATTENDEE: I noticed that you have the book “Common Sense” with you today, I hope you share it with a lot more of those 535 people.
GRASSLEY: Well the reason I brought it is you’re supposed to pass it on to other people when you’re not reading it.
At the end of the town hall, Grassley gave an autographed copy of “Common Sense” to ThinkProgress and said “it’s something you gotta read a couple times.” Watch the video:
ThinkProgress has a photo of Grassley’s signature here.
There is absolutely no good reason I can think of to try to tempt the Washington Redskins to move to some kind of new stadium located inside the District of Columbia. I love football, I love DC, and I love urbanism. But the NFL season only has 16 games. Eight of those games are on the road. That means you’re talking about a facility that’s going to be without an audience on over 95 percent of possible days. That means the facility can’t possibly be anchoring a neighborhood. On the overwhelming majority of occasions you’re talking about a giant empty space.
A baseball stadium or a basketball/hockey arena are used frequently enough to be perfectly viable elements of an urban neighborhood. Nevertheless, the tendency is for governments to subsidize their construction to a degree that goes far beyond what can be justified. But a football stadium just doesn’t work, it’s a hugely inefficient use of land, and thus ought to be exactly where FedEx Field currently is—a pretty peripheral area in the suburbs. Urban land should be used intensively, and the only way for a football stadium to be an intensive land use is to be one of those combo football/baseball stadiums that have fallen out of fashion and nobody wants to use.
The ideal thing for DC to do with the space currently occupied by RFK Stadium and RFK-affiliated parking lots is to put up lots of buildings where people can live and shop and some kind of park for them to enjoy. It’s land near a metro station and would make a nice fairly dense mixed use community that brought some extra amenities to the surrounding neighborhood.
Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking them to reconsider releasing information — such as “a list of names, citizenship, length of detention, [and] capture location” — about detainees held at the detention facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The ACLU explains its decision to request the information on its “Blog of Rights“:
Today, we sent a letter to the Department of Defense (DOD), asking them to reconsider their refusal to turn over information about the detention facility at Bagram in Afghanistan. The request is connected to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed earlier this year with the Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA for documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram. [...]
There is concern that Bagram has become, in effect, another Guantánamo – except with many more prisoners, less due process, no access to lawyers or courts and reportedly worse conditions. Although the nation is embroiled in an intense public debate about U.S. policy pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, Americans remain in the dark about even the most basic facts about Bagram. And, as long as the Bagram prison is shrouded in secrecy, there is no way to know the truth or begin to address the problems that exist there.
There is no doubt that the Obama Administration has done much to reverse the Bush Administration’s disastrous record on civil liberties. Immediately after coming into office, Obama issued executive orders mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and banning torture.
Yet civil liberties advocates continue to warn that the same “legal black hole” that existed thanks to the Bush Administration’s policies in Guantanamo Bay has continued to exist in the Bagram detention center. As Tina Foster of the International Justice Center told NPR recently, the policies in Bagram seem to imply that “individuals captured by the United States anywhere in the world can be taken into custody and held indefinitely without charge, so long as they’re not brought to Guantanamo.”
Yesterday, Dan Stein, Executive Director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — an anti-immigrant designated hate group — appeared on MSNBC’s Dr. Nancy claiming that his years of experience tell him that “illegal aliens” will receive coverage if health care reform passes:
STEIN: Well, I’ve been working this issue for almost thirty years. The way H.R. 3200 is drafted, this is the way it’s drafted: illegal aliens can qualify for the public plan. And the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is pushing to retain that language. And for the affordability credits for the subsidy, if one member of the family is here legally, then the entire family can qualify. And most importantly, there’s no way to verify that eligibility standard. So, the bottom line is, based on all these years of watching and experience at FAIR, we know illegal aliens under this bill will get health care.
Watch it:
You’d think thirty years of experience would’ve taught Stein that undocumented and legal immigrants alike rarely qualify for public benefits and health care reform doesn’t look like it’s going to be any exception. If Stein had actually done his research and read the drafted health care reform legislation, he would’ve noticed that Sec. 242 and 246 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits provided in the bill. That language also applies to affordability credits, meaning that only family members who are “affordable credit eligible individuals” will receive government assistance and “affordable credit eligible individuals” are defined as someone who is lawfully present in the US. Even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — which Stein cites as pressing for inclusion of the undocumented — has issued a statement supporting coverage only for “legal, law abiding” immigrants who pay their “fair share.” In fact, the bill “severely restricts” health care benefits even for legal immigrants.
Ultimately, Stein has his own agenda and it has little do with health care. Today, the Washington Independent reports:
“As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive…The protesters are spurred on in large part by immigration restrictionist groups who are using the health care debate to spread fears about immigrants.”
Anti-immigrant rhetoric aside, Executive Director of Voto Latino Maria Teresa Kumar — who appeared on the same segment opposite of Stein — also pointed out that the more people who are included in any health insurance plan, the more costs for everyone involved go down.
SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse, Paris (wikimedia)
Noam Scheiber has an interesting article in The New Republic laying out in some detail why even though the recession may be over real recovery is likely to take a long time. The basic issue is debt overhand. During a bubble, most people and firms began acting as if they owned lots of very valuable assets against which they could borrow money. Then the bubble pops, and it turns out that everything everyone owns isn’t worth as much as they thought. But their debts still are! That means that spending relative to income needs to become a lot lower than it was during the boom, and stay a lot lower for quite some time until things can balance out again:
Absent a strong demand for exports, the most plausible way for a country to crawl out of this kind of recession is for households to keep paying off debt until they can afford to spend again. Indeed, as Paul Krugman argued in a recent lecture series at the London School of Economics, the reason the United States didn’t slip back into depression after World War II–something many economists feared at the time–is that, 15 years after the initial crash, people had finally put their finances in order.
The trouble is that fifteen years is too long a time. What’s needed is something to spark an investment boom. Scheiber wants that to be industrial policy:
So far as I can tell, the only solution to the underlying economic problem is something that’s been a dirty word in Washington the last generation or two: industrial policy (that is, an active government role in the development of certain industries.) In his LSE lectures, Krugman quipped that “if someone could invent the 21-st century moral equivalent of the railroad, or actually even the moral equivalent of IT in the ’90s, that would help a lot.” I agree–that would help a lot. But waiting around for this to happen seems risky when the alternative is a decade of stagnation.
He thinks industrial policy can solve this problem. I think this is a bit like solving your problem by assuming a can opener. The problem with industrial policy isn’t that good industrial policy wouldn’t be a good idea, the problem is that nobody knows how to do good industrial policy on a systematic basis. If you scour world history for examples of industrial policy paying off you’ll find some, but you’ll also find tons of failures. Simply wanting it to work doesn’t resolve that issue.
That said, couldn’t the moral equivalent of the railroad be . . . the railroad. High-speed passenger rail is not, in fact, a brand new technology but from the perspective of the United States it might as well be. After all, we currently have exactly zero miles of true HSR coverage in this country. None. And it’s not even remotely a speculative technology it works perfectly well. It’s just expensive to build. Very expensive. But insofar as the idea is actually that we’re looking for very expensive medium-term investments that’s more feature than bug. For that matter, there’s also the very old and extremely proven technology of intra-city heavy rail, i.e. metro systems. Digging subway tunnels underneath developed portions of growing metropolitan areas, packing stations relatively close together, and allowing greater density to arise near the stations is an absolutely proven strategy for driving fixed investment and spurring growth. Again, the reason not to do it is that it’s extremely expensive. But if the view is that we ought to spend huge sums of money on something, this strikes me as more promising than hoping the government can direct future technological development.
Alternatively, Ryan Avent hopes Chinese demand can save the world.
Okay, maybe the most crucial missing element in US media coverage of climate change is an actual understanding of the dire nature of the issue or maybe the still unjustifiable “balance” whereby the other “side” is treated as serious sources, rather than as long-wrong disinformers or maybe how they are blowing the economics issue (see Must-read (again) study: How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics “” “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and countless examples here). Still, Donald A. Brown, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University has a case to make — and his excellent blog ClimateEthics (a Time magazine Top 15 pick) is the source of this guest post.
I. Introduction: Scottish Versus The US Climate Change Debate
In March, the U.S. State Department asked me to speak to the Scottish Parliament about climate-change policies as they were debating a new climate-change law.
Before I spoke, a Scottish Parliamentarian made an argument that I have never heard any US politician make. The topic of this speech is also curiously largely absent in US media climate change coverage. The Parliamentarian argued that Scotland should adopt this tough new legislation even though it might be expensive because the Scotts had an obligation to the rest of the world to do so. In other words, those countries most responsible for causing climate change have ethical duties to reduce their emissions even if it costs are significant. That is, high-emitting developed countries like the United States must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as a matter of justice.
In late June, Scotland passed the landmark climate change law that was being debated during my March visit, a law that requires a 42% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, rising to 80% by 2050. (BBC, 2009) On the day the law passed, Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney told the Parliamentarians that passing the world-leading legislation was justified because the climate change affects all the people on of our planet and the Scots had a duty to make the commitments in the law. (TWFY 2009)
The US Congress is striving to pass legislation that would for the first time create binding greenhouse gas emissions reductions 12 years after most of the rest of the developed world bound themselves to reduce emissions in the Kyoto Protocol. Yet, there is not the faintest murmur in the US climate-change debate or in the media’s coverage of the unfolding US legislative fight about duties and responsibilities that the United States has to the rest of the world to reduce the threat of climate change. This is so even though the legislation that has passed the House would require 17% reductions by 2020, a commitment that is only 40% of the Scottish requirement.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the coming month, ThinkProgress will be traveling to town hall events across the country to report on what we’re seeing on the ground. This is our third eyewitness report.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Senate GOP’s lead negotiator on health care reform, has stated repeatedly that he opposes a bill that includes a public option, having once called it a “deal breaker.” “We need to make sure that there’s no public option” for the bill to be bipartisan, Grassley has said. Grassley even admitted this month that his GOP colleagues are urging him to block the public option in his negotiations.
However, a Des Moines Resgister poll released in May found that 56 percent of Iowans support the public option (and indeed, large majorities of Americans nationwide do as well). On Wednesday in Winterset, IA, ThinkProgress asked Grassley if he is willing to buck the will of the majority of Iowans. “That poll is old,” Grassley replied dismissively. “I base my decisions not on polls but on town meetings and mail,” he added. Watch it:
Unfortunately, a large majority of local Iowans who attended Grassley’s four town hall meetings on Wednesday were adamantly opposed to the public option, with some calling it “socialism,” a “government take over” and an encroachment of freedom. Citing Iowa public opinion, a recent Des Moines Register editorial urged Grassley to support the public option:
Congress should give Americans the choice of buying into a health-insurance plan administered by the government, in addition to private-sector plans. A public option could bring down administrative costs in health care, give Americans another alternative for insurance and force the private sector to offer adequate coverage or lose business. Yet Grassley remains opposed to such a plan.
Also on Wednesday, Grassley said that he opposes the public option because of a recent Lewin group study (an inaccurate study that doesn’t reflect the bills currently before Congress). When a town hall attendee later noted that “the Lewin Group is a subsidiary of [a] big health care company,” Grassley replied, “I didn’t know that.”
A reader asks for my thoughts on DC’s new inclusionary zoning rules which basically require developers to provide a certain proportion of the units in new developments at sub-market rates. On the policy itself, I’ve heard of examples of strict inclusionary zoning rules that work well (Brookline, MA I believe is one such example) but I’m a bit skeptical that the DC government is actually up to the task of outlining and enforcing this kind of complicated regulatory scheme in a way that’s workable and beneficial.
But one way or another, this sort of regulatory mandate really doesn’t seem to be the best possible way to achieve the goal of making housing more affordable. Suppose that instead we:
— Reduced or eliminated rules mandating the construction of parking as part of new developments.
— Permitted the construction of taller structures.
— Relaxed maximum lot occupancy rules.
— Permitted the construction of smaller apartments.
That, it seems to me, would increase the supply of housing units in the city. That ought to, ceteris paribus, reduce the market price of housing thus rendering housing more affordable. It would also generate additional tax revenue and some of the revenue could be spent on subsidies for struggling families to help them afford housing. Last, it would increase the proportion of the metro area’s residents who live in the District of Columbia as opposed to the suburbs, which would be good for the environment. Adding an additional inclusionary zoning regulation on top of existing supply constraints, by contrast, seems likely to further constrain supply. Amidst a real construction boom, it’s true, these rules would result in the creation of new affordable units. But absent such a boom it simply discourages new development, meaning the city will have more vacant lots, more surface parking lots, more abandoned structures, and fewer housing units than it otherwise might.
The Chamber of Commerce, and the corporate interests it represents, is engaged in a wildly successful litigation strategy to immunize corporations from the law. Indeed, as the Wonk Room has previously explained, the Supreme Court has embraced the health insurance industry’s claim that employer-provided health plans should be completely immune from accountability when their wrongful coverage decisions injure or kill a patient. It has shielded dangerous medical device manufacturers from accountability when their defective products cause injury or death. And it has even allowed the corporate sector to force consumers and employees into biased, privatized courts that overwhelmingly favor corporate parties.
One of the sharpest arrows in the corporate immunity campaign’s quiver has been a doctrine known as “preemption.” Because the Constitution says that federal law is the “supreme Law of the Land,” Congress has the power to enact laws which “preempt” state laws that conflict with its intended goals. A law preempted by Congress essentially ceases to function.
Although Congress’ power to preempt state laws is uncontroversial, corporate interests increasingly call on courts to misread federal laws to preempt progressive state statutes and tort law which they do not want to be bound by. In the 1970s, for example, a contraceptive device known as the Dalkon Shield caused numerous infections and deaths, and Congress responded by requiring the FDA to approve new medical devices. Even though Congress enacted this law to protect consumers from dangerous devices, the Supreme Court turned this intent on its head, providing almost-total lawsuit immunity to the medical device industry.
A decision handed down this Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, however, is a welcome sign that the judiciary’s willingness to immunize corporations from the law is not boundless. In that case, Snapple was sued for labeling their beverages as “all natural,” despite the fact that the beverages contain high fructose corn syrup (Snapple, to its credit, discontinued its use of HFCS in late 2008). Rather than defend its case on the merits–such as by arguing that HFCS is actually a “natural” ingredient–however, Snapple decided first to claim that it was completely immune from the suit because of preemption.
Essentially, Snapple claimed that, because federal law regulates food labels, it can’t possibly be the case that states also get to enact laws. Like the medical device manufacturers who convinced the Supreme Court that the existence of the FDA precludes state laws governing similar matters, Snapple claimed that the FDA sets both a floor and a ceiling for regulation, and states lack authority to impose additional requirements on the beverage industry.
In rejecting this claim, the Third Circuit stood up for the important principle that federal law should presumptively be viewed only as a floor, and not as a ceiling to more progressive state regulation. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained many decades ago, the purpose of the states is to function as a “laboratory” for new ideas which can be experimented with by one of fifty state governments and then applied more broadly if they turn out well for that state’s citizens. Many of the laws progressives cherish, including the minimum wage and much of our federal environmental standards, were first conceived of by state legislatures. If you take away the states’ power to enact new progressive reforms, you kill this process of experimentation in the cradle.
Corporate interests get this, which is why they have worked to hard to keep the states from enacting progressive reforms that can blossom and grow throughout the United States. Hopefully, this week’s Snapple decision is an early sign that the courts are no longer interested in preventing state innovation.
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