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Abortion Debate Moves To The States, Tennessee General Assembly Considers Abortion Ban

By Igor Volsky on Apr 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm

The Tennessee General Assembly was scheduled to approve a measure banning insurers from offering abortion coverage within the exchanges today, but lawmakers rescheduled the vote for Monday after Democratic members expressed concern that the bill could conflict with the federal Hyde amendment and deny abortions to women in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother was in danger. The bill, HB 2681, seeks to “ensure that Tennessee tax money does not go to pay for abortion as provided in the new federal health care plan.”

Lawmakers in at least four states — including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri and Mississippi — have all introduced bills “that would generally block abortion coverage in exchange plans, while two other states — Arizona and Kansas — are seeking to impose wider restrictions. Arizona has a bill that would blog local governments from providing abortion coverage for their employees and Kansas would “prohibit insurance plans from generally covering abortion.”

“Both abortion opponents and groups favoring abortion rights say they expect to see a growing number of state-level fights over the issues raised by the federal law,” which says states can choose to “prevent plans offered through their exchanges from covering abortion altogether.”

I’ll try to follow these debates in some detail, but from listening to today’s session in the Tennessee general assembly, I’m not too optimistic that pro-choice lawmakers will be able to block these amendments. For instance, Democrats in Tennessee didn’t object to the measure as much as they pressed the sponsor to clarify that it would not prohibit women whose life was in danger or those who became pregnant a result of incest or rape, from obtaining an abortion. They didn’t argue that the federal health law already prohibited public dollars from funding abortion services or maintain that insurers that choose to cover abortion will have to segregate public and private funds.

Of course, if these bills are successful, women would only be able to purchase abortion coverage in the unsubsidized (but newly regulated!) individual health insurance market or, if that’s unavailable, they would have to pay the full cost of an abortion, which is about $500 for a first-semester pregnancy.

Politics

Man ‘disenchanted with the federal government’ indicted for planting pipe bombs in mailboxes.

By Lee Fang on Apr 8, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Larry NorthLarry Eugene North, a man accused of placing 36 pipe bombs into mailboxes across east Texas, was indicted yesterday on charges of possessing an illegal firearm or destructive device. In an interview with Talking Points Memo, Brit Featherston, first assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, said North had anti-government motives:

“It does appear that there were two motives: one, that he was disenchanted with the federal government, and, two, he was disenchanted with an individual who he perceived that had wronged him,” says Featherston of 52-year-old Larry North, who was arrested today.

North, who is reported to have “a constellation of physical and emotional issues,” could face 10 years in prison. As reported by Alan Colmes, this is not the first time North has clashed with the law. In the late 1980s, North was arrested on a charge of unlawfully carrying a prohibited weapon. He was convicted of the Class A misdemeanor charge in 1989, but information was unavailable on whether he was sentenced to jail or just paid the $100 court fine.

Economy

Bernanke’s Deficit Speech Sends The Right Message

By Guest Blogger on Apr 8, 2010 at 7:00 pm

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, the Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is causing a bit of a media tizzy today with his latest speech, in which he warns that, “unless we as a nation demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”

The Chairman is not wrong. Consistently running huge budget deficits with no prospect of ever closing the gap between spending and revenue can have enormous economic consequences. Interest rates would eventually rise, painful inflation would eventually take hold, and an ever larger share of the federal budget would be spent just in the service of paying interest on a bulging debt. This is definitely a situation that we want to avoid.

But don’t confuse a warning about potential future problems with an alarm bell signaling imminent danger. The Chairman is correct when he says that we need to solve our long-term deficit problem, be he made a bunch of other points that are much more relevant right now, and also happen to be right on the money:

1. “[A] sharp near-term reduction in our fiscal deficit is probably neither practical nor advisable.”

Right on, Mr. Chairman. Don’t let anyone tell you that this year’s deficit is an economic problem. It isn’t. In fact, this year’s deficit, and last year’s, is a big reason why the economy is now slowly recovering.

2. “[F]or the near term, inflation appears to be well controlled [and]… [i]nflation expectations, as measured in the financial markets or in surveys, appear stable.”

Correct. Inflation scare-mongers want us to believe that we are on the verge of becoming Zimbabwe, but the reality belies their dire predictions.

3. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

Bull’s-eye. Our long term deficit is the product of an aging population, rising health care costs and a persistent, pernicious campaign to cut taxes (especially for the wealthy) without paying for it. Getting the budget back into balance is going to mean reducing some spending, but it’s also going to mean higher revenues. Anyone who says we can balance the budget entirely by cutting spending isn’t actually interested in solving the problem. They’re just trying to score political points.

Finally…

4. “History has demonstrated time and again the inherent resilience and recuperative powers of the American economy. Our country…has surmounted difficult challenges in the past. I do not doubt that we can do so once again.”

Amen. The challenge of bringing our budget back onto a sustainable path is not insurmountable, even after eight years of remarkable fiscal mismanagement. And Bernanke is also right that meeting this challenge is going to mean making some “difficult choices.” But making difficult choices doesn’t mean economic ruin. The federal government could certainly stand to cut some fat, just as the very richest Americans could certainly stand to pay a little more in taxes.

Climate Progress

U.S. abstains on vote to proliferate coal in South Africa

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 8, 2010 at 6:21 pm

SA Coal PicToday the United States abstained on a World Bank vote to approve a $3.75 billion loan for South African utility Eskom to build a 4800 megawatt coal plant. Ultimately, the loan was approved. But the U.S. vote sends a clear signal that the U.S. government is not willing to accept business as usual – continuing a trajectory of unabated carbon pollution – without due consideration of the environmental consequences.  CAP’s Kari Manlove has the story.

Read more

Health

Romney Now Believes The Individual Mandate Is Unconstitutional…But Only In ObamaCare

By Igor Volsky on Apr 8, 2010 at 6:05 pm

romney2In March, Lee Fang pressed Mitt Romney on the constitutionality of health care reform, asking the former Massachusetts governor if he believed that the individual mandate at the center of his own health care reform effort was, in fact, unconstitutional. Romney refused to answer, telling Fang, “You know I’ve got a long discussion that I could give you on that, but I’m in too harp hay of a hurry right now but I think we have that on the site.” “I think I’ve answered that the best way I can right now which is it’s a big topic and I’m happy to discuss it at length but I just can’t do it in the hall going to the elevator,” Romney said as Fang followed him down the hallway of the National Press Club.

Fortunately, Romney finally had enough time to dig into the intricate legal underpinnings of the constitutional question during his book tour in New Hampshire:

In an interview at the Union Leader this morning, Mitt Romney said President Obama’s health care plan was an unconstitutional violation of the 10th Amendment.

Romney has been saying that a key difference between his Massachusetts health care reform and President Obama’s reform is that his was a state plan and Obama’s is a federal plan. In speeches in New Hampshire last night and this morning, he defended his plan (as he has before) by noting that the 10th Amendment reserves powers to the states that are not explicitly granted to the federal government…

In a scheduled interview this morning, I asked Romney if Obama’s individual mandate unconstitutional in ordering individuals to purchase a commodity. “I’m not enough of a judge,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional on the 10th Amendment front.”

Who new it was actually that simple? The Washington Posts’ Greg Sargent points out the absurdity of trying to argue that a mandate is only unconstitutional if the federal government imposes it, but it’s also worth noting that Romney’s answer makes little legal sense. He doesn’t say that government can’t mandate the purchase of insurance — after all, his own health care law does that — only that it’s a right reserved to the states. But, of course, that’s not how the Supreme Court sees it. The Court has decided that the Commerce Clause grants Congress the authority to regulate economic activity among the states. And, since federal laws are supreme to the laws of the states (under the supremacy clause), states have to heed the new mandate requirements. The tenth amendment only provides that states retain powers that are not granted to Congress.

Romney was also asked if “any other federal programs currently in place violate the 10th Amendment, he said, “I don’t have any I can point to at this stage.”

Politics

Romney Says Massachusetts Not A Model For Health Reform, After Urging Dems To Use It As Model

By Igor Volsky on Apr 8, 2010 at 6:05 pm

Mitt Romney continues to struggle with questions about why he wants to repeal a health care law that is so similar to the health reforms he signed in 2006 as Governor of Massachusetts, particularly since he used to argue that RomneyCare should serve as a template for national reform.

In October of 2009, Romney urged Democrats to use the Massachusetts law as a model to expand coverage. “We have found that we can get everybody insured without breaking the bank and without a public option,” Romney told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. “Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn’t break the bank, doesn’t put the government in the driver’s seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage. That’s what Massachusetts did,” he said.

But since federal reformers adopted Massachusetts’ individual mandate and standard benefit provisions (among many others), Romney has found himself in the awkward position of having to defend his biggest legislative accomplishment while simultaneously attacking its federal twin. Yesterday, during a book signing in New Hampshire, Romney said that Massachusetts is not a model for coverage expansion:

“Had they brought the federal bill to my desk when I was governor, I’d have vetoed it,” Romney told an audience of 150 yesterday at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in Manchester…”We solved a problem in the state with a state answer,” Romney said. “We didn’t have the federal government come in and intrude on the rights of states.”…Romney said the federal government created its plan without learning from Massachusetts or any other state. “It shouldn’t have been put in place without experimentation,” Romney said.

Incidentally, Romney used the 2009 interview (at that point, he was too focused on criticizing the public option to worry about other arguments) to berate Democrats for not using Massachusetts as a model. They did, and now he’s pretending that they didn’t.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Update

Romney is also asserted that the individual mandate in ObamaCare, which also exists in RomneyCare, is “unconstitutional on the 10th Amendment front.”

Climate Progress

Energy industry fights chemical disclosure

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 8, 2010 at 6:01 pm

Natural gas companies want to prevent oversight of fracking

The oil and natural gas lobby is working hard to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from establishing safeguards to protect the public from chemicals used to produce shale gas through “hydraulic fracturing,” also called “fracking” or “fracing.”  CAP’s Sarah Collins and Tom Kenworthy have the story in this repost.

Read more

Yglesias

The Lockdown

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 8, 2010 at 5:31 pm

IPad-01

Apple has adopted a very locked-down model for their iPhone and now for the iPad as well. This creates some additional revenue streams for Apple, but makes the product less desirable for consumers than it otherwise might be. An alternative business model would be for Apple to give those revenue streams up and instead just charge more for the iPad. An alternative to that would be to hold price constant, give those revenue streams up, and instead just hope to sell more iPads. But Apple has decided that the mix it’s chosen is the profit-maximizing mix, and it’s also betting that its combination of innovative lead-time, firm-specific industrial design abilities, and marketing savvy will let it avoid being overtaken by competitors offers a more open and flexible approach.

Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t, but that’s business—different firms trying different strategies to make money. Weirdly, though, a bunch of people in the tech press seem determined to pretend that all of Apple’s various efforts to lock the product down are actually features. So we get things like this from Joel Johnson:

I don’t prefer a closed ecosystem for applications without a way to unwall the garden.

I don’t like that it’s illegal to install a different operating system on an iPad.

[...]

The old guard has The Fear. They see the iPad and the excitement it has engendered and realize that they’ve made themselves inessential—or at least invisible. They’ve realized that it’s possible to make a computer that doesn’t break, doesn’t stop working, doesn’t need constant tinkering. Unlike a car, it’s possible to design a computer that is bulletproof. It just turns out that one of the ways to make that work is to lock it down. That sucks, but it certainly appears to be a better solution than design by committee gave us for the last couple of decades.

But this is silly. If you think about the iPhone, it’s been known for years that there are various ways to “jailbreak” or “unlock” the device. Executing the jailbreaking is, however, moderately difficult, violates various Apple rules, etc. What’s more, with its successive software updates Apple always tries to foil earlier iterations of jailbreaking. If the real purpose for locking the phone down was to enhance its performance by making it more “bulletproof” then the phones could just come loaded with a jailbreak option. You’d hit the button, the phone would say “are you sure?” and detail various potential problems, and if you hit yes then away you’d go.

Instead, they did the reverse. Which is fine. It’s a business strategy and businesses need to try some different strategies. But it’s silly to pretend that it’s anything other than what it is—a calculation that making the device somewhat less useful to its users will help Apple make more money by locking customers in to specialized stores.

Climate Progress

FLASHBACK: Don Blankenship Warned West Virginia That He Believes In ‘Survival Of The Fittest’

By Brad Johnson on Apr 8, 2010 at 5:20 pm

Coal baron Don Blankenship is complaining about the “indignity” of the press for investigating his role as the CEO of Massey Energy, whose Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, WV, is the site of the deadliest mining disaster since 1984, with at least 25 miners killed. Blankenship has a long record of putting coal profits over safety. At the time of the accident, Massey was contesting dozens of major safety violations at the Montcoal mine, even as Blankenship increased production. Blankenship — whose $23.7 million annual compensation includes the use of the company jet and helicopter and a mansion with several servants — has made no effort to hide his “radical” philosophy of unfettered capitalism. He explained this philosophy most clearly in a 1986 documentary by Anne Lewis on his role crushing the union miners at AT Massey’s Blackberry Creek mine, saying that “everybody’s going to have to learn to accept” that the United States is ruled by the law of “survival of the fittest”:

What you have to accept in a capitalist society, generally, is that I always make the comparison it’s like a jungle, where a jungle is survival of the fittest. Unions, communities, people, everybody’s going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society. And that capitalism from a business viewpoint is survival of the most productive. And you may have a year, two years, five year periods where lesser productive companies or people have benefit. But in the long term, it’s going to be the most productive people who benefit.

Watch it:

Blankenship’s social-Darwinist view of the United States is dark, soulless, and destructive. Unlike the mythical uber-capitalists of Ayn Rand novels, Blankenship has no interest in free-market competition within the bounds of the law. Instead, he subverts the political system, busts unions, illegally destroys Appalachia’s unique ecosystem, flouts labor laws, ignores safety rules, and intimidates employees to serve his black obsession with running coal.

Blankenship has successfully delivered his twisted vision of society to West Virginia — flattened mountains, toxic waters, crushing poverty, political corruption, broken communities, and the needless, preventable deaths of the state’s hard-working miners.

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