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Farmer who put up sign claiming Democrats are ‘party of parasites’ has taken $1 million in farm subsidies.

By Zaid Jilani on Jun 23, 2010 at 8:00 pm

jungerman Missouri farmer David Jungerman has raised the hackles of local residents with a politically-charged sign he’s placed on his “45-foot-long, semi-truck box trailer” on his farm. The trailer reads: “Are you a Producer or Parasite Democrats – Party of the Parasites.” Now, the Kansas City Star reveals that Jungerman has been the recipient of over a million dollars of federal farm subsidies since 1995:

The Raytown farmer who posted a sign on a semi-truck trailer accusing Democrats of being the “Party of Parasites” received more than $1 million in federal crop subsidies since 1995. [...]

After a story about Jungerman’s trailer ran in Sunday’s Star, however, some readers called him a hypocrite for criticizing others for getting government help while taking government subsidies paid for by taxpayers.

Jungerman said he put up the sign to protest people who pay no taxes, but, “Always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them” in social programs.

Trying to defend himself, Jungerman told the press, “That’s just my money coming back to me. I pay a lot in taxes. I’m not a parasite.” He also said that the sign is aimed at national Democrats, not local Democrats, many of whom are “are old-fashioned Harry Truman Democrats,” who Jungerman says are “more conservative than many Republicans.” For the record, Harry Truman campaigned on establishing a single-payer health care system and famously vetoed tax cuts, making him much more progressive than many of today’s Democrats.

Health

How The Patients’ Bill of Rights Will Affect Health Insurance Premiums

By Igor Volsky on Jun 23, 2010 at 7:05 pm

Reiterating President Obama’s claim that the interim Patients’ Bill of Rights regulations shouldn’t provide insurers with an excuse to increase premiums, Washington and Lee Professor Timothy Jost takes a closer look at the text of the interim final regulations and concludes that “most of the reforms are expected only to increase premiums by tenths or hundreds of a percent.” That’s because:

- Relatively few individuals are directly affected by most of the regulations.

- Plans have the option prior to 2014 of avoiding the impact of some of the requirements by simply eliminating coverage for services or conditions (although they might lose grandfathered status by doing so).

- Some of the practices are already restricted in many states.

- Some of the regulations really do not impose additional costs (such as allowing individuals to choose their primary care provider or allowing children to be treated by a pediatrician)

“Individuals who may have benefited by some of these regulations, such as the ban on pre-existing condition exclusions for children or the removal of lifetime limits and restriction on annual limits, may be faced with high premiums when they seek to purchase or renew individual coverage,” he speculates, but “[i]n states that require some form of community rating, this barrier will be limited.” And “most insurers limit premium increases for persons in poor health to twice the standard rate.”

The most surprising aspect of the regulations, however, is the pre-existing condition provision. These interim rules prohibit insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions; adults will receive this protection beginning in 2014, which is also when insurers will be required to offer a set of essential benefits. But before 2014, Jost notes that issuers can still get around this rule by excluding coverage for a certain conditions as long as they do not violate state law or other federal laws.

Kaiser Health News’ Phil Galewitz has more on the cost of the regulations here.

Politics

Flashback: Rand Paul said that if he were a governor hit with an ethics scandal, he’d just pardon himself.

By Faiz Shakir on Jun 23, 2010 at 7:01 pm

In 2006, Ernie Fletcher was the Republican, scandal-plagued governor of Kentucky, fighting off charges that he concocted a “a scheme to illegally award state jobs to political supporters.” After a two-year probe by the state attorney general into his hiring practices, Flether was indicted by a “special state grand jury on three counts of criminal conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination.” Fletcher later signed an agreement with the attorney general conceding that there was “wrongdoing by his administration” in exchange for dropping all charges. But in August 2006, Rand Paul — now the GOP Senate candidate — penned an op-ed in the Kentucky Post offering a different solution. Paul said that if he were Fletcher, he’d simply pardon himself:

rand_paulNow to give Fletcher a break, we have to acknowledge that having a bulldog attorney general who is a wannabe Democrat contender for the governorship has driven this nightmare. If you had a Republican attorney general, there would be no indictments and no case. Food for thought for Republicans: Apparently you can’t govern peacefully unless you win the governorship and the attorney general’s office.

Which gets me back to my daydream. What would I do if I were governor?

First, I’d have pardoned myself and everyone included nearly a year ago. Without a pardon the case goes on and on. Fletcher has gotten no kudos whatsoever for not pardoning himself.

Richard Beliles, chairman of the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause of Kentucky, said Wednesday that Paul’s pro-pardon stance would have been “good for an emperor, but it’s hardly good for a public servant. … If that’s what he really thinks, he doesn’t understand the concept of a public servant.”

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 23, 2010 at 6:14 pm

You always were:

— Peter Orszag didn’t get along with Larry Summers.

— But that’s not not why he’s leaving.

— Americans who don’t already get socialized medicine like the Affordable Care Act a lot.

— I had a roast suckling pig one time, though not in a bachelor party context, the best part was the brains; they melt into something creamy and delicious that you can spread on slices of bread.

— Sacramento Kings got substantially better with the Dalembert/Nocioni swap.

— The McChrystal/Petraeus swap is a great idea too.

The new Stars album has not impressed me as much as “In Our Bedroom After the War” or the magnificent “Set Yourself on Fire,” but it’s got some very solid tracks including “Fixed”.

Climate Progress

Peak readership for anti-science blogs?

By Joe Romm on Jun 23, 2010 at 6:13 pm

Tobis: Denyosphere Jumps the Shark

PeakReader

Comparative traffic rankings are always dicey — certainly Alexa.com is unreliable.  Compete.com is considered perhaps the best available.  Click on image for  larger figure of ranking over 12 months, which shows the rise and fall of the anti-science crowd.

Back on March 26, Watts wrote, “Traffic has slowed from about half of what it was during the heady days of Climategate and Copenhagen in December, but I note that this is not unique to WUWT, as other climate blogs have also experienced similar drops since then” (see Hits charade: WattsUpWithThat hypes itself with dubious webstats, while lowballing other blogs).

That may be true of his fellow anti-science bloggers, but it’s not true of Climate Progress.   ClimateAudit’s numbers are now apparently so low that Compete offers this disclaimer:

Read more

Economy

200,000 Jobs And Vital Programs At Stake In Senate Debate Over Medicaid Funding

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 23, 2010 at 6:10 pm

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

The Senate is still — yes, still — trying to wrangle together the perfect formula for its version of a tax extenders bill that extends unemployment insurance and several tax credits. The House, when it passed its version of the legislation, jettisoned $24 billion in aid to state’s for Medicaid, but the Senate has been trying to place the funding back, to no avail.

The Medicaid funding has been a sticking point for some of the self-styled “moderates” in the Senate, who seem to think that cutting a bill’s economy-boosting potential is the height of moderation. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), for instance, “has twice voted against procedural motions on the tax extenders bill because of their cost.” “That’s been my No. 1 concern,” she said. “I’d like to help [the states], but we can’t afford it,” added Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH).

Senate Minority Whip Jon KyL (R-AZ) said that “he thought at least some cut in the Medicaid aid would be necessary to get the bill to pass.” But as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson pointed out, the instinct on the part of lawmakers to cut state aid is all wrong on the economics:

The instinct to wean is understandable, but the timing is troublesome. Take New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie has proposed to cut $11 billion (that’s 25%!) of the state budget for its fiscal year 2011, which begins in two weeks. The states are looking to the federal government to determine how much money they’ll need to allocate toward Medicaid and education. If [it cuts] our new Medicaid crutch in half, the states’ Medicaid burden grows and in a zero-sum budget, that means something else goes.

Thompson pointed to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report stating that “without the extended Medicaid funding, Pennsylvania plans to cut funding for domestic violence prevention in half, eliminate all state funds for addressing substance abuse and homelessness, cut funding for child welfare by one-quarter, and cut payments to private hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors across the state — among other steps.” But Pennsylvania is not the only state that will have to take dramatic steps if Congress doesn’t act.

Arizona would have to cut funding for its state court system, Colorado’s likely cuts “include eliminating state aid for full-day kindergarten for 35,000 children, eliminating preschool aid for 21,000 children, and increasing overcrowding in juvenile detention facilities,” while New Mexico “could eliminate a wide range of Medicaid services, including emergency hospital services, inpatient psychiatric care, personal care assistance for the disabled, prescribed medications, and hospice care.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, estimated that 200,000 jobs could be at stake in this debate over Medicaid funding. “If state governments don’t get additional help from the federal government in the coming fiscal year, then the job losses will be at least that large — in all likelihood, measurably larger than that,” Zandi said.

Politics

Rep. Louie Gohmert Cites Sowell’s Comparison Of Obama To Hitler On House Floor, Calls Him ‘Brilliant’

By Tanya Somanader on Jun 23, 2010 at 5:52 pm

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) drew a comparison between President Obama and Hitler in a speech on the House floor last night that quoted a recent op-ed by conservative columnist Thomas Sowell. In his op-ed, Sowell argued that Obama’s call for BP to set up an escrow account to help oil spill victims in the Gulf was a sign that “American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes.”

Gohmert praised Sowell as a “brilliant man” and used his words to warn that there are “useful idiots” who want President Obama to be a dictator:

There’s a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell. This man, well, his article says quite a lot. His editorial, um, says here — and it’s just been posted this week — but it says, “When Adolph Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920′s” — and I’m quoting from Thomas Sowell in his editorial:

‘leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions. ‘Useful idiots’ was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.’

And this isn’t in the article — this is my comment — but we do have useful idiots today, who are heard to say, ‘Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.’ They know not what they say.

Gohmert then read another section of Sowell’s editorial that claimed that Obama’s push for the BP escrow fund violated the Constitution. “Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation?” read Gohmert. “Nowhere.” Watch it:

This is not the first time Gohmert has made radical, sensational claims. For instance, in 2009, he said that Democrats want another terrorist attack in order to pass a jobs bill. It’s also not new for someone on the right to equate the Obama administration with Hitler’s Germany. (HT: Political Correction)

Yglesias

Elena’s Inbox

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 23, 2010 at 5:28 pm

elena-kagan-3-harvard-law-school-above-the-law-elana-kagan-elena-kagen

The crew over at the Sunlight Foundation have done the country a great service by taking the Elena Kagan email document dump and organizing it into a searchable, gmail-inspired database that lets us actually put the public disclosure to some kind of use. This is great. People like me don’t necessarily spend as much time thinking about technical reforms that can help improve the political process, but obviously such things can actually play a crucial role in determining whether disclosure is meaningful or not.

For example, Frank Gaffney thinks Kagan is likely to use a Supreme Court seat to impose shariah law on the United States of America. We can try to test this hypothesis by searching for “Islam” (no results) or “sharia” (no results) or “shariah” (no results). It’s actually a pretty suspicious pattern. Almost as if she was trying to hide something. There’s no “caliphate” either. Basically, this is either a woman whose radical Islamist political agenda is so deep-seated that she’s managed to cover it up throughout her long march through the institutions, or else Gaffney is just a laughable fool. And since we all know that Gaffney is a respected voice in right-of-center DC defense policy circles, it follows that Kagan is a dangerous closet radical. Beware!

Health

GOP’s Fanaticism About Repealing Health Reform Will Secure Its Place In History’s Dustbin

By Igor Volsky on Jun 23, 2010 at 5:12 pm

Obama_Boehner-cropped-proto-custom_2Lester Feder of Georgetown Law Center’s O’Neill Health Law Institute has an interesting new interview with James Morone — a professor of political science at Brown University — who points out that while we have seen partisan politics break out over past social reforms, never before has the partisan rhetoric extended into implementation:

Normally in our political system, when we have enormous battles over legislation, most political actors consider the politics done when the legislative battle is over. What’s new here is the idea that the battle goes on into the implementation phase. This wasn’t true for Social Security, it wasn’t true for Medicare, it wasn’t true for civil rights. Of course, interest groups always continued to fight to get the best deal possible in implementation. But that’s very different from it being Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus conservatives. Today’s situation is very different.[...]

I’m not sure the Democrats have been quite this insistent after losing legislation. To have the Republican Party be this forceful about a position after the normal political process has run its course is pretty extraordinary.

Morone goes on to explain why he thinks this is in parts I and II of Lester’s interview (both of which are very much worth reading), but I just want to underscore the passion with which the GOP is opposing this law. When I spoke with some Republican staffers on the hill last week about what could only be described as relatively futile legislative effort to repeal the law, they practically screamed at me that they will never, ever, accept that reform has become law and will work very hard to repeal the measure. “Why should we accept something that’s unconstitutional,” they asked.

Indeed, Republicans are using every single obscure regulation and appointment to re-litigate the health care reform debate. In addition to Sen. John Barrasso’s (R-WY) weekly ‘Second Opinion’ speech, prominent Republicans take to the floor and pen op-eds on a daily basis to condemn the new law and celebrate the states that are refusing to implement it. On Monday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that the new grandfathering regulations would cause many Americans to lose the coverage they have. Yesterday Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proclaimed, “we’re not going to quit on this issue, we’re not going to quit on this issue. It’s going to be repeal and replace.” And today, House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a 43-page report rehashing the GOP’s health care talking points.

It’s important not to overstate the cohesion of the GOP campaign, since different factions have adopted different strategies, but it’s safe to say that their larger goal is to goad Democrats into rehashing the 2009 health care legislative debate, rather than looking ahead towards implementation. But that kind of discussion, in which we argue back and forth about CBO scores, diminishes the legislative accomplishment and adds extra weight to the GOP critique. It’s not the role of the minority party to set the terms of debate — particularly when they’re doing so for such transparently political purposes.

President Obama said it best when he framed the discussion this way: “They want to go back to the system we had before.” “Would you?” he asked during yesterday’s Patients’ Bill Of Rights unveiling. Would you want to go back to discriminating against children with preexisting conditions? Would you want to go back to dropping coverage for people when they get sick? Would you want to reinstate lifetime limits on benefits so that mothers like Amy have to worry? We’re not going back. I refuse to go back.”

If the GOP continues to press ahead with repeal, they might slow down the implementation process, but they’ll also run the risk of fading into historical irrelevancy. Who remembers the legislators who led the fight against Social Security or Medicare and better yet, who celebrates them?

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