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Health

Suing While Implementing: Utah Officials Meeting With HHS On ‘Daily Basis’ To Implement Reform

By Igor Volsky on Aug 19, 2010 at 9:00 pm

Utah is suing the federal government over the constitutionality of health care reform, but like many states in this position, it’s also taking steps to implement the law. In fact, according to Dessert News, the state is moving quickly to establish a health exchange for small businesses:

Starting on Sept. 1, the Beehive state’s first health care exchange for small businesses will officially begin operation. On that same day, the federal version of the Utah Comprehensive Health Insurance Pool, which covers people with high-risk health conditions, will also start offering coverage. [...]

In the meantime, the state is set to launch its own health exchange designed for small employers — of two to 50 employees — in which companies will give their workers money they will use to purchase insurance coverage from a wide array of plan options tailored to their specific needs. Exchanges for larger employers will follow in a few weeks.

The tension between states implementing reform on one hand and suing the federal government on the other, is well pronounced in Utah, which has joined Florida’s challenge to the individual mandate, but has also established a special task force to implement the measure.

According to local health advocates on the ground, moderate to conservative Republicans are working diligently to assert local control over how reform is implemented and maximize Utah’s autonomy over the measure — all the while paying lip service to the repeal meme. The state has applied for the rate review grants announced earlier this week and is considering all other funding opportunities. Utah officials are conducting what was described to me as “daily” meetings with HHS officials about implementation, some of which include the governor’s adviser on health reform, John T. Nielsen and Utah Lt. Governor Greg Bell, a moderate Republican.

The tension in the state seems to rest between moderate and conservative Republicans, the latter of which is not too happy about the state’s partial embrace of reform. State health advocates I spoke to warned me that if the November elections bring the hard liners into power, any progress on implementing the measure could be reversed. But the willingness to at least give reform a try is itself surprising.

One Utah involved in state health issues speculated that even the repeal and replace advocates realize that “this is how they have to do reform and it is important to get started and try out some of these ideas.” “I wonder if they’re not thinking well, the only way to prove reforms are wrong, is to give them a good college try,” this person told me.

Justice

Pentagon Doesn’t Anticipate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Will Be Priority For Military Families

By Igor Volsky on Aug 19, 2010 at 8:00 pm

Tomorrow, the military will mail paper surveys to 150,000 spouses of military servicemembers to gauge their reaction to repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law. The survey is part of a larger Pentagon effort to study how allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would affect military and family life. It comes on the heels of a controversial and highly criticized survey of 400,000 active military and reserve members.

Pentagon sources tell me that this second questionnaire will be analyzed in a qualitative, rather than a quantitative manner. The military will try to assess if repealing the policy will affect military retention and recruitment, and the importance of the issue in the context of other concerns like educational opportunities and medical benefits. The Pentagon will work with groups like Servicemembers United to reach out to the spouses of gay and lesbian troops.

“We are asking the family members, if we were to change the law, are there any impacts at all that might affect family readiness and military community life,” DoD spokesperson Cynthia Smith told me. “We understand that military spouses play an important role in a servicemembers’ decision about whether or not they’re going to stay in the military. It’s a retention issue. It’s aslo a recruiting issue becaue we know that spouses are influencers in local communities.”

Interestingly, one source told me that the Pentagon expects DADT to rank low on the list of priorities and said that past focus groups have shown that family members have other, more pressing concerns.

Military spouses will have until September 27th to complete and mail in the survey.

Media

Media: Maybe Obama Should Go To Church More Publicly So People Know He’s Christian

By Amanda Terkel on Aug 19, 2010 at 7:20 pm

Today, Pew put out a poll showing that 18 percent of the American public believes President Obama is a Muslim. That number includes 31 percent of Republicans. Only 34 percent of the adult public says Obama is a Christian, down from 48 percent in 2009. When asked how they learned about Obama’s religion, 60 percent of the respondents cited the media, with tv mentioned the most frequently.

While journalists and pundits on cable news today did acknowledge the “media” have had a role to play, they also seemed to place some of the blame on Obama and his staff, saying that perhaps the President should go to church more frequently and more openly to show the public that he truly is Christian. Watch it:

First of all, Obama should not have to be bible-thumping on C-SPAN every Sunday in order to prove how Christian he is. Second of all, the poll leaves out a very important source of this misinformation: the irresponsible right wing. As Salon’s Alex Pareene notes:

But the fact that thinking-he’s-a-Muslim tracks so closely with disapproval of his presidency is perhaps a sign that the disappearance of the “responsible” wing of the GOP is helping to make outright bigotry totally acceptable.

Going to church isn’t likely to change the minds of the far right. After all, it was his attendance at church that got him in trouble to begin with.

There have been many news reports over the past few years debunking the rumor that Obama is a Muslim. Nevertheless, the right-wing media continues to push the myth. These fringe views aren’t rejected by influential conservatives, but often embraced, and therefore picked up in mainstream discourse and media. Saying that he needs to publicly change his habits of worship in order to appease people is like saying he needs to roll around in big piles of money to show he isn’t a socialist.

And in the end, there will always be people who can’t be convinced of mainstream positions. Twenty-one percent of the public believes in witches, 41 percent believe in ESP, and 34 percent are convinced that “houses can be haunted.”

Climate Progress

Waxman And Stupak Demand BP Detail Scope Of Greenwashing Campaign

By Brad Johnson on Aug 19, 2010 at 6:50 pm

BP Wonk Room adIn a letter to BP America CEO Lamar McKay, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) are demanding that BP disclose its “spending on corporate advertising and marketing relating to the the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and relief, recovery, and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.” Their request follows the efforts of Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) to get answers about BP’s massive greenwashing campaign, which includes months of full-page advertisements in national and regional newspapers, radio spots, television commercials, and Internet ads on websites including ThinkProgress.org. Outside estimates of the scope of the greenwashing campaign managed by BP’s public relations firm Mediashare are in the tens of millions of dollars, the Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson reports:

After the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, BP went on the air with television ads and bought a series of full-page ads in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other papers to position itself as an imperfect but responsible corporation committed to the cleanup of the gulf. The company has spent $55.8 million on television and print advertising so far this year, according to the Nielsen Co., which tracks ad spending.

According to Media Monitors, BP’s radio spots surged to 10,684 last week, with a particular focus on Florida stations. Since mid-July, BP’s internet ads have been running on political blogs, including Talking Points Memo, the Common Sense Media network of liberal sites from FireDogLake to AmericaBlog, and a host of right-wing sites, including Eagle Interactive‘s network with RedState and the Salem Web Network’s Townhall.com and Hot Air.

BP seems to be working harder to protect its brand than to help the people of the Gulf Coast, argued Alabama Attorney General Troy King. He has filed suit against BP because “while BP is spending millions on print ads and airtime, it’s not spending what it should on claims.” Fortunately, BP’s control of the claims process will finally end Monday, with the launch of Kenneth Feinberg’s Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

(HT Mother Jones)

BP has an agreement with Common Sense Media to be notified about this story, reserving the right to pull ads from ThinkProgress.

Related Posts

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 19, 2010 at 6:15 pm

Here we go again:

— Fenty vs Gray, the real debate.

— Belief in haunted houses is surprisingly widespread.

— You can’t believe what you read in Politico.

— Presidential power is complicated.

Elastica, “Car Song”. Ironically in the video they seem to be driving around an incredibly dense, transit-oriented Japanese city.

Media

Fox News’ Van Susteren Hosts Three-Day Infomercial On Palin Without Disclosing Her Husband’s Ties To Her

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Aug 19, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Last night, Fox News aired the final part of its three-day special on oil drilling in Alaska, in which host Greta Van Susteren got the “inside story” from former governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd. The special, shot on location, featured airplane flights over the tundra, boat rides in Valdez harbor, and interviews with the Palins on their dock. As Media Matters noted, the special “basically boil[ed] down to a three-day infomercial of Palin touting her positions on ANWR and her record of ‘play[ing] hardball’ with oil companies as governor.”

Indeed, while the special included numerous interviews with pro-drilling advocates — including the Palins and a vice president of Shell Oil — “The Case Against Drilling in ANWR” was reserved for last night, confined to an interview with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA).

Watch a compilation:

Beyond the questionable seriousness of Van Susteren’s report, there is a deeper ethical concern. Van Susteren’s husband John Coale is one of “the figures charged with guiding Palin’s political image in Washington,” but Van Susteren never revealed this connection during the special. Coale has described himself as simply a “friend” of Palin, but has acknowledged that he helped her start her leadership PAC. “Others familiar with Palin’s political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on — essentially helping to run Sarah PAC,” the Washington Post first reported.

Van Susteren admitted on her blog that her husband “has given Governor Palin advice and helped her,” but she said her husband is not a “paid adviser.” Still, according to a Nexis search performed by ThinkProgress, starting on the day that Sarah PAC was unveiled, Van Susteren has never disclosed her husband’s behind-the-scenes role on air.

The oil special is merely the latest in a long string of Van Susteren puff pieces about Palin. During the presidential campaign, Van Susteren had perhaps the best access to Palin of any journalist, hosting a one-hour “documentary” on “Governor Sarah Palin — An American Woman.” She also scored an exclusive interview with Todd Palin, in which she grilled him “on everything from the story behind the name ‘First Dude’ to how he feels about the name ‘First Dude.’”

After the election, Palin chose Van Susteren for her first national television interview. Since then, Van Susteren has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential slights to the governor and gushing over her popularity. For example, when Palin’s memoir came out, Van Susteren was a strong promoter of the book, devoting plenty of air time to the “buzz” surrounding its publication.

Justice

New Report Details How Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Hurts The Military And The Troops

By Igor Volsky on Aug 19, 2010 at 5:40 pm

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell scholar Nathaniel Frank — formerly of the Palm Center — is out with a new report detailing how the ban against open service undermines the military — which supporters of the policy claim to be preserving. But as Frank explains, “[f]ar from protecting military readiness, the policy has harmed it, sacrificing badly needed personnel that is replaced with less qualified talent; undermining cohesion, integrity, and trust through forced dishonesty; hurting the morale of gay troops by limiting their access to support services; wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars; invading the privacy of all service members—gay and non-gay alike—by casting a cloud of suspicion and uncertainty over the intimate lives of everyone in the armed forces; and damaging the military’s reputation which makes it harder to recruit the best and brightest America has to offer.”

Frank’s report substantiates what many of the recent personal stories of closeted soldiers have described anecdotally. He lists 12 ways in which the military is harmed by the policy (I’m excerpting the top five below):

1. Waste the talents of thousands of essential personnel with “critical skills” who were fired for their sexual orientation — 757 troops with “critical occupations” were fired under the policy between fiscal years 1994 and 2003.

2. Strike at the heart of unit cohesion by breaking apart cohesive fighting teams — a 2009 study published in Military Psychology found that sexual orientation disclosure is positively related to unit cohesion, while concealment and harassment are related negatively. Forcing troops to conceal their sexual orientation appears to reduce cohesion.

3. Hamper recruitment and retention by shrinking the pool of potential enlistees — an additional 41,000 qualified gay Americans might join if the ban were lifted, and an additional 4,000 personnel might remain in uniform

4. Lower the quality of military personnel by discharging capable gay troops leaving slots to be filled through “moral waivers” that admit felons, substance abusers, and other high-risk recruits.

5. Infect the morale of the estimated 66,000 gay, lesbian, and bisexual troops and their military peers who must serve in a climate of needless alienation, dishonesty, and fear

It’s worth pointing out that while these effects on military readiness are easily verifiable (by the Pentagon’s own reports no less), the claims from the other side about how repealing the policy would harm the institution have yet to be experienced by any of the 26 NATO allies that allow open service.

Climate Progress

Science shocker: Drought drives decade-long decline in plant growth

By Climate Guest Blogger on Aug 19, 2010 at 5:31 pm

This could drive an amplifying feedback, undermine biofuels strategy

Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.

NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight — just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said.

“These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive — as was documented for the 1980′s and 1990′s,” said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology research program.

That’s from a remarkable NASA news release today, “Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth” (see narrated video below).

On Friday, the journal Science publishes the study itself, ” Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009” (subs. req’d), which found:

Read more

Yglesias

Four Reasons for a Mistake

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 19, 2010 at 5:28 pm

File-Iraq,_Saddam_Hussein_(222) 1

In response to my post on Howard Dean’s wise February 2003 speech about Iraq a few correspondents have asked me to revisit my own war thinking in 2002. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of exercise because I think it shades into excuse-making, but in retrospect you can think of four strands of argumentation:

1. Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. More forceful intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo had all been called for. This led to a general predisposition in favor of military adventurism.

2. Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously. I knew that Carl Levin & Nancy Pelosi were on the other side, but the bulk of the leading Democratic voices on national security and foreign policy issues were in favor of the war. So was Tony Blair. These were credible people whose views I took seriously.

3. Misreading the politics: It seemed to me that the political consequences to George W Bush of invading Iraq to disrupt a nuclear weapons program and then discovering that there was no such program would be disastrous. Presidents do have access to secret intelligence, and it seemed nutty to me to suggest that the administration would be engaged in a massive, easily-debunked-after-the fact lie. Similarly, I didn’t take all the democracy-talk very seriously but the “better than Saddam” humanitarian standard is a low bar and I figured Bush wouldn’t be doing this unless he said some reasonable plan for extricating our forces and stabilizing the situation.

4. Kenneth Pollack: The formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” I discuss this book in some detail in my own book, but to make a long story short its argumentative structure is badly flawed. Roughly speaking he says “if we invade Iraq and a pony shows up, that will be better than the alternatives, therefore invading Iraq is better than trying to muddle through.” Which is great, except we’re missing the pony! This problem is what Robert Farley’s Jedi Principle is about.

So that’s that. You can, however, always get more psychological. I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people. The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.

Anyways, one thing that’s always puzzled me is why other war supporters were so slow to turn against it. As I intimated in this morning post, notwithstanding any of the above considerations it was clear to me that something was badly amiss as soon as Bush/Blair/Aznar pulled the plug on the inspections process. By a couple of months later, it seemed pretty clear that there was no scary WMD program and also that there was no real plan for what to do. But it seems to have taken all the way until 2005-2006 for “this was a mistake” to become a conventional view even though no really important new information became available during the interim.

Economy

Deficit Fraud Kelly Ayotte’s First Step Toward Deficit Reduction Would Result In A Deficit Increase

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 19, 2010 at 4:53 pm

Kelly Ayotte, the front-runner for the Republican senate nomination in New Hampshire, likes to portray herself as a fierce fiscal hawk. “The spend-a-thon in Washington must stop. That means stopping anymore spending that adds to our deficit and debt,” she has said, adding that “spending cuts must be made with a hatchet, not a scalpel.”

But if her sit-down with the Foster’s Daily Democrat’s editorial board is any indication, Ayotte is a bit clueless when it comes to the federal budget, as her prime deficit reduction strategy would actually result in the deficit increasing:

One way Ayotte wants to cut the deficit is repeal the $900 billion health care reform bill. She noted many components don’t kick in until after the presidential election in 2012. “That’s why it’s important to keep the repeal effort alive,” she said. “What we owe is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. It’s an American issue.”

Of course, as Matt Finkelstein notes, “according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by $130 billion in the first ten years (and up to $1.3 trillion by 2029).” So repealing it will have the opposite effect of that which Ayotte claims she’s going for.

But this performance is really in line with the rest of Ayotte’s deficit peacockery. In an op-ed in the Nashua Telegraph — entitled “Time to stop the spendathon in Washington” — Ayotte outlined five steps that she thinks will fix the deficit. The first, a balanced budget amendment, is a pipe dream that even Republicans realize will be horribly destructive for the economy.

The next, repealing what’s left of the stimulus bill, only cuts spending in the short term and would necessitate repealing money dedicated to middle class tax cuts, thus increasing taxes on the middle class. She would also end earmarks, which amount to less than one percent of the federal budget, and add a “sunset” provision to federal programs, even though discretionary spending programs already have to be renewed every year.

Finally, she would indiscriminately cut every federal agency by 20 percent. I’m curious if she’s really in favor of downsizing the Defense Department, border enforcement, the FBI, the Coast Guard, and a whole host of other vital programs like food inspection or port security, by 20 percent overnight.

Note that none of Ayotte’s solutions have anything to do with the structural causes of the deficit. They’re simply the kinds of ideas conservatives like to tout even when the deficit isn’t a concern. If this is the best she can come up with, no one should be talking Ayotte’s deficit-cutting credentials seriously.

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