The records broken this winter were supposed to be for cold weather. But fast on the heels of the Arctic seeing the lowest January sea ice extent in the satellite record, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports:
February 2011 tied February 2005 for the lowest ice extent for the month in the satellite record. Including 2011, the February trend is now at -3.0 percent per decade.
The NSIDC has more details:
Republicans railing against Medicaid would be well served by reading this brief from the Urban Institute. John Holahan, Lisa Clemans-Cope, Emily Lawton, and David Rousseau argue that the program — which saw an increase in beneficiaries since the Great Recession — has done a better job of containing health care spending than private insurers:
As policymakers explore deficit reduction options involving Medicaid at the federal level and spending reductions at the state level, they need to recognize that a large amount of cost containment measures have already been taken, with considerable success, and further cuts could have adverse effects on access and health care quality for their sickest and poorest residents. [..]
On a per enrollee basis, however, growth in Medicaid spending (the national average, not necessarily specific states) is slower than both growth in national health expenditures per capita and increases in private health insurance premiums (Figure 1). Moreover, although Medicaid spending per enrollee has risen 1.6 percentage points faster than growth in GDP per capita (3.0 percent) over the last decade (2000-2009), its per capita growth has been far below the rise in overall per capita health spending in America, which has risen 2.9 percentage points per year faster than GDP per capita over this same period.
Growth in Medicaid spending per enrollee is lower than the increases in national health expenditures per capita and the premium growth of employer-sponsored health insurance plans due to an aggressive set of cost containment policies implemented by states in general. These include lower fee-for-service payment rates, consistent expansion of Medicaid managed care programs, an array of policies to control prescription drugs, and extension of home health and community-based services intended to reduce the level of institutionalization.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ Edwin Park provides this chart:
The Affordable Care Act does temporarily increase the reimbursement rates to Medicaid providers (and policy wonks agree that more needs to be done in this regard), but this report undermines the argument that Medicaid costs are out of control and that states would be better capping or even opting out of the program. The fact is that Medicaid cost growth per beneficiary “has essentially tracked growth in health-care costs systemwide” and the program actually “provides more comprehensive benefits than private insurance and charges beneficiaries significantly lower out-of-pocket costs.”
ThinkProgress filed this report from the Tea Party Patriots Policy Summit in Phoenix, AZ.
Last weekend, Americans around the country organized “Main Street Movement” protests to stand in solidarity with organized labor and demand that corporate interests pay their fair share. As ThinkProgress has reported, many of the nation’s largest corporate interests pay literally nothing in corporate income taxes. ExxonMobil made nearly $20 billion in profits in 2009, but paid nothing in corporate income taxes. Other extremely profitable companies GE, CitiGroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Boeing similarly have had entire quarters or years without paying corporate income taxes.
At the Tea Party summit last weekend, we spoke to former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), a prospective GOP presidential candidate, about corporate tax cheats. Asked about Bank of America, another wildly profitable American bank that paid nothing in corporate taxes in 2009, Pawlenty simply relied “Well actually the corporate tax rate in Minnesota and around the country is too high.” Reminded several times that Bank of America doesn’t pay it’s corporate taxes, regardless of rates, Pawlenty said that both exemptions and rates should be lowered. However, he again emphasized that he was not troubled, or even aware, of corporate tax dodging, and that corporate tax rates should be reduced:
FANG: Governor, today liberals are demonstrating all over the country in what CBS has called a liberal version of the Tea Party. Their main complaint is that a lot of corporations aren’t paying their fair share. For example, Bank of America, in 2009 paid nothing in corporate income taxes, same with ExxonMobil, GE, and a lot of other big corporations. Do you think corporations like Bank of America should pay their fair share? What are your thoughts on that?
PAWLENTY: Well actually the corporate tax rate in Minnesota and around the country is too high. And I think one thing we could and should do is–
FANG: You think zero is too high with Bank of America paying nothing?
PAWLENTY: We have the highest corporate tax rate, or one of them, in the world–
FANG: But they use loopholes and offshore bank accounts to pay nothing.
PAWLENTY: The things I’ve called for is reducing tax rates and looking at exemptions or special deals within the tax code that give certain companies privileges or benefits. I can’t speak individually to any country, company would get in that regard, but I think one goal or direction is to simplify and reduce tax rates and clean out as many of the special deals as possible.
FANG: To be clear, do you think Bank of America pays too much in taxes already?
PAWLENTY: I don’t know what Bank of America pays in taxes. I’ll just say, setting aside Bank of America, the corporate tax rate in America is too high compared to our competitor nations.
Watch it:
In 2009, as Bank of America made billions in untaxed profits, the firm’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”
Even Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), a Republican well to the right of Pawlenty on most issues, told us that corporate tax dodgers “broke the law.” As he prepares to run for president, Pawlenty has positioned himself close to the corporate right. Last year, we broke a story about how bailed out banks — still on the hook for taxpayer money — were funneling cash to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to kill financial reform. We asked Pawlenty if he had any problem with taxpayer-owned banks secretly lobbying against reforms for their industry. He didn’t.
By Christy Goldfuss, the Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Appearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources Tuesday, Governor Gary Herbert (R-UT) spun a tale of a war on Western jobs. Testifying on the administration’s wild lands policy, he claimed that Secretarial Order 3310 will unleash a wave of lawsuits and destroy existing resource management plans:
We’re being told by oil and gas exploration companies that, due to regulatory uncertainty, they’ll likely be curbing their activities in Utah. They are telling us that they will not invest the time and capital necessary to prepare new bids on new exploration, until the regulatory situation is steadied. The lack of this new investment means not only a loss of jobs for Utah residents but also the loss of natural resources that only increases our nation’s dependence on fuel from foreign, often hostile countries.
The truth is that existing BLM Resource Management Plans are untouched by the administration’s new policy, which only affects future planning endeavors. The oil and gas industry is holding thousands upon thousands of acres of drilling leases without taking action, making the governor’s claims of “loss of natural resources” highly questionable. Furthermore, only 2,530 net new oil, gas, and mining jobs were created in Utah between the years of 1998 and 2008. Even during the Bush administration’s push for greater energy production, the extractive industries did not make up a large portion of the employment in Utah, and were dwarfed by the tourism sector.
As of 2008, less than one percent of the private sector jobs in Utah were from oil, gas, and mining combined. Jobs related to travel and tourism for people coming to enjoy those wild lands make up 13.6 percent of the jobs in Utah.
The wild lands policy in question will not impact current land management, as Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Bob Abbey said in the hearing:
I have heard concerns that the new wild lands policy has put a halt to new projects and will prevent important economic activity in local communities. This claim is, simply put, false.
Instead, the wild lands policy issued in December by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is designed to help the BLM carry out its multiple-use mission, which means managing the millions of acres under BLM’s control, taking into account all uses of the land, including oil, gas, mining, timber, and wilderness. It is the wilderness and the wild lands of Utah that in 2009 brought 19 million people to the state. “Tourism is big business,” Leigh von der Esch, the managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism, testified before the same committee last year. “Parks and federal lands attract visitors that energize local economies, support jobs and economic growth.”
In an interview with the Wonk Room, a small business owner in Utah, Outdoor Utah’s editor Red Oelerich, responded to Gov. Herbert. “I don’t know if all the people making the noise about it understand the economic value of the public lands” and the tourists they attract, Oelerich said. “If there is an overabundance of the extraction industry and if there are coal mines going in, we’re not going to get them, because these are people that want a pretty pristine atmosphere, so it’s going to hurt us economically.”
Approximately 15 percent of the state’s BLM lands may be considered wild lands, which sustain Utah’s thriving tourist industry. By purporting that the wild lands policy could cost Utah billions, Herbert seemed all too willing to ignore the billions of dollars those lands currently generate and the jobs they currently supply in favor of a pollutive industry that just happens to have contributed heavily to his campaign.
Driving in your car:
— New iPad making me sad I have a lame old iPad 1, but us early adopters are the unsung heros of the economy.
— Shanghai metal sorters.
— Park Slope petitioners making explicit what’s often implicit.
— Wisconsin voters launch recall effort against eight state senators.
— Fox News suspends contributors.
— I wonder who sent me a phishing email today while pretending to be the Oregon department of education.
Dum Dum Girls cover “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”.
ThinkProgress filed this report from the Tea Party Patriots Policy Summit in Phoenix, AZ.
In December, former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) lashed out at Arizona’s SB1070 law, a law that allows police to racially profile people they believe to be in the country without documentation. During a speech criticizing the law, the Denver Post reported that “Bush said if his children walked the streets of Phoenix they might look awfully suspicious to police.” Bush’s wife was born in Mexico and his children are Hispanic. At the Tea Party summit, we asked Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sheriff responsible for the Phoenix area (Maricopa County) about Bush’s remarks. A staunch supporter of SB1070, Arpaio was dumbfounded. Arpaio said he was a “campaign guy” for George W. Bush, so Jeb should have spoke to him first before commenting on the law. He then said he’s “gotta educate” Jeb on SB1070:
FANG: What do you think about Jeb Bush? He said he’d be afraid for his sons to be coming to Maricopa County, that they would be racially profiled.
ARPAIO: What? Who said that?
FANG: Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
KEYES: His wife is Mexican.
ARPIAO: So what? My daughter in law is Hispanic, what’s that got to do with it? You mean, because I was a campaign guy for George W. here, a good friend of mine, and you’re saying Jeb said he’s afraid to come to Maricopa County? [...] Jeb doesn’t understand the law. Why doesn’t he call, why doesn’t he talk to me? [...] Why would he talk to me?
FANG: Well you’re America’s sheriff.
ARPIAO: The world’s sheriff. [...] So he really said that? We gotta educate him. We gotta educate that. I don’t know, you probably misquote him.
Watch it:
Also during the interview, Arpiao fully endorsed State Sen. Russell Pearce’s (R-AZ) effort to pass a new law the Wonk Room’s Andrea Nill has referred to as “SB1070 on steroids.”
The Senate today approved a short-term continuing resolution that was passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, granting lawmakers a two week reprieve in which to craft a longer-term spending plan. But the two parties are really no closer to that goal than they were before the short-term resolution was approved.
As we’ve detailed, the long-term continuing resolution that House Republicans have approved — which sets spending levels for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year and is staunchly opposed by Senate Democrats — would gut important federal investments in special education, K-12 education for low-income students, federal job training, environmental protection, community health centers, infrastructure, and programs that aid both pregnant women and newborns. Yesterday, we added housing assistance for veterans to the list.
And here’s one more consequence of the drastic decrease in discretionary spending that House Republicans envision — 10,000 long term disabled people will lose their rental assistance (and likely their homes):
– Cuts in the GOP bill would result in 10,000 people with serious long-term disabilities losing rental assistance through the Section 811 voucher program. Most of these would lose their homes.
As the National Low Income Housing Coalition noted, Section 811 vouchers are “one of the few remaining HUD programs that ensures housing affordability for people with extremely low incomes, such as people who rely on SSI payments which for a one-person household equal only 18% of the national median income — far below the poverty line.” The Coalition on Human Needs bluntly noted that under the GOP plan, “more people will be homeless.”
As if that weren’t enough, the House GOP’s spending plan would also cut funding for maintenance of low-income public housing:
– [The cuts would] allow the housing units of the 1.2 million low-income families in public housing to deteriorate as the Public Housing Capital Fund — which makes maintenance and repairs on the U.S. stock of public housing — is cut by over 40 percent.
Since the Great Recession struck, Republicans in Congress have shown little sympathy for those who are losing their homes through no fault of their own. And, evidently, this attitude extends to low-income disabled people who depend on housing assistance to keep a roof over their heads.
Mark Kleiman, reflecting on Mike Huckabee’s apparent belief that Barack Obama grew up in Kenya, says “That even Huckabee fell into this trap in the context of a friendly interview with a right-wing talk jock suggests a serious problem for the Republicans as they attempt to re-take the White House in 2012 or 2016.”
To me, this is mostly a reminder that people overrate this kind of thing. Recall that Barack Obama said affection for Jesus Christ and firearms is a form of false consciousness. It turned out that his self-described spiritual mentor was a black nationalist peddling nutty AIDS conspiracy theories who thinks 9/11 was “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” And Obama not only won, he won easily against a decorated war hero. Then again, the hero in question was so rich and out of touch that he couldn’t even keep track of how many houses he owned! In other words, nobody gets it through a long campaign season without screwing some things up, but either voters don’t care about this stuff or else it offsets. Obama’s re-election potential is almost certainly going to be a function of economic conditions rather than how gaffe-prone the Republican nominee is.
As Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) hearings on domestic radicalization approach, resistance to his effort — which places singular focus on Muslim Americans — continues to mount. Faith leaders in and around King’s district have already asked him to cancel the hearings, and now over 100 religious leaders in California are asking him to do the same, citing the need for an “elevated civic dialogue transcending fear-mongering and polarization.”
The Islamic Shura Council of Southern California collected 128 signatures from bishops, rabbis and ministers in Southern California on a letter that asks King to cancel his hearing because of an unfair focus on Muslim-Americans:
[T]oday, Muslim-Americans in many communities face fierce opposition when they propose to build a mosque to worship peacefully. Ever growing numbers of Muslims are victims of hate crimes. This bigotry and discrimination, rooted in fear and ignorance is corrosive to the soul of our nation.
As religious leaders and people of faith, we stand together to express our profound concern about the Congressional hearings you have proposed to investigate the Muslim-American community. We fear this effort will only further divide our community and undermine our nation’s highest ideals. We urge you to cancel these hearings.
Also this week, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) — who spent years with his family in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II — wrote an urgent op-ed declaring King’s hearings’ “un-American”:
Hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans were unjustly placed under scrutiny and suspicion because few in Washington were brave enough to say “no.” The decision to incarcerate, according to a report by the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Now, decades later, something similarly sinister is returning to our country. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is organizing congressional hearings on Muslim Americans. These hearings are scheduled to take place within the House Homeland Security Committee.
Rep. King’s intent seems clear: To cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia. By framing his hearings as an investigation of the American Muslim community, the implication is that we should be suspicious of our Muslim neighbors, co-workers or classmates solely on the basis of their religion.
This argument was echoed at a panel on Capitol Hill today by Suhail Khan, a former Bush administration official, who said that “we’ve seen this movie before — whether it was the attacks on Jewish Americans during the Red Scare, on Catholics, on Japanese-Americans during World War II, on African-Americans and so many others who went through horrendous experiences.”
King has already pared back his hearings by removing two controversial witnesses, but he plans to go ahead with the hearings on March 10. He dismissed recent protests outside his office over the hearings in an interview with Good Morning New York last week, saying “this issue is too important for demonstrations.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told conservative radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder should probably resign for advising President Obama not to defend the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). King also reiterated his pledge to defund the Department of Justice division responsible for upholding the law:
KING: I don’t necessarily put this at the feet of Eric Holder, although an Attorney General with a constitutional conscience would resign before he would go along with a directive to refuse to enforce the law…What I intend to do, and there are other solutions that are offered and I believe that the Speaker is focused on this as well, Speak Boehner. But what I intend to do is to offer an amendment on an appropriations bill that would cut the funding to the Department of Justice in an amount yet to be determined that would be equivalent to that amount that they would otherwise use to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
Listen:
“This is a constitutional issue of significant proportions and I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t heard from some of my other colleagues,” he complained. House Republicans have remained relatively muted on the matter, but hinted that they will announce their intentions to defend DOMA before the end of the week. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) recently told ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes that he supports Kings’ defunding drive and would also “absolutely” favor impeaching President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder if such a move “could gain collective support.”
In a letter to Congressional leadership explaining the administration’s decision, Holder pointed to the long history of past administrations choosing not to defend legislation. “[T]he Department in the past has declined to defend statutes despite the availability of professionally responsible arguments, in part because the Department does not consider every plausible argument to be a ‘reasonable’ one,” Holder wrote. “[T]he Department has declined to defend a statute ‘in cases in which it is manifest that the President has concluded that the statute is unconstitutional,’ as is the case here.”
In 1996, Justice Department officials informed the Senate that the DOJ did not uphold the law “in 1946, 1963, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1988, 1990 and 1992.” In 1990, as the number two man in the solicitor general’s office, Chief Justice John Roberts “declined to defend federal laws which set a preference for awarding broadcast licenses to entities with a certain level of minority ownership,” arguing that “the FCC’s policy violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause because it unfairly discriminated based on race.” President George W. Bush similarly didn’t defend a law prohibiting the display of marijuana policy ads in ACLU et al., v. Norman Y Mineta and President Clinton did not uphold a law “barring HIV-positive men and women from serving in the armed forces because they deemed it unconstitutional.”
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