NRA Endorsement Actually A Curse For Candidates, Poll Finds

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Feb 5, 2013 at 6:40 pm

Endorsements from the National Rifle Association might be doing political candidates more harm than good, according to a new poll from Public Policy Polling.

In a national survey, 39 percent of voters said that they are less likely to vote for a politician whose candidacy has garnered NRA backing. Only 26 percent believe they’re more likely to support such a candidate.

But more importantly, the number of independent voters — those who are really up for grabs in any election — are far less likely to see the NRA nod as a good thing: 41 percent say they’re inclined not to support a candidate who’s backed by the NRA.

This information serves to bust the myth that the NRA is an all-powerful lobbying group that dictates political outcomes. While the organization may enjoy wide support among those politicians whose campaigns it bankrolls, soon there may be few of such politicians left; in 2012, only .81 percent of the group’s spending went to politicians who won. And if the NRA is having a negative influence on swing voters as well, then it really has no sway on political elections overall.

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Climate Progress

IMF Chief: ‘Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled’

By Joe Romm on Feb 5, 2013 at 6:25 pm

Another day, another icon of the global financial system becomes a climate hawk.

You may recall World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said of the climate crisis: “If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak.”

Turns out IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is also a climate hawk — and she’s the former conservative finance minister of France.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, she said, “the real wild card in the pack” of economic pivot points is “Increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption.” She called climate change “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century.”

Ms. Lagarde concluded with a call for a new kind of economic growth. “So we need growth, but we also need green growth that respects environmental sustainability. Good ecology is good economics. This is one reason why getting carbon pricing right and removing fossil fuel subsidies are so important.”

In response to a question from the audience, she said: “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”

Perhaps the IMF can release an analysis as blunt as the stunning World Bank Climate Report from November that concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. Its 2012 release, “Fiscal Policy to Mitigate Climate Change: A Guide for Policymakers,” was kind of a yawner.

Then we need to see the IMF actually focus on environmentally sustainable growth, as opposed to say, our currently unsustainable trajectory, which will roast, toast, fry and grill countless future generations.

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Justice

Rick Scott’s Secretary Of State Says Florida Should Restore Early Voting

By Josh Israel on Feb 5, 2013 at 6:20 pm

Florida Secretary of State Rick Detzner

Because Gov. Rick Scott (R) and his legislative allies spent much of 2011-2012 filling up the November ballot with complicated and unnecessary ballot questions and pushing through measures aimed at suppressing voter turnout, Florida voters had to wait in lines for up to six hours. Now, Scott’s handpicked Secretary of State has released a report recommending that Florida expand early voting and limit the length of future ballot questions.

Secretary of State Rick Detzner, who in the days after the November elections said he had no regrets about the Scott administration’s handling of the election, acknowledged in the report that there was widespread frustration with “the length of lines at polling places, which were believed to have been caused by the record number of voters, a shortened early voting schedule, inadequate voting locations and a long ballot.” He makes no mention of the reasons for those factors — Scott’s unwillingness to extend early voting hours, a Scott-signed law shortening early voting, and an effort by the Republican legislature to load the ballot up with complicated ballot measures sure to slow down voters at the polls.

But, he encourages Scott and his fellow Republicans not to repeat the same mistakes in future elections, recommending Florida:

Extend the early voting schedule from a minimum of 8 days to a maximum of 14 days, while also allowing supervisors of elections the flexibility to offer early voting on the Sunday immediately prior to Election Day.
Expand the allowable locations of early voting sites at government owned, managed or occupied facilities to include the main or branch office of a supervisor of elections, a city
hall, courthouse, county commission building, public library, civic center, convention center, fairgrounds or stadium.
Set a word limit for proposed legislative amendments.
Repeal statutes allowing the full text (stricken or underlined) of a constitutional amendment or revision to be placed on a ballot.
Allow mail ballot elections for candidates in certain elections.

While the 14-day period would be an improvement over the eight days currently provided by Florida law, it would represent a return to where things were before Scott took office.

It remains to be seen whether Florida acts on these recommendations. In November, Gov. Scott defended his suppression tactics as having done “the right thing” and a month later blamed the legislature for the early voting limits he himself signed into law. But last month, he endorsed re-expanding the early voting he limited.

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Economy

4 Things The New Congressional Budget Office Projections Show Us About The Economy

By Pat Garofalo and Jeff Spross on Feb 5, 2013 at 6:05 pm

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its latest budget projections today, which show that the U.S. has made substantial progress towards getting its deficit and debt under control. However, the flip side of that reality is that CBO projects economic growth will be sluggish for the next several years, meaning that unemployment will only come down slowly. Here are the four biggest takeaways from the report:

1. The deficit has been reduced by a lot. As Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden noted, in August 2010, CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario” projected a deficit in 2020 of 7.8 percent of GDP. Now it projects that deficit will be 4.7 percent of GDP. The difference between the projected 2013-2020 deficit in 2010 and that same projection today adds up to $4.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

2. The debt is stabilized. Thanks to the fiscal cliff deal and previous budget agreements, most of the country’s debt problem is solved. The CBO’s report shows debt will now peak at 77.7 percent of GDP in 2014, then drop to 73.1 percent in 2018, then rise back to 76 percent in 2022. (See graph below.) According to the Economic Policy Institute, flattening out that second rise from 2018 to 2022 will only require $670 billion in additional deficit reduction — $580 billion in actual policy savings, plus $90 billion in resulting interest savings. That’s less than half the $1.5 trillion in additional deficit reduction President Obama is calling for.

3. Austerity is killing the recovery. The CBO anticipates that economic growth will be slow this year, which “reflects a combination of ongoing improvement in underlying economic factors and fiscal tightening that has already begun or is scheduled to occur — including the expiration of a 2 percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax, an increase in tax rates on income above certain thresholds, and scheduled automatic reductions in federal spending.” Large austerity efforts in Europe have been stifling economic growth and causing continued economic contractions.

4. Jobs aren’t coming back fast. Due to a pronounced output gap — the gap between what the economy is producing and what it could be producing (shown below) — unemployment will remain elevated for several years. CBO projects that the unemployment rate “falls from 8.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 to 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 and then declines gradually to 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018.”

The report clearly shows that, despite the ongoing deficit hysteria in Washington, the far more pressing problem is growth and jobs.

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Health

How Obamacare Is Already Encouraging Cost-Saving Innovations In Health Care Payment And Delivery

By Guest Blogger on Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 pm

The Affordable Care Act gave HHS the authority to test innovative reforms to the healthcare payment and delivery systems with the goal of improving quality of care while reducing costs — and the Administration is beginning to take important steps in that direction.

Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that over 450 health care organizations will participate in the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative. The new initiative tests a promising model that aims to drive down costs throughout the health system by creating financial incentives for medical providers to provide more coordinated, higher quality care to their patients.

Bundling payments is an alternative to Medicare’s current fee-for-service financing system, in which providers are paid separately for each individual service rendered in a single course of treatment. For example, under the current system, Medicare would make a separate payment for each of the following during a cardiac patient’s stay in the hospital:

– Payment to the hospital to cover room and board, nursing services, prescription drugs, other supplies and equipment, and all diagnostic and therapeutic services during the hospital stay
– Separate payments for the services provided by the physicians who cared for the patient during the stay.

If the patient is then transferred to a nursing home, Medicare might make the following additional payments:

– A daily payment amount to the nursing facility to cover room and board, nursing services, prescription drugs, and rehabilitation services during his nursing home stay
– Payment to the ambulance company for transporting the patient to and from his cardiologist’s office
–Payment to the cardiologist for the visit during the nursing home stay

And even after the patient goes home, Medicare could continue to make separate payments:

– Payment to the home health agency for visits after the patient returns home
– Payment for the prescription pain reliever after the patient returns home

This fragmented payment system leads to a fragmented delivery system. Medical providers have every financial incentive to provide high volume of services, whether or not those services are necessary or lead to better patient outcomes, and they don’t have any incentives to coordinate with other providers to deliver efficient and coordinated patient care. That means providers often operate with minimal communication — which leads to waste, inefficiency, and diminished quality of care for their patients.

Our guest blogger is Lindsay Rosenthal, Special Assistant for Health Policy and Women’s Health and Rights at the Center for American Progress.

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Justice

Virginia Lawmakers Pass Even Stricter Voter ID Requirements

By Aviva Shen on Feb 5, 2013 at 5:20 pm

On Tuesday afternoon, the Virginia House and Senate passed two bills to make the state’s voter ID law even stricter. The measures, sponsored by Sen. Dick Black (R-VA) and Rep. Mark Cole (R-VA), would ban voters from presenting a utility bill, pay stub, government or Social Security card as proof of identity — all forms of ID allowed under the current law. They could still use a voter ID card, concealed handgun permit, drivers license, or student ID. But the Senate is also considering a bill that would even further restrict acceptable voting ID to photo IDs only.

Though Virginians endured marathon voting lines on November 6, with voters still waiting hours after polls officially closed, Republicans still claim that voting in the state is too easy. Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA) recently called for stricter photo ID requirements because Obama “can’t win a state where photo ID is required.”

Virginia’s current voter ID law was one of the few approved by the Department of Justice, as it did not disproportionately impact minority voting rights. But if these new measures are signed into law, Virginia’s voter ID law will resemble the one in Texas that was struck down in court because it clearly disenfranchised minority voters. The DOJ estimated at least 600,000 voters would have been affected by Texas’ law — hitting minority and low-income communities hardest. If the U.S. Supreme Court decides to strike down the section of the Voting Rights Act that protects minorities’ voting rights, Virginia, Texas, and other states would be allowed to disenfranchise these voters.

Since Obama won the state in 2012, the Republican-dominated Virginia legislature has been accelerating their push to disenfranchise certain voters. While Democrats were distracted by the inauguration, Virginia Republicans quietly passed a gerrymandering plan to erase at least one Democratic seat. The state also considered a scheme to rig their electoral college votes and dilute minority voting power.

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Security

House Progressives Pitch Military Cuts To Avert Looming Sequester

By Hayes Brown on Feb 5, 2013 at 5:00 pm

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus today outlined what they see as an alternative to the looming $1 trillion in mandatory budget cuts scheduled to take effect Mar. 1, mixing revenue and cuts to reduce the deficit.

Immediately after President Obama’s call to Congress for a temporary reprieve from the cuts, the Progressive Caucus presented its plan to offset the so-called sequestration cuts for good. The executive summary says the group proposes to raise over $960 billion in revenue through closing tax loopholes and ending tax breaks. The cuts that the Caucus members listed for the chopping block all come from the Pentagon, rather than the even split between military and domestic programs currently set to take place.

In total, the Pentagon budget reduction suggested by Caucus co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) come to $278 billion, far less than the pending $500 billion over ten years. Among the reforms the Progressive Caucus eyes are reducing spending on military bands — whose members currently total more than active Foreign Service Officers — by $2 billion, reducing troop levels by four percent via attrition, and moving 10,000 forces from Europe to the U.S.

Among the proposals more likely to stir heated opposition in Congress are calls for reductions in procurement and ending of costly programs don’t advance U.S. missions:

Limiting the Purchase of Virginia-class Nuclear Subs to one per year ($22 billion) – Sec. 631
Significantly and rapidly increasing our fleet of Virginia Class submarines will do little to improve U.S. security. The U.S. Navy currently possesses more firepower than the next 20 navies in the world combined, the majority of which are allies. [...]

Replacing F-35s with F-18s ($23 billion) – Sec. 633
Replaces the Navy’s buy of 237 F-35Cs with 240 F/A-18E/Fs and replaces half of the Marine Corps’ F-35B buy with F/A-18 variants. The F-35 program has failed in its purpose to save U.S. taxpayers money, and has received widespread criticism. The United States currently has 3,029 fourth-generation tactical aircraft—three times more than our nearest competitor—and is the only nation fielding a fifth-generation fighter. [...]

End Production of the V-22 Osprey ($9 billion) – Sec. 634
Boeing’s V-22 Osprey aircraft has been referred to as “dangerous pork with wings,” and for good reason. A 2009 GAO report found that the aircraft was not suited to fly in extreme heat, excessive sand or under enemy fire – making it effectively useless for combat given the countries where America has fought wars recently. Sadly, the V-22 has taken the lives of 36 individuals, including 31 service members.[...]

These proposals, for all the controversy they’ll raise, mark out a distinct plan to avert the sequester, which is more than can be said for Congressional Republicans. Such proponents of defense spending as Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), John McCain (R-AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) have hit President Obama for failing to “lead a bipartisan effort to avert this looming national security disaster,” yet have presented no plan of their own. Now, despitDespite the heated campaign attacks lobbed against Obama for not doing enough to prevent the cuts to Pentagon spending, a growing number of Republicans have embraced the sequester. The across the board cuts have been called “disastrous” both by Congressional military spending hawks like Rep. Buck McKeon and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus isn’t alone in proposing smarter military spending cuts. CAP’s Larry Korb and Max Hoffman recently called for an alteration to the sequester, keeping the $500 billion target amount while focusing the object of the cuts. “Intelligent reductions would force the Pentagon’s leaders to make the hard choices they avoided as the non-war, or baseline, defense budget doubled after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Korb and Hoffman said. Michelle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, today also outlined her own model for reducing Pentagon spending over the next decade.

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Economy

How Offshore Tax Dodging Is Busting State And Federal Budgets

By Travis Waldron on Feb 5, 2013 at 5:00 pm

State and local governments lost $39.8 billion last year because corporations and the wealthy shifted profits to offshore tax havens, an amount roughly equal to what they spent on firefighters in 2008, according to a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The federal government lost $150 billion in revenue to the same practices.

Corporations shifting profits to tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands has consequences for both individual taxpayers and America’s small businesses, and it also complicates efforts to reduce the size of the national deficit, a priority of both parties in Washington. The $150 billion lost to offshore tax avoidance at the federal level annually, the report notes, would be more than enough to offset the automatic spending cuts that are set to take place at the beginning of March if Congress does not offset it. Those cuts total $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

“So much of the discussion in the recent fiscal cliff negotiations centered on shared sacrifice,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) said on a conference call announcing the report. “I think that it is important in considering this report and its implications to reflect on that fiscal cliff agreement, because in it, corporations did not contribute a cent to resolving the fiscal cliff.”

The $150 billion lost to tax havens could cover the cost of Pell Grants for 10 million students for the next four years. It is also enough to double federal spending on Head Start and other education programs or pay for every high-speed rail project proposed by state governments in 2009. At the state level, $40 billion lost is enough to boost the number of firefighters back to 2008 levels or to cover the cost of education for 3.7 million children.

“Every dollar hidden abroad means less money for infrastructure, less money for education, less money for the investments that we need to create a strong local business climate for independent small businesses back home,” the Main Street Alliance’s Sam Blair said.

Meanwhile, offshore tax havens make America’s small businesses less competitive with large corporations. A previous PIRG report found that it would cost each small business $2,116 to make up revenue lost to corporate use of offshore tax havens.

Eight states — California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and North Carolina — lost at least $1 billion to offshore tax havens last year. California, a state that has enacted massive budget cuts in recent years, lost $7.1 billion in 2011, while New York and New Jersey each lost more than $4 billion.

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Politics

Democratic Rep Gets Anti-Immigrant Witness To Embrace Comprehensive Reform

By Rebecca Leber on Feb 5, 2013 at 4:51 pm

Although comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship has strong bipartisan support — notably the Senate’s “gang of eight” — a bill would face its toughest climb in the House of Representatives, where conservatives are still cautious about embracing reform. At Congress’ first immigration hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Republicans stacked the deck with anti-immigration activists and critics of reform.

One of those witnesses, President of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) union Chris Crane, sharply criticized the Obama administration for interfering with ICE procedures and deferring deportation of some DREAMers. But in an exchange with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Crane went off script and admitted comprehensive reform that clarifies border security would help enforcement agents do their jobs:

JACKSON LEE: If we pass comprehensive immigration reform and we established once and for all the parameters of the law and it was the law, that would be more helpful to law enforcement, such as yourself, is that not correct?

CRANE: I guess in theory it would be, Ma’am. I guess it would, again, like everyone’s testified today, what this comprehensive immigration reform really means. [...]

JACKSON LEE: Well, political leaders dictate what the laws are on the books. and I appreciate that, as I said, I’m grateful for your service. I look forward to working with you extensively. But my question again, and I just need a yes or no, if we have laws on the books that are clear to you as a law enforcement officer, and help distinguish between those who are here, not to do us harm, families that need to be reunited, and make it clear, so you understand the distinction of enforcement and what your laws are, that would help you do your job, is that not correct?

CRANE: If I understand the question correctly, yes, it would, Ma’am.

Watch it:

Crane’s claims that Obama is too lenient on immigration enforcement has little founding: Deportation is actually at a record high under Obama, and there are more “boots on the ground” than ever before, while illegal immigration has decreased to net zero.

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Alyssa

Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ Thinks It’s Tough, But It Goes Easy On Washington

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 5, 2013 at 4:43 pm

This post discusses, in its entirety, the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

Over the past two days, I watched all of Netflix’s most ambitious original series yet, a remake of the British miniseries House of Cards. While the show raises interesting questions about both television business models and narrative structures, and while it’s deeply entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey, as Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood, chomp scenery and occasionally on Kate Mara’s ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes, I couldn’t help but feel that House of Cards has a fatal flaw. For all that the show looks attractive, and even half-authentic to the District sometimes, and for all House of Cards is trying its darndest to replicate the repellant chilliness of the British original, it’s actually far too nice to the people and institutions the show would like to skewer. And that’s because House of Cards itself falls prey to some of the kinds of thinking that are most pernicious in the nation’s capital.

Part of the problem is House of Cards‘ insistence that there’s a grandness, rather than a grandiosity, to Frank—while the show believes he’s malign, it’s still convinced that he’s Milton’s Satan rather than Dostoyevsky’s, who Arturo Perez-Reverte once described as “petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.” He declares in the first episode that “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” and House of Cards seems largely to agree with his assessment. Frank may hold up an education bill to get a version that suits his ends, or derail the nomination of the man who was chosen to be Secretary of State over him, but he does get a bill to the President’s desk roughly on deadline, and once the other man is out of the way, speeds the confirmation of his hand-picked replacement. What really distinguishes him from his colleagues, however, and what the show portrays as the source of Frank’s efficacy, however unattractive it may be, is his treatment of power as a higher good than policy. “Leave ideology to the armchair generals,” he says in one of his many editorial asides to the camera. “It does me no good.”

House of Cards is full of acid portraits of people whose conviction has made them weak or duplicitous without being excellent at it. Even if the show has some sympathy for their dedication to and principal on the issues, it never gives them triumphs over Frank, and frequently suggests that passion makes them obvious, slow, or otherwise unfit to play the game that Frank has mastered so well, his competence overriding our moral calculus. During a subplot that involves the passage of a major education reform bill, Frank’s partner on the legislation, a life-long liberal reformer who’s a stand-in for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy turns out to be a naive patsy without the stomach for compromise or maneuver. “I could put my mind to policy, but I’m no good at this brand of politics,” the man tells Frank in agreeing to take the fall for a leak of his proposed bill that garners negative press coverage, and to let Frank take over writing the next draft. His actual ideas about the issues are never mentioned, simply summed up by Zoe as “very far left wing” for a headline. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Kennedy is rotating in his grave fast enough to dislodge the dirt above him so he can haunt House of Cards writer Beau Willimon for this perfidy.
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