Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a last minute hold out on the Affordable Care Act, is potentially facing a tough re-election bid in 2012 and may be having second thoughts about his vote in favor of reform. While he has yet to endorse the Republican effort to repeal the measure — he recently told a local radio station that he would “make some changes” but not “throw it all out just because there are some pieces of it, or parts of it, that aren’t working as good as some others are working” — he has tasked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with exploring alternatives to reforms most unpopular provision: the individual mandate.
Political pressures and the Senator’s reputation for acting as a thorn in the Democrats’ back could soon push him to take a stronger stance on repeal. Therefore, in an effort to prevent Nelson’s 2012 grandstanding against the law, it’s worth highlighting that Nebraska is already benefiting from reform — and Nelson is taking full credit for delivering the benefits. Yesterday, a local ABC station in Omaha, Nebraska reported that “the One World Community Health Center in south Omaha is planning a major expansion thanks to an $8.9 million grant from the Affordable Care Act.” Fortunately, Nelson was on hand to offer some supportive quotes:
Officials said the money will go toward the $15.3 million project to be built on the former Omaha Stockyards property. [...]
The expansion was made possible by the president’s health care reform and by a deciding vote from Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. “Whether you’re rich or poor, when people need health care, they need to receive it,” Nelson said.
The senator said he hopes critics will understand his vote when they see results like this in the metro.
“It makes me feel real proud to know people who are going to get care here are going to get quality care in quality facilities,” Nelson said.
The existing space for One World inside the Livestock Exchange Building will also be renovated with the funds.
According to HealthCare.gov, since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services “has made $14.6 million in new grant funding available in Nebraska,” and enrolled 26 employers in the early-retiree program.
It’s worth noting that Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), who supports full repeal, actually sent a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius requesting grant money authorized by the law for the University of Nevada School of Medicine for “Primary Care Residency Expansion.” Nelson, I hope, avoids similar hypocrisy.
Last week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) – amanThinkProgressreadersarefamiliarwith – took to the House floor to bemoan the “insidious” tax on corporations. “We can compete with anybody,” Gohmert declared, “if you take off that insidious tax” on business. Watch it:
Gohmert’s defense of corporations are not the words of a single rogue congressman. Rather, sticking up for the big guy is an orthodoxy that pervades the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker (R) of Wisconsin has pledged to repeal the state’s corporate income tax. Sen.-elect Marco Rubio (R-FL) wants to slash the federal corporate income tax. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) proposes completely eliminating the tax in his radical Roadmap for America.
Conservatives’ attempts to portray corporations as victims in this economy is dubious for two reasons. First, despite right-wing misinformation, American corporations actually already pay far less in taxes than those in other industrialized nations:
In fact, because of tax havens and other loopholes, many mega-corporations actually pay little to no taxes. The most recent high-profile example is Google, which has used income shifting and other tactics to reduce its effective tax rate to 2.4 percent. General Electric went a step even further. The company not only avoided all corporate income taxes last year, but actually recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.
Secondly, despite the myths that corporate taxes are “strangling” business, and that President Obama is “anti-business,” a report released today from the Commerce Department shows that American companies actually brought in record profits during the last quarter. With an annual profit rate of $1.66 trillion, the third quarter of this year produced “the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago.”
Still record profits are likely not enough to convince conservatives that corporations have it just fine in the U.S.. Even apologizing to mega-corporations that just dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico isn’t enough. Right-wingers like Gohmert and Ryan will not be satisfied until we give tax-free status to all corporations.
I saw a lot of commentary yesterday about how corporate profits are now at a record high. I think it’s worth noting that this is true if and only if you don’t adjust for inflation. And I have no idea why you would think adjusting for inflation is a bad idea in this context. A helpful chart the Commerce Department emailed out yesterday illustrates what’s actually happening:
The major takeaways from this chart are twofold. One, corporate profits aren’t really at a record high. Two, corporate profits hit new highs all the time in an expanding economy. The real story here isn’t that nominal profits are at a record high, it’s that real profits are still below-peak. Which is just to say that corporate profits, like most everything else, reflect incomplete recovery from the recession. The good news here is that the trends are in the right direction. Profits are rising. Capital expenditures are rising. And the non-financial sector is beginning to back away from stockpiling liquid assets:
This all points to things being better 12 months from now than they are today.
One recurring theme in this Greater Greater Washington symposium on the DC Height Act is the idea that the presence of vacant lots in non-downtown parts of DC constitutes an argument in favor of the Act’s non-malignancy.
I think this is a big mistake. Consider some other inefficient rule about the use of downtown DC space. Maybe the City Council is proposing a rule that everyone in the downtown business district needs to wear blue on Monday, green on Tuesday, red on Wednesday, purple on Thursday, and yellow on Friday. Someone says “you know, that’ll be bad for business.” But the proponents of the new rule say “no way; not only will the impact be minimal, if anything it’ll help the city by encouraging investment in under-developed neighborhoods.”
I say false. The best thing under-developed DC neighborhoods have going for them is proximity and connectivity to the valuable land and economic activity in downtown DC. Measures that reduce the value of that downtown land and activity reduce the value of proximity to downtown DC, and impair the chances of development in under-developed neighborhoods. Repeal of the Height Act would, by lowering rents, increase the share of DC-area firms that are located in DC. This would increase the value of connectivity to downtown DC, helping under-developed neighborhoods, and also increase the city’s tax base, also helping under-developed neighborhoods. What’s more, lower rents would increase the entire metropolitan area’s capacity for entrepreneurship and start-ups outside the core politics-and-government industry. This would further increase the value of connectivity to DC-area business centers, further helping under-developed neighborhoods.
If what you think is that the aesthetic value of the Height Act is just so important that it’s worth everyone paying higher taxes, higher per capita pollution levels, impaired working class job opportunities, and reduced city services then fine. But I think very few people do think that. So cognitive dissonance produces a lot of creative thinking about why maybe this isn’t such a big deal, economically. The reality, however, is that it’s a huge deal. Look at the central business district of any American city. Then look at DC. Regulation is massively distorting the allocation of resources in this city.
New psychological research finds that dire messages about the threat of global warming will strengthen people’s acceptance of climate science when combined with solutions, which is the approach taken by leading climate activists. For some people, their response to dire messages is strongly dependent on whether hope is offered. The research, by University of California Berkeley psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, investigated the application of “just world belief” theory to how people interpret the threat of global warming. Unfortunately, the press release announcing the study — to be published next year in Psychological Science — gave a confusing portrayal of the study’s results, leading some prominent climate journalists to draw incorrect conclusions from their research.
Just-world-belief theory, first developed by Melvin Lerner in 1965, studies the concept that “people need to believe in a just world” — i.e. “good things happen to good people” — “thus, evidence that the world is not just is threatening, and people have a number of strategies for reducing such threats.” Experimental research has found since then that there are systematic ways of identifying the level of someone’s belief in a just world (or at least that is how the results of a standard questionnaire are interpreted), and those results are strongly correlated with their response to various situations that involve injustice and justice — from how victims are perceived to how people cope with traumatic events.
Willer and Feinberg have hypothesized that belief in a just world influences people’s understanding of climate change, in part because the concept of a planet tilting toward devastation due to human action could come into conflict with the perception of an inherently stable, just world. Their paper explores two different experiments involving just world belief that can also be understood as straightforward focus-group message testing — which is how the research was presented in their press release, and how most climate journalists reported on the work.
The messages tested in their first experiment began with an accurate portrayal of the dire nature of the science: “many devastating consequences,” “a major heat wave that killed at least 35,000 people,” “much of Florida, California, Texas, and Hawaii” could disappear under rising seas. They then concluded with one of two alternative endings, with opinions from fictitious scientists — a hopeless, fatalistic conclusion (“Science Can’t Help”), and a hopeful, empowering one (“How To Fight Global Warming”). They tested how these messages affected participants’ degree of skepticism about the threat of climate change.
Skepticism among participants who had a low belief in a just world declined similarly for both conclusions — they responded to the dire scientific threat alone. However, participants who had a high belief in a just world responded very differently depending on the conclusion. Given a hopeful conclusion, skepticism plummeted among those with a high belief in a just world. Given the hopeless conclusion, skepticism shot up by a similar amount:
RESPONSE TO DIRE CLIMATE SCIENCE MESSAGE
In the second experiment in the paper, the researchers primed participants toward thinking about the world as either just or injust, then exposed them to two public service announcements from EDF in 2007 that make a strong emotional appeal, one with a train accelerating toward a child and the other with children “ticking”. They were able to mirror the results of the first study, finding that priming on “justice” made respondents reject the message of the PSAs.
In short, the researchers found that the approach taken by leading climate messengers such as Al Gore (“An Inconvenient Truth”), Van Jones (“The Green Collar Economy”), and Bill McKibben (350.org) of combining scientific urgency with solution-oriented hopefulness should be successful, and particularly powerful with people who believe strongly in an inherently just world. That audience includes a significant proportion of conservatives and religiously observant people. Another example of the dire-plus-hope message is Harmony, the new book and film from the Prince of Wales and Tck Tck Tck:
However, the conclusions of the research have been somewhat misleadingly presented. In particular, the researchers repeatedly call the hopeless conclusion “dire,” implying that the text about the effects of global warming was not dire (it was). But “dire” simply means desperately urgent or implying horror — not fatalistic, apocalyptic, or hopeless. The scientific text they gave all participants in their first experiment was in fact extremely dire, discussing the devastation from wildfires, drought, sea level rise, hurricanes, and heat waves.
In part because of the misleading presentation in the paper and the press release, journalists like the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, New York Times’ Andy Revkin (who rejects the science that significant climate impacts are already being felt in the United States), Time Magazine’s Bryan Walsh, Greener World Media’s Adam Aston, Discovery News’s Kieran Mulvaney, and social scientist Matthew Nisbet misinterpreted the results.
Update
Dr. Robb Willer responds by email:
I think your blog post is on the whole quite good, and generally accurate. That said, I (perhaps predictably!) disagree with your characterization of our paper as “misleading.” In the messages we used in our research, we tried to give an accurate description of the scientific view of global warming’s “possible” consequences, and then close with either optimistic or pessimistic conclusions. The result, we claimed, was that one message was dire and the other positive, and I think they were on the whole. I think this is reasonable and not misleading.
Put it this way, if I told you something terrible was “possible” (e.g., “your neighbor could get lung cancer”), but I am optimistic and confident it won’t if reasonable steps are taken (e.g., “if she quits smoking and adopts a healthy lifestyle”), I wouldn’t call that a “dire” message. I think it would be justifiably labeled “positive”…or at least as positive as it gets when you’re messaging about cancer, global warming, etc.
This one study aside, in the other studies we’ve conducted, e.g., Study 2 and the various studies reviewers asked us to remove from the paper, it’s clear that very scary, dire (by either your or our interpretation of the word) messages tend to backfire relative to more positive ones.
Raw Story’s Sahil Kapur is reporting that Fox News is refusing to air an ad advocating for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The 30-second spot, produced by the Palm Center, “includes testimony from military leaders of NATO allies arguing that lifting the ban on gay soldiers is a ‘non-event’ and does not diminish combat effectiveness.”
“I am surprised that Fox News would reject an ad featuring allied Generals, given that host Bill O’Reilly and guest contributor Liz Cheney have both expressed support for open gay service,” Palm Center Director Aaron Belkin said in a statement. “This is an important time for input from all sides on this issue, and I hope Fox will reconsider.” Watch the ad:
Fox might argue that the policy is controversial or too hot for television, but popular and political support for the policy has only increased over the last month. A CNN poll released last week found that 72 percent of Americans now want to end the policy, up from 67 percent in September. Only 23 percent of Americans oppose repeal. Several moderateRepublicans have also signaled that they would vote for repeal and Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME) even called on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to expedite the process.
The decision is particularly peculiar since the network refused a request by the America Issues Project to buy time on the network to broadcast an ad criticizing President Obama over his friendship with Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign, and this summer, after multiple revisions, Fox “agreed to run a Media Matters for America ad pointing out the cable network’s parent company’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.”
On the other hand, this isn’t the first time Fox News has refused to air a progressive ad. In July, the network rejected an ad by VoteVets, which encouraged a “clean energy climate plan,” and before that turned down another spot advocating for ending America’s dependence on foreign oil because it deemed it “too confusing.” In December of 2007, the Fox also refused to air “an ad produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights that criticize[d] the Bush administration for ‘destroying the Constitution’ by the use of renditions, torture, and other tactics.”
I have essentially no sympathy for Family Edited DVDs, a company that’s being sued by a coalition of studios for editing theoretically objectionable material out of major releases and re-releasing them as family entertainment. It’s not just that it’s plagiarism, though of course, it is that, too. It speaks to a larger laziness.
Nobody has a right to insist that art contain only what they want it to be in it. Art doesn’t exist by committee. I may think that the Lupin-Tonks relationship in Harry Potter is implausible, or that the Spider-Man 3 should only have one villain in it, or that it’s really, really gross and beyond one of my personal boundaries that Neo gets his eyes poked out in the last Matrix movie. But it’s not up to me to decide any of those things! Experiencing art is about submitting to someone else’s vision, to fall into someone else’s world. Good art leaves you yearning for me, leaves me wanting more of the world behind the mirrors in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, more of the dissolution of society in The Passage. And it surprises you. I watched Heartburn over the weekend, and found myself just drop-jawed in admiration when Mike Nichols shot a pivotal scene like something out of a horror movie. Lack of control is the price you pay to be truly entertained.
I understand that parents may want to watch movies with their children, and that they may want their children to be able to participate in mass cultural phenomena. But bastardizing entertainment to suit kids is a lazy solution. Even if, say, you cut the sexy or most violent bits out of Iron Man, kids aren’t going to understand a movie about military contracting and moral responsibility. Editing down something like Date Night is beside the point: that’s a movie that’s meant to entertain married couples and folks who are looking forward to the day when they’ll be married, for people who understand action movie cliches so they can appreciate things that subvert them. The response to the problem of finding appropriate entertainment for kids isn’t editing down adult entertainment to cut out the bits that are blatantly inappropriate for them. It’s looking hard for smart children’s entertainment, or going back in time to expose them to movies like The General or The Lady Eve that have a ton to offer both parents and children, that have physical humor and social humor.
And as much as I respect people who are trying to live by strict religious rules or principles, I don’t think they have the right to edit down entertainment to meet their principles, either. There’s no question that there are not a lot of great alternatives out there for people who are looking for movies that reflect the way they’re trying to live. But if you’re supposed to avoid secular entertainment, editing it down is cheating. You don’t have the right to condemn Hollywood and then steal from it to suit your own needs or meet your own compromises.
Think about that. If Max Baucus saunters down to the Cato Institute with a plan to eliminate tax loopholes, use 99% of the revenue to lower tax rates, and spend 1% on Pell Grants, Mitchell wants to say “no.” He would rather keep massive economic distortions in place than let the federal government get one extra cent of tax revenue. This is a fanatical and insane attitude. In politics, nobody ever gets what they want and never will. But when we’re lucky, it’s possible to get things that are better than the status quo. But when ideologues of this sort have become so influential on the American right, it’s extraordinarily difficult to make any kind of progress on anything.
Raw Story’s Sahil Kapur is reporting that Fox News is refusing to air an ad advocating for repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The 30-second spot, produced by the Palm Center, “includes testimony from military leaders of NATO allies arguing that lifting the ban on gay soldiers is a ‘non-event’ and does not diminish combat effectiveness.”
“I am surprised that Fox News would reject an ad featuring allied Generals, given that host Bill O’Reilly and guest contributor Liz Cheney have both expressed support for open gay service,” Palm Center Director Aaron Belkin said in a statement. “This is an important time for input from all sides on this issue, and I hope Fox will reconsider.” Watch the ad:
Fox might argue that the policy is controversial or too hot for television, but popular and political support for the policy has only increased over the last month. A CNN poll released last week found that 72 percent of Americans now want to end the policy, up from from 67 percent in September. Only 23 percent of Americans oppose repeal. Several moderateRepublicans have also signaled that they would vote for repeal and Sen. Olympia Snow (R-ME) even called on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to expedite the process.
The decision is particularly peculiar since the network refused a request by the America Issues Project to buy time on the network to broadcast an ad criticizing President Obama over his friendship with Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign and this summer, after multiple revisions, “agreed to run a Media Matters for America ad pointing out the cable network’s parent company’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.”
On the other hand, this isn’t the first time Fox News has refused to air a progressive ad. In July, the network rejected an ad by VoteVets, which encouraged a “clean energy climate plan” and before that turned down another spot advocating for ending America’s dependence on foreign oil because it deemed it “too confusing.” In December of 2007, the Fox also refused to air “an ad produced by the Center for Constitutional Rights that criticize[d] the Bush administration for ‘destroying the Constitution’ by the use of renditions, torture, and other tactics.”
Last week, the influential auto magazine Motor Trend announced that it had named the breakthrough plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt as its 2011 car of the year. Conservatives immediately picked up on the story and attacked Motor Trend. The magazine “awarded the Obama-approved, government-subsidized Chevrolet Volt its annual ‘Car of the Year’ appellation,” the Weekly Standard whined. Referring the federal government’s auto bailout — which turned out to be hugely beneficial for GM and the ailing industry — conservative Washington Post columnist George Will complained about the government “spending some of your money” to produce the Volt.
But right-wing radio blow-hard Rush Limbaugh was perhaps the most vocal critic. The Volt has been a Limbaugh nemesis for quite some time. He even launched a campaign last August to undermine the innovative car. And this week, Limbaugh said of the Motor Trend award, “[O]f all the cars in the world, the Chevrolet Volt is the Car of the Year? Motor Trend magazine, that’s the end of them. How in the world do they have any credibility? Not one has been sold [and] the Volt is the Car of the Year.” Last week, one of the magazine’s editors, Todd Lassa, shot back at Limbaugh, noting that GM hasn’t sold any Volts “because it’s not on sale yet“:
So, Mr. Limbaugh; you didn’t enjoy your drive of our 2011 Car of the Year, the Chevrolet Volt? Assuming you’ve been anywhere near the biggest automotive technological breakthrough since … I don’t know, maybe the self-starter, could you even find your way to the front seat? Or are you happy attacking a car that you’ve never even seen in person? [...]
All the shouting from you or from electric car purists on the left can’t distort the fact that the Chevy Volt is, indeed, a technological breakthrough. And it’s more. It’s a technological breakthrough that many American families can use for gas-free daily commutes and well-planned vacation drives. It’s expensive for a Chevy, but many of those families will find the gasoline saved worth it. If you can stop shilling for your favorite political party long enough to go for a drive, you might really enjoy the Chevy Volt. I’m sure GM would be happy to lend you one for the weekend. Just remember: driving and Oxycontin don’t mix.
Lassa also noted that the Volt isn’t some left-wing “tree hugging, Obama-supporting Government Motors” conspiracy, but was in fact conceived of well before Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 and well before Obama began his campaign for the presidency. Lassa even points out that former GM executive “Bob Lutz, who famously decreed, ‘Global Warming is a crock of shit’ introduced the car two years before Bush gave GM its first bailout from TARP pocket change.”
“Limbaugh’s beef with the Volt isn’t a question of automotive aesthetics or engineering,” MLive.com’s Jeff Wattrick notes. “He just doesn’t like the Volt because it’s one of them librul eel-eck-trick cars that Muslim-Socialist Obama forced on the real ‘Mericans in Detroit.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a last minute hold out on the Affordable Care Act, is potentially facing a tough re-election bid in 2012 and may be having second thoughts about his vote in favor of reform. While he has yet to endorse the Republican effort to repeal the measure — he recently told a local radio station that he would “make some changes” but not “throw it all out just because there are some pieces of it, or parts of it, that aren’t working as good as some others are working” — he has tasked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with exploring alternatives to reforms most unpopular provision: the individual mandate. 
