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Yglesias

Dental Cartel Looking To Lock Down New Business

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 28, 2011 at 4:46 pm

Big Teeth

I thank Conversion Party for alerting me to the latest news from the dental licensing wars:

The State Dental Commission held a hearing in December to review whether teeth whitening should be classified as “dentistry” – a move that would result in the procedure being done only under a dentist’s supervision. The commission is set to vote on the issue at its May 11 meeting. If the panel rules that it is dentistry, others who provide the service in shopping malls, salons and spas could be put out of business.

“I’m running a business in the state helping the economy,” said Stephen Barraco, owner of Smile Bright, a Branford company employing five people that sells whitening products in salons.

Three of the six dentists on the state commission advertise that they offer teeth whitening in their practices, including the commission chair, Jeanne P. Strathearn, a West Hartford dentist. She declined through her staff to talk with C-HIT for this story. The commission also has three slots for non-dentist “public members.” But two of those seats are vacant.

Here in the District of Columbia five of the seven members of the relevant commission must be dentists, and one of the seven must be a dental hygenist. And to be clear, this isn’t a case where you’re hiring technical experts for a full-time regulatory position. The idea is that you’re a dentist who makes a living selling dental health services, but who also gets to use his or her authority as a regulator to shelter your business from competition. At the federal level, the revolving door at least revolves.

Economy

To Justify Corporate Fearmongering, Sen. Kirk Falsely Calls Illinois’ Corporate Tax The World’s Highest

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 28, 2011 at 4:20 pm

Sen. Kirk (R-IL) speaks at a Caterpillar rental facility.

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL), unlike so many other governors across the country, decided to responsibly deal with his state’s budget gap by raising revenue to offset some of the impact of severe budget cuts. Amongst the tax increases Quinn and the Illinois legislature approved was an increase in the state corporate income tax rate from 4.8 percent to 7 percent.

In response to the tax change, the multinational corporation Caterpillar has threatened to move jobs out of Illinois. CEO Doug Oberhelman — who has hosted Republican fundraisers in his home that featured former First Lady Laura Bush — told Quinn in a letter that “the direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business, and I’d like to work with you to change that.”

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), rather than defending the choices made by the elected officials of his home state, then piled on, claiming that because of the tax increases, Illinois now has “the highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world“:

In comments before and within his address to a formal gathering of Tazewell County Republicans, however, U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., blasted Gov. Patrick Quinn specifically for the increases.

Because of Quinn’s “grievous error,” Kirk said, Illinois now has “the highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world.”

Even with the increase, Illinois doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the United States, much less the entire world. By increasing its corporate income tax rate to 7 percent (which is coupled with a 2.5 percent property tax), Illinois still has a lower rate than Iowa, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and Minnesota, and has a rate roughly equal to that of Alaska.

But, more importantly, Illinois’ rate is only that high on paper. Much like the federal corporate income tax, Illinois’ corporate tax is riddled with loopholes and giveaways, which allow Caterpillar to drive its effective tax rate all the way down to just 1.4 percent.

Kirk has taken the side of corporations against the middle class before, but this is a particularly egregious case of going to bat for a corporation that’s holding people’s livelihoods hostage in order to preserve tax giveaways. During the 2010 campaign, Caterpillar gave Kirk $24,000 and the endorsement of its chairman, Jim Owens.

(HT: ThinkProgress reader Mitch)

Politics

After ThinkProgress Video Stokes Controversy, Herman Cain Disavows Pledge Not To Appoint Muslims

By Scott Keyes on Mar 28, 2011 at 4:01 pm

On Saturday, ThinkProgress interviewed GOP presidential aspirant Herman Cain regarding his controversial statements on Muslims in America. We asked the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza if he would be comfortable appointing a Muslim either in his cabinet or as a federal judge. Cain definitively declared, “No, I will not”:

An uproar over Cain’s comments ensued, both because of the GOPer’s bigotry towards Muslims as well as the obvious violation of Article 6 of the Constitution, which states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Today, the Cain campaign walked back his previous statement. In an interview with Salon’s Justin Elliott, Cain spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael stated that:

Mr. Cain would consider any person for a position based on merit, as anybody else would, as is the law.

While Cain’s apparent change of heart about allowing Muslims (or anyone for that matter, regardless of faith) in his administration is both positive and appropriate, questions regarding Cain’s beliefs about Muslims in general remain. After all, when ThinkProgress asked him about the controversy over his statements that Muslims “have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them,” Cain approvingly quoted his grandfather: “I does not care, I feel the way I feel.”

Update

Cain appeared on Fox News with Neil Cavuto this afternoon to discuss the ongoing controversy. Cain declared that “many of the Muslims are not totally dedicated to this country,” but reiterated that he disavowed his earlier pledge to refuse appointing any Muslims in his administration. Cain ended by noting that “being politically correct isn’t something I’m going to spend a whole lot of my time worrying about.” Cavuto agreed, saying, “you might have many issues, Herman, but being politically correct ain’t one of them”:

Related Posts

Yglesias

Catching Up With The Last Wave of DADT Victims

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 28, 2011 at 3:59 pm

The Obama administration came into office promising to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but for political reasons they took a verrrrrry slooooooow approach to actually doing it. As a political matter, this strategy has been a resounding success. But it does mean that a number of gay and lesbian soldiers found themselves being dismissed who could have been saved by a speedier policy.

Amanda Terkel did an interview with Dustin White, a former member of the New Jersey National Guard, who will hopefully be one of the last people to see his military career cut short in this manner:

“But it’s still always in the back of my mind when I apply for a job,” said White. “I’m always wondering whether they’re going to find my record and what it’s going to say. What is it going to make them think about me as a person? I did everything that I had to do in the military. I always did my job, supported other soldiers, and I performed my duties to the best of my ability. I never got in trouble, never had any disciplinary actions taken against me. If that general discharge that I received makes people think less of me in any way, it really is a shame, because I don’t think I did anything to deserve that.”

Being discharged also affected White financially. After he left the service, he received a letter from the military demanding that he pay back $8,000, the unearned portion of his enlistment bonus.

One of the occupational hazards of politicians and their staff is, I think, a tendency to forget that this stuff isn’t just a game. There’s a real human price to be paid for bad policy, and it doesn’t go away even if the right side “wins” in the end.

Health

GOP Attacks Sebelius For Exempting Insurers From Requirements Of Health Law

By Igor Volsky on Mar 28, 2011 at 3:30 pm

The Hill’s Jason Millman reports that in an effort to undermine the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are now questioning whether Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has the authority to temporarily exempt limited benefit plans — so called mini-meds — from some of the requirements of the new law:

Republicans have been increasingly critical of waivers granted by the Obama administration to organizations that cannot meet a new mandate to provide at least $750,000 in coverage in 2011. They say the waivers, granted for just the annual limits requirement, are indicative of problems in the law. [...]

But House Republicans with oversight powers say the massive overhaul doesn’t explicitly grant the administration power to provide waivers.

“The entire waivers process is predicated on the ability of the secretary to grant waivers in the first place,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Oversight Health subcommittee. “However, this seemingly fundamental step — the statutory basis for waiving compliance with the law — appears to have been wholly neglected by the plain language of the statute.”

It seems to me that the Secretary’s authority for regulating “annual limits” can be found in Section 2711 of the Affordable Care Act (pg. 33 in this PDF), which states: “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may only establish a restricted annual limit on the dollar value of benefits… as determined by the Secretary.” “[T]the Secretary shall ensure that access to needed services is made available with a minimal impact on premiums,” the law says. In other words, it would seem that Sebelius has the authority to determine what constitutes a “restricted annual limit” that can still be imposed before 2014.

And while progressives generally aren’t too crazy about allowing mini med plans — subprime insurance offered to lower wage employees — to skirt important consumer protections, the administration believes that it has to waive certain requirements for specific plans to ensure that individuals are not denied access to needed services or face significantly increased premiums before they have more coverage options in 2014.

The irony here is that conservatives — who have long argued that ACA represents a one-size-fits all approach to health policy — are trying to deny HHS the flexibility to ensure that some plans and beneficiaries aren’t adversely affected by the law’s requirements. (The very requirements they rally against). And, they’re arguing that by taking advantage of all of the provisions in the ACA — including the flexibility it offers — the Secretary is somehow demonstrating that the law is defective.

Alyssa

Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle: On "Sucker Punch"

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 28, 2011 at 3:21 pm

I’m not sure why the number surprised me, but I was kind of shocked to find out that during the heyday of the procedure, 40,000 Americans underwent lobotomies. 40,000 people had parts of their brains cut away because they were diagnosably mentally ill, or because they had crushing headaches, or because they made their stepmother uncomfortable, or because they didn’t fit in with an overachieving family. The main proponent of the transorbital lobotomy did double lobotomies two-handed just to show off that he could. I say all of this before actually discussing Sucker Punch, because however baroque and terrible you think Zack Snyder’s first movie based on original material is, the thing that catalyzes the sailor suits and the clockwork zombies and dragons, the moment when a girl becomes a prisoner of the psychiatric system that will eventually rob her of her brain? That kind of thing was true. It happened.


Sucker Punch is a bad movie, but it’s not as bad as most people think it is, and it will probably never get credit for its virtues, which include the following. There are spoilers if you care:


1) Snyder started working on Sucker Punch seven months before Warner Brothers declared that they just weren’t doing movies with female leads. As Nikki Finke put it at the time, “I’m told [Jeff Robinov] doesn’t even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position (which now is apparently missionary at WB).” He set the project aside for a while to make Watchmen, but the success of that movie got him the go-ahead to make Sucker Punch, and to subvert the No Girls Allowed rule. There are a lot of potential counters to this argument: it’s ensemble picture, it’s a male fantasy so it doesn’t count, etc. I don’t buy it. Snyder’s ideas about women may be weird, and messed up, and objectifying (and I don’t think they always are, but that’s another discussion), but at the end of the day, he wants them in his lens. When he got the chance to tell an original story, he chose to tell one about women.


2) The only major credible female action star in Hollywood today is Angelina Jolie. When Katherine Heigl holds a gun, it’s supposed to be cute and dippy and a little risky. When Sandra Bullock carries a pistol, it’s supposed to be in her lingerie. Gabrielle Anwar is reasonably effectively triggerwoman, but she remains on the small screen at present, and it remains to be seen if she’ll make the jump beyond Burn Notice. No matter how much of a mess Sucker Punch is, at minimum Abbie Cornish, the marvelous Jenna Malone, and Emily Browning are now women whom directors and producers can imagine plausibly bearing arms (I thought the two other women were less convincing). Credentialing is important. Sndyer has given three women their spurs. It’s up to them, and to the rest of Hollywood, what horses they decide to use them on.


3) This is a movie with six major female characters and nobody has to decide between a job and a man. There are multiple attempted sexual assaults in the movie, and avoiding those assaults is of course critically important to the characters and a driver of the plot. But these women don’t want to break out of a creepy Vermont mental institution to like, meet guys. Their role as a superhero is not complicated by whether they’re going to bang the blue irradiated dude or the nerd with a flying owl car. The only moment of sexual heat comes near the beginning when Abbie Cornish locks eyes with Emily Browning across a bleak, emptied out theater, a glance that goes on a bit too long, that becomes the basis for the world Browning’s character builds in her mind. They want to be free, with all the white-hot blankness that implies, where the purity and power of your choice is stimulating and terrifying. This is a different kind of story about women, and even if it’s stumbling and stupid and sometimes ugly, it’s a relief.


4) This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true.


That’s not uncomplicated. It’s not a straightforward feminist message, or a feminist message at all. But something about Babydoll’s decision reminds me a little bit of another New England crazy woman, Anne Sexton, who is less read than Sylvia Plath, who raged towards the dying of the light at enormous cost to those around her. “Suicides have a special language,” she wrote in “Wanting to Die,” “Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” At the end of Sucker Punch, Babydoll understands herself to be the tool. She chooses to be it.


And of course we’re uncomfortable with the idea that she chooses surrender, mental death. We should be! We should be outraged that the Kennedys destroyed their daughter’s brain, and when Jack ran for president, the family lied and said she was a schoolteacher living in Wisconsin and she wanted to stay out of public life, and they got away with it. We should be deeply freaked out by the fact that smart women felt, that they sometimes still feel, that there is no option other than oblivion. Sure, it would be nice to live in a world where we have a plethora of female action stars, where we have figured out the superheroine costume conundrum, where women are safe from rape and coercion. But that freedom is as much a fantasy as dragons, as magic swords. I think Zack Snyder doesn’t understand a lot of things, but he understands that. 

Yglesias

As Long As We’re Privatizing Medicare…

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 28, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Here’s something I don’t understand about Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate Medicare, replace it with a program of vouchers for old people to use to buy health insurance, and then cut spending my ensuring that the value of the vouchers doesn’t grow as fast as the cost of health care—why not just give people money?

I don’t think “just give people money” is always the right idea in every circumstance. I can understand why you might want to give mental health services to someone rather than cash. Or you might pay for a child’s health care or education rather than cut a check as a form of investing in the future. But of all the demographic groups to be paternalistic toward, old people seem like the worst possible option. You might support Medicare rather than cash grants for standard left-wing reasons—you think health care is a right, or you think single payer systems are more efficient. But if you’re Paul Ryan or a Ryan-loving rightwinger who wants to dismantle Medicare then why not simply dismantle Medicare? Instead of an insurance voucher that groups at GDP+1 percent, give people a flat cash grant that grows at GDP+1 percent. If grandma wants to spend that money at the hospital, good for her. If she wants to spend on on heroin or a television, then that’s good for her too.

Ryan’s decision not to embrace the full logic of his plan is probably overdetermined. His plan is largely designed with the goal of obscuring its meaning, “saving” money on old people’s health care by simply refusing to pay for old people’s health care. Going to cash clarifies this point in a way that Ryan Roadmap may find undesirable. In addition, doing it Ryan’s way is considerably more favorable to health insurance companies and hospital CEOs.

But I think discussion would be greatly advanced by trying to do more to separate the question (a) “how much money should we spend on old people” from the question (b) “what share of that money should be earmarked from health care” from the question (c) “how should health care financing be organized?” I’m inclined to be generous to retirees and to say that single-payer health insurance is an efficient risk-pooling mechanism, but I’m highly (and increasingly) sympathetic to the view that (b) needs more scrutiny.

Politics

(Corrected) Senators: ‘Women Will Die’ Without Planned Parenthood Funding

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 28, 2011 at 3:15 pm

As the fight over funding the federal government heats up in Congress, one sticking point is sure to be Title X money for Planned Parenthood, which House Republicans voted to eliminate earlier this month. In the Senate, Republicans Scott Brown (MA) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) have broken with their party in support of continued funding for Planned Parenthood, noting it is one of the nation’s largest and most effective providers of womens’ health services. In an interview this weekend with the Anchorage Daily News, Murkowski A letter sent to Vice President Biden recently signed by 20 Democratic senators explained the stakes :

“More fundamentally, without the care Planned Parenthood provides — without access to Pap smears, pelvic exams and breast exams — women will die,” the senators said.

Indeed, one in five women in the U.S. have used one of Planned Parenthood’s 800 health centers, where the organization provides nearly one million Pap tests and more than 830,000 breast exams each year. The organization also administers nearly four million STD tests every year, including those for HIV. Just three percent of the organization’s work is related to abortions.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that a number of moderate Republicans are signaling willingness to re-instate funds to Planned Parenthood. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) called “the outright elimination” of funding “a step too far,” while a spokesperson for her colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) called the House vote “unwise.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) said he “has always supported Planned Parenthood and family planning efforts.”

The three senators didn’t say how they would vote on a measure to defund Planned Parenthood, and Brown and Murkowski have both voted for the House-passed full-year government funding bill that contained a provision eliminating funds for the organization. As CAP’s Matt Yglesias wrote of Brown’s statement in support of the group, “If he’s voting to defund Planned Parenthood, then all the statements in the world don’t mean a thing.”

Update

An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed the quote to Murkowski, instead of the letter from the 20 senators. We apologize for the error and have corrected it.

Security

Nevada Local Official Reprimanded For Anti-Immigrant Emails

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Mar 28, 2011 at 2:35 pm

Shirley Matson, a county assessor in central Nevada’s Nye County, was reprimanded last Friday for blasting out “blatantly racist” emails to the local sheriff asking him to investigate the citizenship status of workers building a new county jail. According to county commissioners, Matson violated the county’s personal conduct policy.

In her correspondence to the sheriff, Matson wrote that her staff and the public “can plainly see that the construction employees are all Mexican/Latino non-English speaking and I’m getting complaints.” Matson went on to say, “When I worked for Pardee Homes in San Diego that got fined for using illegals millions of dollars because of the shabby construction work, illegals can’t read blueprints, duh! let alone any other important construction instructions. I could go on and on…..but I need to go to work.”

The county assessor’s criticism wasn’t limited to immigrant construction workers. “I would never have a uneducated illegal hater of Americans watch my children or clean my house, they can’t read and have no idea what directions are listed on cleaning supplies, that’s just one example,” wrote Matson.

Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo responded that he has “no legal reason to investigate the workers’ status.” “That’s what we call racial profiling,” DeMeo told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I’m in favor of supporting the Constitution,” DeMeo said. “People (like Matson) want to wrap themselves in the flag but they don’t think the law should apply to anyone but them.” Commissioner Joni Eastley publicly scolded Matson, stating, “Your racially charged and insensitive comments were wholly inappropriate and volatile and they were sent under the seal of Nye County…We don’t tolerate racists.”

Although utterly reprehensible, Matson’s comments pale in comparison to recent remarks made by other local Republican elected officials across the country. From the Kansas state Representative who said we should shoot immigrants like “wild swine,” to the Alabama state Senator who advised Republicans to “empty the clip, and do what has to be done” to stop immigrants from “destroying” his community, hate speech against immigrants is unfortunately nothing new in mainstream politics.

The Nye County commissioners “could do little more than issue a public reprimand” because Matson is an elected official. Matson is reportedly “unapologetic.” However, the five county commissioners who unanimously agreed to stand up against Matson’s troubling remarks should set a precedent that will hopefully be followed in Kansas where over 55,000 people have signed on to a petition seeking the resignation of state Rep. Virgil Peck (R).

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