StupidiNews!

• A series of explosions outside the Iranian embassy in Beirut, Lebanon has left 23 dead so far and over 140 injured as the group responsible for the attack has yet to step forward.
• Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders is considering a 2016 White House run if "no other" progressive candidate enters the race.
• The first planned Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank is under construction, the city of Rawabi will house as many as 40,000. 
• Forget the CEO's "golden parachute" severance package when they leave a company, these days it's the "golden hello" signing bonus for the nation's top CEOs that are drawing attention.
• Who watches the watchmen?  Boston's Finest will be under the eye of GPS units tracking the movements of police cruisers to improve dispatch and response time.

Last Call For The End Of Obamacare, Version 92734

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar lands in the Future Stupidity files with his predictions of the repeal of Obamacare:

Unless the HealthCare.gov website miraculously gets fixed by next month, there's a growing likelihood that over time, enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise. That became clear when even Obama, to stop the political bleeding, offered an administrative fix that threatened the viability of the entire individual exchange market to forestall a House Democratic mutiny the next day. It was as clear sign as any that the president is pessimistic about the odds that the federal exchange website will be ready by the end of the month, as promised.

More than anything, politics is about self-preservation, and the last two weeks provided numerous examples of how public opinion has turned so hard against the law that even its most ardent supporters are running for the hills. It's not just red-state Democrats, like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, distancing themselves from the law. It's blue-state senators like Oregon's Jeff Merkley and New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen -- and top blue-state recruits like Michigan's Gary Peters and Iowa's Bruce Braley, who voted for GOP legislation Friday that the White House said would "gut" the law. Nearly every House Democrat in a competitive district joined with Republicans to threaten the law. Without a quick fix, those ranks will grow.

This tsunami of blowback, which built in just the last month, is unsustainable for Democrats over the long haul. The president isn't just losing his skeptics from the chaotic Obamacare rollout but his allies who stood to gain from the law's benefits -- namely Hispanics, whose approval of the president has dropped more than any demographic subgroup since the problems began. The simplest solution -- if only to stop the bleeding -- is to get the website fixed. (When former DNC Chairman Howard Dean's proposal is to hire tens of thousands of young phone operators to sign people up for insurance -- straight out of a Jerry Lewis telethon -- as he suggested on "Morning Joe," it's clear the website problems are really bad.).

And yes, if the website remains broken (which it's not going to) Kraushaar has a point.  But then he goes way off into the stratosphere:

Would President Obama sign a death warrant on his own signature legislation? That's almost impossible to imagine, but it's entirely reasonable that he may not have a choice in the matter. Consider: Despite the White House's protestations, 62.4 percent of the House voted for Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton's legislation (261-157), just shy of the two-thirds necessary to override a veto. And consider the House Democrats who voted against Upton's bill but nonetheless released harsh statements criticizing Obamacare. Maryland Rep. John Delaney, in a statement, wrote: "The problem we have currently is that the Affordable Care Act is not working." Added Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick: "The stunning ineptitude of the ACA marketplace rollout is more than a public relations disaster. It is a disaster for the working families in my Arizona district who badly need quality, affordable health care." Add them into the mix -- the dozens more members who were poised to split with the president until his face-saving press conference -- and you've got all but the hardy Obama loyalists who could end up bolting if the political environment doesn't improve.

And if that happens, the Democrats all but deserve to be politically wiped out.  That will leave us with of course even more Republicans in power, and that's not acceptable.  But this article assumes that "Obama loyalists" have zero influence in the party, or over Democrats in Congress, and that's not true.

Only if you believe that the millions of people who support the ACA have no voice is this scenario accurate.  I'm telling you that's just not the case, and Kraushaar should know better than to just troll like this.

Or as Jamelle Bouie puts it:

The entire premise of this piece is absolute fantasy: http://t.co/T6wd4VppOS
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) November 18, 2013

Fantasy indeed.

Pick Up Our Ball And Go Bomb You With It

Apparently the concept of US Secretary of State John Kerry making any sort of deal with Iran is so utterly terrifying to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that our erstwhile ally in the Middle East is now actively trying to destroy the 5+1 talks with Tehran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the plan currently being formulated by world leaders to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons will not be effective.

"This is a bad deal," Netanyahu said on CNN's "State of the Union."

He said that global leaders should increase sanctions on Iran, not loosen them.

"I think, if you want a peaceful solution, as I do, then the right thing to do is ratchet up the sanctions," he said. "Iran is practically giving away nothing. It's making a minor concession, which they can reverse in weeks, and you endanger the whole sanctions regime that took years to make."

Netanyahu argued that an imperfect deal could backfire and force the U.S. and other to used the military option.

"If you do a bad deal, you may get to the point where your only option is a military option," he said. "So a bad deal actually can lead you to exactly the place you don't want to be."

Beginning to see why the 5+1 countries are the five UN permanent Security Council members and Germany, and not Israel.  The Iranians want lessening of sanctions as part of any deal.  Any deal that lessens sanctions on Iran is a bad deal according to Israel.  Any bad deal could lead to Israeli military action.  You see where Bibi is going with this.

The question is why?  That's easy, nobody likes getting left out of the party.  Israel doesn't think anyone should be having talks with Iran at all, and they're making it clear to the US that these talks shouldn't continue.

Look for increasing pressure from Republicans demanding to walk away from talks and simply increase sanctions ad infinitum.

Stormy Weather Ahead

Devastation from last week's Super Typhoon Haiyan has prompted the Philippines to take a scheduled UN climate change meeting and start asking some very tough questions about how poorer nations are supposed to survive rising oceans and super storms when the big boys are dumping most of the carbon into the atmosphere.

Calling the climate crisis “madness,” the Philippines representative vowed to fast for the duration of the talks. Malia Talakai, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group that includes her tiny South Pacific homeland, Nauru, said that without urgent action to stem rising sea levels, “some of our members won’t be around.” 

From the time a scientific consensus emerged that human activity was changing the climate, it has been understood that the nations that contributed least to the problem would be hurt the most. Now, even as the possible consequences of climate change have surged — from the typhoons that have raked the Philippines and India this year to the droughts in Africa, to rising sea levels that threaten to submerge entire island nations — no consensus has emerged over how to rectify what many call “climate injustice.” 

Growing demands to address the issue have become an emotionally charged flash point at negotiations here at the 19th conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which continues this week. 

At a news briefing here, Farah Kabir, the director in Bangladesh for the anti-poverty organization ActionAid International, described that country as a relatively small piece of land “with a population of 160 million, trying to cope with this extreme weather, trying to cope with the effect of emissions for which we are not responsible.”

So yeah, these island and coastal nations are pretty pissed off.  While the large nations of the world continue to bicker over who will make the most profit off the twilight of fossil fuels, it's the little guys who are the first up against the wall when the rising seas come.  But hey, say the deniers, if it doesn't affect the US heartland, well, who gives a damn?

Of course, the US heartland just got plastered by a huge tornado outbreak.  In November.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence.  Drill baby drill.

StupidiNews!

• A major multi-state wave of tornadoes ripped through the Midwest on Sunday leaving six dead, hardest hit was central Illinois where tens of thousands are still without power.
• All 44 aboard a Boeing 737 are dead after a plane crash in western Russia, investigators are seeking answers as to how the plane went down on a second landing attempt.
• As Americans are using less gas, the EPA is proposing new rules to reduce the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline to prevent damage to automobile engines.
• Nobel Literature laureate Doris Lessing, author of "The Golden Notebook", has passed at the age of 94.
• California has quickly moved to shut down fraudulent health care websites the state says were falsely luring consumers into believing they were Covered California, the state's health insurance exchange.

GOP Tries To Have Its Obamacare And Repeal It Too

Let's take a closer look at Louisiana's special election for the House from yesterday.  LA-5 wasn't anywhere near my radar as the runoff was between two Republicans.  The difference:  one wanted to repeal Obamacare, the other wanted to repeal Obamacare but while we have the law, let's expand Medicaid to poor, rural Louisianans.

Guess who won by 20 points?

Louisiana voters elected Republican Vance McAllister in a runoff to fill the state’s vacant Fifth District U.S. House seat on Saturday. McAllister, a businessman who embraced the expansion of Medicaid available to the state under the Affordable Care Act, defeated a Republican party favorite who called for full Obamacare repeal. 

In a district won by Mitt Romney with 61 percent of the vote in 2012, two Republicans were the top vote-getters in a 14-candidate October primary. McAllister, who received nearly 60 percent of the vote in Saturday’s special election, criticized much of the Affordable Care Act, but also criticized Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) decision to dismantle charity hospitals in the state, and to reject its Medicaid expansion, which would expand the qualifications for Medicaid recipients and extend healthcare coverage to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Louisianans. “Our governor and Sen. Riser right here have gutted [heath care] to the core and privatized it.” 

McAllister’s top opponent, State Senator Neil Riser (R), received support from House Republican Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), three of the four other Louisiana Republican Congressmen, the National Rifle Association, FreedomWorks and, more tacitly, Gov. Jindal. Riser ran ads saying that he would go to Washington to balance the budget and stop Obamacare — not make friends — andslammed McAllister for ” attempting to redefine himself and stand with President Obama.”

And yet the guy still won by 20 points, mainly because I'm betting all the Democrats in the district sided with him.  This is exactly why Republicans hate Louisiana's "top two" runoff system, by the way.

My prediction will be Vance McAllister won't be the last Republican to run on "the good parts of Obamacare" and win.  Eventually, all of them will be running on it.

Even the ones who lose to Democrats running on keeping Obamacare.

V For Void-etta

Adam Serwer reminds us that Republicans in Virginia's state legislature may simply decide to throw out the razor-thin 164 vote victory of Democrat Mark Herring for state Attorney General:

Herring is currently ahead of Obenshain by a follicle–the current official count states that Herring has 164 more votes than Obenshain out of more than two million cast. A recount is all but guaranteed and litigation seems likely. But even if after the dust clears Herring remains in the lead, under Virginia law, Obenshain could contest the result in the Republican dominated Virginia legislature, which could declare Obenshain the winner or declare the office vacant and order a new election. 

“If they can find a hook to demonstrate some sort of irregularity, then there’s nothing to prevent them from saying our guy wins,” says Joshua Douglas, an election law expert and professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. “There’s no rules here, besides outside political forces and public scrutiny.” 

An election contest is a specific post-election procedure for disputing the official outcome of an election. Different states have different rules for election contests–some put them in the hands of the courts, others in the hands of the legislature. Obenshain couldn’t simply contest the election out of the blue. He’d have to argue that some sort of irregularity affected the result. Still, Virginia law is relatively vague in explaining what would justify an election contest, and historical precedent suggests that co-partisans in the legislature are unlikely to reach a decision that hurts their candidate. 

“History shows that contests in the legislature are generally more politicized than if they’re adjudicated in the judiciary,” says Edward Foley, a professor at Moritz College of Law. That applies to both parties–but it’s Republicans who have the majority in the Virginia General Assembly. The Virginia state senate is evenly split, but Republicans have the majority in the state house. A spokesperson for Obenshain didn’t respond when asked directly if, after exhausting all other avenues, Obenshain would pursue an election contest.

Considering Republicans have declared voting for Democrats as irregular enough to warrant restrictions on voting in pretty much every red state, I absolutely expect Virginia Republicans to throw out the result.  We'll see how much damage they'll take doing so, but my gut feeling says if the result stands as it is right now, Republicans will step in to disenfranchise an entire election and declare that a Democrat winning a close race is grounds enough to void the the whole deal.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Last Call To Reach Out And Touch Someone

Thank you, MIT. This almost makes up for graduating Tom Massie.

Apologies and Apoplexies

So yesterday, President Obama spent about an hour at a press conference apologizing and taking reponsibility for the healthcare.gov website problems.  He also offered states the ability to keep health insurance plans that don't meet ACA minimums on the books for another year.  Again, this is a customer service 101 response here:  "It's not my fault, but as president, it is my problem to fix."

Response from the Village was of course, calm and rational.

President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency. 

Pundits were equally rational.

As the health law teeters, the stakes are so great because the struggle encapsulates each party’s core argument. It embodies the Democratic belief that society works better when risk is shared—between young and old, healthy and sick—and government intervenes in private markets to try to expand both security and opportunity. The fury of the Republican resistance reflects the party’s insistence that markets work best unfettered, that centralized government programs cannot achieve their goals, and that Democrats are unduly burdening the “makers” to support (and politically mobilize) the “takers.”

If most Americans conclude Republicans are right about the health care law, that judgment would inevitably deepen doubts about other government initiatives. In this world, Democrats could still hold the White House in 2016 around cultural affinity, but they would likely struggle to achieve much if they do. If the president can’t extinguish the flames surrounding Obamacare, this runway explosion could reverberate for years.

And columnists?  Totally, completely rational.

We are two Democrats, one of us a baby boomer and the other a millennial. Not only are we of different ages, but we also have vastly different perspectives. Despite this, we hold similar core values. For different reasons, we feel that the Democratic Party has left us. What we are concerned with here is addressing challenges to our core values as a society and redefining what being a Democrat means in today’s circumstances.

To recap, Katrina, explosion, end of the Democratic party, worst hit for government as a solution in the history of government, yadda yadda.

Bush?  We don't recall.  Things were pretty good then, you know.   Iraq?  Afghanistan?  Medicare Part D?  Alberto Gonzales?  Trillions in damage to the global economy?  All those clearly pale in comparison to a web site not working, you know.

The Juice Is Loose

While we keep hearing how Democrats are in disarray and falling apart, keep in mind that the number one target for at least one Tea Party PAC, the Tea Party Leadership Fund, is squeezing Orange Julius right out of office.

A tea party group has launched a campaign to support primary challenges against all 87 Republicans who voted for the deal in late October to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. 

The Tea Party Leadership Fund, a PAC affiliated with the group TheTeaParty.net, began a fundraising push — dubbed the “Primaries for Traitors Fund” — shortly after the shutdown deal passed in the House, and they are now ramping up efforts to find “credible candidates” in each of the districts, said the fund’s treasurer, Dan Backer. 

“From our perspective, we see this as a signature vote. You can’t be a conservative and vote to raise the debt ceiling,” Backer said. “I recognize there are some places where voters may actually think that was the right vote. And there may be places where you have an incumbent who wins with 90% of the vote every time and there’s not a credible challenger. I recognize that, but we’re certainly going to do our best.” 

Backer says the group has honed in on a few specific members to start: Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, New York Rep. Peter King, North Carolina Rep. Robert Pittenger, Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany, and most importantly, Backer said, House Speaker John Boehner in Ohio. 

“Our goal is to keep going one after another after another as our resources allow. To get our feet wet, we’re starting out with a few, but nobody is going to get a pass,” he said.

So with these guys actively looking to bring down any Republican who votes to raise the debt ceiling through primary challenges for them, who wants to take the bet that Republicans won't shut down the government or breach the debt ceiling in the next two months?

Remember, these guys are spending money to elect people who will choose to destroy America's economy and throw us back into a recession, if not depression.  They will certainly target anyone who votes in January to raise the debt ceiling and they're using the only weapon that matters to Republicans, money, to do it.

So yes, this is about to be a massive problem for the GOP in about a month.  And you expect Orange Julius to handle it?

Oh, and you don't see Democrats trying to primary Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, do you.  There's a reason for that.  Mitch McConnell and Orange Julius?  In real trouble.

Now, which party is disintegrating again?

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is offering insurance companies the ability to renew inadequate health insurance policies for another year as a fix to the problems with Obamacare.
• LGBTQ activists have cited an Indiana hospital as breaking federal law by denying visitation rights to a patient's same-sex partner.
• Native American tribal leaders are calling on Washington to ban the NFL's Redskins trademark, saying the team name is offensive.
• Financial ratings agency Moody's has cut the ratings of four major US investment banks on concerns that in another crisis situation, the banks would be unable to pay back lenders and taxpayers.
• IBM is bringing its Watson supercomputer to the cloud to sell its services to developers as the ultimate customer question-answering machine.

The Good News About The Obamacare Numbers

Greg Sargent points out that while the first month of Obamacare's web site rollout has been ugly, there's actually very good news in the numbers that the Obama administration has provided.

The enrollment numbers are in, and as expected, they are well short of projections. Around 106,000 enrolled in new plans during October — with approximately 27,000 coming from states where the federal government is running the exchange (with its extensive problems), and another 79,000 coming through the state exchanges. Republicans are gleefully pointing to the numbers as proof Obamacare needs to be scrapped entirely. 

That confirms two things we’ve long known to be true: the website is a disaster, and short term enrollment figures are a serious political problem for the White House and Democrats. But to Larry Levitt, a vice president at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, another very telling number is this one: over 975,000 have been determined eligible for a marketplace but haven’t yet chosen a plan. 

“That’s one of the most telling numbers — a million people have been determined eligible,” Levitt tells me. “That means if the website had been working well, and a million people had gotten to the end of the process, we’d be looking at a very different trajectory now. We heard about the surge in traffic when HealthCare.gov went live. This suggests there is in fact a lot of interest.”

That means that once the website is ready to go, the interest in signing up is there.  The website just has to have the capability of handling the demand.  The big question is how soon.  The better news: there are also hundreds of thousands of people who have discovered they are eligible for Medicaid under state expansions.

Meanwhile, the 100,000 number is getting a lot of attention, but the report also finds nearly 400,000 were determined eligible for Medicaid. “In total that’s over 500,000 people who signed up for insurance in the midst of a tumultuous launch,” Levitt says. “People make a distinction between the marketplace and Medicaid, but those are both elements of the Affordable Care Act — both are mechanisms to get people insured.” 

In one sense what we’re really seeing in these numbers is the first concrete representation of what the de facto GOP health care plan — repeal Obamacare and replace it with nothing, since there’s no GOP consensus on a replacement – looks like. Presuming many of the 106,000 do pay in the end, GOP repeal would entail taking health coverage away from hundreds of thousands of people.

So now, no matter how much the tea party knuckleheads are screaming for it, full repeal will never happen.  I wish Greg Sargent would sit Ezra Klein down and explain that to him, because Klein has been pissing himself for a month now, and it's gotten to the point where he needs a good slap to the face over his DOOOOOOOOOOOOM crying.

There's good news, but the Village doesn't care.  It's a numbers game to them, rather than the the story of the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people this law will help.

Orange Julius, In The Observatory, With The Candlestick

And the chalk outline of immigration reform is on the floor.

House Speaker John Boehner says he will not allow any House-passed immigration legislation to be blended with the Senate’s sweeping reform bill, further quashing the chances of comprehensive immigration reform legislation being signed into law anytime soon.

“We have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill,” Boehner told reporters Wednesday. 

As Greg Sargent remarks, that's pretty much the ball game for immigration reform getting passed:

The point here is this. The House GOP leadership will never hold a vote on any comprehensive reform package that includes legalization or citizenship. So the only way forward is if House Republicans pass piecemeal provisions — border security measures, plus some sort of legalization proposal for the 11 million, or barring that, the Kids Act (which gives citizenship only to the DREAMers). That would be a route to comprehensive reform if it provided a way to get to conference.

Boehner doesn’t want anything the House passes to be seen as a vehicle for going to conference, because conservatives will revolt. But here is the rub: House Republicans, on their own, probably can’t pass anything that addresses the 11 million — and may not even be able to pass the KIDS Act — if it is seen as a vehicle for going to conference, since conservatives would resist at all costs. So Democrats would be needed to pass any such proposals. But Democrats will only vote for such proposals with an assurance that we would then go to conference. And so, by ruling out conference, Boehner may have just closed off the last remaining route to getting reform done.

There has been a lot of talk lately about how the GOP establishment is going to wage war on the hard-liners inside the GOP that are forcing unelectable candidates and deeply unpopular positions on the party. Immigration reform, however, is a clear cut case where this vow isn’t mattering in the slightest.

It'll matter to them when it costs then elections, and not a moment before.  That's the only thing that will make them listen.

Projection Man

You know at this point how utterly terrified Republicans are of having to face voters over killing immigration, cutting food stamps, nuking job legislation and shutting down the government and costing the country $24 billion, when jokers like Krauthammer are solemnly intoning that the Obamacare website means "the end of liberalism" in America.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer sees “the collapse of American liberalism” in sight, in no small part because of the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

“We have not just Obamacare unraveling, not just the Obama administration unraveling, not just the Democratic majority of the Senate [unraveling], but we could be looking at the collapse of American liberalism,” Krauthammer told Bill O’Reilly Tuesday. “Obamacare is the big thing for them. The biggest in a hundred years.”

Krauthammer addressed tensions and tactical disagreements within the Republican Party — particularly related to the government shutdown in October — and said he believes this is an important opportunity for conservatives to unite.

“This is a moment where we have to be calm. We have to understand what holds us together on the right. We have to watch and explain why the failure of the left is happening. And if we do that, we will win,” he said.

The problem of course is what holds the wingers together on the right is a blinding, irrational hatred of Barack Obama and anyone who supports him.  They've got no hope, just their wars on women, immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ, science, and reality itself.

Demographics are destiny, and the GOP is destined for the scrapheap.

StupidiNews!

• A US Navy relief task force led by the carrier USS George Washington has arrived in the Philippines to provide logistical aid after last week's deadly Super Typhoon Haiyan.
• The body of former Brazilian President Joao Goulart is being exhumed to see if he was poisoned 50 years ago when he died of a heart attack in 1964.
• Federal Reserve chair nominee Janet Yellen will appear today before the Senate Banking committee, where her nomination is expected to be advanced to the full Senate.
• New figures show more than five percent of the global population suffers from diabetes, which kills one person every six seconds.
• Amazon's cloud services are set to take on virtualization heavy hitters like Citrix and VMWare with its new application stream.