Daily Kos

One of the most compelling arguments for Medicaid expansion, at least for people who aren't knee-jerk conservatives who will reject anything and everything Obamacare, is that states implementing it could save millions of dollars because they wouldn't have to be footing the whole bill for treatment for poor people. That's been proven again by Pennsylvania, which has completed implementing the expansion.

Department of Human Services Sec. Ted Dallas Tuesday announced the end of the transition from Healthy PA to traditional Medicaid expansion—known as HealthChoices in Pennsylvania—as the last of the expansion insurance plans took effect.

According to Sec. Dallas, 440,000 Pennsylvanians are enrolled in Medicaid expansion insurance plans with the last group of enrollees coming out of Healthy PA’s primary coverage options into Medicaid expansion. […]

He added with the full transition now complete, Pennsylvania is eligible for more federal funding and will realize a savings of $626 million from people moving off of state-funded care to fully federally funded Medicaid expansion.

“That number will grow as the number of people continue to move into Medicaid expansion,” he said.

That's 440,000 people that now have health coverage, on track to meet the projected 605,000 total enrollments. That's huge. But the savings now available to the state are pretty great, too. Congratulations, Pennsylvania, for coming over from the dark side and taking care of your citizens.

Andy Parker, the father of slain journalist Alison Parker, followed up on his promise to make enacting gun safety measures his "mission in life" with an op-ed last week in the Washington Post.

In recent years we have witnessed similar tragedies unfold on TV: the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona, the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut and of churchgoers in South Carolina. We have to ask ourselves: What do we need to do to stop this insanity?

In my case, the answer is: “Whatever it takes.”

Parker's goal is laudable and his determination a must given the uphill battle he faces. In his opening salvo on the issue, he names names of Virginia lawmakers he hopes to hold accountable for their lack of action. Keep reading below to find out who.

As Republicans continue their calls to defund Planned Parenthood, they completely ignore the public health consequences of taking such an action. Why? Because it will almost exclusively affect women—especially low-income women. Here's a look at how defunding Louisiana's two Planned Parenthood clinics would play out, via Jackie Calmes.

Neither [Planned Parenthood] clinic in this state — like nearly half of all Planned Parenthood centers — performs (abortions). What the Louisiana Planned Parenthood clinics did do last year was administer nearly 20,000 tests for sexually transmitted infections, as well as providing gynecological exams, contraceptive care, cancer screenings and other wellness services for nearly 10,000 mostly low-income patients.

“You can’t just cut Planned Parenthood off one day and expect everyone across the city to absorb the patients,” Dr. Taylor said. “There needs to be time to build the capacity.” [...]

Louisiana is among a number of states counted as medically underserved: It has a large poor and unhealthy population, with high rates of unintended pregnancies, a shortage of health professionals and too few who will accept Medicaid, as Planned Parenthood does.

So cutting off funds for two clinics will stop zero abortions, while depriving some 30,000 women of health services. If that's not the definition of fanaticism, I'm not sure what is. What's certain is it surely has nothing to do with any genuine concern for public health.

As their sudden reemergence on our televisions might indicate, Dick Cheney and offspring Liz have co-written a new book. It is, of course, about how awesome the Bush administration was and great things were going and why Obama is bad, and so forth.

At one stage, the Cheneys write that “history will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq.” But just two pages later, as if unable to resist re-engaging the issue, they describe the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as a “grave threat to the United States” before concluding: “We were right to invade and remove him from power.”

They even insist that U.S. troops “were in fact greeted as liberators,” just as Dick Cheney predicted before the invasion—a quote that Bush administration critics have frequently hung around his neck.

The Cheneys also offer a strained rationale for why, even though Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, the terror attacks still were a reason to invade Iraq. “[A]fter 9/11 … we had an obligation to do everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to much worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely place for terrorists to gain access to and knowledge of such weapons.”

So basically, Dick Cheney has spent the years between 2003 and 2015 in a sealed metal box, coming out only for snacks and television interviews, and if you've got a decade's worth of contrary evidence, or regional repercussions, or dead soldiers to show him in an effort to show him why his top-notch foreign policy ideas turned out to be the biggest American foreign policy disaster since the Vietnam War you might as well toss it now—Dick Cheney still don't care.

I'm not sure why this book needed to be written—yes, we all know that Dick Cheney is unrepentant for his key role in the biggest American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, he's made that abundantly clear already—or who the target audience might be, other than the free-book-when-you-sign-up-for-our-newsletter racket. I'm not sure why it needed to be co-written with daughter Liz, since Dick Cheney is perfectly capable and willing to say all these horrible things himself, except as ongoing effort to gift daughter Liz with her father's neoconservative credentials, by osmosis if necessary, so that Liz can carry on the pro-torture, pro-preventative-war, pro-America-as-rogue-state family business and make a few bucks on the lecture circuit.

So it's not so much a book as an addendum for Liz's resume and something to take up space on the former vice president's oft-vandalized Wikipedia page. Well, that a chance for Dick to be Dick.

“President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going back 75 years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership,” the Cheneys write, calling the idea that that “America is to blame and her power must be restrained” the “touchstone of [Obama’s] ideology.”

And snacks in hand, back into his cozy metal box he goes. At least until Liz needs a job recommendation.

"I am Ozymandias, king of several casinos and golf courses and a very classy mixed-use tower. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

That's a single sentence from a Donald Trump speech last July. Kevin Drum calls it eerily Palinesque; I'd probably classify it as post-modern Limbaughian, myself, as the reflexive interruptions to lavish self-praise weave in and out of a central point that may or may not make any sense, but does not have to so long as it eats up the long minutes between commercial breaks. But there's a twinge of something else in there, as if Donald ate some of Bill O'Reilly's chyrons and is regurgitating them back up in short, chewed phrases?

Ah well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. To sum up: 1) Donald Trump is smart. 2) Nuclear is powerful. 3) Persians are great negotiators.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson There's a stereotype of union members as, well, men. You know: The sweat-stained, blue-collar guy toiling at the construction site, or sweating in a factory. To be sure, it's a stereotype that's grounded in reality. Historically, unions have been a powerful conduit that enabled blue-collar men to enter and then build the American middle class. Labor unions succeeded in limiting their working hours, improving the safety of their workplaces, and raising their pay. But that's only a small piece of the overall union movement.

Take women, for example. In 2014, women made up 45.5 percent of all union members, up from 33.6 percent in 1984, according to a new report on women in unions from the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

And being a union member can make a big difference for women, raising wages and shrinking the gender wage gap. Keep reading below to see just how stark these differences can be.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Three-day weekends are nice, especially if you A) get them at all and B) don't lose pay as a result of time off work. And 24 percent of American workers don't get paid holidays, so either they're working or they're not being paid. As this graph shows, it's one more area where economic inequality is rampant, since workers at the top are overwhelmingly likely to get paid time off.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times calls Donald Trump an "ignorant blowhard" and simultaneously cuts through one hunk of Republican bullshit in Monday's column—Trump Is Right on Economics:

So Jeb Bush is finally going after Donald Trump. Over the past couple of weeks the man who was supposed to be the front-runner has made a series of attacks on the man who is. Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil.

Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong. [...]

I’m not saying that everything is great in the U.S. economy, because it isn’t. There’s good reason to believe that we’re still a substantial distance from full employment, and while the number of jobs has grown a lot, wages haven’t. But the economy has nonetheless done far better than should have been possible if conservative orthodoxy had any truth to it. And now Mr. Trump is being accused of heresy for not accepting that failed orthodoxy?

More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange tangle.

The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, known also as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labor strike primarily of Jewish women working in factories making shirtwaists, a kind of women's blouse. The strike was led by Clara Lemlich and backed by the National Women's Trade Union League of America. It began in November 1909. The union settled with the factory owners in February 1910, the date this photo was taken, and resulted in better pay as well as better working conditions and hours. Just a year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives 146 workers, 85 percent of them women, which showed the nation the dangerous conditions that immigrant women faced in the factories.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—'Chickenhawk' goes mainstream:

Terry Neal's latest piece in the Washington Post examines the whole "chickenhawk" debate, and how the term and the chickenhawk arguments are being aired in mainstream publications.

For months, liberal Web sites and blogs have been buzzing about "chickenhawks" in the Bush administration and among his supporters in Congress. The term, in this instance anyway, refers to hawkish politicians who push war but never actually served in one. [...] Relegated to the fringes of the political debate for most of the year, this topic — fueled by escalating talk of war with Iraq — has picked up steam in recent weeks, with Newsweek, among others, examining the fissure within the GOP under the headline, "Hawks, Doves and Dubya." The issue was not picked up by the mainstream press until some prominent GOP politicos began commenting on it.

As Instapundit would say, advantage blogosphere.

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This Week in High Impact Posts• High Impact Posts • Top Comments

As we celebrate what's left of Labor Day weekend and wind down another brutal Texas summer here in the Lone Star State, a new movie promising miracles and paradise is making its way to local theaters. Proof of Heaven is the purportedly true story of Eben Alexander, a neurologist who was brain dead for a week. During this time he "died and went to heaven" where he met with God, rode on divine butterflies standing in for angels, and even met his deceased sister. Fortunately for everyone including the good doctor, death, in this case, was temporary. The doctor was able to come back, reanimate his alleged corpse, and go on to write a best-selling book that has morphed into a movie about his experiences.

But a well-written Esquire magazine article from a couple of years ago is worth revisiting. It reduces these back-from-the grave claims to the usual near-death scenario that skeptics like me have to come to expect, once these wondrous tales are put under scrutiny. Join us below as we review why this experience is probably more akin to proof of life than proof of heaven.

While perusing my Facebook page, a News.Mic article caught my attention. Mic is a media site tailored to millennials, or young people between age 18 and 34. The article started as follows:

The country is reeling from Vester Lee Flanagan's graphic video recording of the moment he shot and killed two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, during a live TV segment in Moneta, Virginia, on Wednesday morning. While many outlets opted not share the video (including Mic), publications like the New York Daily News chose to use frames from the video on its front page. CNN announced it would be airing the video, but only once an hour.

But as the debate over using the footage continued, one Twitter user succinctly captured the racist double standard that comes with these kinds of decisions:

I watched #EricGarner DIE on the news. I watched #WalterScott DIE on the news. I watched #TamirRice DIE on the news. TF YOU MEAN TOO GRAPHIC?

I asked my friends and followers for their thoughts, and quite a conversation ensued. But there was one message that touched me, because I heard the exasperation in the person's prose. I read between the lines and discerned not only what she was saying, but also what she wasn't sure she wanted to say.

Keep reading below.

The photo above was taken in 1987, when I was a 19-year-old private first class in the U.S. Army. My unit, Co. D, 54th Engineer Battalion, was attached to the 1/11 Armored Cavalry Regiment. We were a part of the 1/11 ACR's rotation on the inner-German border. While the Berlin Wall got most of the press, there was a combination of walls, fences, minefields, and other obstacles dividing East and West Germany.

From the the West German side of the border, we primarily watched the East Germans/Soviets, and what they were up to. On the other side of the border, they did watch us, too. But their primary mission was not to keep people out of East Germany—it was to keep people in.

The inner German border will forever be a part of who I am. Two years of my life were spent in its proximity and the rules that went along with it: No armored vehicles within 50 meters of the border; do not point fully automatic weapons across the border; do not converse with East German/Soviet soldiers on patrol; and report anything unusual that you see on or near the border. Never have I lived in an actual police state, but I was close enough to observe one. And it involved a wall.

Keep reading below to learn about the dangers of history repeating itself.