House passes Protect Predatory Insurers Act

John Boehner's House of Dysfunction passed a bill protecting junk health insurance with a convenient side effect of slow motion undermining the very core of health insurance reform. House GOPers rejected an amendment to protect consumers brought forward by the Democrats. They objected to this language as not being germane to their bill.

The amendment proposed in the motion to recommit in pertinent part requires state insurance commissioners to examine notices of health insurance cancellations or conversions. It also addresses the regulation of health insurance rates, specifically the amendment delineates what would constitute inadequate notice of cancellation or conversions of health insurance coverage and directs state insurance commissioners to investigate such cases of inadequate notice. Additionally, it permits the Secretary of Health and Human Services or the relevant state insurance regulator to take corrective actions if health insurance rates are determined to be excessive, unjustified, or discriminatory….

Translated: If insurance corporations are allowed to sell junk policies, there have to submit to regulatory review if they cancel the policies when people actually get sick and they won't be allowed to indiscriminately price gouge. You'll recall President's Obama's fix also required the insurers to clearly state the limits of the policies and make the consumer aware they had other options on public exchanges.

Well the Republicans won't stand for that. It completely ruins their plan to destroy all and any reforms that interfere with insurance corporation's profits. Even more depressing, 39 Democrats crossed over and voted for the GOP's malicious fakery in a vain attempt to dodge Republican attack ads. As if the dark money frontmen of the GOP won't still pour millions into taking their seats.

A word to those 39 spineless idiots. If you have "D" after your name, you own Obamacare. The good and the bad. The rubes in your district aren't going to be impressed by your cowardly caving into the GOPers thuggery. They'll only respect you if you stand up and fight. Every Democrat should be refusing to countenance the GOP's trickery and holding press conferences on the Capitol steps every day blasting the GOP's perfidy instead of kowtowing to Republican demagoguery.

[Big thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings of The Reaction (Twitter: @mjwstickings) for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round Up]

Wall St. Recovery floats only big boats

The Wall Street Recovery has been very good for the casino capitalists and the mega-corporations they call people. The investor class is swimming in cash and it keeps pouring in. Dow closed at an all time high just this very afternoon. Meanwhile, the majority of America is trying to stay afloat from month to month. So how did this titanic economic disaster happen?

How are companies managing to earn so much money in a sluggish economy? And why aren't their profits goosing the economy?

For starters, weak job growth has held down pay. And since the recession struck six years ago, businesses have been relentless in cutting costs. They've also stockpiled cash rather than build new products or lines of business. And they've been earning larger chunks of their profits overseas.

All of which is a recipe for solid profits and tepid economic growth. The economy grew at a meager annual rate of just 1.8 percent in the first half of 2013. The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, far above the 5 percent to 6 percent considered healthy.

Even so, corporate profits equaled 12.5 percent of the economy in the April-June quarter, just below a 60-year high reached two years ago. Profits of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have nearly doubled since June 2009. Earnings appear to have risen again in the July-September quarter.

Rising tide lifts all ships was a lie. Anything smaller than  luxury yachts gets swamped in their wake and slowly sinks. Time to bail out the people barely clinging to the life rafts. [charterworld.com photo]

New, improved Jim Crow law tested in Texas

Well I suppose we could call it progress. If by that you mean the test run of JimCrow 2.7 in Texas will discriminate against women, old white people and anyone else in danger of voting Democratic of any race or religious background. No one can accuse the GOP of racism for denying Mr. Jim Wright a voter ID card.

Former House Speaker Jim Wright was denied a voter ID card Saturday at a Texas Department of Public Safety office.

“Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn’t give me an ID,” Wright said.

The legendary Texas political figure says that he has worked things out with DPS and that he will get a state-issued personal identification card in time for him to vote Tuesday in the state and local elections.

But after the difficulty he had this weekend getting a proper ID card, Wright, 90, expressed concern that such problems could deter others from voting and stifle turnout. After spending much of his life fighting to make it easier to vote, the Democratic Party icon said he is troubled by what he’s seeing happen under the state’s new voter ID law.

Interesting. Just when polls show the elderly are deserting the GOP, it's suddenly harder for them to cast ballots after decades of no hassle voting. The acceptable documents such as certified birth certificates and passorts are not easy to acquire. Especially for the elderly who likely have neither and wouldn't be able to acquire them within the six day window for certifying their provisional ballots. Would be interesting to know if registered Republicans are suffering the same obstruction in obtaining the newly mandated photo ID and casting ballots.

GOP back to the same old tricks

You'll be shocked to learn Senate Republicans are blocking critical judicial nominees again. They're damned determined to keep the D.C.Circuit  controlled by cons and they're not afraid to filibuster. (What "gentlemen's" agreement?)

And can we please call the "court-packing" claim a lie?

Cornyn's court-packing claim is misleading -- it is a reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attempts to expand the size of the Supreme Court; Obama merely wants to fill vacancies on the appellate level. But he repeated the talking point in multiple op-eds recently, laying the groundwork for a mass filibuster and pressuring GOP senators not to allow Obama to fill any of the three vacant seats on the D.C. Circuit court.

Republicans don't take issue with Millett's qualifications; they argue that the court's caseload is relatively low and so the size of its active bench should be reduced from 11 to eight judges. If they refuse to relent, it would put Democrats in a difficult position, forced to either surrender on a top judicial priority or possibly threaten to scale back the filibuster.

Filling standing vacancies is the Senate's damn job. As has long been the custom, the winners of the election get to pick the nominees. The losers of the election get to vote against them but they can't be allowed to continuously obstruct the process. Every Democrat inside the Beltway Bubble should be demanding an up or down vote. Maybe if they all changed their name to John McCain and stood on the steps of The Capitol chanting "up-or-down vote" Big Media might report about it on the teevee.

Meanwhile, nobody is scared of Harry Reid and his empty threats.

Republicans aren't fretting. "I don't really take this threat of the nuclear option very seriously when it comes to judicial nominations," Cornyn told reporters.

Screw those smug thugs. Kill the damn filibuster. You know if they ever regain the Senate, the GOPers will kill it on the first day so do it now.

Crazy cons

Looking around the internets I see the Crackpot Caucus is pretty much in --"well doubling down on the crazy didn't work, so triple down will do the trick" -- mode. Meanwhile, the rest of the old guard GOPers are freaking out about the damage to the brand. Even worse, (for the rest of us), the fiscal grifters have swooped in.

Charlie Pierce is already on the Fix the Debt vultures beat. No point in rewriting this:

This is the real threat to the recovery right here. Not partisan bickering. Not the temporizing in the deal cut last night. Not even Ted Cruz and the members of the monkeyhouse on the other side of the Capitol. It is this permanent class of deficit fetishists and austerian fantasts. These are the people who will wreck lives. These are people who get heard in the White House instead of being told to go pound sand until we elect Paul Ryan to be president. Every time the president mentons the deficit, these guys get their semi-annual woodies and a little bit of actual progressive politics dies again. These are the people whose credentials really should have been revoked last night, if there actually was the kind of Democratic triumph that we're being sold today. Pete Peterson must have bought Purina short. I am so dreading that conference committee.

On the bright side Mitch McConnell's payoff was what the true believers are calling a "Kentucky earmark", meaning $2.9 billion in federal funding for a dam project. Which I heartily approve of, because -- stimulus. Kentucky's economy really needs it.

GOP in disarray

Went offline for a few hours. Nothing much changed except the GOP's Crackpot Caucus doubled down on the crackpottery. Boehner's House of Dysfunction reportedly adjourned without taking a vote on anything. Hearing speculation they will vote on the Senate bill tomorrow but who knows? I suppose it depends on how well fortified with liquid courage poor ole Johnny is when he arrives on the Hill.

Meanwhile, the fearsome Huckleberry Closet Case** scolds the mean Democrats:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told TPM that he was "proud" of Speaker John Boehner's handling of the fiscal crisis but thought Democrats should have been more flexible with Republicans.

Said Graham: "We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand. It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better."

Kinda give a little? What's the equivalent of 47 votes to repeal Obamacare?

[**yes, Charlie Pierce coined that nym]

House GOP revolting

And I mean revolting in every sense of the word. I would write about the latest "negotiations" (a/k/a hostage demands) but judging from the contradictory narratives in the media, nobody knows what Boehner's House of Dysfunction is doing, including Boehner and his Crackpot Cons.

The maniacal vandals of the Crackpot Caucus are so immersed in their own invented reality, they apparently have no clue that the explosives they're tossing about on Capitol Hill have lit fuses and are about to incinerate the entire world economy. Yet, even though reality based Americans can see the danger, and we will all suffer the consequences, I don't see any remedy for this insanity but to let the crackpots blow the place up. They won't be jolted out of their fantasy world until they're up to their knobby knees in the rubble and even their own deluded base is headed up the hill with torches and pitchforks. Which I have to believe will finally happen when the damage is so overwhelming that even they can't pretend it doesn't exist.

As bad as the damage will be, the alternative -- institutionalizing governance by hostage taking forever -- would be worse. I only hope Obama and the Dems stay strong and refuse to cave at the last minute to spare us the mayhem. Better to suffer now for a better future than suffer for the foreseeable future under the threats and thuggery of reckless Republican crackpots.

Tell me what's going on

Another crazy day out in the real world so just catching up. I see the everything is still all fucked up and bullshit. Also, too. Willing to bet this is the quote of the day:

I feel much better now. “@ByronYork: GOP congressman: 'Most have us have no idea what is going on or what to expect at this point.'”
— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) October 11, 2013

Our country is being run by wayward frat boys, vandals and other assorted miscreant Republican crackpots. Or I should say, being run into the ground. If only we had some sort of organized system of news delivery to report that...


[Big thanks to Batocchio, (who you should be reading every day at his own blog), for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

GOP brand in the dumper

You all know how I feel about polls but this new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is so stunning it has even the tragically jaded journos dragging their jaws across the floor.

By a 22-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama – a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the poll during the last shutdown in 1995-96.

Just 24 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion about the GOP, and only 21 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party, which are both at all-time lows in the history of poll.

...a whopping 70 percent say congressional Republicans are putting politics first.

Once again, thanks Crackpot Caucus. This couldn't happen without you.

GOP seeing the worst numbers in the history of our politics. Dems would be crazy to bail them out. No way should they accept a paltry six week extension. Republicans claim they want to negotiate, then by definition Dems should counter with a demand for at least 24 weeks. With the people tired of the shutdown already, let the GOPers argue against ending it. Not that I'm holding my breath for that.

Stating the obvious

Is there really anyone who didn't know this? Anonymous senior GOP source admits they need Democratic help to escape their own snares in the shutdown insanity. Not at all clear they understand yet how little leverage they have but this is a start.

This source believes that at the end of the day, enough people in the GOP caucus could be OK with this because the economic implication of breaching the debt limit "scares people." This source also acknowledged that under this scenario, House GOP leaders may have to agree to pass a debt ceiling bill without all Republicans on board, and with Democratic support.

Meanwhile, Dana dutifully transcribes their phony talking point.

But multiple GOP sources tell CNN it is hard to nail down a path forward because there are still no direct conversations going on, and the White House will not talk.

What Dana fails to mention, (and how hard would it be to add this one sentence of context), the White House is reaching out to the GOP.

The White House had invited the full Republican caucus to participate in a meeting with the president, but the Speaker opted to send a smaller delegation, including leadership members and committee chairmen, a Boehner aide said earlier Wednesday.

So either these Republicans are too stupid to realize they were all invited to air their grievances directly to the President or they're deliberately lying. Either way they're not fit to hold their office.

Mint the coin

Screw the nattering nabobs of conventional wisdom. The platinum coin is a valid idea well worthy of discussion:

It's not that there's no value in knowing what's possible or likely, it's that it isn't an argument against the value of the proposition. Most things which should happen don't. We talk about them anyway.

So what if it's tied up in the courts for years? It's a legal solution. It would shut down the extortionists. Somebody has to do it. Clearly Boehner isn't up to the task.

Republicans own this shutdown

Crackpot cons in John Boehner's House of Dysfunction (and their paid and volunteer apologists) are desperately trying to shift the blame for the govenment shutdown onto the Democrats but anyone who plays the "both sides do it" storyline on this one is either a liar or a fool. The irresponsible party here couldn't be more clear:

The federal government shut down for one reason: House Republicans did not pass a six-week funding bill.

That doesn’t mean a majority of the House opposed the bill, however. In fact, the House never got to vote on it. Speaker John Boehner refused to hold a vote on funding alone–a “clean” bill–instead only allowing votes on funding plans that undermined Obamacare. The Senate rejected those bills, and Boehner never brought a clean bill to the floor before the deadline for funding the government. If Boehner had simply held a vote on funding alone, 200 House Democrats would back him and he’d only need 17 Republicans to prevail. The votes are there, according to several Republican members who spoke out this weekend.

By standing in the way of majority rule, Boehner took an entirely avoidable shutdown and made it inevitable.

Boehner could end this in a hot minute if only he could find his balls and stand up to the Tea Party vandals in his own party. It's as simple as that. [photo via]

Communication breakdown, drives them insane

I'm on a long overdue visit with my mom so outsourcing the daylight posting. Must reads of the moment:

Brilliant post on the wingnut bloggers reaction to the impending government shutdown and possibly the best hed in the history of the internets by Edroso at his big media gig on the Village Voice.

Clearest review of this current crackpot con brain meltdown and analysis of why the GOP would be taking this apparently suicidal stand that I've seen yet by Peter Weber at The Week. Peter is one of the few mainstream journalists I've seen mention all the GOP hostage demands, in particular the GOP obsession with regulating vaginas. Of course, I have been offline for days so he's probably not the only one to notice Republicans' fear of lady parts but as far as I can see it was mostly ignored by Big Media. Which is, you know, journalistic malpractice.

Broken government

In the face of all evidence to the contrary, John Boehner keeps telling us the real Murkin people support the crackpottery in his House of Dysfunction. I suspect what they really would support is complimentary psyche evals for him and his entire crackpot caucus. These idiots are literally destroying this country and our entire form of government. As Steve Benen said:

We've all heard the "elections have consequences" adage many times, but let's be clear about what we're witnessing in 2013: Republicans are very clearly telling the country, "No, actually, elections don't have consequences. We're still going to do as we please."

Democracies aren't supposed to work this way.

Actually democracies can't survive at all this way. The Republican party is imploding and they're about to drag us all into the black hole of their unreality with them. Not sure how, or if, we can stop them.

Republicans in disarray

I'll probably rot in hell for taking such untoward pleasure in watching the meltdown of Boehner's House of Dysfunction. The establishment GOPers empowered the crackpots in order to gain a majority. Clearly it didn't go quite the way they expected.There's a raging civil war going on within the party. Rank and file Republicans are looking for some leadership to chill down the Tea Party caucus and they aren't finding any. Both Johnny and Cantor are in hiding.

I think it's going to get ugly but the way forward is clear.

There will be voices of caution about how the Democrats have to be the grown-ups in the room because the country needs to be govern. But here's the thing -- the country's not being governed now. One half of the political system is under the effective control of people who believe their primary obligation as elected officials is to make sure the government doesn't work. The Democratic party must make no compromises with the insane. There is no legitimate middle-ground to be found in that tangle of bizarre tactics and political Tourette's. The only responsible thing to do is to make John Boehner either own the nutball caucus or stand up against it. The country demands this. Us or them, John. Time to choose. Whip's coming down.

I don't think Boehner can stand up to them so it's going to be up to the Democrats to make him own it. It would be great if for once, they rose up to the task.

A system based almost entirely on fraud

There's another important anniversary at this time of year. Five years ago this week the Banksters crashed our economy, basically by lying and stealing. Their "punishment" cost trillions. Out of our pockets, not theirs.

In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn’t to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. [...]

Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever.

Which brings us once again to the largest income gap between since the Roaring 1920s when the previous record was set.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income in 2012, their largest stake in Internal Revenue Service figures in at least a century. The previous peak of 18.7 percent came back in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

And do spare me the wailing about how the 1 percenters suffered more during the crash:

[S]ince the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

Last year alone, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 19.6 percent, compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

There oughta be a law. Oh wait. There was a law. They got it abolished and they'll be damned if they're going to allow it to be reinstated.

Nothing left to lose

This is criminal. Witness government sponsored predatory debt collection.

On the day Bennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to the curb.

Movers carted out his easy chair, his clothes, his television. Next came the things that were closest to his heart: his Marine Corps medals and photographs of his dead wife, Martha. The duplex in Northeast Washington that Coleman bought with cash two decades earlier was emptied and shuttered. By sundown, he had nowhere to go.

All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill.

But mostly because the government sold his city lien to an out-of-town debt collection company which proceeded to rack up a boatload of bogus fees and added it to his bill.

Coleman, struggling with dementia, was among those who lost a home. His debt had snowballed to $4,999 — 37 times the original tax bill. Not only did he lose his $197,000 house, but he also was stripped of the equity because tax lien purchasers are entitled to everything, trumping even mortgage companies.

Mr. Coleman is not alone.

Foreclosures have upended families in some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. Houses were taken from a housekeeper, a department store clerk, a seamstress and even the estates of dead people. The hardest hit: elderly homeowners, who were often sick or dying when tax lien purchasers seized their houses.

One 65-year-old flower shop owner lost his Northwest Washington home of 40 years after a company from Florida paid his back taxes — $1,025 — and then took the house through foreclosure while he was in hospice, dying of cancer. A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.

How did we reach the point where such vicious preying on the elderly and the weak is legal? These vultures shouldn't be in business, they should be in jail.

Team Yellen

Considering the ongoing dismal state of our so-called economic recovery, it's rather clear the Fed's monetary policy under Bernake was (as the kids say) all fucked up and bullshit. So now that we got rid of Helicopter Ben, Obama has a clear choice. It's between the Bankster's best friend, Larry Summers or the Bankster's greatest fear, Janet Yellen. Joseph Stiglitz is on Team Yellen. So am I because:

The controversy over the choice of the next head of the Federal Reserve has become unusually heated. The country is fortunate to have an enormously qualified candidate: the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. There is concern that the president might turn to another candidate, Lawrence H. Summers. Since I have worked closely with both of these individuals for more than three decades, both inside and outside of government, I have perhaps a distinct perspective…

Whoever succeeds Ben S. Bernanke as the Fed’s leader will have to make repeated judgment calls about when to raise or lower interest rates, the levers of monetary policy.

Two elements enter into these judgments. The first is forecasting. Wrong forecasts lead to wrong policies. Without a good sense of direction of where the economy is going, one can’t take appropriate policies. Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.

Of course, the galling reality is Summers will most probably get the job because, the damnable Boy's Club. This is why we can't have nice things.

Government waste on welfare

This has happened in every state that has tried this trick. It's wasteful and the money would be better spent on helping people rather than trying to feed bogus stereotyping. Why drug testing people who need welfare assistance is stupid.

Utah has spent more than $30,000 to screen welfare applicants for drug use since a new law went into effect a year ago, but only 12 people have tested positive, state figures show.

The idiots in the Statehouse who sponsored this bill were (shockingly) unavailable for comment. [image via]

The world according to Derp

Damn Dimmocrats:

[I]n Lincoln, Ill., GOP Rep. Aaron Schock told an audience at a coffee shop that the Democratic-controlled Senate had "sat on their hands" while the House sought to repeal Obama's health care law. "The president right now is doing a very good job of trying to make it look like the House is dysfunctional," Schock said. "Really what we're trying to do is carry out the wishes of the people."

Because surely, the American dream has always been overpaying insurance corporations for crappy health care.