What America would look like without the EPA

Pretty much like Shanghai:

For the seventh day this month, Shanghai officials have warned children and the elderly to stay inside in a city where 24 hours exposed to the off-the-charts pollution would have hazardous consequences to one’s health. Hundreds of flights and sporting events have been cancelled, while face masks and air purifiers sold out in stores. All week, the pollution level hovered at “heavily” and “severely” polluted, according to Shanghai’s Air Quality Index, at up to 31 times the recommended levels. [...]

Officials have ordered vehicles off the road to curb air pollution, so far removing roughly 30 percent.

Since that didn't work so well, Shanghai's "environmental authority took decisive action to address the frequent air-quality alerts: It adjusted standards downward to ensure that there won’t be so many.

That's pollution, not ordinary fog. Beijing doesn't usually look much better. This is your world without environmental regulations.

The trouble with Obamacare

As I said before the fatal flaw in Obamacare has always been its dependence on BigInsurance to act responsibly in being allowed to remain as the middlemen to health care. I don't think they have any great obligation to inform their policy holders about the competition but the scary cancellation letters forcing consumers to opt out of being flim flammed into high priced products shouldn't be legal. If we had a functioning Congress, they would fix that oversight. But we don't, and many will be cheated.

Which brings us to the second chronic flaw. Confused consumers. The exchanges are complicated. There's a multitude of choices. Guessing a majority of those who need them the most don't have the educational or technical skills to navigate the system. Even among those who do, one anticipates the wade through the process with the same joyous anticipation normally reserved for root canals. Repairing the website won't change that.

Obamacare is far from perfect. We knew that from the beginning. It barely loosens one finger of the chokehold the insurance brokers have on our health care. But it's still better than the status quo. Many people will be breathing easier with health care security.

Millions of people could qualify for federal subsidies that will pay the entire monthly cost of some health care plans being offered in the online marketplaces set up under President Obama's health care law, ...

Far too many will likely fall through the cracks that won't be repaired until the Crackpot Caucus is deposed. That will take a little more time. Everything changes. At its own pace. Sometimes for the better.

Scumbag insurance corporations scamming their policy holders

Building a bit on the last post, TPM investigates and finds insurance companies lying about Obamacare to their policy holders.

Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they'd identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she'd be covered.

Of course she would be paying $300 a month more for the pleasure of staying with a plan she "liked." But Donna is no fool. She shopped around on the Obamacare exchanges.

If Donna had done nothing, she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more a month for insurance than she will now that she went to the marketplace, picked the best plan for her family and accessed tax credits at the heart of the health care reform law.

"The info that we were sent by LifeWise was totally bogus. Why the heck did they try to screw us?" Donna said. "People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them."

Donna is not alone.

It's happening in many states. More than a few insurers are doing it, but some are more blatantly swindling consumers than others.

The insurance companies argue that it's simply capitalism at work. But regulators don't see it that way. By warning customers that their health insurance plans are being canceled as a result of Obamacare and urging them to secure new insurance plans before the Obamacare launched on Oct. 1, these insurers put their customers at risk of enrolling in plans that were not as good or as affordable as what they could buy on the marketplaces.

This was always the fatal flaw in Obamacare. Its success depended on the greedy insurance mega-corporations to be honest in their dealings. We knew that was never going to happen. But at least it's more difficult for them to get away with it now. So there's that. Still, caveat emptor.

Blame the damn insurance corporations

If you needed further proof of the total failure of our Fourth Estate you need look no further than the media's frenzied search for alleged Obamacare victims. Today the (once proud and now useless bird cage liner) Wall St. Journal delivers up cancer victim Edie Sundby whose losing one of her insurers. What the op-ed doesn't tell you is she would lost that coverage anyway because United Healthcare long planned to drop all individual policies. It seems they can't compete in the individual market in California because of selective tax breaks being given to only some insurers, of which they were not one.

But there's a lot more Ms. Sundby didn't tell us in her lament for lost health care. Steve M. does some digging and discovers the Edie's is a  poor little rich girl tale. Leaving aside the discrepancies in her stories, (she's been featured in various media more than once), few cancer patients have this luxury:

Whenever Edie suffered a setback, she took what she calls "a spirit quest" into the wilderness. Weary from chemo in the summer of 2009, she and Dale traveled by camper van through national parks in the West. "The wilderness helps me forget everything," Edie explains. "I don't think about cancer; I feel healthy there." Twice more they headed out on camping trips, the last time in 2011 when the cancer returned.

So they both could take months off from work and travel as far afield as Alaska and Fiji. And they clearly have resources or at least connections among the the venture captial crowd. Edie was looking forward to launching a new line of beauty products this year. It may well be that Edie will be inconvenienced by Obamacare but she is far from the typical insurance consumer. Clearly it won't ruin her life to rework her policies whereas living without any health care at all would literally kill millions of Americans who will now have access to affordable coverage.

So the question for all the journos who are jumping on the "Obama lied because these people say they like their insurance" is, did it never occur to you that maybe the alleged victims are lying because they hate Obama, or liberals or Democrats, or poor people and they want to help Republicans kill Obamacare because it only helps millions of uninsured and doesn't do anything for them? Crazy idea I know. That never happens.

Taking care of Bezos

By now you've heard that the gazillionaire owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought the WaPo. (Moment of silence for the untimely end of Kaplan test prep daily jokes.) This of course will be a topic of endless fascination among the insider media types for the duration of the summer.

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has already been living life under a Bezos investment at his publication and tells us it's not a bad thing. He offers up his own speculation on why Bezos decided to make the purchase.

Over at The Week, Peter Weber surveys the internets and collects the five best reasons why Bezos bought the WaPo.

For myself, damned if I know why he did it or what's going to happen to it now. The vindicative bitch in me would love to see some of the smug pundits have to deal with the reality of unemployment they so blithely dismiss when it happens to other people. Rather doubt that's going to happen, at least to those who deserve a pink slip the most.

As for Jeff's reasons, I suspect he did it a) because he could and b) because he who controls the information delivery to the masses can control public opinion. He's a uber-rich guy with an agenda and so far, I'm told, had only a small footprint inside the Beltway bubble. This buy enlarged that with a speed and weight that couldn't be achieved so expeditiously any other way.

What he intends to do with it remains to be seen but I don't have high hopes that he's going to change anything for the better. Would be thrilled to be wrong though. The optimist in me lives in hope.

A McBudget for the working poor

"McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget." If this sample McBudget wasn't so cruel and insulting, it would be so absurd as to be funny.



Have to love that it starts by assuming their workers need two jobs to make ends meet. Of course that ignores the fact that few of their workers actually clear even as much as $1000 in a month, much less are offered schedules that allow them to get a second crappy minimum wage job with enough hours to make up the difference. And apparently they believe all their workers live in the tropics and thus need no money for heat.

In response to an email from Think Progress asking how they came up with this work of fantasy fiction, McDonald's had this to say.

The samples that are on this site are generic examples and are intended to help provide a general outline of what an individual budget may look like.”

I'd suggest their CEO try to live on that budget for a month or two and then get back to us on how well it worked. Measuring on the stupid or evil scale, this farce goes off the chart on both.

Google Energy

A bit of good news from a corporate behemoth. Using their megabucks to make a commitment to healing the planet, Google has sunk over $1 billion into renewable energy. Analysts say Google is "the only company other than energy businesses and financial institutions that has taken large ownership stakes in major stand-alone power projects."

The Internet search giant's efforts to transform the world's use of power and fossil fuels have included a $200 million investment in a Texas wind farm and the purchase of a company that makes innovative flying wind turbines. It has invested $168 million in a solar project in California and is funding the development of an offshore grid to support wind turbines off the Atlantic coast.

In total, it has an ownership stake in more than 2 gigawatts of power generation capacity, the equivalent of Hoover Dam, said Rick Needham, Google's director of energy and sustainability.

Google even has a subsidiary, Google Energy, that's authorized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to sell wholesale electricity that it generates from its power assets.

Nice to see a corporation as big as Google making an investment in future technology instead of deliberately fomenting climate disruption in order to bleed every last cent in short term profits.

Koch attacks the messenger

When you're a mega-billionaire you don't need Fox News to shill for you against bad press. Instead, like the Kochs, you make up your own facts and launch individualized smear campaigns against legitimate journalists. Like this guy who wrote about the XL Pipeline.

In a rebuttal posted on its Web site, KochFacts.com, the company asserted that Sassoon’s story “deceives readers” by suggesting that Koch Industries stood to benefit from construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a denial Sassoon included in his story. KochFacts went on to dismiss Sassoon as a “professional eco-activist” and an “agenda-driven activist.”

It didn’t stop there. The company took out ads on Facebook and via Google featuring a photo of Sassoon with the headline, “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.” The ad’s copy read, “Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com.”

Not going to link to it but the website is impressive. It's a combination of presenting the material from every wingnut meme that gets passed around in viral emails by your crazy uncle but couched in the language of the well-educated and a collection of articles by their friendly fluffers in BigMedia. For instance this feel-good bit from the WSJ.

As part of their effort to position themselves as a credible alternative to Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers make two promises: We won’t string you along, and we won’t go hostile.

“We get a fair amount of calls,” Dave Robertson, president and chief operating officer of Koch Industries, said in a recent interview at Koch headquarters, an anonymous-looking compound surrounded by farmland on the fringes of Wichita, Kan. “We’d like to get more — and not just from Wall Street. There may be business owners out there who have need for capital for certain things and they’re not connected with the Wall Street bunch. We’d be happy to field those calls…. We feel we have the ability to assess the opportunity and respond very quickly.”

Desperate business owners and Koch's unlimited cash reserves. What could possibly go wrong?

I've always wondered how otherwise seemingly intelligent people could get suckered in by the crackpot con propaganda. Suddenly it becomes clearer...

DC to Walmart: Screw you

Nice to see some good news from a local government for a change. Walmart threatened to cancel their ambitious building projects in DC if the local council didn't kill legislation they disapproved of but the DC Council passed a living wage law anyway.

D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.

Should the bill be signed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and pass a congressional review period, retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage.

Good for DC for recognizing wages need to be pinned to the actual cost of living. Every city should pass a law that requires these mega-retailers to pay their employees enough so they don't need government assistance to survive. And certainly well past time for someone to stand up to Walmart's intimidation tactics. Let them take their greedy business model of wringing out their profits by shifting the social costs of underpaying their workers onto the taxpayers and shove it.

The Koch plan for prosperity

Charles Koch studies the problem of poor Americans. He's figured out what's keeping the poor folk down and has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant solution. Eliminating the minimum wage.

But how to convince the working poor that this odious requirement they be paid at least $7.25 a hour is a bad thing? That the real problem is a "culture of dependency" on government mandated fair wages because, as the Buddhists say -- money is suffering? Well, he launched a $200,000 ad campaign for that. Thus says the man with a personal worth of $43 billion:

The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. “That is the power of economic freedom,” the ad concluded.

Said world including billions of people who work for pennies a day in countries where there is no minimum wage.

I imagine the next ad will explain why a living wage is holding our economic growth down because giving the working class more money to spend is never going to increase buyer demand in a consumer based economy.

Their own private armies

In Wisconsin, when someone asks -- "Who was that masked man, anyway? -- they aren't talking about the Lone Ranger.

Here’s a fascinating little story. There’s been a battle royale up in Wisconsin over an effort to establish a big iron mining operation near Lake Superior, to be owned and operated by a company called Gogebic Taconite. The Republican legislature approved the mine in March over environmentalists’ objections. Some protests have been staged since the operation got started. But people started to get freaked out over the weekend when the company brought in what the Wisconsin State Journal calls “masked security guards who are toting semi-automatic rifles and wearing camouflaged uniforms.”

This is no one-off fluke. These mask wearing, camo clad, paramilitary "security guards" come from a thriving company created to serve large corporations who want to use third world tactics inside America under the pretense of protecting their property.

Indeed, as the site notes, “BPS has at its disposal the latest cache of specialized equipment for border security operations, not typically found in the private sector. As example, BPS owns heavily armored Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV’s), Tactical All Terrain Vehicles (T-ATV’s), FLIR (mobile thermal systems), mast equipment (eye in the sky), and many other state-of-the-art assets … The presence of BPS will prevent criminal organizations from posing a threat to your personnel or your mission.”

If your needs are different, Bulletproof can also provide “a QRF (quick reaction force) tactical unit to secure a manufacturing plant during a heated worker strike.”

Seriously. This is the real threat to our way of life. I mean, how different does this sound than say, paramilitary intimidation in Colombia? This is our future under the control of the "free market" multinational mega-corporations.

And as always, our favorite past resident of "Koch Industries' midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin," Charlie Pierce, has more to say that's worth reading.

Why Americans are so ill informed

A new Gallup survey tells us television is still America's primary news source for current events (55%), leading the Internet, at 21%. Even worse, Fox News and CNN are the market leaders both in viewers and click-bait sensationalism. Accuracy in reporting has never been part of the Fox business model and at this point it's little more than a quaint relic of the past at CNN.

On a related note, MoJo runs the numbers to find just how large a goldmine Citizens United spending has been for BigMedia. Which is leading to new rounds of consolidation.

And it's not just CBS that's riding high thanks to political ad spending. TV stations in battleground states are magnets for ad spending, and they're driving a new wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry, leaving a handful of big media companies well-positioned to reap hundreds of millions during the 2014 midterm elections and, especially, the 2016 presidential race. Just in the past month, the Gannett company bought 20 TV stations for $1.5 billion, and the Tribune Company inked a $2.7 billion deal for 19 stations. Those deals included stations in battleground states.

Meanwhile, SuperPACs ads keep getting slicker and less easy to distinguish from the programming, especially since the disclosure requirements are so dismally inadequate. There are no incentives to get the information right. The big money is in misinformation. This is a problem.

Evil overlords

Of all the uber-wealthy crackpots who bought out our government, two stand out from the rest. It couldn't be clearer. The Koch brothers rule our world and their apparent mission is to destroy our planet, and civil society, for their personal profit.

The House of Representatives voted to slash the EPA budget by 27 percent, one of the biggest cuts since President Richard Nixon and the Congress created the agency in 1970. The Senate subsequently modified the severity of these cuts, and the budget was ultimately cut by nearly 16 percent. What is less known is that more than 100 House members - all Republicans, many tea party members - signed a little-known "pledge" (similar to the Grover Norquist no tax increase pledge) backed by the Koch brothers promising to not spend any federal money to fight climate change without an equal amount of tax cuts. Most of the pledge signers received campaign contributions from Charles or David Koch or Koch Industries. The Workshop has tracked the signing of the pledge by 411 current state and federal politicians nationwide (all Republicans except four Democrats and two Independents at the state level). Among them are such prominent state officials as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia. The first person to sign the Koch-backed pledge was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, where Koch Industries is headquartered. Of the 85 conservative Republicans first elected to the House of Representatives in 2010, 76 signed the pledge and, of those, 57 received money from Koch Industries' political action committee. The members of Congress who signed the pledge have also introduced several bills aimed at limiting EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and limiting regulation of the nation's biggest polluters.

Of course you already know the Kochs and their various industries are among the leading polluters of the planet. Nor is this the only way in which they are corrupting the public commons. They're deep into education, medicine and finance as well. It's all part of their master plan to keep the masses sick, poor and stupid. They are not good people and neither are the politicians who sell out to them for criminally paltry sums.

Predatory capitalists

There's no real news this weekend so here's your long read. ProPublica posts an eye-opening piece, "The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed."

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Corporations have been using temps to cut costs for decades, but under the latest iteration of this business model, the plan appears to be to virtually cut full time hires to the barest minimum in order to exploit a desperate job market and effectively shift the social costs of their predatory capitalism onto the taxpayer.

Read it in full to see our future. They're stealthily turning us into a banana republic. Hard to see how this ends well for anyone except the owners and their CEOs.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

RIch get richer, the poor get screwed

Another in long series of reminders that the wealth created by financial markets only raises the luxury yachts, leaving everyone else underwater in their wake.

The biggest gains in wealth are going to wealthy households that tend to save a big chunk of their incomes and spend a smaller proportion on basics such as food and clothing. "Those guys don't spend much," says economist Edward Wolff of New York University.

So Wolff looked at the net worth of the median U.S. household — those smack in the middle, where half of households earn more and half less. The median family's net worth is far more modest than the average: $61,000, Wolff estimates. That is $50,800, or 47 percent, short of where it was in 2007.

They make their wealth here, invest it overseas and hide it in offshore tax shelters. Their biggest investment is in buying politicians willing to enact their think tanks' policy prescriptions -- to only their own benefit. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Americans are coping with devalued homes, diminished wages and benefits in a limping labor market and rising costs of living and the wealth holders want them to sacrifice more.

We are truly ruled by evil people.

Shocked to learn there's surveillance going on in this place

Anybody who's old enough to have been paying attention shouldn't be surprised to learn the huge telecom data sweeps are still going on unabated. Adding, I'd be willing to bet it's not only AT&T who's cooperating on this. The only thing that's changed is now they do actually get a secret court warrant to conduct surveillance. Furthermore this didn't start with the bed wetting after 9/11 when the vast majority of Americans willing gave up their privacy rights for imagined security against those scary terrorists. Government has been spying us for as long as I can remember in some way or another.

I don't like domestic surveillance. I was out there ringing the alarm when they passed the Patriot Act. I begged the cons to fight with us when the Bush era warrantless surveillance programs were revealed precisely because nobody in government gives up a power once they get it. So I don't have much patience with the hysteria now and especially find those using this as yet another excuse for Obama bashing more than a little tiresome.

I would love to think this latest revelation would consolidate enough mass outrage to end the whole damn program, but I'd also love to think I'll be the next one to win a multimillion dollar jackpot in the lottery. Not going to happen. Still, it's useful to look at the facts about the program and consider exactly what we let happen right under our noses.

As Charlie Pierce so adroitly points out:

This is the surveillance state writ large, with large corporations and the government in close cooperation...

And because we are supposed to be a self-governing political commonwealth, we are complicit, too. All of the powers under which the NSA operated were approved, over and over again, by the Congress, the members of which we freely elect, and none of whom will ever win an election on issues like this because, all tricornered hats and the outrage of the Paul family aside, there is no electoral constituency for the Bill of Rights any more. All of the powers under which Verizon operated were approved, over and over again, by its customers, who now know what the company was doing, and who, I predict, will keep handing over the data. Given the dark, midnight nature of government secrecy, a lot of the infrastructure behind this current outrage was put in place in the daylight. The fault, dear Brutus...

Read Charlie's whole post to put this in perspective. This didn't happen in a vacuum. Corporations, under sanction of the courts, have been chipping away at our privacy rights for years. Drug testing in the workplace. Social media monitoring of employees even when they're off the clock. Kids being searched without probable cause in the schools. The list is nearly endless and we probably waited too long to stop it now.

Which is not to say we shouldn't try to stop it but it's not going to happen overnight because of internet outrage. It would take a sustained effort over years. Not sure we're capable as a society of pulling that off anymore. Meanwhile, I'll be over here sitting with Steve M. doing my best to at least minimize the damage by keeping people in government whom I trust marginally more with power I never wanted them to have in the first place. [graphic via]

Addendum: More from Charlie. Not to be expecting much help from Congress on ending the surveillance. Especially precious is when the Republican author of the Patriot Act is very concerned it's being abused by that uppity blah guy in their White House.

Leaks and the limits of the First Amendment

Walter Pincus gets to the heart of what's wrong with the media freakout about DoJ's leak investigations. Do read it all, it's short but here's the main point. The media may "just be doing their job" but the leaker is in breach of their contract. The leaker is breaking the law to give them the information. So why is it so damn scandalous for the DoJ to seek to enforce the law? That is their job.

As Pincus points out:

Applying labels such as co-conspirator provides a probable cause for the judge to grant the warrant, as in the Rosen case. If Rosen offered money or some other reward, it might be a different case. I believe the First Amendment covers the right to publish information, but it does not grant blanket immunity for how that information is gathered.

Rosen actively encouraged his source to break the law. He brazenly waltzed in and out of the State Department wth barely an attempt to cover his tracks. I used more sophisticated subterfuge to hide my underage cigarette smoking from my parents. And I'm not moved by the wailing about leak investigations “intimidating a growing number of government sources.” The DoJ's job is not to make it easy for lazy journalists to get a scoop. Furthermore, exposing active undercover counterterrorism operations being conducted in the interests of national security is not whistleblowing. It just isn't.

The White House Correspondents’ Association board was late to the defense of the reporters. When they say, “Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs,” it should raise the question, what the hell is their job? Traditionally it was to watchdog government misconduct, not to expose our intelligence assets who are risking their lives to provide inside information on foreign plots against our country.

The principle of freedom of the press on which our country was founded was designed to protect criticism of corrupt politicians. Our founders designed it protect the press from retribution when it exposes government misconduct. It's not a blanket exemption for exploiting insider connections to expose rightful government process conducted for our protection simply to win a news cycle.

As Pincus notes there's a big difference between nothing being more sacred to the profession of journalism and the notion that “nothing is more sacred than our profession.” At some point we have to ask, is journalism even a profession anymore, or is it just another Big Business conducted for no loftier goal than corporate profit.

Big Media ignores worldwide Monsanto protest

If the whole world protests against Monsanto and BigMedia refuses to cover it, did it happen? Maybe not in the United States but the rest of the world is banning GMO crops even as they're allowed to pollute our agriculture here at will.

In France, justice demands recompense for Monsanto's criminal negligence.

The French court in Lyon ruled that Monsanto’s Lasso weedkiller formula, which contains the active ingredient alachlor, caused Paul Francois to develop lifelong neurological damage that manifests as persistent memory loss, headaches, and stuttering during speech. [...]

In 2007, France officially banned Lasso from use in the country in accordance with a European Union (EU) directive enacted in 2006 prohibiting the chemical from further use on crops in any member countries. But despite all the evidence proving that alachlor can disrupt hormonal balance, induce reproductive or developmental problems, and cause cancer, the chemical is still being used on conventional crops throughout the U.S. to this very day.

“I am alive today, but part of the farming population is going to be sacrificed and is going to die because of (alachlor),” added Francois to Reuters.

In the U.S. it's not just the farmers. Our entire population is endangered by the corporate coup of our government by Monsanto and other deep pocket multinational corporations who have co-opted our political class.

Obamacare, it's lowering costs

There was some article going around a week or so ago where one of the big health insurers was claiming rates would rise by something like 384% because of Obamacare. Which unsurprisingly turns out to be pure bullcrap. The news out of California, our biggest state with some 7.1 million uninsured residents, is rates are going to be significantly lower than even neutral observers had predicted.

I couldn't access the original New Republic piece. Apparently you need to be a subscriber now to read it, but Ed Kilgore has a good summary:

Based on the premiums that insurers have submitted for final regulatory approval, the majority of Californians buying coverage on the state’s new insurance exchange will be paying less—in many cases, far less—than they would pay for equivalent coverage today. And while a minority will still end up writing bigger premium checks than they do now, even they won’t be paying outrageous amounts. Meanwhile, all of these consumers will have access to the kind of comprehensive benefits that are frequently unavailable today, at any price, because of the way insurers try to avoid the old and the sick.

Ed has the numbers and a policy that was expected to cost $450 a month will actually be $300 and that's before the government subsidies kick in. For healthy 20 years old, the subsidies will completely cover a bare bones policy and a single individual making under $45k a year, estimated to be about 12% of the population, will get generous subsidies as well finally making health care affordable for just about everybody. And this is even with major insurers opting out of the exchanges.

And it's not just in California. Obamacare is lowering rates in other states too because, competition.

We've see this happen in other states. Earlier this month, rate proposals released by insurance companies in Washington state showed some people's premiums would actually go down. Premera Blue Cross had estimated that premiums would rise about 50 percent to 70 percent. When Oregon released proposed health care premiums online in May, two insurers requested the chance to adjust their rates — to make them lower. Why is this happening? "The premiums and participation in California, Oregon, Washington and other states show that insurers want to compete for the new enrollees in this market," the Kaiser Family Foundation's Gary Claxton told The New Republic. The glories of the free market.

This is why the GOPers keep trying to repeal it. Their greatest fear is it will succeed and prove the reformers, and Obama, were right.

Tea Party not a victim of IRS vendetta after all

Here's the first non-hysterical piece I've seen on the IRS mess. Tea Party groups were not the only ones singled out by the IRS. Some "471 groups received additional scrutiny, a total that indicates a crackdown on politically active nonprofit groups that extends beyond the Tea Party outfits." Liberal groups were targeted for additional scrutiny too and at least one had their status denied. So far no Tea Party group has claimed their applications wasn't approved. No doubt more of them were targeted but only because they filed many more applications than anyone else. And this is still true:

“The real problem is that phony 501(c)(4) groups are exploiting the tax laws to protect donors who don’t want to be held accountable for vicious, deceitful political ads,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The good news about this pseudo-scandal is it spurred some action on Capitol Hill to address the larger issues.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own IRS investigation, has introduced legislation with Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to require all groups spending money on politics to disclose their donors.

“These problems will continue as long as there is an absence of clear and enforceable rules,” Wyden told reporters yesterday. “In the absence of clear and enforceable rules the bureaucracy pretty much makes it up as they go along.”

This would help. The deep pocket funders of the dark money groups don't care so much about the tax break as they do about keeping their donors secret. Force them to disclose their donors and they may lose interest in forming these groups at all. At worst, they couldn't hide behind fake grassroots front groups anymore. That would help some.