Don't look now, but Nevada's state legislature just passed a bill that could make Medicaid a public option there. The bill allows folks who qualify for Obamacare subsidies to use them to buy into Medicaid instead, an option that might be attractive to both Nevada and Nevadans simply because Medicaid generally pays doctors less than Medicare does. But if Gov. Sandoval doesn't veto the bill (and he may not), I suppose those "conservative," "states'rights" people in the Trump Administration could always come in to try to squash it. You can't judge by "positive" interactions with Tom Price's CMMS, after all.
Is Kansas finally ready to bounce back? The state legislature finally rolls back a big chunk of Gov. Brownback's "signature" tax-cuts-for-the-rich by overriding his veto of a sizable legislature-passed tax hike. To the Republican Rep who voted against the override by saying it was "(t)oo much, too fast," I might remind him of William Lloyd Garrison's axiom that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually. I might also be interested in his opinion of those actually too-much-too-fast tax cuts in the first place.
Michael Shermer at Scientific American reminds us of the key reason "Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong": they don't point to a better theory that explains the data better. Also, they often "point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence." Of course, when you worship at the altar of mammon, you don't have to do science very well.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is following up on earlier ProPublica reports that Wells Fargo has been charging mortgage fees to customers inappropriately, often blaming bank-caused paperwork delays on the customer. And given that these were, you know, mortgages, the fees could be $1,000 or more. Nice work if you can get it! The CFPB is, of course, the agency Congress and President Trump are so hot to cripple, because worshiping at the altar of mammon also means you don't have to do morality very well.
The Town Hall project provides a list of the 193 members of Congress (out of 535 Reps and Senators) who have not held townhalls since the inauguration. Some "liberal" media flak no doubt stands ready to call the problem "bipartisan," but only 34 of the 193 are Democrats, meaning this is a problem is over 82 percent Republican. You'll see New Jersey House Rep. Frelinghuysen on that list -- the one who told activists to pipe down and let him do his work, the one who outed another activist to her employer, the one who should lose re-election to a shrub in 2018.
Finally, the Columbia Law School's Knight First Amendment Institute thinks President Trump is violating the First Amendment by blocking critics from his Twitter feed. But I think that depends entirely on whether Mr. Trump's Twitter account really is a "designated public forum," and not just the absurd rantings of a guy who happens to be President; under the latter, I think he would have First Amendment free association rights like anyone else, whatever we may think of him blocking his critics. But making the President use an official account that is a "designated public forum" would be well within Congress's rights.
thanks for sharing
Posted by: Esther | 2017.06.29 at 03:37 AM