By Rachael Revesz
Allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump have resurfaced as the Republican prepares to face a series of primaries on March 1, otherwise known as Super Tuesday.
The Guardian reported that a woman, who The Independent has chosen not to name, is sticking by her allegations that the presidential hopeful forced the woman, whose boyfriend had just struck a business deal with him, into a hotel room and touched her intimately without consent.
She also alleges that he “groped” her on several occasions and engaged in “hostile and offensive sexual behavior” towards her between 1992 and 1997.
The woman alleged that the incident had left her “emotionally devastated and distraught.” She dropped the $125 million lawsuit one month after filing it.
The case coincided with another legal dispute against Mr. Trump, lodged by her former boyfriend over an alleged breach of contract relating to their beauty pageant business venture.
Mr. Trump denied the allegations and claimed at the time that the lawsuit alleging sexual assault was intended to make him settle the business dispute, which he reportedly did later that year for a six-figure sum.
“They must explain that Trump is an entitled mess whose business record is so questionable that he managed to bankrupt a casino; that he is an unashamed fraud who didn’t even wait to be elected president before folding on Planned Parenthood and Obamacare, exactly like the “feckless” Congress he is running against; that he is feigning religiosity to appeal to people he believes are rubes; and, above all, that whatever he may be pretending now, he has spent a lifetime screwing the little guy.—Charles C.W. Cooke
7 Astounding Confessions From Conservatives About the Dismal State of the GOP and Likely Nominee Trump
By Steven Rosenfeld Pass the bourbon! Yes, it’s really come to that. Not only are stalwarts of the American conservative movement apoplectic about Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, they are doing the country a remarkable favor by explicitly saying what makes their party so weak and Trump such a loser.
Tonight, when GOP presidential candidates meet for yet a final debate before 15 states vote or caucus on Super Tuesday, these angst-filled voices are saying Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have their last chances to save the GOP from itself by going nuclear. We will see if that happens and how the Donald responds, but in the meantime take a look at what conservatives are saying about the GOP, its backbone, its base, and about its increasingly likely nominee.
[...]
3. Trump is a white trash billionaire. Cooke says Rubio and Cruz need to say so. “They must explain that Trump is an entitled mess whose business record is so questionable that he managed to bankrupt a casino; that he is an unashamed fraud who didn’t even wait to be elected president before folding on Planned Parenthood and Obamacare, exactly like the “feckless” Congress he is running against; that he is feigning religiosity to appeal to people he believes are rubes; and, above all, that whatever he may be pretending now, he has spent a lifetime screwing the little guy.
4. Go birther on the birther. Cooke says the Donald must die to save the GOP, and those attacks can start with one of his ploys—saying he isn’t eligible to be president. “Melt down the fences if you have to; we need long-range bombers here. If Donald Trump can flood the airwaves with his nonsense, his opponents can counter it incessantly. And while they are at it, they can tie him up in court, just as he’s trying to do to Cruz. There are a good number of “just asking” questions ready to be put to them, among them “Trump’s mother was Scottish, can he really be president?” and “Trump ran a host of scams designed to rip off the poor; surely one of them would like to sue him?”
5. Get through to the “morons.”At The Federalist, Bill James, cites all the rational reasons why Trump is unqualified to be president, but then notes his party’s base is filled with “morons” supporting him. On the brainy side of this ledger, James said, “Trump is more interested in what is good for Donald Trump than in what is good for America… I don’t think Trump’s background in business prepares him… Trump’s hard-ass approach to problems would be very dangerous for our nation… (And) everything he says is either an outright lie, or something he is merely saying because it is convenient.”
By The Conversation
During New Year celebrations in Cologne, there were more than 500 reported attacks against women, including robbery and sexual assault. Most of the suspects are of North African origin, and some are thought to have entered the country illegally or as asylum seekers.
The news was welcome campaign fodder for US presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Referring to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy on refugees from Syria, he commented in his usual rhetoric: “I don’t know what the hell she is thinking”.
Trump went on to say that he did not want to have “people coming in from migration from Syria (sic)” as these were aggressive young men who “look like they should be on the wrestling team”. More dangerously still, Trump believed such people could act as terrorist “Trojan horses”.
Trump’s comments are in line with his vicious verbal attacks on Mexicans and other immigrant groups in the United States. But they betray his own family background. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, a German, lived a migrant life in the US on the edge of illegality and rejection. During the World War I, he belonged to an immigrant group which was sweepingly labelled the “enemy within” or – in his grandson’s parlance – a Trojan horse.
The great wave
Friedrich Trump was swept to the United States in one of the biggest waves of mass migration in history. During the 1880s and early 1890s, 1.8m Germans emigrated to various European and overseas destinations. When young Friedrich arrived in New York in 1885 he joined around 200,000 of his compatriots who had already settled in the metropolis, forming a distinct “Little Germany”. After working for six years as a barber, he was caught by the Gold Rush, moved west and opened up a chain of restaurants and hotels in Washington State and British Columbia. Hospitality did not only include food and lodging, but also alcohol and prostitution. Friedrich anglicised his name to Frederick and became a US citizen.
For more than 30 years, the Federalist Society has worked behind the
scenes to shape Supreme Court outcomes to a conservative agenda. In King v. Burwell, its influence could eliminate health insurance subsidies for millions of people.
By Nina Martin, ProPublica
The Supreme Court has no shortage of potentially precedent-shattering cases on its docket this term. But the one the justices are hearing tomorrow, King v. Burwell, could be the most consequential.
King focuses on the issue of whether low-income people who get insurance under the Affordable Care Act's federal exchanges are entitled to tax subsidies. Much has been said (and written) about what could happen if the justices rule "no": Millions of people in as many as 37 states could lose their health coverage. The political earthquake could be cataclysmic.
Yet, few reports have highlighted the role of the Federalist Society, the conservative law group whose ideas are at the intellectual heart of the King v. Burwell challenge. That's not surprising, given that the group's members have played a mostly behind-the-scenes part in King — and in many of the most significant conservative legal victories of the last 30 years.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q. What is the Federalist Society? What did it grow out of?
A. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a small group of conservative and libertarian law students at Yale and the University of Chicago. Many of the founders had worked on the Reagan presidential campaign, and when they arrived in their elite law schools, they noticed a profound mismatch between the ideas that were achieving political ascendancy — about limited government and free markets and states' rights — and a liberal orthodoxy that was embedded in almost all major legal institutions of the time.
Flash forward 30 years: The Federalist Society has matured into a self-professed "society of ideas" that claims 40,000 to 60,000 members. These include every Republican-appointed attorney general and solicitor general since the 1980s, dozens of federal judges, and four sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices: Antonin Scalia, who was one of the organization's original mentors at the University of Chicago; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.
Q. How does it operate?
A. The Federalist Society doesn't exhibit its power in a way that is easily recognizable. It doesn't bring court cases, or lobby, or publish position papers, or officially endorse political or judicial candidates. Instead, it trains and socializes its members through thousands of events every year. It promotes collaboration. Members are encouraged to draw on their training and networks as they go about their work as judges, policy makers, litigators and academics. In this way, the Federalist Society's influence is one step removed from the policy process. Yet that influence is profound.
Q. The Federalist Society doesn't even make public its membership rosters. How did you trace its impact on policy and the courts?
A. I used speaker agendas from Federalist Society national student conferences and lawyer conferences from 1982 to 2012 to construct a database of everyone who's ever participated in one of these meetings: 1,190 individuals in all. These are the thought leaders — the Mick Jaggers of the movement. If you are invited to speak at a national conference, it signals true believership.
Then I tracked their movements: What Supreme Court cases were they participating in? Were they consistently promoting a certain kind of scholarship or set of beliefs?
I identified the key areas of law that have taken a significant conservative turn over the past 30 years. And by reviewing transcripts from meetings and conferences, I was able to show how those ideas were gestated within the Federalist Society network for decades before being accepted by the Supreme Court.
Q. What kind of ideas?
A. The organization's statement of principles provides a useful frame. The first part says: We believe the state exists to preserve freedom. Two key areas where this principle has played out are the Second Amendment — there has been a radical reframing of the right to bear arms as a right on par with speech and religious freedom — and campaign finance, culminating in Citizens United and the idea that corporations and individuals both have free speech rights.
A second Federalist principle holds that the separation of governmental powers is central to the Constitution. There's been a very, very concerted effort to narrow the federal power over interstate commerce, to restrict the ability of Congress to regulate, and to dramatically expand states' rights.
The third principle is the idea that it is the role of the judicial branch to say what the law is and not what it ought to be. That is the key issue in King v. Burwell.
Q. Let's talk about the Supreme Court's first Obamacare decision in 2012. Conservatives greeted that ruling with shock, outrage, disappointment. They lost — the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was upheld. But in your view, that ruling was actually an important Federalist Society victory. Why?
A. For one thing, they won on the Medicaid expansion issue. Conservatives and libertarians had fought that expansion, arguing that it was a coercive policy that infringed on states' rights. The proposed expansion was a keystone of the ACA, so that part of the ruling was a huge blow to health care reform.
The Federalist Society also prevailed on the issue of the constitution's Commerce Clause. Congress had argued that the Commerce Clause gave it the power to regulate health care, but a majority of the justices disagreed. That precedent has further contributed to the narrowing of the federal commerce powers.
It's true, Chief Justice Roberts found a way to salvage the ACA's individual mandate based on the power of Congress to impose taxes. That made many conservatives very unhappy. But the Federalist Society didn't just get half a loaf, it got 80 percent of the loaf.
Q. King v. Burwell is avery different type of case. How does the issue at the center of it reflect Federalist Society thinking?
A. Unlike the 2012 challenge to the ACA, King v. Burwell is not a constitutional case. It's a statutory case. At issue is whether people in states with federally facilitated health insurance exchanges are entitled to receive the tax benefits that make insurance affordable. The parties in this case are asking the Supreme Court to interpret just five words: what is meant by an "exchange established by the State."
There are two very different ways to look at the issue of statutory interpretation. For many years, the dominant view was: If the meaning of that language is not immediately apparent, judges should look to legislative history – what was Congress's intent when they wrote those words? In the case of Obamacare, the legislative intent is pretty clear: Congress's aim was to provide tax benefits to lower income Americans to help underwrite the cost of insurance.
But since the 1980s, there's been a quiet revolution in statutory interpretation by the courts. Instead of taking into consideration legislative history and intent, there's been a shift to just looking at the plain meaning of the text and ignoring everything else because supposedly things like legislative history are too subjective. This revolution began with a core group of Federalist Society members centered in the Reagan Justice Department. Justice Scalia has been a major proponent.
If the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell prevail, the Federalist Society will have two victories. The obvious one is that Obamacare will suffer another major setback. The other will be to more firmly entrench this idea of statutory interpretation – we shouldn't look at legislative history; we shouldn't look at consequences; we should just look at the plain meaning of the words, and our inquiry ends there. The Supreme Court majority's approach could well be: The ACA says what it says — let Congress fix it. But they know full well that this Congress will not pass that fix.
Q. This idea of ignoring Congressional intent, and just reading the plain text of a statute, comes up in another important Supreme Court case this year,Young v. UPS, which focuses on pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. How has Federalist Society thinking shaped the Supreme Court's rulings on sex discrimination?
A. Young v. UPS is another case of statutory interpretation — in this instance, the question centers on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. The Act prohibits employers from treating pregnant women differently from other employees who are "similar in their ability, or inability, to work." But what does that mean? Women's rights advocates say it's obvious: Pregnant women must not be discriminated against in the workplace. But many employers said it means that pregnant women can't be treated any differently than "similarly situated" male employees — otherwise women are getting preferential treatment. Never mind that men can't be similarly situated because men can't get pregnant.
One of the ways the Federalist Society has been effective is in changing the debate. Twenty or 30 years ago, if you were going to hear oral arguments in a case about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, much of the discussion would have focused on statutory intent — the fact that the entire purpose of this Act, regardless of how the language is phrased, was to prevent discrimination on account of pregnancy. That is virtually not talked about now.
In the Young oral arguments last December, almost the entire focus was on the meaning of "similarly situated" and "similar in their ability or inability to work." There was a lot of discussion about semicolons. And when you limit the conversation in this way, the effect almost always is to limit protections, to restrict rights.
A. There's a trope you hear over and over in the Federalist Society network: the idea of the "color-blind Constitution." The implication is, to treat people equally, you treat them the same and it will all shake out in the end. The government shouldn't try to equalize resources or equalize opportunity — that's not its role. As long as discrimination isn't intentional, it doesn't matter whether a law or policy has a disparate impact on minorities.
But there's another way of understanding equality, which is that if you want to treat some people equally, you have to treat some people — like pregnant women, or certain homeowners, or black voters in historically segregated states — differently. That is a line of thinking that Federalist Society members have absolutely rejected.
As we've seen, this Supreme Court has been pretty opposed to race-conscious remedies. It has seemed pretty bent on limiting, if not declaring unconstitutional altogether, affirmative action policies. In the Shelby v. Holder voting rights decision from a couple of years ago, it repudiated the idea that certain states should have to appeal to the federal government or courts before they make changes to their electoral voting procedures. That case, of course, also touched on another issue important to the Federalist Society network, states' rights.
Q. I've been reading a lot about the pressures on Roberts in King v. Burwell.
A. Yes, there is a very active campaign, mostly by the left, to remind Chief Justice Roberts that the integrity of the Supreme Court as an institution is once again at stake and to argue that there are alternative paths he could take to uphold this provision of the ACA and still keep his conservative credentials. On the right, there's been very quiet and subtle but potentially very effective counter-pressure. People say, we're not worried about losing any of the conservatives on this, Roberts will follow the rule of law.
One important function of the Federalist Society has been to provide a counterweight to the so-called liberal media. There was a very conscious effort to build a counter-elite to counteract this effect.
Q. What do you think the outcome of King v. Burwell will be?
A. Because of this 30-year revolution in statutory interpretation, the justices have a shield. My sense is that conservatives have enough cover that if five of them want to strike down the law, they will.
Q. But unlike in 2012, the ACA has already gone into effect. Millions of people would have their subsidies and their health coverage taken away. The real-world consequences would be very different.
A. Yeah, but you'd have to believe that the justices are in touch enough with real people to believe that they're going to take that into consideration.
Anthony Kennedy has demonstrated enough antipathy to the ACA that you would not normally count on him to be the one to save it. But he is the one who, in the marriage equality cases, for example, would bring up the fact that there are children who want their parents to be able to get married. So there are times that he will actually look outside the court and try to work in the real-world impact of potential decisions.
I don't know if this is one such case. I don't know how bent he is on disposing of Obamacare at any cost. But who knows — maybe he'll be the John Roberts of King v. Burwell.
Related stories: Read Nina Martin's story about how Alabama Judge Tom Parker and the personhood movement are shaping the abortion rights debate.
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By Jon Queally
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday announced it will take up a legal challenge brought by conservative forces against the Affordable Care Act, the law claimed by the Obama adminstrative to be its signature domestic policy achievement.
The challenge to the sweeping legislation that overhauled many aspects of the for-profit U.S. healthcare system is directed at whether or not federal subsidies designed to make now-mandated private insurance policies more affordable can be offered to people who live in states that decided against establishing their own insurance exchanges and instead opted to depened on exchanges built by the federal government.
The challenge focuses on four words in the massive bill. It said people would qualify for tax credits when they buy insurance in a market “established by the state.”
Only 14 states have established such exchanges. The law authorized the federal government to establish exchanges in those states that did not act, and it has done so.
Under a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service, consumers can claim tax credits in any market. The administration says that is consistent with the law’s goal of making coverage available to all Americans.
But challengers claim the interpretation is contradicted by the wording of the law. They say the withholding of the tax credits was meant to spur states to create their own exchanges, and should not be available where states opted not to act.
Since the [ACA] health care exchanges have been in operation, nearly five million individuals have received federal subsidies to help them afford health insurance on an exchange run by the federal government. The average subsidy had been about $4,700 per person. The fate of those subsidies apparently will now depend upon how the Court interprets four words in the Affordable Care Act. In setting up the subsidy scheme, Congress said it would apply to exchanges “established by the State.”
The challengers to subsidies for those who shop for insurance on a federal exchanges have argued that those words limit the availability to the tax benefits solely to state-run exchanges. That argument failed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in the ruling now under review. It was accepted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but that ruling has now been set aside while the full D.C. Circuit reconsiders the issue.
Thus, as of now, there is no split in the federal appeals courts on the challengers’ argument and thus on the scope of the ACA language regarding subsidies. The lack of such a split, however, did not prevent the Court from going ahead to grant review of the King case, as the challengers had asked it to do. They had argued, among other points, that the longer the subsidies continue to consumers who had gone to federal exchanges, the harder it would be to undo the program if the Court were to accept the challengers’ interpretation.
It would have taken the votes of four Justices to grant review. The Court, as usual, did not indicate the way the Justices had voted on that question. It will take a majority, of course, to decide the case in the end. A ruling is not expected to emerge until near the end of the current Term, in late June or early July.
By Greg Stohr
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a challenge to the subsidies that are a linchpin of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, accepting a case that suddenly puts the landmark law under a new legal cloud.
Two years after upholding much of the law by a single vote, the justices today said they will hear a Republican-backed appeal targeting tax credits that have helped more than 4 million people afford insurance.
A ruling blocking those credits might unravel the Affordable Care Act, making other provisions ineffective and potentially destabilizing insurance markets in much of the country. The high court’s decision to hear the case comes days before the start of the law’s second open-enrollment season. A decision will come by June.
By Seth D. Michaels
When 2015 rolls around, will an all-Republican-controlled 114th Congress come with it? It pains me to say it, but I wouldn’t want to bet much against it. A Republican takeover of the Senate is quite likely, and the outcome would be pretty dreadful.
[...]
So you don’t need to speculate about what their legislative priorities would look like. We’ve seen their votes.
Those votes include the Paul Ryan budget with its huge cuts to safety-net programs and fundamental changes to Medicare. It includes a bevy of limits on access to abortion and birth control, harsh and punitive measures aimed at immigrants and lower-income people who get public assistance, and repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. And it includes a whole lot of ideological grandstanding, including, most recently, the attempt to sue the President. Thanks to the need to negotiate with a Democratic Senate, the House Republicans’ worst impulses are constrained, at the moment.
A case study for what bigger Republican legislative majorities are likely to do comes out of North Carolina, where Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the state House, is in a very close race against Sen. Kay Hagan. There, unified Republican control resulted in policies that massively redistribute power from poorer to richer, including unemployment insurance cuts, restrictions on voting rights, and a shift in the tax burden from income to sales taxes. Other Republican state legislatures, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas, have used the power they emerged with after 2010 to pursue ideological pet projects.
John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy are the ostensible leaders of the House Republicans. The agenda for the caucus, though, is set by its rightmost members. This bloc has frequently thrown D.C. into chaos, scuttling Boehner’s efforts at deal-making and pulling policy to the right. A Republican Senate majority would face similar pressures. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is working to build himself into the leader of the hard Republican right in Washington, driving the October 2013 shutdown and helping organize resistance to Boehner’s proposed border bill. What would he attempt to do as part of a Senate majority?
GOP control of the House has meant a weaker economy. Standoffs over government funding and the debt ceiling are routine. The 2011 debt-ceiling fight led to completely unnecessary sequestration cuts. We’ve seen chaos in federal contracts and furloughs for federal employees. “Cut and grow” economics has been a sick joke. Food stamps have been cut and unemployment insurance extensions have lapsed. Time and time again, Republicans have thrown anchors to the recovery.
The next debt ceiling increase is expected to be necessary on March 15, 2015. Mitch McConnell has already committed thoroughly to the lie that raising the debt ceiling is a favor to Obama that requires concessions on Obama’s part. What will be the ransom demands next time?
When Hobby Lobby filed its case against Obamacare's contraception mandate, its retirement plan had more than $73 million invested in funds with stakes in contraception makers.
By Molly Redden
When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, the company's owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm's owners cite in their lawsuit.
Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company's owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).
Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby's retirement plan have stock holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby's health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.
By Amanda Marcotte
Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.
Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.
1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”
“Teaching the controversy" is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.
2. Climate change denialism. This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.
Occupy DC protests the Koch brothers' "Americans for Prosperity" at
the Convention Center. Nov 4, 2011. (Photo by Edward Kimmel)
By ALAN FRAM Associated Press
The Senate's top Democrat criticized a pair of billionaire brothers in
unusually harsh terms Wednesday, accusing the conservative duo of being
"un-American," spreading lies about President Barack Obama's health care
overhaul and lacking a conscience.
In a pair of appearances on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry
Reid, D-Nev., became the latest Democrat this election year to
denunciate Charles and David Koch — pronounced "Coke."
The brothers' representatives said Reid's attack was "disgraceful" and
accused him of attacking people hurt by the 2010 health care law.
Reid's focus was on television ads that are being used against
Democratic congressional candidates, commercials that he said
misleadingly criticize the health care law.
Washington (CNN) – Support for the
country's new health care law has dropped to a record low, according
to a new national poll.
And a CNN/ORC International survey
released Monday also indicates that most Americans predict that the
Affordable Care Act will actually result in higher prices for their
own medical care.
Only 35% of those questioned in the
poll say they support the health care law, a 5-point drop in less
than a month. Sixty-two percent say they oppose the law, up four
points from November.
Nearly all of the newfound opposition
is coming from women.
Medicare Part D fills one in four prescriptions nationwide but hasn’t moved to encourage use of cheaper generic versions of the most-used drugs. Medicare has failed to rein in doctors who routinely give patients pricey name-brand drugs when cheaper generic alternatives are available. As a result, billions of dollars are wasted on brand name drugs, and the poor often end up paying the highest prices.
Happy Pill On Emptees. (Illustration: formatbrain)
by Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber and Jennifer LaFleur,ProPublica, Nov. 18, 2013, 3 p.m.
Medicare is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by failing to rein in doctors who routinely give patients pricey name-brand drugs when cheaper generic alternatives are available.
ProPublica analyzed the prescribing habits of 1.6 million practitioners nationwide and found that a tiny fraction of them are having an outsized impact on spending in Medicare's massive drug program.
Just 913 internists, family medicine and general practice physicians cost taxpayers an extra $300 million in 2011 alone by disproportionately choosing name-brand drugs. These doctors each wrote at least 5,000 prescriptions that year, including refills, and ranked among the program's most prolific prescribers.
Many of these physicians also have accepted thousands of dollars in promotional or consulting fees from drug companies, records show.
While lawmakers bitterly disagree about the Affordable Care Act, Medicare's drug program has been held up as a success for government health care. It has come in below cost estimates while providing access to needed medicines for 36 million seniors and the disabled.
But this seeming fiscal success has hidden billions of dollars lost to unnecessarily expensive prescribing over the program's eight-year history.
The waste is exacerbated by a well-meaning benefit written into the drug program, known as Part D: Low-income patients pay less than $7 per prescription regardless of a medication's cost. The unintended consequence is that doctors can dole out name brands with little fear of pushback from patients about price.
Barack Obama's second term fumbles have pitched him to record low poll ratings and splintered his credibility with the American people. But has his presidency reached the point of no return? History and opinion poll data suggest that when reelected…
By Peter Hart
During his interview with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (11/3/13), NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory offered up this fanciful account of the Tea Party movement's origins during a discussion about internal GOP fights:
Look, the reason there is a Tea Party right now goes back to
President Bush. I actually think it goes back to the beginning of a more
robust security state after 9/11; the government expands to deal with
security. There's also Medicare Part D. There's a lot of government
spending, and then there's ultimately the bailouts, which conservatives
start to rebel against. And then President Obama continues that.
This is the kind of rhetoric Tea Party figures like to trot out when
critics note that a movement that claims to be concerned about
government spending was sure quiet (or nonexistent) during the Bush
years. But Gregory arguably manages to take it one step further by
linking the right-wing movement to a critique of the national security
state and Medicare Part D.
NBC Meet the Press Host, David Gregory interviews Mitt Romney.
Which Tea Party movement is this?
As a refresher: The movement really geared up in the wake of comments by CNBC host Rick Santelli (2/19/09),
who was outraged by government plans to offer help to distressed
homeowners (i.e., not the Wall Street bailouts). His call for "tea
party" protests against policies to help these "losers"–issued just a
month after Obama's inauguration–resulted in the first wave of such
protests. Glenn Beck, then a host at Fox News Channel,
took up the cause too. Some of the most visible examples of Tea Party
activism were the "town hall" protests against what would eventually
become the Affordable Care Act. The Tea Party "brand" was adopted by
many well-known, well-connected figures in the Republican Party, like
Dick Armey.
What did they all want? It wasn't always clear; as Steve Rendall and I wrote (Extra!, 5/10), the movement is full of political contradictions that media often failed to explore, but
there's one consistency they ignore in painting Tea Partiers as
wholesome adherents to small government, constitutional principles and
so on: the movement’s singular and often racialized loathing of Barack
Obama.
Corporate pundits have spent years coming up with more flattering
descriptions of the Tea Party than what they most clearly seem to
represent. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said they "began as a protest against Republicans for being soft on deficits." His colleague David Brooks wrote
that the "Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between
business and government that is polluting the country." Someone should
alert the Koch Brothers!
Newsweek's Jon Meacham once wrote that the Tea Party could be good for everyone, since it was about "the recovery of the spirit of the American Founding." Time's Michael Crowley suggested
the movement was animated by disgust with Wall Street; they believe
that "Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for
power and profit at the expense of the little guy." He also argued that
Tea Partiers are about calling out "an elite Washington–New York
establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich
the wealthy and strengthen the powerful."
This is a remarkably charitable view of an obviously right-wing
movement that began just as soon as a black Democrat took office. That's
not to say that all Tea Party activists are motivated by a racialized
loathing of Barack Obama; but to suggest that the Tea Party exists to
express dissatisfaction with both major parties and the national
security state, and that Obama's presidency just so happened to coincide with the rise of this movement, stretches even the most active imagination.
Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
