Chaos on Both Sides
This week Dana Beyer announced that she is running against Rich Madaleno for Maryland state Senate in District 18, and so far the reaction is fascinating, with chaos on both sides.
District 18 includes a chunk of downcounty MoCo, including some of Silver Spring, Kensington, Chevy Chase, and Wheaton. Politically this is as blue as you get, I doubt that there is any place in the country that is more solidly liberal and Democratic than District 18. (In 2010 the Daily Caller rated Montgomery County, Maryland, as the second most liberal place in the US, and that includes the relatively conservative upcounty communities.)
The incumbent, Madaleno, is popular in his district. He is known as a guy who loves to study budgets and finagle the details of complicated policies. He is a practical negotiator in the legislature who picks his fights and sometimes wins them. Beyer, in contrast, is a principled progressive who positions herself solidly -- usually at the left end of the spectrum -- and is willing to take the losing side of a vote if she believes she is right. I am not a profound political pundit but if I was voting in that district I would see this race as a choice between pragmatism and principles. As the campaigns gear up I'm sure the candidates will clarify their differences on the various issues.
Remember that the Republican Party is dead in Montgomery County. Last time I looked, there were no elected GOP officials in the county at all. That means that the Democratic primary effectively determines who will win the office. Beyer and Madaleno are both Democrats, and the primary election will be held in June.
Honestly, this is not a big deal. The Senator from District 18 works on legislative business with 46 other people in one chamber of a bicameral state legislature. If there is a big deal, it has to do with the observation that Madaleno has never faced a Senate primary challenge, and Beyer is an underdog whose declared candidacy is unusually bold.
Oh woops, hold the presses. This just in. Madaleno is gay, and Beyer is transgender.
A paragraph of review here. Sexual orientation means who you are attracted to, where "gay" means that a person is romantically and sexually attracted to those of their own sex. Gender identity means who you are. "Transgender" means that someone was assigned the wrong sex at birth, and has changed their presentation, for instance their dress and maybe their name and maybe they have had surgery or other treatments, to correct the error. "LGBT" means lesbian gay bisexual transgender, and is a blanket category for people who are in the minorities of sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation and gender identity don't have anything to do with one another, but the prejudice gay and transgender people face is similar and the groups have found it practical to work together to fight bigotry and carve out a place for themselves in society, so LGBT is a sometimes-uncomfortable but useful aggregate concept.
The idea that a transgender person would challenge a gay person in a political contest has both sides in a tizzy. Both Beyer and Madaleno are well-known and well liked in the LGBT community as activists and promoters of LGBT rights, and the gay activists seem to feel a sense of conflict in having to choose one or the other, though so far they are lining up behind Madaleno. The Advocate reports a feeling in the Maryland gay community that it was not a good idea for Beyer to push the issue:
The other day Madaleno posted a link on Facebook to a CBS News article about the District 18 contest, and it is an eye-opener. The story itself is nothing, the headline is ""Transgender Candidate to Challenge Gay Senator in Maryland", because I guess that is the news story, as far as CBS editors can see. But you should see the comments on this thing.
Click that link only if you have a strong stomach. As I write this, there are more than a thousand comments, and they are almost all, as far as I can see, variations on the "Democratic depravity on parade" theme. These people find ways to impugn LGBT people that I never heard of, it is one of the most repulsive displays of mass ignorance I have ever seen. I will copy a few for you:
So, oddly, the LGBT activists and the Nutty Ones are united in seeing Dana Beyer's decision to run against Rich Madaleno in terms of sexual identity. Meanwhile the actual voters in District 18 have to ask themselves, does that matter? These are two intelligent, well-informed, articulate and passionate human beings, either one of them will make an excellent leader, and in June the community will vote and choose. Beyer is perhaps more stridently progressive than Madaleno, and Madaleno is more centrist, let's say, and some people might prefer one approach or the other. Rich definitely has the advantage at this early point in this race, but Dana is charismatic and popular and well-connected and I wouldn't count her out quite yet.
Montgomery County Council member George Leventhal issued a statement on Facebook supporting Rich Madaleno this morning, and I think he put himself right in the middle of the wrong place to be. He said:
I remember a time, a couple of years ago, when a straight person ran against another straight person. It was terrible, I couldn't decide, they both seemed perfectly straight and advocated for straight people. How do you know who to vote for? See how dumb that is?
Rich will be hard to beat but Dana will give it a good shot. If they can paint a clear picture for the voters to see the differences between them, then at least they can choose the kind of person they want to represent them in Annapolis. Maybe it will be a choice between principles and pragmatism, and I wouldn't try to guess how it will come out.
District 18 includes a chunk of downcounty MoCo, including some of Silver Spring, Kensington, Chevy Chase, and Wheaton. Politically this is as blue as you get, I doubt that there is any place in the country that is more solidly liberal and Democratic than District 18. (In 2010 the Daily Caller rated Montgomery County, Maryland, as the second most liberal place in the US, and that includes the relatively conservative upcounty communities.)
The incumbent, Madaleno, is popular in his district. He is known as a guy who loves to study budgets and finagle the details of complicated policies. He is a practical negotiator in the legislature who picks his fights and sometimes wins them. Beyer, in contrast, is a principled progressive who positions herself solidly -- usually at the left end of the spectrum -- and is willing to take the losing side of a vote if she believes she is right. I am not a profound political pundit but if I was voting in that district I would see this race as a choice between pragmatism and principles. As the campaigns gear up I'm sure the candidates will clarify their differences on the various issues.
Remember that the Republican Party is dead in Montgomery County. Last time I looked, there were no elected GOP officials in the county at all. That means that the Democratic primary effectively determines who will win the office. Beyer and Madaleno are both Democrats, and the primary election will be held in June.
Honestly, this is not a big deal. The Senator from District 18 works on legislative business with 46 other people in one chamber of a bicameral state legislature. If there is a big deal, it has to do with the observation that Madaleno has never faced a Senate primary challenge, and Beyer is an underdog whose declared candidacy is unusually bold.
Oh woops, hold the presses. This just in. Madaleno is gay, and Beyer is transgender.
A paragraph of review here. Sexual orientation means who you are attracted to, where "gay" means that a person is romantically and sexually attracted to those of their own sex. Gender identity means who you are. "Transgender" means that someone was assigned the wrong sex at birth, and has changed their presentation, for instance their dress and maybe their name and maybe they have had surgery or other treatments, to correct the error. "LGBT" means lesbian gay bisexual transgender, and is a blanket category for people who are in the minorities of sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation and gender identity don't have anything to do with one another, but the prejudice gay and transgender people face is similar and the groups have found it practical to work together to fight bigotry and carve out a place for themselves in society, so LGBT is a sometimes-uncomfortable but useful aggregate concept.
The idea that a transgender person would challenge a gay person in a political contest has both sides in a tizzy. Both Beyer and Madaleno are well-known and well liked in the LGBT community as activists and promoters of LGBT rights, and the gay activists seem to feel a sense of conflict in having to choose one or the other, though so far they are lining up behind Madaleno. The Advocate reports a feeling in the Maryland gay community that it was not a good idea for Beyer to push the issue:
Carrie Evans, executive director of Equality Maryland, the state's largest LGBT advocacy group, questioned Beyer's intentions, as the battle to pass Madaleno's antidiscrimination bill rages on. "We really are questioning the timing of her announcement," Evans said in a statement to the The Baltimore Sun. "We need to all be focused on getting this bill passed."Now, this is The Advocate, and they have to see the world through this particular prism, they are looking out for gay people. Also, I should note that some transgender people do not feel that Equality Maryland represents them very well.
Equality Maryland will support Madaleno in the primary. "He has been a champion of our community for decades, and we will stick by him and ensure that we do what we need to do to get him re-elected," Evans told the Sun. "This is a district that feels very connected to him. I absolutely know in June they will send him back to Annapolis."
Evans expressed concern that Beyer's entry into the race will force Equality Maryland to devote resources to support of Madaleno that would have otherwise gone to other races, as up until Beyer's announcement, Madaleno was running unopposed. Trans Woman and Gay Man Vie for Maryland Senate Seat
The other day Madaleno posted a link on Facebook to a CBS News article about the District 18 contest, and it is an eye-opener. The story itself is nothing, the headline is ""Transgender Candidate to Challenge Gay Senator in Maryland", because I guess that is the news story, as far as CBS editors can see. But you should see the comments on this thing.
Click that link only if you have a strong stomach. As I write this, there are more than a thousand comments, and they are almost all, as far as I can see, variations on the "Democratic depravity on parade" theme. These people find ways to impugn LGBT people that I never heard of, it is one of the most repulsive displays of mass ignorance I have ever seen. I will copy a few for you:
- This is an example of Obama's America at its most repulsive, ridiculous, and morally disgusting.
- The political parties are filled with the most heinous immoral corrupt beings that the earth can produce.
- I'm thinking the bearded-lady will announce next, or possibly, snake-boy.
- Montgomery County looks like a great place to avoid like the plague it is.
- Let's see, gender identity versus sexual preference. Why does either identity qualify them for election to anything? Oh, that's right, it's "Progressive."
- So, will the he-she-its settle the race by swinging their purses at each other? I am SO glad I don't live in Maryland!
- I hope someone can find a cure for gay soon. I don't know how much more I can take.
- maryland voters must be so proud to have not one but TWO immoral homosexuals for the same office. the democrats have to be wetting their pants over which one of the perverts they want.
So, oddly, the LGBT activists and the Nutty Ones are united in seeing Dana Beyer's decision to run against Rich Madaleno in terms of sexual identity. Meanwhile the actual voters in District 18 have to ask themselves, does that matter? These are two intelligent, well-informed, articulate and passionate human beings, either one of them will make an excellent leader, and in June the community will vote and choose. Beyer is perhaps more stridently progressive than Madaleno, and Madaleno is more centrist, let's say, and some people might prefer one approach or the other. Rich definitely has the advantage at this early point in this race, but Dana is charismatic and popular and well-connected and I wouldn't count her out quite yet.
Montgomery County Council member George Leventhal issued a statement on Facebook supporting Rich Madaleno this morning, and I think he put himself right in the middle of the wrong place to be. He said:
It is surprising that Senator Madaleno would face a challenge within the LGBT community, since his passion for human rights and marriage equality has consistently put him on the front lines on those issues.But, no,there is nothing surprising about a candidate having a challenger in the primary election. It happens every day. It would be surprising if you thought all LGBT people were the same, or if all that mattered was loyalty to your sexual identity group. Remember last year, the president of the state Senate allowed "one gay bill" to be voted on. Maybe this year there will be two, or even three. That's not very much, it isn't how you decide who to send to represent your district. Rich didn't run because he's gay, and Dana isn't running because she's transgender. They disagree on policy priorities and now the voters get to choose.
I remember a time, a couple of years ago, when a straight person ran against another straight person. It was terrible, I couldn't decide, they both seemed perfectly straight and advocated for straight people. How do you know who to vote for? See how dumb that is?
Rich will be hard to beat but Dana will give it a good shot. If they can paint a clear picture for the voters to see the differences between them, then at least they can choose the kind of person they want to represent them in Annapolis. Maybe it will be a choice between principles and pragmatism, and I wouldn't try to guess how it will come out.
posted by JimK at 3:30 PM
119 Comments:
"I wouldn't try to guess how it will come out"
I'll go ahead and go out on a limb
Dana Beyer. motivated by nothing by narcissism, will suffer another humiliating defeat, to the utter delight of those who Dana attempted to intimidate out of their right to petition the government as well as though sued by Dana using a law Dana wrote
"Dana is charismatic and popular and well-connected"
your spell-check must be changing your words because the people of Montgomery County detest the detestable Dana and Dana's old buddy, Duchy
they've made that clear in the voting booth repeatedly
btw, tip for Rich:
save money and just use a spare office at the teacher's union office for your re-election campaign
Montgomery County is the only county in America where a requirement for public office is to pay a fee to the teacher's union
you're part of a class act, Rich
"Beyer is perhaps more stridently progressive"
ah, there are so many euphemisms for "nutty"
the pro-life movement has succeeded in reducing abortions to pre-Roe levels:
The U.S. abortion rate dropped significantly from 2008 to 2011 and hit its lowest point since 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decide), according to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute. The big drop occurred soon after a wave of state anti-abortion restrictions went into effect.
The rate declined to 16.9 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2011, a 13 percent drop from 2008. The rate had peaked in 1981 at 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women -- roughly twice the 2011 rate -- and plateaued at about 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women from 2005 to 2008.
According to the latest Guttmacher data, more than half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. About three-fourths of women who have abortions say they can't afford a child; three-fourths say having a child would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for other dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.
State legislatures enacted a record number of anti-abortion laws in 2011, including mandatory waiting periods, mandatory ultrasound laws, strict new building requirements for clinics, gestational limits on abortion and requirements that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals. The Guttmacher study concluded that further research is needed to determine what effect the new laws are having on the abortion rate and access to services.
Lying Anon changed words and skipped paragraphs from the HuffPo article reporting this drop in the abortion rate, as follows:
In the first paragraph, Anon changed a very important word. The word "prior" was changed to "after":
"The U.S. abortion rate dropped significantly from 2008 to 2011 and hit its lowest point since 1973 (the year Roe v. Wade was decided), according to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute. The big drop occurred just ***prior*** to an unprecedented wave of state anti-abortion restrictions going into effect."
After Anon's first two paragraphs, Anon then skipped paragraphs 3 and 4 completely. They read:
"Researchers found no evidence that the drop in abortions was related to new legal restrictions on the procedure. The total number of abortion clinics declined only 1 percent between 2008 and 2011, and the number of providers dropped by 4 percent. Rachel Jones, lead author of the study, said the decline had more to do with an increase in contraceptive use.
"The decline in abortions coincided with a steep national drop in overall pregnancy and birth rates," she said. "Contraceptive use improved during this period, as more women and couples were using highly effective, long-acting reversible contraceptive methods, such as the IUD. Moreover, the recent recession led many women and couples to want to avoid or delay pregnancy and childbearing.”"
Anon's third posted paragraph is actually the fifth paragraph in the HuffPo piece, after which, Anon skipped these next three paragraphs, which read:
"While the overall abortion rate was declining, the Guttmacher study found that the percentage of medication-induced abortions was increasing relative to surgical abortions among women in their first trimester of pregnancy. Nearly a quarter of nonhospital abortions were early medication procedures in 2011 -- a 6 percent increase from 2008.
“Clearly, the availability of medication abortion does not lead women to have more abortions,” said Jones. “However, it has likely helped women obtain abortion care earlier in pregnancy, as evidenced by a shift toward very early abortions.”\
Medication abortions are typically prescribed by a health care provider in two doses, the second of which can be taken at home. They are extremely safe and can work up to nine weeks into a pregnancy. But state legislatures have been passing legislation to restrict medication abortions since 2011."
Anon's fourth posted paragraph is a cut, paste, and omission of most of the final three paragraphs of the HuffPo piece, which actual read:
"State legislatures enacted a record number of anti-abortion laws in 2011, including mandatory waiting periods, mandatory ultrasound laws, strict new building requirements for clinics, gestational limits on abortion and requirements that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals. The study notes that most of these restrictions were passed in the second half of 2011, and because there is typically a lag between a law's passage and its implementation, they would not have affected the 2011 abortion rate.
The Guttmacher study concluded that further research is needed to determine what effect the new laws will have on the abortion rate and access to services.
"Although we found no evidence that new abortion restrictions affected abortion incidence or services at the national level during the study period, this does not mean these laws are not problematic," the study authors wrote. "Some of the new regulations undoubtedly made it more difficult, and costly, for facilities to continue to provide services and for women to access them.""
The Anonymous liar above should be banned from posting here IMHO.
"WASHINGTON -- Conservative news outlet Breitbart.com reported Sunday night that a Coca-Cola ad featuring the song “America the Beautiful” sparked “outrage from some viewers" because, among other perceived offenses, it "featured a gay family."
The writer of the song herself might be a bit confused by the outrage.
Katharine Lee Bates, who first drafted the words to the anthem in 1893, lived in Wellesley, Mass., for 25 years with Katharine Coman, whom some described as her lesbian partner. In an 1891 letter to Coman, Bates wrote that she couldn’t leave Wellesley for long because “so many love-anchors held me there, and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart ... Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven."
After Coman's death, Bates published a collection of poems, Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, that were to or about her. While the nature of their relationship isn’t certain -- it's been described as a “Boston marriage,” a term that included platonic relationships between women but often had undertones of romantic attachment -- the two expressed deep love for each other during their many years together.
In the commercial that aired during Sunday's Super Bowl, a gay couple is briefly seen roller-skating with their daughter and then hugging each other as the anthem is sung. GLAAD, an LGBT rights advocacy group, praised the spot in a statement and noted that it marks the first Super Bowl ad to feature a gay family.
"Including a gay family in this ad is not only a step forward for the advertising industry, but a reflection of the growing majority of Americans from all walks of life who proudly support their LGBT friends, family and neighbors as integral parts of ‘America the Beautiful,’” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis.
Bates and Coman might be proud."
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bad anonymous posted:
"The big drop [in abortions] occurred soon after a wave of state anti-abortion restrictions went into effect."
As good anonymous pointed out, that was a lie, the truth is (and the article originally said) "The big drop occurred just prior to a wave of unprecidented state anti-abortion restrictions went into effect.
Its just like when he lied about the shutdown and posted results from several polls asking which party the public blamed the most and bad anonymous swapped the numbers for the Democrats and Republicans to make it look like the public blamed the Democrats more when the truth was the opposite.
Bad anonymous later posted that while he wouldn't admit he lied his religion says all people are immoral as though that somehow made it okay for him to lie. Later he tried to justify the lie about the polls by absurdly stating that he hadn't lied about "material facts" in the discussion when the discussion was about who the public blamed more! Lying about the polls on blame doesn't get any more material to the discussion than that!
When I point out that bad anonymous has a long record of lying he feigns indignation and tries to deny it but we see once again that he has no moral qualms whatsoever about lying, as long as it suits his anti-freedom agenda he'll make up whatever story he feels like. He admitted as much when he stated if he doesn't attribute an article he cuts and pastes he'll change it however he likes whether the changes he makes are true or not.
Its bad enough that bad anonymous floods this blog with his right wing propaganda but at least we shouldn't have to put up with his constant lies - I agree, its time to ban him for his dishonesty.
So, bad anonymous, you can't say whether the drop in abortions came before or after the unprecidented anti-abortion laws isn't a "material fact", how do you justify trying to deceive people this time?
And good anonymous, thank you once again for your diligence in catching bad anonymous lying yet again.
you morons are really a trip
if I pull a few facts out some advocacy piece, you apparently believe I'm obligated to advance the opinion of the advocate...or I'm "lying"
let me make it easy for you to understand:
when the Gutsmasher Institute says abortions are at their lowest level since Roe v Wade, that's a fact and I repeated it
when they say it is not due to the limitations being placed on abortion by state governments, that's their opinion..and they have a mission to propagandize for the continued use of infanticide as a birth control method
I have no obligation to repeat their reprehensible point of view
comprehende?
you know, last fall, the sequester was in full effect and the government was shut down for weeks...and the economy boomed
now, the government's up and running, the sequester cuts have been cancelled and Obamacare is the law
and here's the result:
"NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market had its worst day in more than seven months, and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 320 points, as reports of sluggish U.S. growth added to worries about the economy."
Justify your preference for intellectual dishonesty and plagiarism however you wish.
Your comprehension of economics is about a bad as your comprehension of climate change.
Walmart, the second largest public corporation and biggest private employer in the world, disagrees with your amateur assessment.
Wal-Mart lowers forecast due to food stamp cuts, bad weather
"Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Friday that U.S. sales figures for its fiscal fourth quarter would probably come in below earlier forecasts when they’re announced Feb. 20 due to the effects of volatile weather and cuts to the federal food stamp program.
The world’s largest retailer said in November that for the fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, it expected sales at American Wal-Mart stores open at least a year to be relatively flat. So-called same-store sales at its warehouse chain Sam’s Club were projected to be anywhere from flat to up 2%.
But on Friday the company said that sales would likely miss the mark, pushed down from stronger-than-expected pressure from a government reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that went into effect Nov. 1.
Winter storms also caused store closings during the period, according to Wal-Mart, which has more than 11,000 units in its system.
The company said earlier this month that it was laying off 2,300 workers at Sam’s Club stores.
In midsession trading, Wal-Mart stock was down 6 cents to $74.69 after slumping earlier in the morning.
The company also said its total earnings for the fourth quarter and the full year would land at or slightly below the low end of its earlier predictions.
Wal-Mart had projected earnings per share of $1.60 to $1.70 for the quarter and $5.11 to $5.21 for the year."
when they say it is not due to the limitations being placed on abortion by state governments, that's their opinion..and they have a mission to propagandize for the continued use of infanticide as a birth control method
Yeah, why leave in all of their pesky analysis when you can cut and paste it into your own propaganda? Breitbart would be proud.
Let me guess - that's the same "logic" you used to keep insisting McCain or Romney was going to win the election even though the electoral college votes clearly indicated Obama would win - just ignore all of the analysis that doesn't fit your predetermined answer. Or better yet, blame it on the omnipresent "liberal media bias."
Be careful. If you keep doing things like that, you'll convince yourself somebody's got WMD and go invade their country.
Ooops, too late.
Have a nice day.
Cynthia
cinco, you're a fool
they didn't use any analysis to make this assertion
they were simply arguing for their side
it's a old argument that attempts to justify infanticide by saying that just as many would happen even if it were illegal
so, they hate to give it up
states were trying to restrict abortion long before 2011
and contraceptive use didn't suddenly become effective in 2011 either
they were just propagandizing
the original statement I made is a fact
abortions are at the level they were before Roe v Wade
most Americans are now pro-life
de facto nullification of Roe v Wade is reality
de facto nullification of Roe v Wade is reality
it really is
Both Rich Madaleno and Dana Beyer are pro-choice Democrats, as are the majority of voters in MoCo so however you want to read the national polls on abortion, climate change, SNAP and the like, the fact is a Democratic pro-choice candidate will be the next Maryland State Senator in District 18.
Spin yourself as dizzy as you want, you will not change that fact.
Just because someone is pro-life personally, it does not necessarily mean they want to make such an important personal decision for others. This truth becomes clear when we do not turn a blind eye to the findings of another Gallup poll: Majority of Americans Still Support Roe v. Wade Decision
"PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty years after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Roe v. Wade, significantly more Americans want the landmark abortion decision kept in place rather than overturned, 53% to 29%. Another 18% have no opinion, the highest level of uncertainty Gallup has recorded on this question in trends dating to 1989.
In the broadest sense, Americans' reaction to Roe v. Wade has been consistent for the past few decades. A majority have always opposed overturning the decision, while roughly a third favor doing so. However, in 2006, as the percentage of Americans with no opinion about the status of Roe v. Wade increased, the percentage opposed to overturning it dropped below 60%, and has since remained in that lower range. This year, with a record-high 18% unsure, the percentage wanting it overturned fell below 30% for only the third time since 1989.
Gallup trends indicate that the increase in public uncertainty about overturning Roe v. Wade is largely the result of a growing percentage of young adults aged 18 to 29 expressing no opinion. This suggests that the generation born entirely after Roe became law has had less exposure to information about the decision than those who lived through the original decision, or were at least old enough to witness some of the major abortion debates during the 1980s and '90s, such as those involving President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 and reaction to the high court's Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey decision in 1992.
The same Dec. 27-30 poll also updated Gallup's longest-running trend on abortion attitudes. This asks Americans if abortion should be "legal under any circumstances," "legal only under certain circumstances," or "illegal in all circumstances." Currently, 52% favor the middle position, while 28% say it should always be legal and 18% never legal. Views on this have been fairly stable over the past four years...""
“it's a old argument that attempts to justify infanticide by saying that just as many would happen even if it were illegal”
Yeah, well that’s probably just because prohibiting abortion was just about as successful as prohibiting alcohol. I’m not sure which claimed more lives though. Here’s a little reminder from Al Capone’s home town:
From:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/20/abortion-before-roe/
"In Chicago, at Cook Country Hospital, there were about 5,000 women a year coming in with injuries bleeding resulting to illegal abortions, mostly self-induced abortions," Leslie Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime, said in an interview. "They had an entire ward dedicated to taking care of people in that situation. Those wards pretty much closed up around the country once abortion was legalized."
One hospital, one town, 5,000 illegal abortions and injured women a year. This number doesn’t account for the illegal ones that didn’t require a subsequent hospital visit.
“de facto nullification of Roe v Wade is reality”
No, when it does become a reality though, we’ll know it because the illegal abortion clinics will be all over the country, not just Philadelphia, and more and more women will be in hospital emergency rooms after the fact.
Look, as a non-sexual person it’s hard for me to understand why promiscuous heterosexuals just can’t keep their own genitals in their own pants, given the potential for what they refer to as “an unwanted child.” There are plenty of gay couples out there that would love to have a child, and they would never be “unwanted.”
“they didn't use any analysis to make this assertion”
Firstly, they did WAY more analysis than you ever did, and secondly, given that you never actually do ANY analysis, why would you complain when you suspect someone else doesn’t???
The most interesting data from the Guttmacher study was this:
“Thirty-seven percent of women obtaining abortions identify as Protestant and 28% identify as Catholic.[3]”
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html#3
Now we know that the reason that the Catholic Church doesn’t want to cover abortion in its insurance programs is that they would be responsible for covering over a quarter of all abortions in the U.S. Way to go “no contraception” doctrine!
Have a nice day,
Cynthia
Bad anonymous said "if I pull a few facts out some advocacy piece, you apparently believe I'm obligated to advance the opinion of the advocate...or I'm "lying"
when the Gutsmasher Institute says abortions are at their lowest level since Roe v Wade, that's a fact and I repeated it
when they say it is not due to the limitations being placed on abortion by state governments, that's their opinion".
You disgusting lying scumbag. The statistics PROVE that virtually all of the decline in abortions happened BEFORE all the unprecedented anti-abortion laws. This is an easily verifiable fact. There is NO debate about this. An honest person cannot simply decide he doesn't like the facts so he's going to assert without basis that the opposite of reality is true. But then, you are not an honest person.
You have the gall to lecture gays and lesbians about immorality then you lie left, right, and centre whenever the whim strikes you. You KNOW there's no debate about when the decline in abortions happened but you figure you've already lied repeatedly so you may as well lie one more time rather than admit the truth.
NOTHING bad anonymous posts can ever be considered the truth without independent verification. He is an evil train-wreck, trying to take society and all that is good down with him and he'll lie at every opportunity to do that.
Its time he was banned.
Bad anonymous said "states were trying to restrict abortion long before 2011".
There were a record number of anti-abortion laws passed in 2011 and the number of anti-abortion laws passed then,and in each of 2012 and 2013 far, far exceeded the number passed in any other year. There were more passed in the three years between 2011 and 2013 than in the previous decade COMBINED.
It doesn't matter how many times bad anonymous is slapped in the face with the truth he'll still deny it but for anyone else who might doubt it look at this graph. Its obvious that there was an unprecedented flood of anti-abortion laws starting in 2011.
Bad anonymous said "and contraceptive use didn't suddenly become effective in 2011 either".
No one said it did you lying a-hole. It has ALWAYS been highly effective (that's why conservatives hate it) and the use of contraception and the decline in number of abortions started in 1981 long before 2011 as the data from the Guttmacher institute shows.
Bad anonymous said "they [the Guttmacher Institute] didn't use any analysis to make this assertion".
You're just so full of sh*t. YOU'RE the one that makes assertion after assertion without analysis or facts, and in direct contradiction to the facts and evidence that have been laid before you. The Guttmacher Institute did a huge volume of research, data collection, and statistical analysis to reach its conclusions which you no doubt suspected but chose not to investigate instead prefering to make up a story that suited your biases and assert that it was a fact.
Conservatives claim to abhor abortion but the truth of the matter is they abhor women having control over their own sexuality even more and so when they're given an option to reduce abortions by promoting contraception they don't want to do that, they instead prefer to attempt to make contraception harder to get or to ban it altogether because they'd rather women undergo abortions than have consequence free sex.
I don't know darling. I think a lot about honesty, and teaching honesty. It seems to me that quoting a large piece from someone else, and changing a few words to dramatically alter the meaning, is less than forthright.
I will also point out that whether something happens before or after something else is not in general considered a matter of opinion, unless one is particularly mystical about the nature of causation and time.
rrjr
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Bad anonymous said "now, the government's up and running, the sequester cuts have been cancelled and Obamacare is the law
and here's the result:
"NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market had its worst day in more than seven months, and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 320 points, as reports of sluggish U.S. growth added to worries about the economy.""
You're doing the same thing you do with global warming, cherry picking the data and looking at such short a term that the fluctuation is meaningless. That change in the stockmarket is really insignificant in the greater scheme things and will likely be turned around in weeks, if not days.
The truth of the matter is the U.S. economy grew by 3.2% in the last quarter which is excellent economic performance. Once again, you're lying through omission.
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As many as 17,000 Americans will die directly as a result of Republican goverernors of some states deciding not to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, according to a new study
Researchers from Harvard University and City University of New York have estimated that between 7,115 and 17,104 deaths will be “attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states” in a study published in Health Affairs.
“The results were sobering,” Samuel Dickman, one of the authors, said, according to the Morning Call. “Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”
They projected that 423,000 fewer diabetics would receive medication to treat their disease. If opt-out states had expanded Medicaid, 659,000 women who are in need of mammograms and 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears would have become insured, the study found.
“Low-income adults in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion will forego gains in access to care, financial well-being, physical and mental health, and longevity that would be expected with expanded Medicaid coverage,” the authors wrote.
The Republican message, as always: Screw the poor.
The head of the Republican Party's advice to starving children:
“Where to find food… Of course the first will be, try your house. It’s a thing called the refrigerator. You probably know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in, in what’s called, the kitchen of your house – called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely, you’re going to find Ding Dongs, Twinkies, Lays Rigged Potato Chips, all kinds of dip and maybe a can of corn you don’t want. But it WILL be there.
If that doesn’t work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. You know where McDonald’s is. There’s the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s –and if they don’t have Chicken McNuggets, dial 911 and ask for Obama!
There’s another place, if none of these options work, to find food. There’s always the neighborhood dumpster. Now you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive, and survive until school kicks back up…”
"Wayne Maines was in a meeting when he got the call. His daughter, a transgender teenager who had been fighting the state of Maine for years over her right to use the girls' bathroom at school, had finally won.
“I just broke down right then and there,” he said.
In tears, he called his wife, who texted their daughter, Nicole. She was in a school assembly, and immediately ran to the front of the room to announce the victory. “The whole school got up and cheered,” he recounted.
On Thursday, Maine’s Supreme Court made history when it ruled that officials from the public school violated state anti-discrimination law by not allowing Nicole to use the girls' bathroom. It was the first time that a state court has ruled it unlawful to deny transgender students access to the bathroom of the gender with which they identify.
The case stemmed from an incident that occurred when Nicole was in fifth grade. She is now 16 and attends a different school, which is private.
Born a biological male, Nicole was identifying as a female at the age of 2. By the time she was in fifth grade, she had a female name and used the girls' bathroom, with her school’s full support.
But that all changed after a male student followed her into the girls' bathroom on multiple occasions, charging that if she had the right to be in there, so did he. Sensing trouble, the school banned her from using the girls' bathroom. Using the boys' bathroom was out of the question, so she was required to use the faculty bathroom that was isolated from the other students.
"Our daughter just wanted to go to school, be with her girlfriends, get a good education and be accepted by her peers. In other words, Nicole wanted the same things that most other girls her age want," Maines wrote in a blog post for The Huffington Post. "The school acknowledged that it was critical to Nicole's development that she be treated like the girl she has always known herself to be. Instead, she was made an outcast, separated from her peers. She was bullied and harassed simply because she is transgender."
Her family and the Maine Human Rights Commission filed a discrimination lawsuit.
In 2012, a lower court ruled in the school's favor. But last Thursday, Maine's Supreme Court ruled that Nicole's rights were violated under Maine's Human Rights Act.
“A tremendous amount of weight is coming off my shoulders,” Maines told The Huffington Post. "It's still sinking in."..."(This great news story continues here.)
oh, what joyous rapture
some guy has gotten the courts to say he his school has to let him use the girls' room
score!!!
Several million American workers will reduce their hours on the job or leave the workforce entirely because of incentives built into Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
That would mean losses equal to 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, because people would opt to keep their income low to stay eligible for federal health care subsidies or Medicaid, the agency said. It had estimated previously that the law would lead to only 800,000 fewer jobs by that year.
The report is major new evidence of the failures of Obamacare, the huge overhaul of U.S. health care coverage that mean catastrophe for Democrats in November's midterm elections.
It's the latest indication that "the president's health care law is destroying full-time jobs," said Republican Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "This fatally flawed health care scheme is wreaking havoc on working families nationwide," he said.
The agency also reduced its estimate of the number of uninsured people who will get coverage through the health care law. The budget experts now say more than 1 million fewer people than had been expected will gain coverage this year, because of the website problems that have prevented people from signing up.
Also, the budget experts see the long-term federal deficit picture worsening by about $100 billion a year through the end of the decade because of slower growth in the economy than they had previously predicted.
The Congressional Budget Office also revised its Medicaid enrollment projection downward by about 1 million.
...What the CBO really found was that the numbers of hours worked would decrease under Obamacare, by roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent between 2017 and 2024. The report then translated those lost hours into the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs. But that doesn't mean 2.5 million jobs are going to disappear from the U.S. economy.
The CBO report, in fact, specifically undermines that claim. Those lost hours will "almost entirely" be the result of people choosing to work fewer hours because of Obamacare -- not because they lost their jobs or can't find a full-time job.
"The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses' demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).
The report explicitly says that Obamacare isn't going to force businesses to cut jobs on any grand scale. What it is going to do is change how much Americans work.
"I think it’s important to distinguish between people choosing to work less and jobs being lost," Larry Levitt, vice president at the non-partisan Kaiser Famiy Foundation, told TPM...
SURPRISE! The GOP’s Latest Anti-Obamacare Talking Point Is Bunk
"Republicans have seized on a few sentences in a new Congressional Budget Office report that says that while the labor force will continue to grow over the next decade, there will be a reduction in the hours worked because of Obamacare:
'The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024. '
This instantly became a screaming headline for the right that Obamacare kills jobs, which earned three Pinocchios from The Washington Post‘s fact checker, Glenn Kessler. Jobs will not be lost, but “some people might decide to work part-time, not full time, in order to keep getting health care subsidies. Thus, they are reducing their supply of labor to the market.”
In other words, people will be able to work less without the fear of losing their health insurance, which is fantastic. Mothers and fathers will choose to stay home with their kids and workers will have the freedom to start businesses and seek educational opportunities.
“Obamacare alters the employer-employee relationship in a way that empowers employees,” Business Insider‘s Josh Barro wrote, explaining how the law will help decrease income inequality.
Meanwhile, the other news in the report contradicts nearly every talking point Republicans have used against the law. Not only does it decrease the deficit, the CBO found that “there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA.”
And though the number of enrollments predicted for this year has been reduced by 1 million due to the flawed rollout, the numbers for the next few years are impressive.
“The ACA will increase the number of Americans with health insurance by 13 million this year, 20 million next year, and 25 million a year from then through 2024,” The Los Angeles Times‘ Michael Hiltzik wrote. “Some 80 percent of those enrollees will be receiving federal subsidies to keep their coverage affordable.”
Although this new anti-Obamacare talking point has already been struck down, that only makes it stronger with Republicans.
If increasing the workforce is the party’s goal, let’s just get rid of Social Security and Medicare so grandma stops lounging around and gets a job.
Or if they really wanted to grow the workforce, Republicans could pass the Senate’s immigration bill. The CBO predicts that this one piece of legislation would cut the deficit, grow wages and increase the labor force by 6 million in the next decade."
Another outstanding job, Good Anonymous. You really are exceptionally good at what you are doing.
And kudos to you to Robert for so succinctly summing up what is wrong with Bad anonymous's post on the drop in abortions.
so, to you morons, if people choose not to work because the government will give them more money of they don't, that's great?
The Affordable Care Act, a k a ObamaCare, became law almost four years ago. It became operational last Oct. 1. Yesterday, Feb. 4, 2014, the ACA may well have been dealt its death blow.
The Congressional Budget Office released a major study of the government’s budget and its effect on the overall economy over the next 10 years. In dull bureaucratic language, it delivers a devastating analysis of the inefficiencies, ineffectualities and problematic social costs of ObamaCare.
The one-two punch: Virtually as many Americans will lack health coverage in 10 years as before the law was passed — but 2 million fewer will be working than if the law hadn’t passed.
One killer detail comes on Page 111, where the report projects: “As a result of the ACA, between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.”
ObamaCare’s key selling point was that it would give coverage to a significant number of the 30-plus million Americans who lack it. Now the CBO is telling the American people that a decade from now, 6 million-plus of their countrymen won’t get health care through their employers who otherwise would have.
Even more damaging is this projection: “About 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents.”
Why? Because, in selling the bill to the American people in a nationally televised September 2009 address, President Obama said the need for ObamaCare was urgent precisely because “there are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”
Now the CBO is saying is that in 10 years, about the same number of people will lack insurance as before. This, after new expenditures of as much as $2 trillion and a colossal disruption of the US medical system.
If that’s not startling enough, there’s also the telling projection about ObamaCare’s impact on employment — “a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.”
Overall employment will rise, the report says, but not steady, secure, long-term assured employment. The possibility of securing government-provided health-care without employment will give people a new incentive to avoid it. “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply,” the report says.
Indeed, overall, between 2017 and 2024, the actual amount of work done in this country will decline by as much as 2 percent.
How come? Because of perverse incentives ObamaCare provides in the form of subsidies to some and higher taxes to others.
First, the report says Americans will “choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.”
Here’s why: Poor people get certain subsidies, which disappear once a worker achieves a certain level of compensation. So it may be better to work less, or not work at all, rather than reach that higher pay level, because the pay increase won’t offset the loss of the subsidy.
This is the classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.
As the report says, “If those subsidies are phased out with rising income in order to limit their total costs, the phaseout effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates [the tax rates applying to their last dollar of income], thus discouraging work.”
There’s a problem on the other end as well — among those whose tax dollars pay for the whole shebang: “If the subsidies are financed at least in part by higher taxes, those taxes will further discourage work or create other economic distortions, depending on how the taxes are designed.”
Oh brother, look who's still spinning the same lie,and is now pilfering bits and pieces from an opinion piece in the New York Post, a rag well know for having no decency and generating "Anger at New York Post cover photo of subway passenger seconds from death".
You are stooping mighty low to support your party's lies.
really, you lyin' piece of trash
what in the article would you happen to "think" is incorrect?
The quotes in your right wing NYPost opinion piece include such phrases as "likely" and "might".
Your latest posted opinion piece again quotes this one sentence of the CBO report that has the right wing in a frothy fit:
"'The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024. '"
But as usual, the right wingers will continue to omit what else the CBO said about those employment numbers namely:
"Although CBO projects that total employment (and compensation) will increase over the coming decade, that increase will be smaller than it would have been in the absence of the ACA. The decline in full-time-equivalent employment stemming from the ACA will consist of some people not being employed at all and other people working fewer hours; however, CBO has not tried to quantify those two components of the overall effect. The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemploy- ment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week)."
And
"CBO’s estimate of the ACA’s impact on labor markets is subject to substantial uncertainty, which arises in part because many of the ACA’s provisions have never been implemented on such a broad scale and in part because available estimates of many key responses vary consider- ably. CBO seeks to provide estimates that lie in the middle of the distribution of potential outcomes, but the actual effects could differ notably from those esti- mates. For example, if fewer people obtain subsidized insurance coverage through exchanges than CBO expects, then the effects of the ACA on employment would be smaller than CBO estimates in this report. Alternatively, if more people obtain subsidized coverage through exchanges, then the impact on the labor market would be larger."
Quit posting pure spin right wing "opinion pieces" here, plagiarizing and tampering with actual news reports, and being intellectually dishonest. You only make your side look bad doing that day after day.
And while you're at it, clean up your mouth.
Go do something productive for a change -- instead of spinning yourself dizzy, go research Massachusetts and tell us how much employment has been lost there and how many state residents have ceased working to have their health insurance paid for as a result of Romneycare, the model for Obamacare.
HuffPo reports:
A Lot Of Media Outlets Botched The CBO's Obamacare Report
"...The Congressional Budget Office issued a report on Tuesday that said that as many as 2 million people could exit the workforce thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The reasons for this, the CBO said, were varied, but it stressed that the economy would see "a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than...a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor," thanks to, for instance, people choosing to quit jobs they didn't like but were only staying in because of their health care benefits.
That's not how a lot of media outlets reported the news, however. A lot of them said that the report was warning that Obamacare would kill over 2 million jobs—a notion at odd's with the CBO's conclusion that some workers would choose not to work...."
And here is the Washington's Post correction:
"CORRECTION: This tweet was wrong so we deleted it. CBO didn't say ACA would cut 2M jobs. It's about workers, not jobs "
"Several million American workers will reduce their hours on the job or leave the workforce entirely because of incentives built into Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
That would mean losses equal to 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, because people would opt to keep their income low to stay eligible for federal health care subsidies or Medicaid, the agency said. It had estimated previously that the law would lead to only 800,000 fewer jobs by that year.
The report is major new evidence of the failures of Obamacare, the huge overhaul of U.S. health care coverage that mean catastrophe for Democrats in November's midterm elections."
the TTF lunacy brigade is getting themselves all bent out of shape, which is unfortunate, considering their preferred activities
above is the first part of my post, that is causing this shape shifting among the mindless masses here
the parts of the article I posted never said people would be fired, as you can see
the always shocking thing when you talk to leftist loonies is that they never see any problem with people quitting their jobs and going on the public dole
great, they will quit because they won't need the money because the rest of us will be subsidizing their insurance as well as our own
I thought Bill Clinton officially ended the Democratic Party support of these type of policies when he ended welfare
that's how he produced that surplus Dems can never shut up about
Dems now need to go back to the future
let's all remember the sage words of Margaret Thatcher:
"the problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people's money"
the nuts at TTF may think it's great that 2.5 million able bodied citizens will quit jobs they "don't like" in order to sponge of the rest of us
real Americans aren't amused
that's right
real Americans
There you go, Margaret Thatcher, real American.
Keep spinning!
From a Forbes op-ed:
Like Her Friend Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher Just Wouldn't Cut It In Today's GOP
"...Take at look at what Mrs. Thatcher had to say about the NHS in her book—
“I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud. It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.”
Talk about a non-starter in today’s Republican Party.
At least todays conservatives can count of Mrs. Thatcher to have seen through the nonsense that is global warming, yes?
Sigh…once again, major GOP fail.
As David Frum writes, “Margaret Thatcher, climate pioneer: Educated in chemistry at Oxford University, the late British PM was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm on climate change. “ And Annie-Rose Strasser reminds us that Thatcher once warned, “The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”
Gun control?
It was during Mrs. Thatcher’s term, and under her leadership of the majority party in Parliament, that the British government passed the Firearms Act of 1988 which outlawed semi-automatic weapons, allowed the police to refuse a weapon to anyone they deemed to be unfit and gave the Home Secretary the power to add additional guns to the list of banned weapons as the Secretary saw fit.
But then, there is always Thatcher’s record of jobs—something that Republicans like to trumpet as President Obama’s most critical failing.
When Mrs. Thatcher took office in 1979, unemployment in Britain stood at 5.3 percent. By 1984,... unemployment reached a stunning 12 percent before falling to 7.5 percent on the day Thatcher left office. The net result? Unemployment was 2.2 percent higher on the day Thatcher left than on the day she arrived.
Keep in mind that ‘my lecturer’ —who shall remain unnamed—frequently, and publicly, criticizes President Obama for his failures on the job front. And yet, the fact that that Mrs. Thatcher left office with more people out of work than when she arrived is no obstruction to his staunch support for Thatcher’s economic policies. [AKA willful blindness]..."
An arcane Texas law allowed John Peter Smith Hospital to override a family's decision to remove a brain-dead woman from life support––because she was 14 weeks pregnant.
After months of struggling with Texas courts and the hospital to respect her predetermined wishes, the family was finally able to put the mother and unborn fetus to rest––ending the torment this family has endured.
But this hellish nightmare isn’t over. The grieving husband has begun to receive medical bills for his wife’s unwanted and contentious treatment.
Overzealous sanctity of life laws to protect unborn children have forced the living members of this family-father and young son–to endure emotional stress and now financial hardship.
Sign the petition demanding that this family not be held accountable for medical bills the state and hospital racked up––urge them to foot the bill and address this law immediately.
Petition Text
Our Message to To John Peter Smith Hospital and the State of Texas–––
To John Peter Smith Hospital and the State of Texas–––
We urge you to absolve the Munoz family of the medical bills incurred because you refused to honor the end of life wishes for Marlise Munoz. The Munoz family has endured prolonged hardship because of arcane laws to protect an unborn fetus and should not required to pay for your wrong-headed decisions.
Sign the petition here
"Like Her Friend Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher Just Wouldn't Cut It In Today's GOP"
just fascinating but the subject was socialism and whether the government should give 2.5 million able-bodied Americans subsidies paid for by taxes on everyone else that will be taken away if they quit work
only a TTFer or a member of the White House staff or an employee MSNBC or a member of the Obama family would say yes
Margaret Thatcher fully supported the "socialism" of the National Health Service in England.
She said "“I believed that the NHS was a service of which, we could genuinely be proud. It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.”"
Trick Websites Dupe Democrats Into Donating To Republicans
"The National Republican Congressional Committee has set up a number of websites that look like they could be a Democratic candidate’s campaign page, unless you read the fine print. They may even violate a Federal Election Commission regulation, Campaign Legal Center expert Paul S. Ryan explained to ThinkProgress.
The NRCC has set up these pages for various congressional opponents, including Amanda Renteria (CA), Martha Roberston (NY), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Alex Sink (FL), and John Tierney (MA). Each follow a similar format; they list the candidate’s name “for Congress” to ask for donations:
According to Ryan, the websites appear to violate a Federal Election Commission regulation prohibiting political committees and parties from using a candidate’s name in special projects. The FEC considers websites, including microsites, a special project falling under this rule. The only exception is when the site makes it unambiguously clear it is opposed to the candidate. In Ryan’s opinion, the page set up under Tierney’s name “does not unambiguously show opposition to Tierney.” However, he noted, the FEC is “not a nimble organization” and it can take two years to complete an investigation, well past election day.
Ray Bellamy of Florida says he was tricked by the page and accidentally made a donation to the NRCC. “It looked legitimate and had a smiling face of Sink and all the trappings of a legitimate site,” Bellamy told the Tampa Bay Times. The look-alike page uses the same colors as Florida candidate Alex Sink’s campaign, with the URL sinkrocongress2014.com. Once entering information, the person is redirected to an NRCC thank-you page.
When a crop of mock sites cropped up last month, the NRCC defended its actions as perfectly legal. In the meantime, the NRCC has agreed to return Bellamy’s donation."
Yay! After public backlash, the NRCC had to start offering refunds to donors who'd been misled, and now, Google has put a "reported phishing website" warning on at least the anti-Alex Sink site.
If you've been duped into giving money to the NRCC via one of their misleading websites, you can file a phishing complaint with Google and with the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).
Google: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/
Email a complaint to US-CERT at phishing-report@us-cert.gov
These are the URLs we know about that we ask you report:
http://contribute.AnnKirkpatrick.com
http://contribute.SinemaForCongress.com
http://contribute.RonBarber2014.com
http://contribute.sinkforcongress2014.com/
http://contribute.johntierney2014.com/
http://contribute.martha-robertson.com/
http://renteria4congress.com/
For most of these, the plain “www.” versions of those web addresses could certainly be seen as misleading too, but the donation pages are the real concern.
Yesterday, after reading the CBO’s startling facts on job losses because of Obamacare, I thought maybe the Democrats would have reason to pause and, after some reflection, would say, “We take these findings seriously. We don’t want to disincentivize work or erode the potential of America.”
Instead, the Democrats were immediately defensive. They began spewing a bunch of incoherent pabulum. But some candor broke through as the Democrats struggled to contort the CBO report. In front of the White House press corps, the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers was asked whether families would have less money if their work hours were reduced as a result of Obamacare. He responded, “They had something before, which was a 65-hour job, and maybe no health care and no great health-care options. You now give them a new option they didn’t have.” The “new option” he is speaking of is to simply rely on the government instead of working to support themselves. The Obamacare option he was advocating is to get something for nothing, not to work more. Presumably, Furman is suggesting that the idea that people should have to work to earn their keep is the opposite of what the Obama administration finds desirable.
White House press secretary Jay Carney drove home this line of thinking later, saying, “When somebody decides for himself or herself not to work 64 hours, but to work instead for 35 hours, even though the option of working more hours and potentially having the extra money that that option provides is available to them, they’re making a choice about their quality of life.” What these White House spokesmen said is astonishing in what it reveals. The White House and the left are admitting that they think less work and less initiative in the workplace is perhaps a good thing.
And finally, this morning, the New York Times — a message delivery vehicle for the Democrats — made the point even clearer. The lead in today’s editorial reads, “The CBO estimated on Tuesday that the ACA will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million. That is a good thing, a liberating result of the law.” The Times thinks government should liberate people from having to work. And that it is actually good if fewer people work because of Obamacare.
If Democrats pursue their line of reasoning, it will represent something of a pivot point in American politics. Previously, Democrats have acted indignant when Republicans suggested they are trying to breed Democratic voters by enticing them with entitlements and making them dependent on government. Here, for the first time, the left is making government dependency part of its pitch, saying that it is desirable to work less. This means there could be an additional, vivid, undeniable contrast drawn between the two parties.
One party wants to provide incentives and rewards for work, ambition and personal responsibility. The other party finds those traits to be unbecoming and misguided and hopes people with jobs will just quit — with the understanding that the Democrats will keep them supplied with benefits.
What does this say about Democrats trying to keep the poor poor? In a show of hypocrisy, they try to convince people to work less and then bemoan “income inequality.” Will the left give up all pretense and start encouraging Democratic voters to stop working and take the handouts they are given? Who will be the first Democratic politician to seize on this and tell voters, “Vote for me, work less, and Washington will take care of you”? Incredible.
so, the Dems think unemployment is liberating?
maybe we'll all start calling it funemployment
The CBO just released its latest analysis of the country’s economic and budget outlook, and it’s a doozy. If you’re a Denver Broncos fan who watched in horror as your team disintegrated during the Super Bowl on Sunday, then you’ll have some idea of how Obamacare’s proponents will feel as they read this report.
Yes, it’s that bad.
It’s so bad that there’s even a report section entitled, “How Much Will the ACA Reduce Employment in the Longer Term?” (Spoiler alert: a lot). As predicted by its conservative opponents, Obamacare has indeed reduced employment, increased spending, and made health care less accessible.
Here are 5 facts from CBO’s report that illustrate how the law’s effects bear no resemblance whatsoever to its namesake’s promises.
1) Obamacare Will Eliminate 2.5 Million Jobs By 2024
2) In 2024, There Will Still Be 31 Million People In The U.S. Without Health Insurance
3) Surprise! Millions Of People Who Liked Their Health Plan Will Lose Their Health Plan
4) Obamacare Reduces The Incentive To Find And Keep A Job
5) Your Paycheck Will Be Smaller Thanks To Obamacare
Name-calling is unnecessary, and unseemly.
which one you referring to, Robo?
I like to gauge the effectiveness of the remarks
remember, this is for posterity!
Keep spinning your webs of deceit and blinding yourself with all those ubbles!
"INDIANAPOLIS — In the midst of the sweeping transformation taking place in health insurance, the company that served as an illustration of why an overhaul was necessary could end up benefiting most from the new federal health care law.
Just a few years ago, the health insurer WellPoint outraged its customers — and regulators — by proposing an increase of nearly 40 percent in some of its annual premiums.
Now, WellPoint has captured a large portion of the government money being spent on Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, and can gamble on the new insurance marketplace because of protections offered by the federal government in the early days of the law’s introduction.
How WellPoint fares in the longer term is hard to predict and its recent earnings report was mixed, with quarterly profits lower.
But the story of how the company went from health care opponent to beneficiary provides a look at how the industry is changing — and potentially thriving — under the new Affordable Care Act.
“We’ve got the most to win,” acknowledged Joseph R. Swedish, the chief executive of WellPoint, a company that had been one of the industry’s loudest critics of how the law would affect insurers.
A for-profit company cobbled together from Blue Cross plans in different states to become one of the nation’s largest insurers, WellPoint had the largest presence in the individual and small-business markets that the law sought to overhaul. The company was thriving under rules that allowed it to avoid covering people with expensive medical conditions and charge much higher prices to people who were old or sick.
But despite its history of resistance to changes in the business, WellPoint has emerged in the early months of the rollout as the largest participant in the newly created state marketplaces. The company has signed up about a half million people in the 14 states where it has Blue Cross plans, and it has captured a leading share of the market in at least a half-dozen states, by its own count, including California, Connecticut, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York and Virginia. It lags in Maine and Kentucky, where new entrants have emerged as formidable competitors.
WellPoint is also increasing the number of people it insures through Medicaid, as states rely more heavily on private companies to manage the program. About a year ago, the company bought Amerigroup, a large Medicaid managed care company. Selling coverage to the government now accounts for 45 percent of the company’s overall revenue, compared with 10 percent just a couple of years ago...."
Continues here
CBO director: Obamacare will reduce unemployment
"...Republicans went mad with glee at the new Congressional Budget Office report on deficits and the Affordable Care Act, with multiple GOP officials claiming it showed the law will kill over two million jobs. That was false.
Under questioning today before the House Budget Committee from Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed that in reality, his report suggests Obamacare will reduce unemployment:"
Video: CBO Director: ACA will *reduce* unemployment
The CBO report found that Obamacare — through subsidizing health coverage – would reduce the amount of hours workers choose to work, to the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers over 10 years. This was widely spun by Republicans as a loss of 2.5 million jobs.
To counter this, Van Hollen cited the report’s findings on Obamacare’s impact on labor demand, rather than supply. On page 124, the report estimates that the ACA will “boost overall demand for goods and services over the next few years because the people who will benefit from the expansion of Medicaid and from access to the exchange subsidies are predominantly in lower-income households and thus are likely to spend a considerable fraction of their additional resources on goods and services.” This, the report says, “will in turn boost demand for labor over the next few years.”
“When you boost demand for labor in this kind of economy, you actually reduce the unemployment rate, because those people who are looking for work can find more work, right?” Van Hollen asked Elmendorf.
“Yes, that’s right,” Elmendorf said.
Elmendorf added that the factor Van Hollen had identified was something CBO thinks “spurs employment and would reduce unemployment over the next few years.”
So there it is: The CBO report found the opposite of what some foes of the law claimed.
...What this really comes down to is that Republicans mischaracterized the report’s findings because they don’t want to let go of their “Obamacare is a job killer” talking point. After all, it’s much harder politically to argue that helping poor people get health coverage is a bad idea because it reduces their incentive to work than it is to argue that Big Bad Government Regulations (in the form of unpopular Obamacare) are killing millions of jobs, driving up unemployment, and strangling the recovery.
But the CBO report just doesn’t support that latter claim, and the director of the CBO himself has now confirmed it."
do you morons ever, and I mean ever, think about what you say?
wheeee!
unemployment will go down because less people will work
that's how Obama is currently "reducing" unemployment
right now, the labor participation rate is at its lowest point since the Depression
and statistical analysis has shown its not because of baby boom retirement
so Obamacare will significantly increase this number
the CBO confirms this
further, the increased demand for labor will tend to drive up labor costs and cause inflation
so, in addition to the extra tax burden, prices will go up
peachy!
all that, and the number of uninsured Americans will be no different
November 2014: it gets closer every day
Job growth saw another weak month in January, with employers adding just 113,000 positions as a continued economic slowdown dampened hiring.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported Friday that the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent, a function of a labor force participation rate still mired around 36-year lows.
liberal commenter joins top-rated cable new network:
Democratic strategist James Carville has landed at Fox News Channel as an on-air contributor.
"James' successful and storied career in politics over several decades is an enormous asset to Fox News," said executive VP of programming Bill Shine. "We are privileged to have him lend his breadth of experience, wit and dynamic perspective on the network."
Carville, famous for his work on the 1992 presidential campaign for Bill Clinton, is also known for his sparring with his wife, Republican political consultant Mary Matalin.
A political science professor at Tulane University, Carville is the author and co-author of several books, including January's Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home.
Bad anonymous said "We don’t want to disincentivize work".
You spending your day surfing the internet and posting B.S. here while you're at work disincentivizes you from doing the job you're paid to do. Why don't you stop disincentivizing yourself to work?
When people are working two jobs to make ends meet its a good thing when Obamacare allows them to cut back on their hours and improve their quality of life.
A new Congressional Budget Office report that forecasts budgetary and economic conditions for 2014 provides ammunition for supporters of the Affordable Care Act on a couple of fronts. The first is that the “risk corridors” in the law will save the federal government billions of dollars:
Congressional Republicans are threatening to take the economy hostage unless Democrats vote to increase Obamacare premiums. A temporary program built into the law called “risk corridors” is a a financial shock absorber meant to shield consumers from premium hikes stemming from insurance industry uncertainty during the health law’s first three years, and Republicans have previously supported more generous versions of the program for Medicare. Now, they’re slamming it as a “taxpayer-funded bailout” of insurance companies under the ACA.
But CBO’s new report finds that the provision will actually save taxpayers and the government a considerable amount of money. Under the risk corridor program, the government takes a cut of the profits from insurance plans that set their premiums too high and redistributes it to insurers that set their premiums too low so that those companies won’t be forced to raise consumers’ monthly rates. According to CBO, “risk corridor payments from the federal government to health insurers will total $8 billion and the corresponding collections from insurers will amount to $16 billion, yielding net savings for the federal government of $8 billion.”
CBO had previously estimated that risk corridors would be budget neutral. Now, the agency predicts that insurance companies are likely to set their monthly premiums too high relative to how much they will have to pay out in medical costs.
The second way the Affordable Care Act saves money is that premiums on policies obtained through the health care exchanges are considerably lower than previously predicted:
The Obama administration argued last year that ACA marketplace premiums would be lower than the CBO originally expected. The organization confirmed that on Tuesday, reporting that current marketplace premiums are actually 15 percent cheaper than it predicted last year.
A recent analysis by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the most Silver, Gold, and Platinum plans sold through ACA marketplaces are anywhere from $61 to $1377 cheaper than the average employer-sponsored health plan. An Obamacare Silver plan could be close to $2500 per year cheaper than an employer policy, according to PwC.
That doesn’t mean every single person will have lower premiums, of course, but most people will.
Bad anonymous said "Do you morons ever, and I mean ever, think about what you say? wheeee!
unemployment will go down because less people will work".
You're being willfully stupid again. Unemployment will go down for three reasons:
1)Poor people who will get healthcare at a lower cost will spend their savings on additional goods and services
2)More people will be buying healthcare services
3)Those who choose not to work excess hours because Obamacare allows them to will not be unemployed or underemployed as they are not seeking [additional] work. The work they were doing still needs to be done, those jobs haven't been eliminated and people who currently ARE unemployed will fill them thus reducing the number of people who are unemployed.
Bad anonymous said "right now, the labor participation rate is at its lowest point since the depression".
First, given your rampant lying I don't believe you and no one else should either. Second, the labour participation rate is not really a concern, its the unemployment rate that really matters. If people don't need to work then good for them. Its not a problem when people no longer need to and don't work two jobs to support themselves. Thirdly as the vast majority of the people getting cheaper health care due to Obamacare will simply work less rather than stop working altogether the labour participation rate will remain largely unchanged. Fourth, when demand for jobs increases because many people don't need to work as much some people who hadn't been looking for work may decide to get a job and the labour participation rate will increase.
Bad anonymous said "the increased demand for labor will tend to drive up labor costs and cause inflation so, in addition to the extra tax burden, prices will go up".
Nonsense. This is economics 101. Prices will only rise if demand goes up and supply does not. Demand for employees will go up but there is more than enough supply of employees amongst the unemployed that labour costs will not increase.
Once again, it is YOU who is not thinking about what you are saying because you sense that if you thought it through you wouldn't have a propaganda point. So you choose to be stupid so you can pretend you've scored a point when in reality you're both wrong and [willfully] stupid.
"do you morons ever, and I mean ever, think about what you say?
wheeee!
unemployment will go down because less people will work"
Look who is calling the CBO director Douglas Elmendorf a "moron," even though you have access to the video of Elmendorf's testimony to Congress, in which he confirmed that in reality and contrary to lying GOP claims, his report suggests Obamacare will reduce unemployment.
You are the one with your head stuck in the sand, ignoring this fact and others you don't like, as you keep spinning the latest repeatedly debunked GOP lie.
Spin spin spin.
"Look who is calling the CBO director Douglas Elmendorf a "moron," even though you have access to the video of Elmendorf's testimony to Congress, in which he confirmed that in reality and contrary to lying GOP claims, his report suggests Obamacare will reduce unemployment."
I didn't call him a moron. I called you one.
He was simply answering questions designed by his interrogator to make the Obama case.
It's the kind of thing that happens in courtrooms every day.
Only here, there was a prosecutor but no defense.
What you morons don't realize is that reducing unemployment by reducing the GDP makes us a poorer country.
And that's what happens when 2.5 million less people are contributing to our economy and having it paid for with everyone else's taxes.
So let's get this right. Team Obama taxes millionaires who create jobs, while Obamacare creates incentives not to work at those jobs. No wonder recovery is so anemic. The policy here is to create fewer jobs and induce people to work less at those jobs. This runs counter to the most basic principles of our economy and our country.
The American Idea (see Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan) had at least something to do with the virtues of work, family and opportunity. But what we see from the Obama administration are policies that undermine these ideals.
Here's a contrasting vision: The great entrepreneur Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources, has harnessed the technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to completely revolutionize the energy sector of our economy. He has turned North Dakota into Saudi Arabia.
Energy independence is in sight.
Now, the energy sector is responsible for roughly 10 percent of our growth. And tens of thousands of energy jobs are now being created at very high wages, all while our trade deficit is evaporating and our entire Middle East foreign policy may be changing.
Of course, the Obama administration is taking credit for the oil-and-gas revolution. But they initially opposed it and, in fact, had nothing to do with it. And if they opened up federal lands and offshore drilling, the energy success would be even greater. But that's not happening.
The fact is, the energy revolution is a perfect down-home example of free market economics at work, not government planning.
One of the remarkable things about the Harold Hamm story is that roughly 10 million oil-and-gas royalty owners now exist across the country. The energy revolution has created thousands of new millionaires. This is similar to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, whose wildly successful entrepreneurial ventures also created thousands of new millionaires. Not just investors, but low-level staffers who got just a little bit of stock when Microsoft or Apple or Facebook was started. They became millionaires.
And that money didn't go under mattresses. One way or the other it circulated through our economic system, creating thousands of new companies, vastly more jobs and even more millionaires.
In other words, wealth creates businesses that create jobs that create a rising tide that lifts all boats.
President Obama doesn't get this. He is hung up on inequality. But why is wealth- and income-inequality bad? If the oil-royalty owner makes $1 million while the roustabout in the field in North Dakota or Texas or Ohio or Pennsylvania makes $100,000, there is greater inequality, but everybody benefits. What Obama doesn't get is that the creation of successful millionaires is not a zero-sum game. The millionaire's success does not come at the expense of everyone else. In fact, that success makes everyone better off.
Free-market capitalism should make us all equal at the starting line, and that should lead to better, though unequal, outcomes at the finish line. The point here is opportunity, freedom and economic dynamism. More millionaires create healthier economies with more jobs, stronger families and better lives than our parents and grandparents had.
But now comes a new CBO study of Obamacare, which exposes a perverse incentive system that will cause the equivalent loss of 2.5 million jobs over the next decade as people work less, not more.
In the Obama scheme, an industrious person climbing the ladder of opportunity is penalized heavily for his or her success. Health care subsidies are reduced as a result of her higher income, while marginal tax rates go up as she shifts into a higher tax bracket. So she loses the government benefit and her effective federal tax climbs higher.
There is no ladder of opportunity here. It's really a work trap that becomes a poverty trap. It's similar to the other traps found in welfare, food stamps, unemployment compensation and the marriage penalty.
Democrats defend this work trap as providing more leisure time. But they forget to tell you that the perverse health care incentives that lead to less work also lead to less income, less wealth, less opportunity and less economic freedom to prosper.
So step back for a moment, and look at the contrasting visions of Harold Hamm and Obamacare. Mr. Hamm's roustabouts and millionaires create huge incentives to work and prosper. President Obama's health care plan creates huge incentives not to work, not to supply labor, not to work harder and not to create the opportunity for a rosier future.
"the labour participation rate is not really a concern, its the unemployment rate that really matters. If people don't need to work then good for them. Its not a problem when people no longer need to and don't work two jobs to support themselves"
you idiot
the labor participation is going down because people are giving up and seeking other ways to survive than employment
the way unemployment benefits work in America is that you must pretend you are seeking employment to get it
when your extended benefits run out, there is no longer any need for pretense and one is no longer counted as unemployed
Again with the willful stupidity. People will start working less because they don't need to pay as much for healthcare due to Obamacare They are not "giving up and seeking other ways to survive". Obamacare is improving their standard of living.
Don't sling around the term "idiot" when its you being one.
And of course it is nonsense that people are poor because they don't work hard enough. Large percentages of poor people work two jobs and are working far harder than the rich, many of whom do essentially nothing. Economics experts agree that increasing the income of the poor improves the economy because all that money is spent on goods and services whereas with the rich when you increase their income they hoard the money, essentially removing it from the economy and causing job loss and stagnation.
If you really want to increase the labour participation rate then stop subsidizing the rich and tax them at the Clinton era levels when the economy was doing much better. Make the rich put their money back into the economy and give them incentive to work.
Bad anonymous said "But now comes a new CBO study of Obamacare, which exposes a perverse incentive system that will cause the equivalent loss of 2.5 million jobs over the next decade as people work less, not more.".
And of course that is a lie that has been debunked several times. No jobs will be lost, some people will simply choose to work less and the jobs they vacate will be filled by the unemployed thus reducing the unemployment rate.
Bad anonymous wants to take the freedom away from people to stop working at two jobs if they don't need to.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bad anonymous said "I didn't call the CBO director a moron. I called you one."
You called us morons because we repeated what the CBO director said, that is no different than calling him one.
Bad anonymous said "He was simply answering questions designed by his interrogator to make the Obama case."
The CBO is an independent non-partisan organization which you've often quoted in your failed attempts to show Obama is doing a poor job. You can't claim they support your case only when they say something you like or can attempt to twist to deceive people and then assert they're partisan when they say something that refutes your partisan agenda.
Bad anonymous said "What you morons don't realize is that reducing unemployment by reducing the GDP makes us a poorer country. And that's what happens when 2.5 million less people are contributing to our economy and having it paid for with everyone else's taxes.".
Your lie has been debunked several times here already. There will NOT be 2.5 million less people contributing to the economy. Those jobs will not disappear, the employees filling them will work less of their own volition and ALL those jobs will be filled by people currently unemployed. Obamacare is a net job creator as the people who save as a result of it (most people) are poor and will spend their savings on goods and services and because more people are getting health care more will be spent on healthcare goods and services. And there will be no net tax increase as Obamacare will reduce the cost of healthcare The truth of the matter is the GDP increased by 3.2% the last quarter which is excellent economic growth despite Republicans doing everything they could to derail it.
Income inequality is the enemy of economic growth
The richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. The wealth gap in the U.S. is as wide as it was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. The richest 1% of Americans own more than 35% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% control just 2.5%.
Bad anonymous posted "And that money [rich people earned] didn't go under mattresses. One way or the other it circulated through our economic system, creating thousands of new companies, vastly more jobs and even more millionaires.".
An obvious lie. If rich people were spending their money they wouldn't have millions or billions in wealth, their bank accounts would be at zero. The vast majority of income rich people earn is taken out of the economy and sits stagnant as savings whereas in contrast the poorest Americans spend virtually all their income on goods and services.
To get the economy going the government needs to:
Invest in education and job training
Upgrade the nation's infrastructure
Reform the entire tax system, including sales & payroll taxes, to make it more progressive
Constrain Wall Street's gambling behavior
Increase the minimum wage and earned income tax credit to help move people out of poverty
All steps the Republicans have opposed because to them its well worth it to see the economy fail and ordinary Americans hurt so they can try to blame it on Obama.
Ground breaking research shows Democrat policies are better for the majority of Americans than Republican policies.
The crazy thing is that despite the common assumption that the Republicans are the party for people primarily concerned about maximizing their money they are in fact the worst party for the vast majority of people's monetary interests. The "go to" policies of the Republicans are to cut taxes and government. During the time when the tax rate has been lowest its benefited the rich and increased their wealth but the average american has seen their share of the overall wealth drop or remain flat. Lowering the tax rate has only seen the gap between the ultra rich and the average American grow. Under Republican administrations, and allowing a one-year lag to provide for time for policies to have effect, unemployment has increased, while gross national product decreased. The opposite has occurred under Democratic control of the White House. This reflects the basic divergence in policy objectives of the two parties.
Democrats and Republicans have followed different approaches to the economy for as long as there have been Democrats and Republicans. Many Americans know that there are characteristic policy differences between the two parties. But few are aware of two important facts about the post-World War II era, both of which are brilliantly delineated in a new book, “Unequal Democracy,” by Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton.
Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
Data for the period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.
It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now — an unsettling development that has finally touched the public consciousness.
Over the entire 60-year period, income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all.
"the labor participation is going down because people are giving up and seeking other ways to survive than employment"
One way the survive without being employed by someone is to start your own small business and to work for yourself.
An added bonus of leaving an employer and starting your own business, now that the ACA has been enacted and found constitutional by the US Supreme Court, is that rather than allowing your employer to decide if your policy will cover things like contraceptives or not, now you get to decide what coverage you want to pay for yourself and no employer can deny you the coverage you want.
That, my friend, is FREEDOM and heartily support FREEDOM for all Americans!
=========
Right on, Priya Lynn!
Thank you for your excellent research, documentation, and cogent replies to the Vigilance troll.
Smile,
Good Anon
Oh and thanks, Bubble Anon, for yet another right wing opinion piece without attribution.
Larry Kudlow: President Obama’s work trap
PS. Mr. Kudlow, that "anemic recovery" you lament is due in great part to GOP obstruction (count the filibusters) and thanks to GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell, who instead of having their number one priority be helping us recover from Bush's bungling, had as his number one priority making the recovery anemic for the purpose of preventing the President from being elected to his second term.
Speaking of McConnell, TIME reports:
Poll Highlights McConnell’s Vulnerability in Kentucky
"A new poll that shows Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell trailing his Democratic opponent raises questions about whether the Republican Minority Leader’s unpopularity in the Bluegrass State may jeopardize his seat in November.
McConnell trails Alison Lundergan Grimes by four points in the Bluegrass Poll, 46 percent to 42 percent, with a margin of error of three percentage points. It’s the second survey in a week to show him locked in a tight race with Grimes, Kentucky’s Secretary of State. A Rasmussen poll released Feb. 3 showed the two candidates in a dead heat.
November is nine months away, and McConnell remains the favorite. But there are distressing signs for the Republican leader. The new poll found that 60 percent of Kentuckians disapprove of the powerful five-term incumbent, compared to just 32 percent who approve of his performance in the Senate. That’s a shade worse than the ratings registered by President Barack Obama, who lost the state by 22 points in 2012.
Before McConnell can face Grimes, he must first fend off a primary challenge from tea party-backed Republican Matt Bevin. The poll bolsters the argument Bevin’s supporters have made for his candidacy: that McConnell’s long record in Washington and weakened status in the state make the insurgent the better bet to hold the seat for Republicans in November..."
Terror on Bulls#%t Mountain - Family First
In September, two weeks before the ACA was due to launch, President Obama declared that "there's no serious evidence that the law . . . is holding back economic growth." As for repealing ObamaCare, he added, "That's not an agenda for economic growth. You're not going to meet an economist who says that that's a number-one priority in terms of boosting growth and jobs in this country—at least not a serious economist."
In a way, Mr. Obama had a point: "Never met him," says economist Casey Mulligan. If the unfamiliarity is mutual, the confusion is all presidential. Mr. Mulligan studies how government choices influence the incentives and rewards for work—and many more people may recognize the University of Chicago professor as a serious economist after this week. That's because, more than anyone, Mr. Mulligan is responsible for the still-raging furor over the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that ObamaCare will, in fact, harm growth and jobs.
Rarely are political tempers so raw over an 11-page appendix to a dense budget projection for the next decade. But then the CBO—Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare.
As the CBO admits, that's a "substantially larger" and "considerably higher" subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures.
Mr. Mulligan's empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, "but, boy, it's a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six."
The CBO's intellectual conversion is all the more notable for accepting Mr. Mulligan's premise, which is that what economists call "implicit marginal tax rates" in ObamaCare make work less financially valuable for lower-income Americans. Because the insurance subsidies are tied to income and phase out as cash wages rise, some people will have the incentive to remain poorer in order to continue capturing higher benefits. Another way of putting it is that taking away benefits has the same effect as a direct tax, so lower-income workers are discouraged from climbing the income ladder by working harder, logging extra hours, taking a promotion or investing in their future earnings through job training or education.
The CBO works in mysterious ways, but its commentary and a footnote suggest that two National Bureau of Economic Research papers Mr. Mulligan published last August were "roughly" the most important drivers of this revision to its model. In short, the CBO has pulled this economist's arguments and analysis from the fringes to center of the health-care debate.
For his part, Mr. Mulligan declines to take too much credit. "I'm not an expert in that town, Washington," he says, "but I showed them my work and I know they listened, carefully."
At a February 2013 hearing he pointed out several discrepancies between the CBO's marginal-tax-rate work and its health-care work, and, he says, "That couldn't persist forever. There would have to be a time where they would reconcile those two approaches somehow." More to the point, "I knew eventually it would be acknowledged that when you pay people for being low income you are going to have more low-income people."
Mr. Mulligan thinks the CBO deserves particular credit for learning and then revising the old 800,000 number, not least because so many liberals cited it to dispute the claims of ObamaCare's critics.
The new finding might have prompted a debate about the marginal tax rates confronting the poor, but—well, it didn't.
Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.
Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. "I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points."
A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, "is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. We know that it doesn't matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you're putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren't willing to compensate the households enough so they'll still work." Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).
He adds: "I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there's too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that's a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less? We're pursuing our dreams?"
The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.
He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating "our strong conclusion" that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. (Mr. Cutler has since qualified and walked back some of his claims.)
"Why didn't they say, no, we didn't mean the labor market's going to get bigger. We mean it's going to get smaller in a good way," Mr. Mulligan wonders. "I'm unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They're sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that."
Mr. Mulligan's investigation into the Affordable Care Act builds on his earlier work studying the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus.
The Keynesian economists who dominate Mr. Obama's Washington are preoccupied by demand, and their explanation for persistently high post-recession unemployment is weak demand for goods and thus demand for labor. Mr. Mulligan, by contrast, studies the supply of labor and attributes the state of the economy in large part to the expansion of the entitlement and welfare state, such as the surge in food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. As these benefits were enriched and extended to more people by the stimulus, he argues in his 2012 book "The Redistribution Recession," they were responsible for about half the drop in work hours since 2007, and possibly more.
John Smid the former director for another organization that claimed to change gays to heterosexuals has decided to admit the truth:
"The ExGay message of God’s deliverance from the homosexual orientation has been destructive! It has created a dangling carrot of change without any real outcome of freedom from homosexuality. The damage has occurred in the subsequent loss of one’s soul, or the destruction stemming from serial fleshly encounters that only leave one void and searching for the next one.
I believe much of my grief today is also from how I played a role in furthering the message of deliverance from homosexuality. I used to teach that hope for their eternity would come when they found freedom. I conveyed a message that God would be more pleased with people who were not gay. I spent a tremendous amount of energy attempting to help men and women find a life of freedom of their natural homosexual desires.
Today I realize that it is far better to help men and women accept their homosexuality is innate, and an authentic reality. Regardless of where it came from, it is what it is. There is freedom in Christ for someone to hope for intimate connection with anther compatible human being if they so choose to pursue it. For those who are satisfied with a life of singleness, there’s a place for them to accept being gay and feel accepted and loved within that life experience. But neither choice can be made until they accept their homosexuality without shame."
"the message of God’s deliverance from the homosexual orientation has been destructive"
homosexual desire or inclination is something of which deliverance is to be sought because it leads to homosexual behavior, which is opposed to God and is destructive to both society and those individuals who participate in it
as with all perverted sexual desires, indulging it makes it worse and leads to more destructive behavior
sure, desires have mysterious origins
but most can be dealt with
why do we think sexual desires are in a sacred and irresistible category?
because it all stems from an over-emphasis of the sexual aspect of the human being to the exclusion of more important aspects
it's all part of our over-sexualized modern society
you can't keep a bird from flying into your hair, obviously
you can keep it from building a nest, obviously
you just have to try
Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking that saying things is tantamount to accomplishing things, and that good intentions are good deeds. So, his presidency is useful after all, because it illustrates the perils of government run by believers in magic words and numbers.
The last progressive president promised Model Cities, with every child enjoying a Head Start en route to enjoying an Upward Bound into a Great Society. Today’s progressive president also uses words — and numbers — magically emancipated from reality.
What Obama didn’t know: The many controversies that the White House says the president was kept in the dark about.
Thirty months have passed since Obama said: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Today, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, says Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power has “strengthened.” In last month’s State of the Union address, Obama defined success down by changing the subject: “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.” If saying so makes it so, all is well.
Assad, however, seems tardy regarding this elimination, perhaps because the threat of force was never actually made. The Democratic-controlled Senate nullified the threat by its emphatic reluctance to authorize force. Reuters recently reported that Assad had surrendered “4.1 percent of the roughly 1,300 tons of toxic agents” he supposedly has. The “.1” is an especially magical number, given the modifier “roughly” attached to 1,300 tons.
proceed.
The magic number 8 percent identified the level above which Obama’s administration said unemployment would not rise, thanks to the 2009 stimulus. Seven dollars is the figure, plucked from the ether, that Obama says will be saved by every dollar spent on “high quality” universal preschool, which is probably defined, with tidy circularity, as preschool that saves seven dollars for every dollar spent on it.
Forests continue to be felled to produce the paper on which are printed the continuing studies demonstrating that the United States, which has more than 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines and about 175,000 miles of hazardous-liquid pipelines, would not be menaced by the 1,179 miles of Keystone XL. The new State Department study says construction “would support approximately 42,100 jobs (direct, indirect, and induced).” Obama, of course, has his own number. In a July 24, 2013, interview with the New York Times, he said construction “might create maybe 2,000 jobs.”
The workforce participation rate is at a 36-year low; in the second half of the fifth year of the recovery, a smaller fraction of the population is employed or looking for work than was when the recovery began. Nevertheless, the administration is cheerful about the Congressional Budget Office’s conclusion that the ACA will substantially slow the growth of employment and compensation over the next decade.
The decrease is projected to be nearly three times larger than the CBO had previously predicted. The ACA’s insurance subsidies, which decline with rising income and increase with falling income, will cause many people to choose to stop working, or to work less, or to stop looking for work, thereby reducing the number of hours worked by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021.
An administration spokesman did not dispute the CBO’s key finding but hailed it as evidence that the ACA is increasing Americans’ choices. Really.
Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama’s critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
having the Olympics in a straight country is paying off already
a straight guy set the record for speed skating
more great records to come:
SOCHI, Russia (AP) -- Sven Kramer leaped on the top step of the medal stand, unleashed a scream for the Dutch fans and defiantly pointed both index fingers.
He'd been waiting four long years for this moment.
And, still, it's not enough.
Kramer got started on his road to Olympic redemption - and that's all it was, a start - by claiming his second straight speedskating gold in the men's 5,000 meters Saturday.
After the runaway victory, Kramer made it clear he won't be satisfied unless he leaves Sochi with three gold medals around his neck. He's made too many blunders on the sport's biggest stage to settle for anything less.
"For sure, there was a lot of pressure," he said. "I knew I had to skate the race of my life."
That he did. The 27-year-old broke his own Olympic record with a time of 6 minutes, 10.76 seconds - nearly 5 seconds ahead of teammate Jan Blokhuijsen, who took the silver. Jorrit Bergsma completed a medal sweep by the powerful Dutch team by claiming the bronze.
All three were cheered on by the king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, his wife Queen Maxima, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
"What can you say? We could never have hoped for such a great result," said the king, himself a keen speedskater. "That Sven was able to deliver despite such pressure, it leaves me speechless. What can you say, such a great Olympic record."
The Dutch were the first people to legalize same-sex marriage.
The marriage bill passed the House of Representatives by 109 votes to 33. The Senate approved the bill on 19 December 2000 by 49 to 26 votes. Only the Christian parties, which held 26 of the 75 seats at the time, voted against the bill. Although the Christian Democratic Appeal would form the next government, they did not indicate any intention to repeal the law.
The main article in the Act changed article 1:30 in the marriage law to read as follows:
"Een huwelijk kan worden aangegaan door twee personen van verschillend of van gelijk geslacht.
(A marriage can be contracted by two people of different or the same sex)"
The law came into effect on 1 April 2001, and on that day four same-sex couples were married by the Mayor of Amsterdam.
The Dutch Remonstrants were the world's first Christian denomination to perform same-sex unions and marriages in 1986. Also the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, the largest Protestant denomination in the Netherlands, allows their congregations to perform same-sex marriages since 2004.
that's fascinating but the fact remains that a straight guy, Sven Kramer, set a new world record in a straight country, Russia
facts are facts
You and your fellow homophobes must be so excited!
Why don't you all move to Russia if you like their laws so much better than the laws here?
Meanwhile, back at home in America, the Land of the Free, rather than discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation, same-sex couples are being afforded the same rights as straight couples have long had.
Unlike Russians, Americans believe in equality, freedom, and equal justice for all.
TheHill.com reports:
New rights for same-sex couples
"The Obama administration will continue the extension of federal benefits to married same-sex couples as heterosexual couples, Attorney General Eric Holder will announce on Saturday.
The Justice Department plans to issue a “policy memorandum” on Monday, which will allow same-sex couples to be able to file jointly for bankruptcy and will mandate that they will not be compelled to testify against each other in trial, among other new rights.
Holder will deliver the news at a gala thrown by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign in New York City Saturday night.
“Just like during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the stakes involved in this generation's struggle for LGBT equality could not be higher. Then, as now, nothing less than our country's commitment to the notion of equal protection under the law was on the line,” Holder will say in his speech, according to an excerpt.
“As attorney general, I will not let [the Justice] Department be simply a bystander during this important moment in history.”
Same-sex couples now have the right to file for domestic support obligations, including alimony and are eligible for Justice Department programs that provide compensation to surviving spouses of public safety officers.
Federal inmates in same-sex marriages will also receive the same benefits as married straight couples – such as, exchanging correspondence, having visitation rights and receiving “compassionate release” or a sentence reduction because of the incapacitation of a spouse. Same-sex inmates may also receive escorts to a spouse’s funeral and are eligible to be furloughed in the event of a crisis involving their spouse.
It is the latest move since a Supreme Court decision last year ruled that not extending federal benefits to same-sex couples was unconstitutional. Holder supported the ruling.
In response, the administration has taken steps to ensure that all same-sex couples are treated like married couples when it comes to certain federal benefits, such as filing taxes.
Holder emphasizes the changes to be implemented on Monday are the first of their kind in the U.S., and the extension of rights will be available, even if the person’s state does not recognize the marriage.
“This means that, in every courthouse, in every proceeding, and in every place where a member of the Department of Justice stands on behalf of the United States - they will strive to ensure that same-sex marriages receive the same privileges, protections, and rights as opposite-sex marriages under federal law,” Holder plans to say, according to excerpts of remarks that were released by the Justice Department. "And this policy has important, real-world implications for same-sex married couples that interact with the criminal justice system.”...
Hey, sometimes even straight guys can do well in spandex.
It's an equal opportunity world.
Have a nice day.
Cyn
and then there were 17:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/04/us-britain-scotland-marriage-idUSBREA131N320140204
"(Reuters) - Scotland voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to allow same-sex marriages, becoming the 17th country to give the green light to gay marriage despite opposition from its main church organizations.
The Scottish government, which will hold a referendum on independence from Britain in September, said passing the same-sex marriage bill was an important step for equal rights and paved the way for same-sex wedding ceremonies later this year.
The move was opposed by the Scottish Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland but the law will not compel religious institutions to hold ceremonies on their premises."
Have a VERY nice day...
with chocolate...
and rainbow marshmallows!
Cynthia
Severe storms in Britain are bringing in gales of up to 80mph as large swathes of the country are dealing with floods and seemingly endless downpours. It’s all part of the wettest January in England since 1766, and much of the country has been under water for weeks.
"Scotland voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to allow same-sex marriages,"
after all those years with Scottish men running around wearing skirts, you can't be surprised about this
obviously, as so commonly happens in the Highlands, the legislators were drinking Macallan all day
it's why a lot of their laws don't make a lot of sense
btw, saying countries "allow" gay marriage is propaganda
they recognize it, which is different
"becoming the 17th country to give the green light to gay marriage despite opposition from its main church organizations"
the odd thing is that all 17 of these countries have a Christian heritage
sounds like Christianity is the world's most tolerant religion
"The Scottish government, which will hold a referendum on independence from Britain in September,"
this is a foregone conclusion
the Scottish royal stone was returned to Edinburgh 18 years ago, after the English monarch had been sitting on it for 700 years
Scotland is as gone as India and America
"said passing the same-sex marriage bill was an important step for equal rights"
could we have an actual quote?
"and paved the way for same-sex wedding ceremonies later this year"
why the delay?
"The move was opposed by the Scottish Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland but the law will not compel religious institutions to hold ceremonies on their premises."
how about religious people?
will they be forced to bake cakes for immoral homosexual marriages like they are in Seattle?
if so, this is an important step for unequal rights
"Have a VERY nice day...
with chocolate...
and rainbow marshmallows!"
yeah, go gag yourself on a durian and some chocolate dipped crickets
"could we have an actual quote?"
LMAO
You reap what you sew!
If a low-income mother is working – and paying through the nose for childcare – just because her job has insurance and her husband’s job doesn’t, then the family’s lot is improved by a policy that makes it easier for them to afford insurance outside of work, enabling her to stay at home with their children.
Or imagine a young employee at a tech company. He’s itching to get out and launch his own startup, but he stays in his job because he needs the insurance. This is bad for him, and bad for the economy deprived of his innovation.
Obamacare’s subsidies for the individual insurance market may be bad or good on net, but this particular aspect – freeing stay-at-home moms and would-be entrepreneurs from jobs they’re keeping just for the insurance – is a good thing, if you think stay-at-home moms and entrepreneurs are good things.
All of this is tied up with another good thing – maybe the best thing about Obamacare: decoupling health insurance from employment. Employer-based insurance is a relic of ill-conceived federal wage controls and tax breaks. The employer-based system not only keeps moms working against their wishes, it also decreases employee mobility.
Out lesbian speedskater Irene Wust wins Olympic gold medal
"IIrene Wust, an openly lesbian speedskater from the Netherlands, won a gold medal in the women's 3,000 meters today at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Afterwords, she tweeted this photo of her celebrating.
Wust has now won three Olympic gold medals in speedskating, a hugely popular sport in the Netherlands. She came out in 2009 after saying she had a girlfriend, but then grew tired if answering questions about her personal life and has stayed focused on her sport.
Wust is one of seven open LGBT Olympians in Sochi, all of them women.
more global cooling:
TOKYO (AP) -- The Tokyo area was hit by a rare heavy snowfall Saturday, stalling trains, grounding flights, and blanketing roads and skyscrapers with snow.
By mid-afternoon, around 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow had fallen.
The Japan Meteorological Agency issued its first heavy snowfall warning for central Tokyo in 13 years. It warned that snow and rain would continue through the night.
Several universities in Tokyo delayed the start of entrance exams because of delays in metropolitan trains and subways, known for almost always being on time.
Major carriers Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways suspended domestic flights from Tokyo's Haneda airport. Some bullet trains were delayed and parts of expressways were closed.
Japanese media said dozens of injuries were being reported from people slipping and falling, or crashing their cars.
Atlanta, Tokyo, Jerusalem
it appears the new ice age is coming faster than meteorologists suspected
everyone gas up and drive in circles
we gotta heat this planet up!!
There may certainly be individual wags out there who are miffed that their tax dollars are going for medical treatments to allow older people to have sex. There may be cranky folks who do not think that anyone should be getting Viagra for any reason, because if God wanted them to have an erection God would have taken care of that already.
But it's not a movement. You don't see a dozen conservative women all lined up in a row to testify to Congress that allowing men past childbearing age to have sex is an abomination unto their Lord, or nationwide hobby supply shops demanding that the entire national health care system be restructured to allow them to personally decide which of their male employees ought not to be receiving medical care for insufficient sexytimes. Their religion may dictate that nobody have sex unless they are married, and unless they are fertile, but there is no nationwide, Fox-News-covered movement afoot to demand that the appropriate health care remedies be given only to married and fertile people. You don't hear the Fox News talking heads going on about that.
It's only American women that get that treatment. Nobody's screening the menfolk to ensure that they only get their Viagra or their vacuum erection systems if their employers are all right with that sort of thing. There is not 1/100th of the attention spent to deciding whether employers, or taxpayers, or random lawmakers of particular theocratic bent ought to have veto power over sexual health care for men that they are all presumed to have by "natural law" over women. And it is not a case of hobby shops or taxpayers or theocratic lawmakers simply never having the idea, until some other wag pointed it out, because wags have been pointing it out for a very, very long time now to no effect whatsoever. Nope; it is still only the womenfolk whose fertility needs to be managed and ensured, never the men.
"it appears the new ice age is coming"
Maybe it "appears" like that to bubble dwellers who spin more bubbles into their own eyes, but the scientists at NASA and NOAA have disagree and have data that shows global temperatures, are warmer than average compared.
Scientists know the temperatures in three cities, "Atlanta, Tokyo, Jerusalem," don't tell us very much, however global average temperatures do.
NASA: Long-term global warming trend sustained in 2013
"NASA scientists say 2013 tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures.
With the exception of 1998, the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record have all occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the warmest years on record.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which analyzes global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated report Tuesday on temperatures around the globe in 2013. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience temperatures warmer than those measured several decades ago.
The average temperature in 2013 was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 Celsius), which is 1.1 F (0.6 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline. The average global temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1880, according to the new analysis. Exact rankings for individual years are sensitive to data inputs and analysis methods.
"Long-term trends in surface temperatures are unusual and 2013 adds to the evidence for ongoing climate change," GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. "While one year or one season can be affected by random weather events, this analysis shows the necessity for continued, long-term monitoring.".."
NOAA: Global Summary Information - December 2013
2013 global temperature ties as fourth warmest on record since 1880
"The globally-averaged temperature for 2013 tied as the fourth warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 37th consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average annual temperature was 1976. Including 2013, all 13 years of the 21st century (2001-2013) rank among the 15 warmest in the 134-year period of record. The three warmest years on record are 2010, 2005, and 1998.
Most areas of the world experienced above-average annual temperatures. Over land, parts of central Asia, western Ethiopia, eastern Tanzania, and much of southern and western Australia were record warm, as were sections of the Arctic Ocean, a large swath of the southwestern Pacific Ocean, parts of the central Pacific, and an area of the central Indian Ocean. Only part of the central United States was cooler than average over land. Small regions scattered across the eastern Pacific Ocean and a region of the Southern Ocean south of South America were cooler than average. No region of the globe was record cold during 2013."
Sochi Weather Warmer Than Expected
"SOCHI, Russia (AP) — With temperatures rising on the Black Sea coast, the Sochi Olympics are starting to feel more like the Summer Games.
On Monday, these Sub-Tropical Olympics really started to heat up with temperatures soaring to 16 degrees C (61 degrees F). That led to skiers in the mountains above Sochi putting snow in their racing suits to cool down, and left ski jumpers landing in puddles.
"I'm trying to hide from the sun here because I feel like I'm getting red," said Chemmy Alcott, a British skier who competed in the super-combined race.
The weather could get even warmer by the end of the week.
Organizers said the temperature could reach 17 C (63 F) on Thursday.
But even up in Krasnaya Polyana, where the outdoor events are being held, temperatures were well above freezing.
"It was pretty warm snow and I don't think I adapted to it well," said American skier Stacey Cook, who missed a gate in the slalom leg of the super-combined. "It slides under your ski more."
At the RusSki Gorki Jumping Center, organizers canceled the first of three jumps after sunny skies and 15 C (59 F) temperatures softened the snow in the landing area. The second session was postponed after an official said the first competitor fell while landing.
When training resumed, only 38 of 55 starters made jumps in each of the two rounds.
The mountain venues are expected to return to freezing Tuesday, organizers said. But from Wednesday, warmer weather is in the forecast.
To combat the possibility of high temperatures, organizers have been storing large amounts of snow and say will they have enough to continue."
"Scientists know the temperatures in three cities, "Atlanta, Tokyo, Jerusalem," don't tell us very much,"
actually, it tells us what the temperatures are in places where people live
"however global average temperatures do"
yeah, they tell us what global average temperatures
which is kind of esoteric if it doesn't affect temperatures in inhabited parts of the globe
it could be that the North Pole and some desert lands can get warmer, bringing the averages up without significantly affecting population centers
although, since you brought it up, the pace of increase in the average has slowed to a virtual halt
"NASA scientists say 2013 tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures."
well, that statement contradicts itself so it must be a paraphrase of the scientists
and shows the low intelligence of the TTF warmist alarmists
if 2013 is the same average temperature as 2006, the "long-term trend" is not "continuing"
I've pointed this out many times and been called a liar
the long-term rise in temperatures has ceased for the last 15 years and the alarmists, who have doctored and kited the stats for years, have reached the day of reckoning
the global warming we saw in the eighties and nineties has stopped and, while temperatures haven't declined yet, they are no longer climbing
since this has happened as carbon emissions have exploded in China and India, there is little reason to believe it ever had a connection with human activity
I realize this will necessitate a career change for many climatologists but I hear they're hiring taxi drivers in New Dehli
The CBO Basically Now Has To Explain Its Report In A Way A 6 Year Old Can Understand
"With extraordinary patience, the Congressional Budget Office has responded to the confusion over its recent report on the Affordable Care Act, providing answers to frequently asked questions about the document. Such as: QUESTION: "Will 2.5 Million People Lose Their Jobs in 2024 Because of the ACA?" ANSWER: "No, we would not describe our estimates in that way." That sort of thing.
The CBO goes to extraordinary lengths to re-present its material, this time for an audience of the intellectually shortchanged. For example, here the CBO, an organization dedicated to making projections, attempts to explain what a "projection" is:
Q: Are You Sure That CBO’s Current Estimates of the Labor Market Effects of the ACA Are Accurate?
A: No, we are not sure that our current estimates are accurate, because our estimates are always uncertain. As we emphasized in the report: “CBO’s estimate of the ACA’s impact on labor markets is subject to substantial uncertainty, which arises in part because many of the ACA’s provisions have never been implemented on such a broad scale and in part because available estimates of many key responses vary considerably. CBO seeks to provide estimates that lie in the middle of the distribution of possible outcomes, but the actual effects could differ notably from those estimates.”
So, as it turns out, the CBO is not making prophetic declarations, like the Oracle at Delphi.
Here is my favorite paragraph:
Here’s a useful way to think about the choice of wording: When firms do not have enough business and decide to lay people off, the people who are laid off are generally worse off and are therefore unhappy about what is happening. As a result, other people express their sympathy to those people for having “lost their jobs” due to forces beyond their control. In contrast, when the labor market is strong and people decide on their own to retire, to leave work to take care of their families, or to cut back on their hours to pursue other interests, those people presumably think they are better off (or they would not be making the voluntary choices they are making). As a result, other people are generally happy for them and do not describe them as having “lost their jobs.”
Next up: Pictures and rebuses! Maybe a pop-up book."
Frequently Asked Questions About CBO’s Estimates of the Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act
"In contrast, when the labor market is strong and people decide on their own to retire, to leave work to take care of their families, or to cut back on their hours to pursue other interests, those people presumably think they are better off (or they would not be making the voluntary choices they are making). As a result, other people are generally happy for them and do not describe them as having “lost their jobs.”"
that doesn't describe the conditions outlined in last week's CBO report
in that case, people will quit because the government is taxing other people to pay for their health care and the government will stop doing this if they work more and make too much money
Obama's "clever" plan will pay people not to work
it's similar to how unemployment has been going down because people are "choosing" not to keep looking for a job so they are no longer considered unemployed
November 2014 is going to be fun
I wonder how hot the globe will be then
Ha HA Ha HA HA HA ha HA!!!
"the low intelligence of the TTF warmist alarmists
if 2013 is the same average temperature as 2006, the "long-term trend" is not "continuing""
it's hard to argue with this
TTFers are just not very intelligent
"if 2013 is the same average temperature as 2006, the "long-term trend" is not "continuing" "
NOAA: Long-term warming and environmental change trends persist in the Arctic in 2013:
Though not as extreme as last year, new report by NOAA and partners finds that the Arctic continues to show evidence of a shift to a new warmer, greener state
"Dec. 12, 2013: According to a new report released today by NOAA and its partners, cooler temperatures in the summer of 2013 across the central Arctic Ocean, Greenland and northern Canada moderated the record sea ice loss and extensive melting that the surface of the Greenland ice sheet experienced last year. Yet there continued to be regional extremes, including record low May snow cover in Eurasia and record high summer temperatures in Alaska.
“The Arctic caught a bit of a break in 2013 from the recent string of record-breaking warmth and ice melt of the last decade,” said David M. Kennedy, NOAA’s deputy under secretary for operations, during a press briefing today at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco. “But the relatively cool year in some parts of the Arctic does little to offset the long-term trend of the last 30 years: the Arctic is warming rapidly, becoming greener and experiencing a variety of changes, affecting people, the physical environment, and marine and land ecosystems.”...
NASA: NASA Finds 2013 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming Trend
"January 21, 2014 NASA scientists say 2013 tied with 2009 and 2006 for the seventh warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures.
With the exception of 1998, the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the warmest years on record.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which analyzes global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated report Tuesday on temperatures around the globe in 2013. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience temperatures warmer than those measured several decades ago.
The average temperature in 2013 was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 Celsius), which is 1.1 F (0.6 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline. The average global temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1880, according to the new analysis. Exact rankings for individual years are sensitive to data inputs and analysis methods.
"Long-term trends in surface temperatures are unusual and 2013 adds to the evidence for ongoing climate change," GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. "While one year or one season can be affected by random weather events, this analysis shows the necessity for continued, long-term monitoring."
Scientists emphasize that weather patterns always will cause fluctuations in average temperatures from year to year, but the continued increases in greenhouse gas levels in Earth's atmosphere are driving a long-term rise in global temperatures. Each successive year will not necessarily be warmer than the year before, but with the current level of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists expect each successive decade to be warmer than the previous...."
"The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience temperatures warmer than those measured several decades ago"
no one denies that
but the increase appears to have halted for about 15 years now
that's inconvenient if you make a living by getting government grants based on warmist alarmism
"The average temperature in 2013 was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 Celsius), which is 1.1 F (0.6 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline"
so, it's warmer now
that's not news
the increase all happened a couple of decades ago
it's now been 15 years without any extension of that trend
if this is the plateau, it's one we could live with
again, during this time, carbon emissions have increased with a continually building accumulation
and yet, not much increase in the temperature
"The average global temperature has risen about 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1880, according to the new analysis"
with no perceptible effect
weather was much more volatile in the 20th century with huge hurricanes and devastating droughts
those things still happen now, but are more isolated
overall, global weather is more stable than eighty years ago
maybe warming is good
"Exact rankings for individual years are sensitive to data inputs and analysis methods"
15 years are more than a blip
Anon blabbered:
“but the increase appears to have halted for about 15 years now
that's inconvenient if you make a living by getting government grants based on warmist alarmism”
First of all, everyone knows if you want a good, secure, high-paying job paid for by the government, the best place to go is a military contractor. I’ve contracted for some, and I have to say, the engineering skills at some of these places would be an epic failure at any private company – they wouldn’t be able to stay in business with what they build, and how slowly they finally manage to get it (mostly) working. It’s only by sucking on the taxpayer teat that these companies keep afloat. But thanks to military contracts in every congressional district in the country, the congress keeps voting to send them more money – even though they should have been fired LONG ago.
And while conservatives have been doing nothing but denying global warming, without any actual research, scientists (you know, those people who actually execute brain cycles to understand things) have been working to figure out what’s going on:
Summary:
“Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years. The strongest trade winds have driven more of the heat from global warming into the oceans; but when those winds slow, that heat will rapidly return to the atmosphere causing an abrupt rise in global average temperatures, scientists say.”
Full article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140209152454.htm
Have a nice day,
Cynthia
cinco, while I wouldn't doubt that massive inefficiency exist in the military, like most other government enterprises, you could hardly say the military is an "epic fail"
our capabilities are unmatched
nice that you can concede, unlike some of your lunatic comrades here, that global warming has ceased for the last 15 years, and it's nice that the alarmists have finally devised a theory to explain this
but it remains a theory and one that we should be skeptical of, considering that it's common knowledge that when scientists start with the result they want and work their research backwards, they usually find what they want to find
which is justification for continued funding
btw, ginger ale and grenadine with a maraschino cherry is the drink of the day
"Have a nice day"
yeah, go snorkel with the crocodiles on the sunny shores of Peppermint Bay
Irrelevant point maker stated:
“our capabilities are unmatched”
So is our spending.
It’s not exactly a surprise when we spend about as much on our military as the rest of the planet COMBINED.
Here’s an idea of were some of that money went – look for the line that shows “56 decommissioned aircraft carriers”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_by_country
Compare that to all of our “enemies.”
“nice that you can concede, unlike some of your lunatic comrades here, that global warming has ceased for the last 15 years, and it's nice that the alarmists have finally devised a theory to explain this”
First of all, we can’t say it “ceased.” Secondly, it’s the climate scientists that have measured it and reported it to the public. It hasn’t exactly been kept a secret, and no one has been denying it. There are science sites all over the web. Read them for yourself. You’ll find they’ve been studying and explaining LOTS of things.
“but it remains a theory and one that we should be skeptical of, considering that it's common knowledge that when scientists start with the result they want and work their research backwards, they usually find what they want to find
which is justification for continued funding”
Scientists use theories to describe everything. That’s why we have a Theory of Gravity, and a Theory of Relativity. They also have theories about microwaves which allow you to warm your cocoa. That’s what scientists DO. They come up with theories. That’s why we eventually get things like electricity, trains, cars, nuclear bombs, tornado warnings, hurricane forecasts, and earthquake prediction devices that stop trains in Japan.
They keep coming up with useful stuff, like solar cells, cruise missiles, drones, and the internet so we can put kitty cat videos on the web. That’s why we keep them around and keep paying them to invent new weapons to kill people with.
If scientists didn’t have a pretty good idea of whether or not they were going to find the Higgs Boson before the built the Large Hadron Collider, they would have looked like a bunch of incompetent boobs if they couldn’t find it. It would have been EXTREMELY difficult to justify another mulit-billion dollar investment like that. Being RIGHT a good portion of the time is how they keep their jobs. If they were just guessing and coming up with theories all the time that didn’t need proof, they could just go into religion.
Have a VERY nice day,
Cynthia
more global cooling:
A winter storm dropped several inches of snow and ice in North Alabama overnight and more is expected.
ATLANTA (AP) - Forecasters issued an unusually dire winter storm warning Tuesday for much of Georgia, but many residents already were heeding advice to stay home and off the roads, leaving much of metro Atlanta a ghost town during the usually busy morning commute.
The storm could be a "catastrophic event" reaching "historical proportions," the National Weather Service said in its warnings. Forecasters cited potentially crippling snow and ice accumulations, and they expected widespread power outages that could last for days. As much as three-quarters of an inch of ice is forecast for Atlanta, and wind gusts up to 25 mph could exacerbate problems.
"A winter storm dropped several inches of snow and ice in North Alabama overnight"
Meanwhile Alaska Just Suffered a Major, Avalanche-Filled Heat Wave
"Feb. 4, 2014
The miserable polar weather that blasted the lower U.S. this January no doubt had many folks dreaming of Hawaii. But maybe they should've been considering Alaska, instead, where an unusual and potent heat wave raised temperatures to 40 degrees above average.
The abnormal spate of warmness – which far as I can tell has not been addressed by weatherperson Sarah Palin – forced the cancellation of skiing events, with one organizer saying, "We just don't have the snow and way too much water in the hills to put together a quality race." It also led to the 2014 Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race being launched in downtown Fairbanks, rather than its historical starting line on a frozen river, because the river ice was so thin spectators would've fallen through it. Then there were the large avalanches that swamped roadways, such as the one hiding under a snowy Slurpee in the above photo. But more on that in a minute.
To give people an idea how freaky an event this was for the 49th State, NASA has put together a visualization of phenomenal temperatures from January 23 to the 30th. Based on satellite readings, the map shows warm-weather abnormalities spreading in red all across the region. Areas of white were about average, meanwhile, and blue spots show cooler-than-normal temps." (there are no blue spots)
Climate change "may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions," so when we experience a January with moderate temperatures in Alaska and arctic temperatures in Hotlanta, there has been a change in both "average weather conditions" and in "the distribution of weather around the average conditions."
The more you talk about climate change, the more ignorant you reveal yourself to be.
Alaska: the last refuge to which an alarmist scoundrel clings
both what's happening in Alaska and in Georgia have happened before
weather is always unpredictable
using the oldest trick of fortune tellers, alarmists are extrapolating events that were inevitable anyway
someday, Florida will have one of those hurricanes predicted by global warmist alarmists a decade ago
then, we'll all realize they were right all along
ha,ha!!
and, oh shocker, California's having a drought
John Boehner sings!
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Bad anonymous said "“but the increase appears to have halted for about 15 years now".
That is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked here. The truth is that average global temperatures have continued to increase which is obvious to anyone who looks at this graph:
thanks from the article from a magazine that calls itself a "team of astrojournalists and space reporters"
wonder how often they interview little green men from Mars
it did include a useful table, however, proving that, not only have you not debunked anything, but that global temperatures remain close to 1998 levels
they did dip for one year, 1999, and a couple of years did slightly exceed 1998 but the trend of 1975 to 1998 has basically halted for all intents and purposes
we are very, very slightly warmer than 15 years ago
indeed, while the temperatures are higher than 1900, most of the rise took place during two spikes: 1918 to 1930 and 1975 to 1998
doesn't seem to mesh well with anthropogenic global warming theory as carbon emissions have steadily risen since 1900 and especially in the last 15 years
and, significantly, the rise that has taken place since 1900 has not only not made life unbearable, it has coincided with longer lifespans and a remarkable reduction of poverty and suffering
maybe you should find some religion, since baseless faith in global warming seems to be failing you
ha-ha
so now we know where lazy Priya gets all the "facts"
space reporters from the Intergalactic Federations of Planets
who can argue with minds at warp speed?
going boldly where no imagination has gone before
that pretty much blows lazy Priya's warming argument to smithereens
we'll just call the rhetorical St Valentines Day Massacre
ziiIIIiiiing!!
I posted the information that anyone can verify - its obvious from the graphs that global warming has not halted since 1998 but continued to increase. Note of course, as is typical, bad anonymous never posts a link to anything to back up his claims because he has a well established reputation for lying.
In fact scientists 1999 predictions about the rise in temperatures for the next decade have proven remarkably accurate with the actual rise being within a few hundredths of a degree of the predicted rise.
Global temperatures have NOT held steady for the past 15 years, most of those years have been warmer than average with the last decade being the warmest on record. 2011 was the ninth warmest year on record since 1880. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998, and the last year that was cooler than average was 1976. The hottest years on record were 2010 and 2005.
Bad anonymous has a well documented history of lying on this blog and that is why he rarely posts links to back up his claims and even on those rare occaisions when he does post a link he often lies about what's in it hoping no one will check to verify the truth.
The statements in that second last paragraph I wrote in the previous comment can be verified here
"I posted the information that anyone can verify - its obvious from the graphs that global warming has not halted since 1998 but continued to increase. Note of course, as is typical, bad anonymous never posts a link to anything to back up his claims because he has a well established reputation for lying."
lazy Priya, you are a trip
I'm not kidding when I say that you believe this as a matter of faith rather than evidence
you are committed, by faith alone, to the idea that humans are destroying our environment and drastic action is necessary
you did, indeed, "post information that anyone can verify"
no need to verify, however
what it says is common knowledge and shows the opposite of what you say it does
in the graph you show, the last temperature shown in actually lower than 1998, 15 years ago
this is conceded by all climatologists of repute, and even the latest IPCC report addresses it
they have certain rationales and theories about why it's happened but, unlike you, they don't deny the facts
here's a link to a report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research where they discuss some of the reasons why what you deny happened has happened:
https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq#t2507n1344
an excerpt:
"the year 1998 was the warmest year, globally, in the 20th century. Since 2001 the global trend has been relatively flat (see graph)"
similar to your graph which showed the same thing
(note that it dipped dramatically in 1999 and went back up some in 2000, prior to this "flat" period)
then they discuss what the IPCC refers to as the warming hiatus over the last 15 years:
"Although scientists are confident that global temperatures will rise further in the coming decades, there could still be occasional "pauses" in warming that last a few years, like the one we've been seeing since the late 1990s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) devoted a section of its 2013 physical science assessment to analysis of the 1998–2012 warming hiatus."
so, this is not a site biased against AGW
and they say there has been a pause in global warming
they think it will return and their reasons are worth discussing
but, first you must admit that you have been lying here for some time and that global warming has halted in the last 15 years
your credibility is already shot but you can begin the process of rehabilitation by admitting you lied
the year 1998 was the warmest year, globally, in the 20th century.
Meanwhile, in the 21st century:
"The news follows January announcements by NASA and NOAA that ranked 2013 differently among the hottest years on record, but they all add up to one thing: Earth's long-term warming trend showed no signs of stopping last year.
1) The global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.5°C (0.9°F) above the 1961-1990 average and 0.03°C (0.05°F) higher than the most recent 2001-2010 average, the WMO said.
2) Even more impressive:.... 2013 was the second-hottest year without an El Niño, the periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to warm up global temperatures.
3) “The rate of warming is not uniform but the underlying trend is undeniable," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. "Given the record amounts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, global temperatures will continue to rise for generations to come."
"Our action – or inaction – to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases will shape the state of our planet for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren," added Mr Jarraud.
4) The 21st century so far has brought 13 of the 14 warmest years on record, the WMO said. The hottest years have been 2010 and 2005 – about 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the long-term average – followed by 1998, which had one of the 20th century's strongest El Niño events.
5) In contrast with 2012, when the U.S. experienced its warmest year on record, in 2013 the warmth was most extreme in Australia, which experienced its hottest year on record (and where every month in 2013 brought a national average temperature at least 0.5°C above average).
6) Across the world's land surfaces only, the global temperature in 2013 was about 0.85°C (1.53°F) above the 1961-1990 average and about 0.06°C (0.1°F) above the 2001-2010 average – the fourth warmest on record, partly due to a very warm November-December.
Read more about 2013 temperature records at the World Meteorological Organization."
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