Like a baseball player on steroids, our atmosphere has been “juiced” with human emissions of greenhouse gases, which means we are going to be breaking heat records at an “unnatural” pace for a long, long time. Climatologist Richard Alley offers a different analogy in a column today: Humans have made some extreme weather events more…
Republican Resistance Is Holding Back Economy [graph]
Technically, we won’t hit the fiscal cliff — Washington’s preferred term for the near-simultaneous triggering of more than $600 billion tax increases and spending cuts, as well as the predicted point at which we once again hit the debt ceiling — until after the election. But the effects could be felt long before. The 2011…
Justice Department, Texas Face Off In Court Over Voter ID Law
The Justice Department and the state of Texas faced off at trial Monday over the state’s new voter identification law, which the Obama administration claims violates the federal Voting Rights Act. In opening arguments before a three-judge panel in federal district court in Washington, D.C., a lawyer for Texas argued that the photo ID requirement…
Public Opinion Snapshot: Public Says Keep or Expand Obamacare
The public’s view of the law is quite complex: Reservations co-exist with sentiment that most of the law’s changes are necessary and perhaps even need to be expanded. In the latest edition of the Kaiser Health Tracking poll, for example, 53 percent of respondents said Obamacare should either be kept as is (25 percent) or…
Florida accused of concealing worst tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years
According to the Post, the coverup began as early as last February, “when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision…
GOP To Make 31st Attempt To Repeal Obamacare Act
The House Rules Committee takes up a bill Monday called the “Repeal of Obamacare Act.” And just like it says, the bill would wipe away the president’s Affordable Care Act. A vote of the full House is planned for Wednesday. It’s the first legislative response from House Republicans after the Supreme Court upheld the law….
Congressional GOP Planning Rollback Of Individual Health Law Provisions
As the House Rules Committee schedules a hearing on the bill to repeal the full 2010 health law, Republican members and staff examine how to target individual provisions through budget reconciliation. Politico Pro: Gaming Out Repeal By Reconciliation If Mitt Romney wins the White House and Republicans take back total control of Congress in November,…
Obamacare Is Good for Medicare
The Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare this past week upholding the many benefits included in the law has brought renewed attacks on the health care reform law—even though it expands insurance access and coverage for all Americans in an affordable way. Many opponents are focusing on changes to the Medicare program that will reduce the…
The Facts on Immigration Today
The Obama administration has directed an unprecedented amount of resources to ensuring our southern border is secure and undocumented immigrants (criminal and noncriminal) are deported. In June 2012 the Department of Homeland Security announced they would allow DREAM Act-eligible youth to apply for deferred action, granting them protection against deportation and the ability to get…
Website Tests How Political Opposites Actually Discuss Differences
By now, a couple of generations of moviegoers are familiar with the disembodied voice in a cornfield that leads Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) to risk all for a baseball diamond. Web developer Pascal Rettig is not in as precarious a position as that fictional farmer, yet he has challenged himself by constructing a social stadium…
Infographic: Obamacare Is a Tax Cut for Middle-Class Families
Below is a link to a great graphic that shows what many people don’t know about Obamacare: very soon most families will be getting large tax breaks because of the law. In fact, the average family purchasing insurance through an exchange will get over $5,000 in annual tax credit. Infographic: Obamacare Is a Tax Cut…
GOP Aims to Sink Navy’s “Great Green Fleet”
Even though House conservatives fought in May to prevent the Navy from spending any money on biofuel, the service last Friday launched its “Great Green Fleet”—the first-ever US flotilla to get underway with mostly non-conventional fuel. But election-year jockeying may mean an epic battle over biofuel in Washington this fall. The fleet—technically, an aircraft carrier…
Study: Obamacare Medicaid Expansion Would Dramatically Reduce Numbers Of Uninsured In Conservative States
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted two years shows that all states would see significant reductions in their uninsured populations because of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, at almost no cost to state budgets. But the effect would be particularly dramatic in southern states with low Medicaid participation — the conservative states most likely to…
High Uninsurance In States Prepping To Stymie The Affordable Care Act
Many of the governors threatening to stymie implementation of the Affordable Care Act preside over states with high uninsurance rates, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser data breaks down each state’s population by source of insurance, and by percent uninsured. Unsurprisingly, Massachusetts has the lowest uninsurance rate in the country, thanks to…
Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project
When the New York Times ran its story on Obama’s “kill list,” showing the president poring over names of people to potentially assassinate in drone strikes, it sparked a controversy. The content of that controversy was not over this extraordinary revelation about Obama’s use of power but rather over the leaking of state secrets, which…
Democrats Lead House Ad Spending
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its allies have made their plans known early this year, plopping down millions of dollars in advertising reservations in markets across the country months before those advertisements will air. The DCCC has reserved a total of $46 million across dozens of media markets around the country for ads that…
STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage
While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an…
GOP governors say Medicaid costs are already breaking states’ backs. Are they right?
The Republican governors vowing to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion argue the program is already burdening cash-strapped state governments and would be a poison pill for state budgets in the long run. Are they right? When you look at all spending on state programs—including money from both federal and state governments—Medicaid is the single…
Republican Michigan Governor Vetoes GOP Voter Suppression Law
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) bucked his fellow Republicans on Tuesday by vetoing a voter ID law crafted by GOP members of the state legislature, the Detroit Free Press reports: Among the bills vetoed was one requiring photo ID for first voter registration or to obtain an absentee ballot, a requirement that African-American activists claimed…
Former IRS Official Demands Investigation of ALEC : Roll Call Lobbying & Influence
The former head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations division has asked the agency to revoke the tax-exempt status of the conservative nonprofit ALEC. Marcus Owens, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale, who for a decade directed the division responsible for approving organizations’ charity status, accused the American Legislative Exchange Council of illegally lobbying state lawmakers…