RETURN OF THE CVL?: Why the USN may build a few light aircraft carriers (CVLs).
Archive for 2017
February 16, 2017
MEGAN MCARDLE: A Rough 24 Hours For ObamaCare.
THE GOP’S NEXT WEAPON: Elizabeth Warren.
In Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Republicans see a next-generation liberal bogeyman they can use to trip up vulnerable Democrats running for re-election in red states.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might not have consciously elevated the Massachusetts firebrand’s national profile when he abruptly cut off her floor remarks during the heated debate over the confirmation of Jeff Sessions to serve as U.S. attorney general. But while some commentators said the Kentucky Republican erred in giving her a newly raised platform, he and other senior Republicans preparing for 2018 were pleased if that was the result.
Nearly 10 incumbent Democrats are up in states won by President Trump in November. And, Republicans view Warren — her politics and her personality — as a weapon they can use against those Democrats in the midterms.
Well, with her vinegary partisan manner, racial dishonesty, and air of unearned privilege, she’s a perfect cartoon liberal already.
THE OTHER SIDE OF OBAMACARE: Millions Excluded from Obamacare Aid, Pass on Coverage.
“It’s hard to tell people who don’t see health care needs in the year ahead that they should be paying premiums and higher deductibles to make the system work for everyone else,” says JoAnn Volk, a senior research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “But the going-in idea is that you’ll need health insurance at some point.”
To 42-year-old Tiffany, one of several people U.S. News spoke with whose last names are being withheld to protect their privacy, the costs of coverage to her and her husband this year were overwhelming: $1,221.20 per month, with an $11,700 deductible. If they were to divorce, they realized, they would qualify for cheaper coverage. Alternatively, Tiffany’s husband, who is self-employed, would need to make an extra $20,000 a year to make up the difference once medication and doctor visits are factored in.
Though the option of ending their 17-year marriage wasn’t truly on the table, to them it accentuated the lack of options they faced this year. The Columbus, Ohio-area residents already had been unhappy with the plan they bought the previous year, finding that it covered few of the services they needed. Their regular medical needs include providing medication for a daughter with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and another with mild asthma.
As a family of five making between $115,000 and $125,000 a year, they did not qualify for subsidies. And doctors in the plans available were far away.
“This year, I just cried,” Tiffany says of the moment she saw how much insurance was going to cost them. “I’m not an emotional person. I was just floored. I completely shut down because there were no options.”
Somebody needs to tell JoAnn Volk that the choice between going broke now for certain, or taking a chance on going broke later, is no choice at all.
Anyway, ObamaCare sticks it to the middle and upper-middle class because, as Willie Sutton is supposed to have said, that’s where the money is.
DEBUNKING FAKE NEWS, TEXAS EDITION: But from a supposed “Mythbuster.”
A MAJOR FAIL FOR ORGANIZED LABOR: Boeing: Union vote fails, 74 percent vote against joining IAM.
CHANGE: IRS Guts Enforcement of Obamacare Individual Mandate.
It’s a tax!
BRENDAN O’NEILL ON FEARS OF “FASCISM:”
In recent weeks, the corrosion of the meaning of fascism that Weissman and Orwell worried about has intensified to a shocking degree. We seem to be witnessing the falling apart of historical categories; the unhinging of political language from reason; a profound break between historical experience and political expression. That people can openly talk about a return of the 1930s — as if that decade were some kind of free-floating thing, an attitude, rather than a specific, grounded moment in history — shows how meaningless the idea of fascism has become. That people feel haunted by the 1930s — we’re being bruised by ‘deeply disturbing echoes of [those] dark days’, says Prince Charles — is a testament more to their own moral destabilisation, to their own experience of political disarray, than it is to any return of fascism.
This is most pronounced among the political class. It is their sensation of being under assault, of the ebbing away of their technocratic, judicial, evidence-based authority over society following the decidedly political jolts of Brexit and Trump, that has led them to resuscitate the fascism frenzy. The omnipresence of that word tells us little about a return of fascist terror, but a great deal about the political class’s own feeling of terror at recent political events. . . .
It is a fantasy to claim fascism has made a comeback. And it’s a revealing fantasy. When the political and media elites speak of fascism today, what they’re really expressing is fear. Fear of the primal, unpredictable mass of society. Fear of unchecked popular opinion. Fear of what they view as the authoritarian impulses of those outside their social, bureaucratic sphere. Fear of the latent fascism, as they see it, of the ordinary inhabitants of Nazi-darkened Europe or of Middle America, who apparently lack the moral and intellectual resources to resist demagoguery. As one columnist put it, today’s ‘fascistic style’ of politics is a creation not so much of wicked leaders, as of the dangerous masses. ‘Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you’, he says. ‘Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you.’ In short, not leaders but the led; not the state but the people. This, precisely, is who terrifies them. This, precisely, is what they mean when they say ‘fascism’. They mean you, me, ordinary people; people who have dared to say that they want to influence politics again after years of being frozen out. When they say fascism, they mean democracy.
Indeed.
BUSTED: 2 More Arrested in Killing of Kim Jong-un’s Half Brother, Malaysia Says.
The Indonesian, identified as Siti Aishah, 25, is the second woman arrested in the case. Her appearance matches the image of a woman captured in airport surveillance videos, said a statement from Khalid Abu Bakar, the inspector general of police. The police later said in a statement that Ms. Siti’s boyfriend, a 26-year-old Malaysian, had been arrested “to assist in investigations.” He was identified as Muhammad Farid Bin Jalaluddin.
In Jakarta, an official from Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry said that Ms. Siti was an Indonesian citizen. The Indonesian government has asked for access to her so that its embassy employees in Kuala Lumpur can provide legal assistance.
The arrests brought the number of people detained in the case to three. A woman arrested Wednesday was carrying a Vietnamese passport, but it remained unclear whether she was from Vietnam.
The news media in Malaysia reported that the police were looking for four male suspects, suggesting that the plot was more involved than initially indicated. It was unclear whether the Malaysian man arrested Thursday was one of the four.
Was Kim Jong-nam’s assassination so sloppily executed that it allowed half the perpetrators to be caught within days? Or was Kim’s assassination sloppily executed on purpose, in order to enhance Kim Jong-un’s reputation for being crazy-dangerous?
AN ‘AGGRESSIVE, PROACTIVE ATTACK’ TO PREVENT DISASTER AT THE OROVILLE DAM:
A swarm of trucks and helicopters dumped 1,200 tons of material per hour onto the eroded hillside that formed the dam’s emergency spillway. One quarry worked around the clock to mine boulders as heavy as 6 tons. An army of workers mixed concrete slurry to help seal the rocks in place.
“This is an aggressive, proactive attack to address the erosion,” said Bill Croyle, acting director of the state Department of Water Resources. “There’s a lot of people, a lot of equipment, a lot of materials moving around, from the ground and from the air.”
At the main spillway, a different and riskier operation was underway: Despite a large hole in the concrete chute, officials have been sending a massive amount of the swollen reservoir’s water down the chute to the Feather River in a desperate attempt to reduce the lake’s level.
The structure continued to hold Tuesday without sustaining more significant damage, officials said.
The idea is to get the reservoir’s water level low enough that it can take in rain from an upcoming series of storms without reaching capacity. If the reservoir filled up again, water would automatically flow down the emergency spillway, which on Sunday appeared to be nearing collapse, forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people downstream.
I don’t think “proactive” means what acting Department of Water Resources director Bill Croyle thinks it means. A proactive effort would have fixed the damaged spillway during the drought, when the water level was far below the danger zone.
MATTIS TO NATO ALLIES: Pay Your Fair Share.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Proposed ABA Accreditation Rule Sets Process To Determine Validity Of GRE, Other LSAT Alternatives In Law School Admissions.
WHO’S THE BOSS? Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump on Leak Concerns.
The officials’ decision to keep information from Mr. Trump underscores the deep mistrust that has developed between the intelligence community and the president over his team’s contacts with the Russian government, as well as the enmity he has shown toward U.S. spy agencies. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump accused the agencies of leaking information to undermine him.
In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said. Those sources and methods could include, for instance, the means that an agency uses to spy on a foreign government.
A White House official said: “There is nothing that leads us to believe that this is an accurate account of what is actually happening.”
A spokesman for the Office of Director of National Intelligence said: “Any suggestion that the U.S. intelligence community is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the president and his national security team is not true.”
Stay tuned.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: California Law Deans Take Bar Exam Complaints To Lawmakers; State Bar Director Admits There Is ‘No Good Answer’ For High MBE Pass Score.
SHOOTING THE MESSENGER: Calif. Student Suspended for Taping Prof’s Anti-Trump ‘Act of Terrorism’ Rant.
EIGHT YEARS AGO, ON INSTAPUNDIT:
IT SEEMS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD TO ME: Carlos Slim, who pumped $250 million into the NY Times last month, is profiled today in the paper as a Mexican telecom billionaire with a “complex relationship to the news media.”
Well, nothing’s changed there.
I WAS ONE OF THEIR LOYAL READERS: Back when I wasn’t out of the political closet, I read them assiduously. Now Connie du Toit is gone, and due to the nature of her final illness, Kim du Toit is left with a mountain of bills and a life to rebuild… without the love or his life. Bloggers don’t have insurance. We just have each other, and our readers. Surviving Life Without Connie
END PRIVILEGE SHAMING: The Return of the Privilege Police.
IF YOU ARE A MODEL WITH A PERFECT BODY, YOU SHOULDN’T BE ASHAMED, BECAUSE… WHAT? Christie Brinkley’s Bikini Feminism.
MEH. YOUR MILLEAGE MAY VARY:Why Thomas Hardy, Not Jane Austen, Is a Better Guide to Love.
REFUTING THE NARRATIVE: Poll: Hispanics back Trump deportations, ending ‘sanctuary cities’.
TOO LATE! THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS ALREADY REVOLTING: How Rex Tillerson can head off a revolt at State.