Here’s a happy song for all of you: Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless / And they’re always the same / A verse, then a verse, and refrain.
Open thread.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 108 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Here’s a happy song for all of you: Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless / And they’re always the same / A verse, then a verse, and refrain.
Open thread.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 184 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Mark Joseph Stern, legal correspondent at Slate, has the story. He also has a summary on twitter:
Biden agreed to name Chad Meredith, an anti-abortion advocate, to a federal court in Kentucky in exchange for McConnell’s promise that he would stop blocking Democrats’ picks for U.S. Attorney in Kentucky.
The deal hinges on Judge Karen Kaye Caldwell, a GWB nominee who agreed to take senior status *on the condition* that Biden and McConnell name a conservative to replace her. That’s why there was no public vacancy when this story first broke.
The White House was supposed to consult with @RepJohnYarmuth and @AndyBeshearKY on judicial nominees when a vacancy arose, but cut this deal with McConnell instead. Yarmuth and Beshear were blindsided because only the White House knew about the vacancy.
Caldwell submitted her move to senior status on June 22 but for unclear reasons, it first became public on Friday. I’m told she will vacate the seat only upon the confirmation of her successor. Now that the seat is open, we’ll see if the White House goes through with this.
My main reaction to this is that Caldwell should sit on the bench until she dries up and blows away, and I hope her hemorrhoids give her daily pain during her extended time in service. Judges already think they’re God — hopefully we can make an example of one who’s trying to manipulate the appointment process this baldly. Also, mandatory retirement age for all judges (including the Supremes) would be a good thing.
The whole story is worth reading because it has a lot of the nuance of the whole issue of judicial appointments.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 327 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Ruben Gallego is a Democrat from Arizona and this is how he reacted this morning to some bad messaging:
Some follow ups from RG:
Then he went after a Republican rep who was using the “Liberal World Order” in the ways that you would expect. The he kept hitting Republicans on choice.
Was this bad or good on his part? Personally, I don’t really have a problem with a party that calls out bad messaging and asks for better. Also, I think Gallego is someone to watch who has a future in the party.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 49 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Some good news from my neck of the woods:
A controversial bitcoin mining operation on the largest of central New York’s Finger Lakes does not meet the requirements of state climate laws, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation ruled Thursday, denying an air permit request the entity’s owner, Greenidge Generation LLC., made in March 2021.
The Finger Lakes are a stunningly beautiful wine producing region in Central/Western New York. Greenidge has a natural gas power plant there, which was supposed to be used for peak power generation (mainly in the Summer). Instead, they installed a Bitcoin mining operation there. Of course they should be shut down, and it finally happened. New York doesn’t need to pollute itself so cryptobros can get rich.
This ruling is especially important in New York, where some Democrats who should know better are Bitcoin-curious, mainly because Wall Street wants to get in on the shitcoin action. The most famous example is New York Mayor Eric Adams, but Kirsten Gillibrand is also in the mix. She and Wyoming’s dumbest Republican, Cynthia Lummis, have teamed up to push legislation “regulating” the crypto industry by basically giving it everything it wants. I’ll be writing to Gillibrand to tell her to drop this shitcoin nonsense, and I suggest that all New Yorkers call or write her office, too.
In some good New York news, Kathy Hochul won Tuesday’s primary and will be elected Governor this Fall, after replacing Andrew Cuomo last year.
I’m Sure the Christofascist Supremes Will Reverse This Next TermPost + Comments (49)
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Civil Rights, Commentary, Open Threads, Proud To Be A Democrat!, The War On Women, Women's Rights
The Supreme Court's overruling of 50 years of rights was the most arrogant misreading of history and law that you could ever find. https://t.co/kkVXP9Ujj0
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 30, 2022
Women’s Rights Are Human Rights Open Thread: If Only We’d Listened…Post + Comments (164)
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Open Threads
The federal government spends almost a trillion dollars per year on non-elderly healthcare. The Congressional Budget Office released a new report that breaks this spending down for 2022 and projects what it will look like in 2032.
The big story is that the tax exclusion for employer sponsored health insurance is big and growing as a percentage of GDP. These tax expenditures are regressive as higher income folks get bigger tax breaks and likely contributes to increasing medical cost spend growth as this segment of the US healthcare ecosystem has the worst ability to actually negotiate prices.
It is also a nasty political problem to control or reduce. The ACA attempted to slow the growth of this tax expenditure by the Cadillac tax. The Cadillac tax was an excise tax on the increment of premiums that were above a fairly high threshold. The objective was to shift people out of super broad network plans that had no incentive or means to say no, into plans that would at least occassionally say no. The target plans were often the $40,000 per year Goldman Sachs paid for senior executive health insurance in 2009. It also would have hit union plans pretty hard.
It failed. No one, besides a few health and tax economists, loved the policy. Congress kept on voting to extend the start date before finally killing it.
The GOP has the idea of ICHRA, individual contribution health savings accounts, that will sort of chip away at the value of this exclusion by the creation of an annual defined contribution lump sum payment that will encourage people to buy cheaper plans instead of what is offered by their Human Resources Department. The CBO thinks ICHRA will be a small sliver of US health coverage with 2 million people covered in 2032.
The ESI tax exclusion is a huge subsidy to middle and upper class families that no one recognizes that they are getting right now. It distorts our labor and healthcare markets at a significant direct and likely larger indirect costs. And it is only going to get bigger over time.
Federal spending on non-Elderly healthcarePost + Comments (7)
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Biden Administration in Action, Climate Change, Commentary, Open Threads, Politics, Proud To Be A Democrat!
>> Saturday @VP to speak at @essencefest, per @AprilDRyan: https://t.co/x8oWmOUZPH
— Herbie Ziskend (@HerbieZiskend46) June 30, 2022
… Harris’ appearance will resemble that of former First Lady Michelle Obama, who attended the Essence Festival in 2019 for an intimate conversation moderated by news anchor Gayle King about her New York Times best-selling memoir, “Becoming.” The celebrity conducting the interview with the vice president has not yet been announced.
Sources close to Harris told theGrio that she personally requested to attend the largest annual gathering of Black America with a focus on Black women. The timing of the request is, in part, due to her understanding of this moment of uncertainty on various levels that impact Black women and the community.
Some of those issues of uncertainty have placed Vice order President Harris at the forefront of the administration’s fight. Harris has become the face of the White House’s battle for legal reproductive care after last week’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — which the Biden White House has said is a top priority for the administration.
As a U.S. senator and now vice president, Harris has also led on the issue of Black maternal health and has emphasized the alarming data that shows Black women are three times more likely to die during pregnancy.
The last time Vice President Harris made an appearance at Essence Festival was in 2019 when she was a Democratic presidential candidate. She was one of a number of presidential contenders who understood the magnitude of this audience and worked for a direct connection to the community in exchange for their votes…
TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Still BusyPost + Comments (92)