Enjoy yourselves
Kay wrote at Balloon Juice from 2010-15.
Since then Kay has been sharing her thoughts in the comments rather than on the front page.
Judge Posner recants the recant on voter ID
Says it was out of context. Read his explanation yourself and see what you think.
Here’s the reporter’s reaction:
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Mike SacksVerified accountâ@MikeSacksHP
Aw Judge , no @huffpostlive #LegaleseIt link? Richard Posner: I Did Not Recant My Opinion on Voter ID @tnr http://feedly.com/k/1dfgdHG
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Mike SacksVerified accountâ@MikeSacksHP
Let’s go to the tape. Cut to 9:04: http://huff.lv/GJHJS0 via @HuffPostLive #LegaleseIt!
Judge Posner recants the recant on voter IDPost + Comments (63)
Depends on where you’re standing
This is from commenter Phoenix Rising :
My wife had cancer in 1994. The small business where she worked at the time lost their insurance over it. She hasnât been insured for 19 years. The only bright spot: the indications that your leukemia is back include full-body bruising and blood coming out your ears when you floss. At least we havenât spent the decades wondering if something was lurking that regular followups might have found.
In January 2005 her mammogram showed a mass. We knew that we were going to lose everything, as the best-case outcome. My wife went outside after listening to the voicemail (left at 4:55pm on a Friday asking her to come back in Monday morning but not saying whyâŠ) and smoked her last cigarette.
By Monday weâd found the baseline film, by Wed. the radiologist that Planned Parenthood referred her to (paid by the YWCA program for uninsured women) had matched them up. The lump was scar tissue from a bee sting in childhood. She still hasnât smoked again, but that was the longest weekend of my life.
This is what it means to be uninsured: the news that your 5 year old may lose a parent in elementary school takes a backseat to âweâre going to lose the house…unless my wife dies quicklyâ.
I have melanoma, the cancer that lurks. Iâm now on a followup schedule that continues until I die of something else, or the lurking semi-solid cells that are statistically likely to be somewhere in my body hit a switch and start to multiply again.
Our business has never been big enough to offer insurance. We knew from 1994 that plans to cover fewer than 50 people wouldnât pay out or would take the premiums and run if we ever made a claim, so we didnât bother to offer the option to make Blue Cross richer in order to feel insured. Obviously this has affected recruiting at our company.
Two critical points:
-In the past 4 weeks, I have received 5 resumes from exactly the kind of people we would like to hire more of. All say theyâll be available around the 1st of the year. Demographically theyâre very different from the resumes Iâve seen over 15 years in this business. Theyâre younger and looking for fewer hours doing something they already know is hard in ways they enjoy. They can afford to leave Big Ugly Death Star Corp. because they can buy health insurance.
-I was diagnosed in Sept. 2011. Because my state had already implemented the part of the ACA that requires insurance companies to continue policies at similar rates EVEN IF the individuals on them make claimsânot something we expected, after our earlier experienceâIâm still insured.
Weâre going to buy an exchange plan that puts our family on one deductible and OOP max, for the first time ever, next week.
The technical issue we discovered with the web site was after applying: whoever coded the ‘citizenship for adopted people’ section of the eligibility database chose the wrong field type for the only way our government has to verify my kid lives here legally. So we have to talk to a manager with superpowers before we can choose among the 57 (!) options to get our family covered.
We can afford any of these plans. Fifty-seven choices. Sure, some of them aren’t appropriate for our family’s health profile (rare cancer=must have some out of network coverage; hearing aids for kid must be covered, etc.). Some of them cost more than I’d prefer to spend, once we add up the premium and deductible–which we anticipate meeting sometime in Feb. 2014, with the backlog of preventive and screening that Mrs Phoenix hasn’t had access to since before PET scans were invented.
But we get to buy insurance, in a market that has to take our money and has to pay for the health care we may need.
As a parent, a spouse and a small business owner, I would carry the Congresscritters and President who got us these solutions across a river of acid on my back to keep them.
I feel like this about community health centers, because I relied on one once for pregnancy care so I get Phoenix Rising’s devotion.
Speaking of community health centers, oh look! Hereâs a GOP supporter of community health center funding under Obamacare, but only when he’s in Kansas, not when he’s in DC:
(Moran breaking ground at an Obamacare-funded clinic in Kansas. Photo credit: Moranâs Facebook page)
Perspective
They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around.
For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday â starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours â for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.
When Remote Area Medical, the Tennessee-based organization running the event, decided to try its hand at large urban medical services, its principals thought Los Angeles would be a good place to start. But they were far from prepared for the outpouring of need. Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by dayâs end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.
The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administrationâs proposed changes to the nationâs health care system.
Texas voter ID law gets off to a great start, if the goal was to deny Latinos and women the right to vote
In a new and exciting twist on voter suppression, women voters are targeted by Texas:
Texasâs new voter ID law got off to a rocky start this week as early voting began for state constitutional amendments. The law was previously blocked as discriminatory by the federal courts under the Voting Rights Act in 2012, until the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the VRA in June. (The Department of Justice has filed suit against the law under Section 2 of the VRA.) Now we are seeing the disastrous ramifications of the Supreme Courtâs decision.
Based on Texasâ own data, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters donât have the government-issued ID needed to cast a ballot, with Hispanics 46 to 120 percent more likely than whites to lack an ID. But a much larger segment of the electorate, particularly women, will be impacted by the requirement that a voterâs ID be âsubstantially similarâ to their name on the voter registration rolls.
âWhat I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,â 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts said.
Watts has voted in every election for the last forty-nine years. The name on her driverâs license has remained the same for fifty-two years, and the address on her voter registration card or driverâs license hasnât changed in more than two decades. So imagine her surprise when she was told by voting officials that she would have to sign a âvoters affidavitâ affirming she was who she said she was.
âSomeone looked at that and said, âWell, theyâre not the same,ââ Watts said.
The difference? On the driverâs license, Judge Wattsâs maiden name is her middle name. On her voter registration, itâs her actual middle name. That was enough under the new, more strict voter fraud law, to send up a red flag.
âThis is the first time I have ever had a problem voting,â Watts said.
The disproportionate impact of the law on women voters could be a major factor in upcoming Texas elections, especially now that Wendy Davis is running for governor in 2014.
Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a âpoll taxâ); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). âA law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,â a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.
Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far.
Is anyone surprised that Texas’s law also harms women voters, in addition to all the other targeted groups? To predict where voting restrictions are going, look to whatever group might be drifting away from the GOP. Gender gap? Check!
We’ve seen a judge and a justice admit they got a voter ID case completely wrong. What are the odds the conservatives on the SCOTUS admit they got the VRA case wrong?
A fraudulent vote is an outrage, but a vote denied is a trifle
Some voters are more important than others:
Two weeks ago, Richard Posner, one of the most respected and iconoclastic federal judges in the country, startled the legal world by publicly stating that heâd made a mistake in voting to uphold a 2005 voter-ID law out of Indiana, and that if he had properly understood the abuse of such laws, the case âwould have been decided differently.â
For the past ten days, the debate over Judge Posnerâs comments has raged on, even drawing a response from a former Supreme Court justice.
Judge Posner claimed, during an Oct. 11 interview with HuffPost Live, that at the time of the ruling, he âdid not have enough information ⊠about the abuse of voter identification lawsâ to strike down the Indiana statute. But he also said the dissenting judge on the panel, Terence Evans, had gotten it ârightâ when he wrote that the law was âa not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnoutâ by certain voters who tended to vote Democratic. (It was passed on a straight party-line vote by a Republican-controlled legislature.)
Last Thursday, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens sounded several of the same notes, telling the Wall Street Journal that while he âisnât a fan of voter ID,â his own 2008 opinion upholding Judge Posnerâs ruling was correct â given the information available at the time. Incidentally, Justice David Souter dissented for roughly the same reasons as Judge Evans, and Justice Stevens now says that âas a matter of history,â Justice Souter âwas dead right.â
In other words, both the Seventh Circuit and the Supreme Court got the balance of burdens wrong, as Indiana University law professor Fran Quigley rightly noted. Given that voting is a fundamental right, Quigley wrote, âthe burden should have been on the State of Indiana to prove the law was necessary, not the challengers to prove how it would trigger abuse.â
Judge Evans put it more pungently in his 2007 dissent, saying the law was effectively using âa sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table.â
Rather than acknowledge this reality, Judge Posnerâs original opinion dismissed the importance of the votersâ claims, contending that since no election gets decided by a single vote, the âbenefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive.â
Iâve written about this twice before and some commenters (understandably angry) said that it doesnât matter what Posner (and Stevens) say now because the deed is done.
It does matter, because weâre finally reaching the heart of this dispute. The conservative view on voting never made any sense. Voting is so unimportant that it doesnât matter if people (here and there, whatever) are wrongfully disenfranchised AND so important that we need ever-increasing restrictions to âfight fraud.”
If one fraudulent vote is such an insult to the system that even the chance of that occurring justifies more and more restrictions, then one wrongfully disenfranchised voter is also vitally important and should justify protections. They canât have it both ways, and they didnât. They had it one way. Their way.
Their votes are important and canât be âdilutedâ by the rest of you riffraff and their faith in the validity of elections is central and canât be threatened even in the abstract, but your vote or your faith in the validity of elections when voters are disenfranchised? Get over it.
A fraudulent vote is an outrage, but a vote denied is a triflePost + Comments (69)
Ohio expands Medicaid to…low-wealth people
I was confident this would eventually happen, because Ohio has a lot of uninsured working class people and providers want to get paid.
Huge blow for the Tea Party in Ohio, though. They have a single issue and that issue is opposition to Obamacare. I think they should immediately shut down the state government if they haven’t done so already:
A little known budgetary panel today voted 5-2 to accept $2.56 billion in federal funds to pay for the controversial expansion of the federal-state health insurance of last resort.
Two Republicans joined the panelâs two Democrats and Gov. John Kasichâs appointed chairman to do what the 132-member General assembly would not â expand eligibility for Medicaid to some 275,000 additional Ohioans.
But the maneuver is expected to draw a legal challenge.
Mr. McGregor, a moderate Republican known to occasionally break with his caucus, voted âyes,â joining with Sen. Chris Widener (R., Springfield), Rep. Chris Redfern (D., Catawba Island), Sen. Tom Sawyer (D., Akron), and Mr. Kasich’s board chairman, Randy Cole.
Mr. McClain, whose district stretches as far north as Seneca County, joined Sen. Bill Coley (R., West Chester) in the minority.
âOur members want to seriously quicken the pace of a series of bills that relate to Medicaid reforms and improving the opportunities for low-wealth and struggling citizens to move up and off of having a need for Medicaid,â Mr. McCain said.
âLow-wealthâ? What is this new phrase? Is it a way not to give them credit for working?
Ohio expands Medicaid to…low-wealth peoplePost + Comments (43)