White teen in BMW hits three cars, assaults cop in Pennsylvania and doesn’t get shot
By David Ferguson Saturday, September 6, 2014
A 19-year-old former high school field hockey star plowed her BMW into three cars, left the scene of the accidents and kicked a police officer in the head before being apprehended in Bensalem, Pennsylvania on Thursday morning.
According to WPVI Channel 6, Sarah Culhane from Princeton, New Jersey was arrested after 3 reported hit-and-run accidents and after she assaulted an officer who was trying to arrest her.
Bensalem police were called to the scene of an accident around 9:30 a.m. Thursday and arrived in time to see the blue BMW at fault in the crash take off from the scene. Police pursued the vehicle, but called off the pursuit to avoid a high speed chase.
Alan: In many U.S. police departments, it is standard operating procedure to "call off pursuit to avoid a high speed chase." It would be wise to codify "call off orders" for all manner of minor offenses which look like they're "getting out of hand." Let's not forget: The "crime" which eventually resulted in Michael Brown's body taking six police bullets -- the second last one in the head and only then the sixth fatal bullet -- was "jaywalking."
The BMW struck a second vehicle at an intersection, injuring one woman, then drove away again from the scene before striking a third vehicle and coming to a rest.
Police said that Culhane bolted from her car and ran from police.
Culhane and the injured woman were both taken to St. Mary’s Medical Center in Bensalem to be treated for their injuries.
Bail for Culhane was set at $750,000, which she was unable to meet. She is currently being held at Bucks County Jail on charges of aggravated assault, accidents involving injury, resisting arrest, red light violation, driving at unsafe speed and reckless driving.
Culhane was the breakout star of her high school field hockey team and currently attends Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Barack HUSSEIN Obama, a Rockefeller Republican politically situated to the right of Richard Nixon, is hallucinated to be a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist, anti-American, job-killing quisling, whose Anti-Christ goal is to surrender the United States to aOne World Governmentheaded by Arab sheikhs. The conservatives who think these things also think they are normal and adamantly deny all charges of racism. "Republican Party Is Full Of Racists," Colin Powell's White Chief Of Staff http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/10/republican-party-is-full-of-racists.html ***
"Non-Racist" Gringos Cheer Black Man Who Would "Ventilate Black Asses With M16s"
President Obama speaks at a press conference during the second day of the NATO 2014 Summit at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, South Wales, on Sept. 5
***
"Obama's Benghazi, Reagan's Beirut And America's Loss Of Perspective-Proportion-Balance"
At a recent fundraising event, President Obama suggested we should all calm down about global security threats: “The world has always been messy. In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.” Despite the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, he said, “I promise you things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago, or 30 years ago. This is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.”
You might be a little confused by this message from the commander-in-chief. After all, some of his deputies have framed the state of the planet a little differently. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested America was in “a very complex, dangerous world,” and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey intoned that “the number and kinds of threats we face have increased significantly.” Just a few weeks ago, Nancy Lindborg, an assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, argued that “we are probably at a near-historic level of humanitarian need right now.”
As it turns out, both the president and Lindborg are broadly right: Despite the implosion of the Middle East over the past two years, the U.S. is still in a far better national security situation than it was 25 years ago. At the same time, the demand for American humanitarian assistance may never have been higher—in part because the end of the Cold War means aid can be mobilized to help in more places. And that suggests a logical response: Shift our global efforts, and related budgets, away from using military tools and toward humanitarian ones.
Compare the challenges of today with those of 1989, a quarter-century ago. For all of the jubilation of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was still a unified country. Iran and Iraq were less than a year out from one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 60 years. Saddam Hussein was a year away from invading Kuwait, the trigger for the Persian Gulf War. The unwinding of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan signaled the start of that country’s civil war. U.S. troops invaded Panama, and ongoing civil wars occupied countries including Angola, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. The Shining Path was fomenting terror in Peru, while the Medellín cartel was on a rampage. And the Chinese army fired upon its own citizens, massacring thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Nobody at the time thought the world was in a period free of international strife, and many would probably have swapped 2014’s challenges for their own.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may boast that his tanks could occupy Ukraine’s capital of Kiev in two weeks if he wanted—but he’s not following through on that threat. In 1956 the Soviet army invaded Hungary and occupied the capital Budapest, with no pretense and little restraint. Sixty years later, the Russian army is tiptoeing across a border 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) to the east, declaring all the while it isn’t even doing that.
Putin leads a country that has a gross domestic product of just more than $2 trillion—that’s about the same as Italy’s. Russia’s military expenditure in 2012, at $91 billion, compares with a combined expenditure of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. of more than $200 billion—or with the U.S. at $682 billion.
And there’s no successor to the Soviet Union in terms of an armed threat to the West. Back in the heyday of the Cold War, the Pentagon used to publish Soviet Military Power, a glossy pamphlet designed to demonstrate the country’s overwhelming conventional superiority against NATO and scare up some more dollars for new cruise missiles along the way. The tradition has yet to be revived with a Chinese Military Power, perhaps because it would be risible to suggest that the country possesses anything more than the ability to project power in its home region. China’s military spending is less than a quarter of the U.S.’s.
Regarding weapons of mass destruction, the risk of accidental nuclear war during the Cold War was constant—and we frequently came very close. In 1989 there were58,336 (PDF) nuclear warheads stockpiled worldwide, compared with only 10,215 warheads today. Not that the remaining weapons would be insufficient to pulverize the planet, but the declining numbers are a symbol of a broader de-escalation of the threat. With U.S. assistance, Russia has concentrated its stockpile of weapons in fewer locations that are better protected, for example. And only four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Russia, and France) actually keep warheads on missiles or at bases with operational launchers.
It’s true that India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear weapons club since the Cold War (bringing total membership to eight), North Korea has tested devices, and Iran will perhaps restart its weapons program if international talks fail. This may have marginally increased the overall threat of a nuclear device being detonated in anger even while the risk of total global thermonuclear annihilation has declined.
On the other hand, a series of three Nuclear Security Summits over the last four years have brokered agreements on reducing stocks of fissile material, improving the security of nuclear installations, and strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency and international oversight capacity. And there’s simply no evidence that any terrorist group has come close to stealing or constructing an atomic bomb.
We know that children raised by two parents tend to be more successful — at school, in the future labor market, in their own marriages — than children raised by a single mom or dad. And from this fact, it might seem easy to conclude that marriage wields some outsized power over a child's life — that its absence creates unstable homes and chaotic families, while its presence nurtures them.
In reality, though, the question of why children of married parents are more likely to thrive is an extraordinarily complicated one. From a new analysis by Kimberly Howard and Richard V. Reeves at the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution:
Is it simply because they have, on average, higher family incomes? (Two earners are better than one, and one household is cheaper to run than two.) Or are two committed spouses better able to provide consistent parenting? Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?
Parents who marry differ from parents who don't in many ways beyond the marriage itself. Today, better-educated, higher-income adults are much more likely to marry. That means their children benefit from the marriage,and the income, and the education of their parents. Howard and Reeves also point out that the same skills that make marriages work (like commitment and patience) also come handy for good parenting. And so perhaps it's not that children are better off when their parents marry — it's that the qualities that enable successful marriages also make good parents.
Among all of these factors, it's not easy to tease out what matters most. But the answers (as best as we can identify them) are crucial for public policy. If we believe that marriage itself is what matters for children, then we'd want to encourage parents to marry. If we believe it's the financial stability that matters, then we'd want to find ways to bolster the income of single parents outside of marriage. If we believe it's the good parenting skills so often present in married households that make the difference, we could try to instill those skills in parents regardless of whether they have spouses.
In their analysis, Reeves and Howard offer a large part of the answer. By their calculation, children whose mothers are continuously married grow up to make higher incomes at age 40 than children raised at some point by single parents. The difference amounts to about 14 percentiles in adult income rank (children with married parents grow up to make, at age 40, in the 57th income percentile, compared to the 43rd). How much of that difference might be attributable to factors other than — and perhaps obscured by — the marital status of their mothers?
Their analysis uses a model based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. When they controlled for the income differences of married and single-parent households, the age-40 income gap shrank by 5 percentiles:
Reeves and Howard
Two-parent households don't just tend to have more money (which they might spend on tutors, museums, books or simply better health care and groceries). They also have more time (which they might spend on homework help, library visits and bedtime reading). Add the time factor to the parenting qualities I mentioned earlier (patience, commitment), and it's possible that part of the marriage effect is really a "parenting effect": Children with married parents also have more engaged parents, and it's the engagement that really matters.
When Reeves and Howard controlled for a measure of parenting based on home observation and self-reported behavior, that 14-percentile difference shrank even more dramatically, to 7.5 percentiles. "Parenting" here covers activities like regularly reading or eating meals with children.
Reeves and Howard
When Reeves and Howard controlled for parenting and income at the same time, along with a few other characteristics like race and the age of the mother, that 14 percentile difference shrinks down to a little more than four percentiles. Reeves is confident the gap would shrink even further if researchers had reliable data to account for other factors, like the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods where children grow up, or the quality of schools they attend. At the end of the day, marriage itself might still have some effect on the adult outcomes of children. But it would be a small one.
Parenting skills and income levels are no doubt closely related, so we can't simply add the two effects together in the above analysis. But it's clear here that parenting skills and income levels drive much of the difference we often more simply attribute to marriage itself.
"Those two factors taken together explain most of the better outcomes for the children of married couples," Reeves says. "Not all. But most. And I think the takeaway here is not to mistake a commitment device – which marriage is – for an explanatory device."
Making single parents get married, in other words, won't fundamentally change the other characteristics about them that really drive their children's success. The good news in this is that family income and parenting skills are more realistically addressed through public policy than marriage anyway.
Emily Badger is a reporter for Wonkblog covering urban policy. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities.
Tim Arango, The New York Times’s Baghdad bureau chief since 2010, answered questions on the popular “Ask Me Anything” section of the social site Reddit. Mr. Arango’s recent coverage has focused on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as the Sunni militant group has seized territory across the region. He reported last week on the only known survivor of anISIS massacre that took place in June.
Following are excerprts from the Reddit discussion, condensed and edited.
Q. What will it actually take to restore Iraq to a suitable state again? — FLaty
That is going to be a long project. It’s going to take peace in Syria, and within Iraq the first step is for Sunnis to push out ISIS from their communities. But more importantly, Iraq, if it is ever to achieve peace and prosperity, will need a serious reconciliation effort. There may be no more traumatized society in the world than Iraq, and it goes back decades. Iraqis will need to learn to forgive one another for the past if they are ever to move on.
Q. Do you think America’s influence in Iraq was negative? — Frajer
Yes, there is no other way to see it. Everything that is occurring in Iraq today is related to the American legacy there. The forerunner of ISIS was created to oppose the American occupation, and many of its leaders were in American detention facilities in Iraq. On the other side of the ledger, as it pertains to Iraqi politics, you see the American legacy. The U.S. basically chose Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose sectarian politics alienated many Sunnis, creating the fertile ground for ISIS to sweep into these areas. And many of those Maliki policies that have pushed aside the Sunnis were started by the Americans. Excluding Sunnis from political life? That has its origins in the American de-Baathification policy. Mr. Maliki’s security policy of conducting mass arrests of Sunni men in the name of fighting terrorism? The U.S. did that too. So at every turn in the Iraq story now, you see the American legacy at play.
Q. How has the current crisis affected American influence in Iraq? Is there a greater willingness now by the major Shiite parties to work with the U.S., compared to the time of the U.S. withdrawal? — matt_bp
The influence of the United States declined dramatically after the American troops left in 2011. The Iraqis were largely happy to see them go — even as they worried about what might happen without U.S. troops in the country — and the Obama administration turned its attention away from Iraq. Now, U.S. influence is stronger, because the Shia leaders see ISIS as an existential threat and they want U.S. military support. But there has always been a huge undercurrent of mistrust among the Shia toward the Americans, even though the invasion upended the old social order and put the Shia in power. This stems from the 1991 Shiite uprising after the first Gulf War, when the Americans encouraged the Iraqi Shia to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then stood by as they were slaughtered. The Shia still talk about this, and still blame the Americans.
Q. How do you rate the Obama administration’s actions in Iraq?— eragon38
It’s not my job to rate the Obama administration’s actions in Iraq. But I will tell you that after 2011, the administration basically ignored the country. And when officials spoke about what was happening there, they were often ignorant of the reality. They did not want to see what was really happening because it conflicted with their narrative that they left Iraq in reasonably good shape. In 2012, as violence was escalating, I wrote a story, citing U.N. statistics, that showed how civilian deaths from attacks were rising. Tony Blinken, who was then Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s national security guy, pushed back, even wrote a letter to the editor saying that violence was near historic lows. That was not true. Even after Falluja fell to ISIS at the end of last year, the administration would push back on stories about Mr. Maliki’s sectarian tendencies, saying they didn’t see it that way. So there was a concerted effort by the administration to not acknowledge the obvious until it became so apparent — with the fall of Mosul — that Iraq was collapsing.
Q. Could you describe the daily dynamic of The Times’s Baghdad bureau? How many other reporters are working alongside you? You spend more time in the office or out in the field? — badbatteries
For most of the last two years — until Mosul fell in June — I was the last guy covering Iraq for us, and I would go there intermittently. Now there are others coming in, and it is great to have the company. We go out quite a bit, whenever we need to, or sometimes just to go antique shopping. We usually have someone watching the daily news and others are working on enterprise stories. We try to make time for some Ping-Pong and chess everyday, too.
Q. As a reporter, do you think your safety in Iraq or how you cover the country has changed since 2010? — journo15
It has changed a great deal. When I first arrived in 2010 the entire country was open to me. I could — and did — go to Falluja for lunch on a whim. Now most of the country is off-limits. We can be in Baghdad, the south and the Kurdish region in the north. Just about everything else is a no-go.
Q. Did you or Adam B. Ellick, the videographer, talk to Ali about the risks involved in showing his face in the ISIS massacre video? How and why did he make the decision? — rebellicfish
ISIS massacred hundreds of Iraqi military recruits in June. Ali Hussein Kadhim survived. This is his improbable story. [Includes graphic images.]
Video CreditBy Mike Shum, Greg Campbell, Adam B. Ellick and Mona El-Naggar on Publish DateSeptember 3, 2014. Image CreditBryan Denton for The New York Times
Ali wanted to tell his story because he wanted the world to hear what happened to him, and more importantly what happened to his fellow soldiers. By the time we spoke to him, he had already appeared on a local television channel, so his decision had been made.
Background on ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Video CreditBy Christian Roman on Publish DateJune 30, 2014. Image CreditReuters
Q. Can you tell us more about how you found the lone survivor of the ISIS massacre? — tklapheke
We have a network of stringers around the country that we keep in touch with on a daily basis, and this came from one of our guys in southern Iraq.
Q. What is ISIS’s relation to the rebellion in Syria? — niqdisaster
The forerunner of ISIS was Al Qaeda in Iraq, but it was severely diminished after the American troop surge of 2007 and the Awakening, which was an American-led program in which insurgents were paid off to switch sides. After the Americans left Iraq, the group continued to target Iraqi Shia with almost daily attacks. And then, it saw an opportunity in the chaos of the civil war in Syria. That is what allowed the group to flourish and sweep back into Iraq in such a dramatic way this summer.
Q. Is it plausible that ISIS fighters had crossed the Syrian border to take Mosul in large convoys without being detected by Western intelligence in the region? — Imagineallthepeeps
In the days before Mosul fell, there was plenty of intelligence that suggested an imminent ISIS assault on the city. It was passed on by the Americans and the Kurds to the Iraqi government, but was largely ignored until it was too late.
Q. Is the U.S. in danger of “losing” the Kurds? — bzjaffe
The U.S. remains a strong partner with the Kurds. It was partly the threat by ISIS to the Kurdish capital of Erbil that got the American airstrikes started. And the Americans have been funneling weapons to the Kurds, and it looks like the strategy going forward will be to provide more training to the Kurds. So the U.S.-Kurdish relationship seems intact to me.
Q. Could this ISIS business actually turn out to be a good thing for the U.S. in that it allows/requires us to work/cooperate with elements in the Middle East that tend to be hostile to our presence? — LicensedFaptician
I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but it is certainly bringing together countries that have long had antagonistic relationships to confront the common threat of ISIS. The U.S. and Iran are the best examples. While they say they are not coordinating, the U.S. has been bombing from above while Iranian-backed Shiite militias, which a few years ago were killing American soldiers, have been doing the fighting on the ground, for the same cause.
Q. Can you give us a feel for what the general reaction is to ISIS among average Sunni and Shia Iraqi people?— limbodog
The Shia are horrified. Most Sunnis, too, although initially in places like Mosul, Sunnis were happy to see the Iraqi Army leave. But over time, ISIS is likely to alienate local communities with its harsh rule.
Many groups, including both the youngest and oldest families and those without a college education, saw steep income declines even after an economic recovery had begun.
Percent change in median pretax family income, inflation–adjusted, 2010–2013
Top 20 percent by income
College degree
Bottom 20 percent by income
All families
High school diploma only
Young families1
Seniors2
4.3
1.1
-3.5
-4.7
-5.6
-6.1
-8.7
How Are American Families Doing?
A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being
How are we doing?
That is the question that reverberates in every report of the latest economic data. It’s the one that nags Americans as they head to the voting booth. It’s the question that sets our national mood. A new report provides the most exhaustive look at how Americans’ personal finances are faring — and sheds light on why the soaring stock market and occasionally giddy headlines have rarely translated into mass contentment with the economy.
Every three years, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances interviews thousands of American families (6,026 for the newly published 2013 edition) about their income, savings, investments and debts. It is some of the richest information available about Americans’ financial lives, particularly in the 2010 to 2013 period of halting, inconsistent recovery from the Great Recession.
So how are we doing?
No recovery in incomes for most groups
The most basic measure of financial well-being is how much money people make and how much that money can buy. Many measures, such as per capita personal income, have risen in recent years, even after adjusting for inflation.
But this survey gives us a richer view of how incomes of people in different groups were affected. It is rather depressing.
Incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.
Many groups, including both the youngest and oldest families and those without a college education, saw steep income declines even after an economic recovery had begun.
Percent change in median pretax family income, inflation–adjusted, 2010–2013
Top 20 percent by income
College degree
Bottom 20 percent by income
All families
High school diploma only
Young families1
Seniors2
4.3
1.1
-3.5
-4.7
-5.6
-6.1
-8.7
Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.
This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.
Wages have fallen as a proportion of income
The survey’s breakdown of where household income is coming from helps explain why this is happening.
Most Americans, particularly those in the middle- and lower-income brackets, derive most of their income from wages and salaries, not from investment income. In the wealthiest 25 percent of households, only 47 percent of their income comes from wages, compared with 70 to 80 percent for the lower three brackets.
Wages have been under pressure for the last several years, as high unemployment has held back the ability of workers to demand raises. Meanwhile, a rise in asset prices for everything from stocks to real estate has meant that those with investments have greater opportunities to sell those assets for capital gains. And while the wealthiest 25 percent receive a meaningful chunk of their income from capital gains, the bottom 75 percent receive a trivial amount.
It isn’t a huge surprise that wages and salaries have fallen as a share of total household income, to 62 percent in 2013 from 68 percent in 2010. Capital gains income rose from 1 percent to 5 percent.
And that goes a long way to explaining the disparate trends in total income among different groups.
Wealth has been stagnant despite markets’ recovery
Income matters, but so does wealth. And here you would expect most everybody to be better off in 2013 than they were three years earlier. After all, the stock market and housing prices both experienced strong increases.
Not quite. The gains in the stock market did not translate into greater wealth for most American families. The median American household was worth $81,200 in 2013, down from $82,800 in 2010 and way down from the $135,400 of 2007. (Those numbers are all inflation-adjusted, using 2013 dollars).
Change of percentage of households owning stocks (either directly or indirectly) by income bracket, from 2007 to 2013.
Bottom 20 percent
Lower middle income
Middle income
Upper middle income
80th to 90th percentile
Top 10 percent
-3%
-10%
-3%
-4%
-5%
+2%
Unlike incomes, a falling net worth is something that the wealthy and the rest of us can complain about together: The top 10 percent, as measured by either income or wealth, also had a slightly lower inflation-adjusted net worth in 2013 than in 2010, and both were still far below 2007 levels.
The housing crash and financial crisis walloped the American household’s finances, in other words, and as of last year there had been no recovery despite surging financial markets.
The data contain answers as to why. The sell-off in the stock market in 2008 and 2009 was truly jaw-dropping. And it appears that many Americans — particularly middle-income Americans — decided investing in stocks just wasn’t for them.
Among people in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution, only 9.2 percent owned stocks in 2013, down from 14 percent in 2007. They also have eschewed retirement accounts, the most common vehicle for long-term investment; only 51 percent of middle-income families had a 401(k) or similar account in 2013, down from 56 percent in 2007.
Among all Americans, the proportion owning stocks in some form, either directly or indirectly (via mutual funds or retirement accounts) has fallen from 53 percent before the crisis in 2007 to 49 percent in 2013. The financial crisis appears to have scared Americans, especially middle-income Americans, away from financial investments, which means they have benefited less from the recovery than they otherwise would have.
But there’s been progress reducing debt
Net worth has two components: assets and liabilities. While the news is gloomy on the asset side of Americans’ household balance sheets, things look rather better on the liabilities side. There has been major progress in reducing both the size of Americans’ debts and how much they must pay relative to their incomes to service them.
Among middle-income families, the proportion with mortgage debt on their primary residences fell from 50.5 percent in 2007 to under 40 percent in 2013. Of those in that income bracket who had a home mortgage, the median balance fell 15 percent to $84,800 from $99,600.
Other forms of debt were also paid down. The proportion of families with credit card balances fell from 46 percent in 2007 to 38 percent in 2013.
Meanwhile, the combination of low interest rate policies from the Fed and Americans’ work to reduce debts is having major benefits in terms of decreasing the share of incomes that goes into paying debt. For all families, debt service payment is the lowest share of income it has been in any survey going back to 1989.
For those key middle-income consumers, debt service isn’t the lowest on record, but it has still fallen from nearly 20 percent of income in 2007 to 16 percent today. It may not sound like much, but spending 4 percent less of income to service mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and other debts leaves noticeably more for everything else.
Progress, but frustration
Add it all up, and how are Americans doing? The progress in reducing debt burdens is good news, and it leaves Americans less vulnerable to shocks. But as long as incomes are not rising for most Americans and the booming market is not widely enjoyed, there’s little reason to expect people to be happy with the results they’re getting.
How and why other countries spend less on health care than we do. "We spend far more than other countries on everything from hospital stays to MRIs to prescriptions to end-of-life care. It’s also the case that private-sector spending makes up a much larger share of health spending here than it does in other advanced economies....The U.S. position in the figure — highest on health spending/GDP; lowest on public share —presents us with the very picture of an outlier. Correlation not being causation, you are within your rights to argue that this doesn’t prove that more private sector means less efficient health care. It could be that people here demand more health care than in those other economies." Jared Bernstein in The Washington Post
Key priority of Burwell: Improving HealthCare.gov, sans the politics. "Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said Monday in her first major speech that she wanted to move beyond the politics of health care and work with members of both parties to improve the management and operation of HealthCare.gov, the website used by millions of people to sign up for insurance coverage....Ms. Burwell said she wanted to shift the conversation to areas of potential agreement. Polls consistently show that the public remains more negative than positive on the Affordable Care Act, but that Americans want Congress to improve the law rather than to repeal it." Robert Pear in The New York Times.
Explainer: Challenges ahead for Obamacare in its second year. Elise Viebeck in The Hill.
HHS spends $60M to help people navigate marketplaces in second enrollment season. "The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) divided the money between 90 organizations that will provide in-person assistance to people shopping for health plans....The awards span community non-profits, universities, tribal groups and charities in 34 states. At least two Planned Parenthood affiliates were included.. Elise Viebeck inThe Hill.
Rural enrollment could pose continuing challenge. "Americans living in rural areas will be a key target as states and nonprofit groups strategize how to enroll more people in health law insurance plans this fall. Though millions of people signed up for private insurance or Medicaid in the first year of the Affordable Care Act, millions of others did not. Many live in rural areas where people 'face more barriers,' said Laurie Martin, a RAND Corp. senior policy researcher....Distance is one problem....But the most significant barriers may stem directly from state decisions about whether to expand Medicaid eligibility — more than 20 states chose not to — and whether to operate their own health exchanges." Shefali Luthra in Kaiser Health News.
Narrow-network ACA plans aren't so bad after all, research suggests. "Health economists actually tend to be quite fond of these products, as they help hold down spending. The potential for savings is big: limited choice plans can reduce patient spending by as much as a third, new research from economists Jon Gruber and Robin McKnight finds. Using a natural experiment from Massachusetts, Gruber and McKnight find that patients who switched to narrow network plans had access to a smaller set of equally good hospitals. They used more primary care but went to the emergency room less. And these patients, along with their employers, ended up saving a whole bunch of money." Sarah Kliff in Vox.
Obamacare has let young people stay on parents' plans longer, but studies question overall benefits. "As expected, it increased the rate of health insurance among young adults....But the provision didn't change whether the age group perceived themselves as healthier or whether they thought health care was any more affordable, according to a new study in JAMA Pediatrics....In another study out today, Stanford University researchers...analyzing 2011 data from California, Florida and New York hospitals, the researchers found that the under-26 group had 2.7 fewer ER visits per 1,000 people than the older group." Jason Millman in The Washington Post.
And another study finds Medicaid expansion boosting ER visits overall. "Many people newly insured by Medicaid under the federal health care law are seeking treatment in hospital emergency rooms, one of the most expensive medical settings, a study released Monday concludes....It also found indications that newly insured Medicaid patients admitted to hospitals may be sicker than patients previously covered under the same program, which serves more than 60 million low-income and disabled people. The findings have implications for federal and state policymakers managing the coverage expansion under President Barack Obama's health care law." Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in the Associated Press.
McAuliffe retreats on Medicaid expansion in Virginia, puts forth modest expansion. "Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia took only modest steps on Monday to extend health care to the poor and disabled....Mr. McAuliffe, who in June ordered his cabinet to devise a plan for unilateral action by Sept. 1...announced that only 25,000 uninsured Virginians would be receiving coverage, far fewer than the 400,000 he has said are eligible if the state expands Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The retreat seemed Mr. McAuliffe’s acceptance that he is politically hemmed in, especially after Republicans took control of both houses of the General Assembly following the surprise resignation of a Democratic senator in June." Trip Gabriel in The New York Times.
KLEIN: GOP governors' cave-in on Medicaid expansion is short-sighted. "In reality, under Obamacare, the federal government only fully pays for the Medicaid expansion through 2016. After that point, states will have to start paying for a portion of the expansion, eventually covering 10 percent of its cost. Though that doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s worth keeping in mind that Medicaid is already a major burden on state budgets....Twenty-one states are 'not moving forward at this time' with Medicaid expansion, according to a tally by the Kaiser Family Foundation. If their governors and lawmakers resist the pressure of hospital lobbyists and withstand liberals’ public shaming campaign, they will be doing a service to future generations." Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner.
September 8, 2014 When two environmental activists used a lobster boat to block a shipment of coal to a power plant, they planned to cite the urgency of climate change to justify their actions if the case went to trial.
As it turns out, a Massachusetts county was one step ahead of them. Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter announced Monday that he had reached a deal to dismiss or downgrade the charges against the two activists because of the need to address climate pollution.
"Climate change is one of the gravest crisis [sic] our planet has ever faced," Sutter said in a statement. "In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been sorely lacking. I am heartened that we were able to forge an agreement that both parties were pleased with and that appeared to satisfy the police and those here in sympathy with the individuals who were charged."
Ken Ward and Jay O'Hara had faced four charges following their May 2013 blockade, during which they anchored a lobster boat in the path of a freighter delivering 40,000 tons of coal to the Brayton Point power plant in Massachusetts, delaying the shipment for a day. Ward and O'Hara—who bedecked their boat with a banner reading "#coalisstupid" and another with the logo of the green group 350.org—said the blockade was meant to show that bold action was needed to combat climate change.
The two also prepared a novel defense for their trial: They didn't dispute the facts of their blockade, but instead sought to "prove the necessity of their doing so," according to their website. They were set to argue that the "urgency and necessity of dramatic steps to curb carbon pollution to mitigate the global climate crisis" justified their actions.
It's unclear how far the "necessity" defense would have taken them. In a piece for The Boston Globe, Harvard law student Joseph Hamilton pointed to historic examples of the defense, including the San Francisco mayor who in 1920 was found not liable for destroying several homes to combat a raging fire. Activists on issues from nuclear power to abortion had mounted the defense to mixed results in recent decades.
Massachusetts courts require that defendants prove "clear and imminent danger," that the actions "would be effective in directly reducing or eliminating the danger," and that there was "no legal alternative which would have been effective" to combat the danger.
Ward and O'Hara said that their case would have explained why "legal avenues are inadequate to address this threat" and told "a story which emboldens and energizes the climate movement."
The trial, however, is off after the county reached a deal to drop or downgrade the charges, although Ward and O'Hara will be required to pay restitution to the town of Somerset, where the coal plant is based.
In a statement, Ward said that Sutter had "in effect accepted our necessity defense," calling it a victory for the environmental movement. "Protest works, indeed protest may be the only thing that can save us," he added.
Sutter, who unsuccessfully sought a congressional seat in 2012, used the deal to position himself as tough on climate, saying that the district attorney's office would "take a leadership role on this issue."
According to a transcript, he also spoke to supporters outside the courtroom brandishing a copy of Rolling Stone with an article by Bill McKibben on climate change. (McKibben, a Middlebury College professor and environmental activist, had been scheduled to testify at the trial.) Sutter said that he would join environmentalists at the People's Climate March this month in New York City coinciding with a United Nations climate summit.
Hardly a bastion of liberal thought, a Forbes magazine article says Obama not only outperformed conservative hero Reagan, but also has reduced the national debt. Here's the last paragraph of the article:
Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories. Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.” Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.
Alan: The worst torture photos have been "sealed" by federal court order.
And you can bet it's the same reason the Senate report on Torture hasn't yet been released. The CIA far exceeded their own definition of 'waterboarding' with at least two or more high-profile detainees, and they don't want the American People to know it. Sadly, as it stands, we'll probably never know how many others were subject to this type of despicable torture as well.
The CIA brought top al-Qaeda suspects close “to the point of death” by drowning them in water-filled baths during interrogation sessions in the years that followed the September 11 attacks, a security source has told The Telegraph.
The description of the torture meted out to at least two leading al-Qaeda suspects, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, far exceeds the conventional understanding of waterboarding, or “simulated drowning” so far admitted by the CIA.
“They weren’t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth,” said the source who has first-hand knowledge of the period. “They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.”
(emphasis mine)
The Telegraph (UK) obtained a second source for the article familiar with the Senate report who told them that it contains several "unflinching accounts" of CIA interrogations that would"... deeply shock" the American People.
Senator Dianne Feinstein herself said that the report will expose “brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation” Purportedly, the Senate report also accuses the CIA of lying and of grossly exaggerating the usefulness of torture.
An official CIA description of waterboarding in the 2004 report says that a cloth is used to cover a subject’s nose and mouth and is saturated with water for “no more than 20 seconds” before being removed. A stream of water is then “directed at the upper lip” in order to prolong “the sense of suffocation”. he However the report also admits that waterboarding was being carried in a “manner different” from that prescribed in the US military’s standard SERE training manual, but details were not revealed, beyond the frequency of the treatment, which was admitted to have broken guidelines.
Since the CIA's use of waterboarding was publicly known it only stands to reason that because of the new revelations and graphic nature of the classified 3,600 page report (of which 480 pages are to be declassified) Republicans including former officials like former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet and former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld are dead set against its release to the public.
Among the additional difficulties for investigators seeking the truth about what happened is the fact that in November 2005 the CIA destroyed some 92 video tapes of its waterboarding and interrogation of Mohammed and the others.
The agent responsible for destroying the tapes, Jose Rodriquez, was only reprimanded. He justified his actions, arguing that he worried the tapes would eventually be leaked to the media, and would provoke a backlash, endangering agents' lives.
A third source for the article, familiar with the report, said that in general, the torture techniques used by the CIA was far more brutal than widely known even in the agency.
“They got medieval on his ass, and far more so than people realise,” the source told The Telegraph referring to the treatment of Mohammed and Nashiri, but declined to provide further details because of the still-classified nature of the material.
