Reagan Solicitor General Slams Chief Justice
Roberts’ Health Care Opinion From The Left

post from ThinkProgress on 03 July 2012 01:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

One of the heroes of the fight to save the Affordable Care Act from conservatives on the Supreme Court was Charles Fried, a former Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice and former Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan. Fried did not simply condemn the legal attacks on health reform in the strongest possible terms, he was one of the few prominent Republicans who filed a brief defending the law in the Supreme Court.

In a brief post on SCOTUSBlog yesterday, the former Reagan official had harsh words for Chief Justice Roberts’ decision to include several gratuitous sops to the Tea Party in his opinion before eventually concluding that the Affordable Care Act is largely constitutional:

The fact is that not since 1937 has the Court turned down the use of the Commerce Clause as a basis for Congressional intervention in a major national economic concern ? which of course neither the Gun-Free School Zones Act nor the Violence Against Women Act were. Activity/inactivity is a new basis for limitation and has no anchor in our jurisprudence. That is why Roberts?s opinion was not conservative but radical. I have my doubts about the political and economic virtues of the ACA, but am appalled at this radically reactionary new doctrine.

Fried’s reaction to this law is exactly the right response from a conservative who objects to it. Conservatives have every right to oppose the Affordable Care Act. They likewise are free to vote in November for candidates who object to the law — but the remedy for Americans who simply disagree with a law is elections and not lawsuits which have no basis in the Constitution or longstanding precedents.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/07/03/510110/reagan-solicitor-general-slams
-chief-justice-roberts-health-care-opinion-from-the-left/

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Media Connecting The Dots On U.S. Storms, Heat
And Wildfires: ‘This Is What Global Warming Looks Like’

post from ThinkProgress on 03 July 2012 01:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

Who’s connecting the dots on the extraordinary bout of extreme weather events hitting the U.S.? No, it’s not the “liberal” media. It’s Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, the popular conservative news aggregation site.

Here’s the Drudge Report highlighting a fantastic story from the Associated Press today:

The U.S. is getting hit by a range of powerful extreme weather events this summer. Record droughts in the West and Midwest are fueling historic wildfires, putting pressure on farmers, and driving up crop prices. Extreme ?hurricane-like? storms took eastern states by surprise over the weekend, knocking out power to millions of people and leaving them sweltering in an ongoing heat wave. Across the country in June, more than 3,000 heat records were broken. That was after an off-the-charts heat wave in March where heat records blew out cold records 12-1.

With all these events occurring simultaneously, climate scientists are being more blunt than ever — and journalists are finally connecting the dots in their stories. In the last few days, we’ve seen a number of excellent pieces making the connection between these events and climate change. The latest is from Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein:

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”
“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.”
Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho ? an unusually strong, long-lived and large straight-line wind storm ? blew through Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Greenhouse gases from man-made sources are putting a lot of extra energy into the atmosphere. In fact, the radiative forcing of all the CO2 humans have dumped into the air is equal to about 1 million Hiroshima nuclear bombs per day.

Scientists often compare that extra energy to a baseball slugger on steroids. While it’s difficult to look at a specific home run and say steroids were the only reason it happened, it’s much easier to show that the drugs increased the likelihood the ball made it over the fence. The same is true for climate steroids like CO2. All that extra energy in the atmosphere increases the probability and intensity of extreme weather events, making the droughts, storms and wildfires Americans are facing this summer far more likely and far more destructive.

As NBC Washington?s Chief Meteorologist, Doug Kammerer, explained on air ?If we did not have global warming, we wouldn?t see this.?

Also helping connect the dots on these events, PBS recently featured a six-minute interview with Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Trenberth does an excellent job explaining the combination of factors that make extreme weather events more likely, finishing the interview with a blunt warning: “This is a view of the future, so watch out.”

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“I don’t think there has been anything quite like this before….the odds are changing for these to occur with…the global warming from the human influences on climate.”
“You look out the window and you see climate change in action. This is the way it gets manifested…now we’re in the peak of the heat season and now we’re going outside the realm of conditions previously experienced. And so that’s when the damage really comes extreme and we get all these wildfires, houses have been burned, tremendous damage to the environment, and maybe some other consequences to come. These are all manifestations of climate change that we expect to see more of as time goes on.”
“It’s easy to break an individual record because the weather system happens to be at that particular location. With an unchanging climate you expect that the number of highs and the number of low temperature records are about the same. And that was the case in the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s. And then by the 2000′s, we were breaking high temperature records at a ratio of 2 to 1 over cold temperature records. But this year, we’ve been breaking high temperature records at a rate of about 10 to 1. Ironically, there are still some cool spots — mainly in the Pacific Northwest and cold temperature records continue to be broken. So breaking records is not an indication of climate change, but breaking records at a rate of 10 to 1 versus the cold records, that’s a clear indication of climate change.”
“This is a view of the future, so watch out.”

It’s good to see such a broad range stories connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather. Unfortunately, it usually happens when the problem is on doorstep.

Here are more details on the heat wave from Climate Central:

The heat wave that is now extending into early July has been remarkable in its intensity and geographical scope. Consider that during just the June 25-July 1 period, 1,851 daily high temperature records were set or tied in the U.S., along with 609 record warm overnight lows. This compares to 149 record cold daily highs, and 267 record cold overnight lows during the same period.
Of these records, 157 were all-time high temperature records, and nine were all-time records for warm overnight low temperature. In fact, most of the year’s all-time high temperature records were set or tied during the ongoing heat wave.
The year-to-date has seen at least 21,969 record daily highs set or tied, and 18,180 records for warm overnight low temperature. By comparison, only 3,395 records have been set or tied for cold daily high temperature, and just 2,443 records for cold overnight low temperature. This translates to a ratio of about 7-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records.
In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record-lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that climate change increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

And here are some stunning local records via Climate Central:

Atlanta, GA: Set an all-time record of 106°F on Saturday, June 30. This beat the old record of 105°F set in 1980.
Macon, GA: Tied the all-time record of 108°F on Saturday, June 30. The old record was last observed in 1980.
St. Louis, MO: Set a monthly high temperature record of 108°F on June 28. The old record was 105°F, set in 1936.
Indianapolis, IN: Set a monthly high temperature record of 104°F on June 28. The old record was 102°F, which was last recorded in 1988.
Ft. Wayne, IN: Tied the all-time high of 106°F on June 28.
Norton Dam, Kansas: Broke the all-time high with 118°F on June 28, beating the old record of 113°F.
Dodge City, KS: Set an all-time high of 112°F, beating old record of 110°F.
Washington, DC: Set a monthly high temperature record with 104°F on June 29, beating the old record of 102 F. This was just the 10th time on record that DC has reached 104°F or higher during any month of the year.
Charlotte, NC: Tied the all-time record of 104°F on June 30.
Columbia, SC.: Set an all-time record high of 109°F, breaking the previous all-time record high of 107°F.
Nashville, TN: Set an all-time record high of 109°F, breaking the previous record of 107°F.

Mother Nature is just getting warmed up.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/03/510481/media-connecting-the-dots-on-u
s-storms-heat-and-wildfires-this-is-what-global-warming-looks-like/

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How California’s New Homeowners’ Bill
Of Rights Protects Against Wrongful Foreclosures

post from ThinkProgress on 03 July 2012 01:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

California lawmakers yesterday passed legislation that will give homeowners some of the most stringent legal protections in the nation against predatory, aggressive bank lending practices. The legislation passed both the Assembly and state Senate despite opposition from Republicans and the financial industry and is expected to be signed soon by Gov. Jerry Brown (D).

The “Homeowners’ Bill of Rights,” pushed by state Attorney General Kamala Harris (D), aims to extend to the state level many of the protections ensured by the mortgage fraud settlement between six big banks and the federal government and state attorneys general. Unlike the settlement, it will apply to all banks and lenders. California was among the states hardest-hit by the housing crisis and has been the location of some of mortgage lenders’ worst practices — a recent audit of San Francisco foreclosures found that nearly every one had legal issues of some sort.

Here is a breakdown of how the legislation will help California homeowners once it becomes law in January 2013:

“Dual-tracking” will be outlawed. The law bans banks from pursuing foreclosure while a borrower is seeking a loan modification, a process known as “dual-tracking” that led to countless foreclosures even as homeowners were attempting to stay in their homes. Modification departments at banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, for instance, often instructed homeowners to stop making payments to help enter the modification process. When borrowers followed those directions, the banks foreclosed on them anyway.
Robo-signing will be prohibited. The law also bans robo-signing, the process through which banks approved often-fraudulent foreclosure documents en masse in order to speed up the process. Under the law, lenders who file unverified documents will face fines and potential recourse from borrowers. Robo-signing, prevalent at big banks, led to fraudulent, wrongful, and mistaken foreclosures and was one of the major subjects of the federal mortgage settlement. Wells Fargo insiders said their robo-signing department was “exactly like an assembly line,” and the bank once put a junior employee it had hired from a pizza restaurant in charge of loan documentation.
Borrowers will have an easier time dealing with their banks. The new law requires the banks to assign borrowers a single point of contact when they discuss their loans. It also requires banks to explicitly approve or deny a modification, verify foreclosure documents, and provide such documentation to homeowners upon request.
Borrowers will be able to sue their banks. California homeowners will now have the right to sue banks for “significant, material” violations of the new laws, a level of recourse that has been valuable for homeowners in other states. A judge in Louisiana, for instance, awarded a homeowner $3.1 million in damages because of “reprehensible actions” from Wells Fargo, which serviced the loan.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/03/510252/california-homeowners-bill-of-
rights/

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Mississippi's Threat to Roe v. Wade

post from The American Prospect on 03 July 2012 12:54:10 PM. © The American Prospect

As Salon's Irin Carmon reports, a Republican appointed district-court judge has prevented a new statute that would force the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi to close. (The new law was necessary because, despite the best efforts of past Mississippi legislatures, one lone clinic in Jackson has managed to heroically persevere through a maze of state restrictions.) The stay is only temporary, and the issue will presumably have to be resolved by a higher appellate court, possibly ending with the Supreme Court of the United States.

Should this case make it up the appellate chain, it will provide a crucial test for Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that currently controls reproductive freedom cases. Under Casey, pre-viability abortions cannot be banned, but regulations that do not constitute an "undue burden" are permissible. The implicit premise of the compromise that upheld Roe v. Wade was that while women seeking abortions could be inconvenienced, they could not be denied their right to choose an abortion outright. In practice, however, as the case of Mississippi starkly demonstrates the "undue burden" standard has been applied so narrowly that states can use an ever-expanding variety of arbitrary restrictions to deny many women their right to choose altogether.

This case could prove an especially important landmark because the motives behind the Mississippi statute are transparent. While state regulations of abortion are almost always intended to be part of a long-term plan to ban abortion outright by pro-life interests, state legislators often try to defend abortion regulations as means not to restrict abortion, but to protect the health of women.

In the case of Mississippi, there's no pretense that these regulations are anything but attempts to make it impossible to obtain abortions in the state. The goal, according to Governor Phil Bryant, is to make Mississippi "abortion free." Should the latest set of arbitrary regulations somehow not succeed in shutting down the lone abortion clinic remaining in the state, the legislature will keep trying. The goal is to ban abortion, not to protect the health of women.

To uphold Mississippi's regulatory framework would be to effectively overrule Roe and Casey. What would happen should this case get to the Supreme Court, however, is unclear. Theoretically, there are five votes on the Supreme Court for upholding Roe v. Wade. But one of these votes, Justice Kennedy, has found only one kind of regulation (spousal notification) to be an "undue burden," and wrote an opinion upholding a federal ban on partial birth abortions rife with the sexist assumptions of anti-choice activists. The best-case scenario would probably be a lower appellate court decision holding the new law unconstitutional that the Court declines to review.

Should it get to the highest level, anything could happen, including the de facto overruling of Roe v. Wade.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/mississippis-threat-roe-v-wade

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Probation as a Revenue Scheme for Cash-Strapped
States

post from Firedoglake on 03 July 2012 12:50:43 PM. © Firedoglake

If you liked for-profit prisons pushing tougher sentencing and leading to a sharp increase in the warehousing of US citizens, then you'll love for-profit probation.[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/5fePMfBadI8/

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Hospitals to tea party governors: 'We need
Medicaid expansion'

post from Daily Kos on 03 July 2012 12:43:51 PM. © Daily Kos

Elderly patient by hospital bed There's a key constituency in the health care industry that is becoming increasingly concerned by Republican governors' grandstanding over Medicaid expansion. The hospitals that are charged with treating the uninsured and the poor for free have been counting on the expansion of Medicaid to help clear their books of unpaid debts.

The American Hospital Association and other national industry groups endorsed the health care reform law, calculating that more insured people would make up for $155 billion in lower Medicare payments over a decade.
A smaller Medicaid expansion would be bad news for hospitals, especially in states like Florida and Texas with large numbers of uninsured people, according to Sheryl Skolnick, a health care equities analyst at CRT Capital Group in Stamford, Conn. "That risk is real and meaningful: the hospitals may end up paying for the poorest and sickest of today's uninsured anyway AND see cuts in Medicare and Medicaid on top of that," she wrote in a note to clients Friday. [...]
Getting the Medicaid expansion in place has already become the "number one priority" for the Texas Hospital Association, said John Hawkins, the senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at the organization. "It's the kind of thing that hits our members right on the margin when they're trying to digest other payment cuts," he said.

Hospitals, and hospital executives, tend to be influential in their communities and in state and local politics. Their lobbying could be the best bet for making grandstanding Republican governors back down on accepting the Medicaid expansion. But don't count on it. The ideological zeal and delusion of achieving future greatness on the national stage of the teabagger governors like Nikki Haley, Rick Scott, Bobby Jindhal and Scott Walker shouldn't be discounted.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/ieIZqYHbvaw/-Hospitals-to-tea-part
y-governors-We-need-Medicaid-nbsp-expansion

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There Are Sound Economic Reasons to Federalize
Medicaid

post from Firedoglake on 03 July 2012 12:14:01 PM. © Firedoglake

With the Supreme Court ruling that states have the option to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion and several Republican governor already saying they will opt-out, now is a good time to push for fully federalizing the program. Common[...]

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There Are Sound Ecomomic Reasons to Federalize
Medicaid

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Mitt Goes into the Fog

I just want to elaborate on a point I made in passing in my column today about Mitt Romney's complex ideological dance. When it became clear that Romney would indeed be the Republican nominee, people began speculating about how he would execute the "move to the center" that every nominee must undertake, since in the primaries you're appealing to your party's base, while in the general election you have to appeal to independents. It's particularly tricky for Romney, since every time he switches positions on something people are reminded that he switches positions on things a lot, and that gives Democrats the opportunity to remind everyone of his flip-flopping past.

So has Mitt managed to find a way out of this dilemma? I think he has. The answer to how one should go about moving to the center is: don't. Romney hasn't taken a single position at odds with the hard-right stances he took during the primaries or said anything that would antagonize conservatives, or repudiated any of the extremists he's been courting for years. But hold on?doesn't that mean he'll alienate voters in the middle? Not if you adopt an entirely different strategy. Mitt hasn't moved to the center, but he hasn't stayed on the right, either. Instead, he's just moved into the fog. You see, you can't call Romney a flip-flopper if you can't tell what he thinks about anything.

Not that this won't frustrate some people. Here's Republican Congressman David Rivera complaining that Romney can't win the votes of Latinos if he won't tell them what he actually wants to do about immigration. And what about the most anticipated Supreme Court decision in years, deciding the constitutionality of the most important piece of social legislation in decades? Romney's response is, let's talk about something else:

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that's not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He's been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn't want to make health care a major part of the election.

Bold leadership! It certainly appears that four months from the election, Mitt Romney is becoming very risk-averse. If the economy continues to sputter, he might be able to win without saying much of anything about the country's critical issues. But that in itself is a pretty risky chance to take.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/mitt-goes-fog

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Mitt Goes Into the Fog

So has Mitt managed to find a way out of this dilemma? I think he has. The answer to how one should go about moving to the center is: don't. Romney hasn't taken a single position at odds with the hard-right stances he took during the primaries, or said anything that would antagonize conservatives, or repudiated any of the extremists he's been courting for years. But hold on?doesn't that mean he'll alienate voters in the middle? Not if you adopt an entirely different strategy. Mitt hasn't moved to the center, but he hasn't stayed on the right, either. Instead, he's just moved into the fog. You see, you can't call Romney a flip-flopper if you can't tell what he thinks about anything.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that's not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He's been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn't want to make health care a major part of the election.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/mitt-goes-fog

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