“His Policies Speak For Themselves”: Rand Paul Can Try To Be His Party’s Bill Clinton, But He’ll Never Be President
Rand Paul continues to fling any turd he can find at the Clintons for pretty obvious reasons.
The first-term senator from Kentucky has to do something to show the GOP establishment he can be competitive in a general election, and he’s trying to keep the former president out of his home state’s Senate race so that Rand didn’t sell out to Mitch McConnell for nothing.
There’s no doubt that the younger Paul is a savvy tactician. The proof of this is that he’s ironically trying to follow Bill Clinton’s path to the presidency by staking out a series of “Sister Soulja moment“-like strategic breaks from his party.
Last week, he noted that the GOP’s repulsive attempts to stop minorities from voting are “offending” people. Paul was the first Republican to call out Ted Nugent’s “sub-human mongrel” slurs against President Obama. And he’s built lots of credibility with civil libertarians on the right and left by focusing on “drones,” which has become a code word for “civilian casualties,” which happen to be down under this president, along with military casualties and wars.
Though Paul’s own drone stance is complicated by the fact he thinks it’s cool for a drone to take out an American suspected of robbing a liquor store, his non-interventionist tendencies and willingness to negotiate with Iran do all Americans a favor, providing a hedge against the far right’s recent destructive tendencies toward war.
These anti-war stands will also lead to a deluge of attacks funded by hundreds of millions of dollars should he become competitive in the 2016 Republican primary, which has been designed to give Jeb Bush the nomination, should Jeb want it.
However, these stands are not why Paul will never be president. America is as nearly non-interventionist as he is these days. His Aqua-Buddha past and support for ending some of the drug war have seeped into the mainstream, too. Rand probably can even get away with a dad whose “institute” publishes the work of 9/11 truthers.
What voters won’t tolerate are Rand Paul’s key actual policies:
- He released a budget that calls for the immediate privatization of Medicare and Social Security along with raising the retirement age;
- He favors a flat tax, which would cut taxes for millionaires and raise them on the middle class;
- He supports personhood, which would ban all abortions and some forms of birth control, a stand so unpopular it was even defeated in Mississippi.
Bill Clinton’s strategy was to make the Democratic Party appear more moderate. Rand Paul gets that rhetorically, perhaps.
But single women aren’t going to elect a president who would appoint Supreme Court justices who believe a fertilized egg has 14th Amendment rights. The middle class and seniors aren’t going to trade the Medicare promise for more tax breaks for millionaires. One decent comment on voter ID isn’t going to erase Paul’s opposition to immigration reform — just as one trip to Detroit won’t make him an “inner city” hero.
The usual caveats apply. The economy could go bust or we could find out that #Benghazi is worse than Iraq, 9/11, Watergate, Iran/Contra, Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy combined.
But Democrats have a natural advantage in 2016, and Rand Paul would take that advantage and put it on steroids.
UPDATE: In a statement to Slate‘s Dave Weigel, Rand Paul’s Super PAC director backed off the senator’s criticisms of voter ID laws: “At no point did Senator Paul come out against voter ID laws. In terms of the specifics of voter ID laws, Senator Paul believes it’s up to each state to decide that type of issue.”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, May 13, 2014
“Marco Rubio Disqualifies Himself”: ‘Hey Man’, There’s A Difference Between Climate Science And Meteorology
If American presidents need to prove a basic ability to accept facts, then Senator Marco Rubio of Florida—who’s publicly mulling a run — just disqualified himself from competition.
In an interview with ABC on Sunday, days after the release of an alarming White House report on the present and future effects of climate change on the United States, Mr. Rubio said:
“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”
There’s something almost cute about the last part of that sentence — a hedge he can bring out in a general election if he’s accused of willful stupidity. I’m not a climate-change denier, he might say, I just don’t think scientists are giving us an accurate picture.
Does Mr. Rubio think scientists are lying? Or that they don’t know what they’re talking about? Either way, what leads him to believe that the “portrait” of climate change offered by scientists is inaccurate?
Previously, Mr. Rubio told a GQ reporter “I’m not a scientist, man”—when asked about the age of the earth. (He went on to say we may never know “whether the earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras”).
Yet he sounded science-y, if not scientific, when — on Sunday — he argued that “our climate is always changing. And what [scientists] have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and — and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity.”
He believes that climate scientists have made a schoolboy error, and that he—Marco “not a scientist, man” Rubio — knows better.
This is particularly funny since Mr. Rubio felt the need to point out last week that President Obama, who does believe in climate change, is “not a meteorologist.” Mr. Rubio may or may not know that there’s a difference between climate science and meteorology; but, setting that aside, he’s evidently aware — when it suits him — that there’s a difference between scientific and political expertise.
Rubio defenders might argue that it doesn’t matter whether or not the senator thinks “human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate” — so long as he’s willing to do something about those dramatic changes.
He’s not.
“I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate,” he said on Sunday.
Later he added, “I have no problem with taking mitigation activity. What I have a problem with is these changes to our law that somehow politicians say are going to change our weather. That’s absurd.”
Here’s the kicker: Mr. Rubio sits on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and the Subcommittee on Science and Space.
By: Juliet Lapidos, Taking Note, Editors Blog, The New York Times, May 12, 2014
“Crazy Climate Economics”: These Days, Republicans Come Out In Force To Oppose Even The Most Obviously Needed Regulations
Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”
So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme — why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.
And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.
Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet — 97 percent of the literature — are the product of a vast international conspiracy. But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.
You can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But Justice Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested that the E.P.A.’s proposed rule — which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost — reflected the Marxist concept of “from each according to his ability.” Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?
And you can just imagine what will happen when the E.P.A., buoyed by the smog ruling, moves on to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
What do I mean by crazy climate economics?
First, we’ll see any effort to limit pollution denounced as a tyrannical act. Pollution wasn’t always a deeply partisan issue: Economists in the George W. Bush administration wrote paeans to “market based” pollution controls, and in 2008 John McCain made proposals for cap-and-trade limits on greenhouse gases part of his presidential campaign. But when House Democrats actually passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, it was attacked as, you guessed it, Marxist. And these days Republicans come out in force to oppose even the most obviously needed regulations, like the plan to reduce the pollution that’s killing Chesapeake Bay.
Second, we’ll see claims that any effort to limit emissions will have what Senator Marco Rubio is already calling “a devastating impact on our economy.”
Why is this crazy? Normally, conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues — such as a cap on carbon emissions — those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.
Now, the rules the E.P.A. is likely to impose won’t give the private sector as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economywide carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to blame: Their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.
Furthermore, it turns out that focusing climate policy on coal-fired power plants isn’t bad as a first step. Such plants aren’t the only source of greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re a large part of the problem — and the best estimates we have of the path forward suggest that reducing power-plant emissions will be a large part of any solution.
What about the argument that unilateral U.S. action won’t work, because China is the real problem? It’s true that we’re no longer No. 1 in greenhouse gases — but we’re still a strong No. 2. Furthermore, U.S. action on climate is a necessary first step toward a broader international agreement, which will surely include sanctions on countries that don’t participate.
So the coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate — just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 11, 2014
“How The Right Wing Is Killing Women”: Far Right Ideology Is Trumping The Health Needs Of Millions Of Americans
According to a report released last week in the widely-respected health research journal, The Lancet, the United States now ranks 60th out of 180 countries on maternal deaths occurring during pregnancy and childbirth.
To put it bluntly, for every 100,000 births in America last year, 18.5 women died. That’s compared to 8.2 women who died during pregnancy and birth in Canada, 6.1 in Britain, and only 2.4 in Iceland.
A woman giving birth in America is more than twice as likely to die as a woman in Saudi Arabia or China.
You might say international comparisons should be taken with a grain of salt because of difficulties of getting accurate measurements across nations. Maybe China hides the true extent of its maternal deaths. But Canada and Britain?
Even if you’re still skeptical, consider that our rate of maternal death is heading in the wrong direction. It’s risen over the past decade and is now nearly the highest in a quarter century.
In 1990, the maternal mortality rate in America was 12.4 women per 100,000 births. In 2003, it was 17.6. Now it’s 18.5.
That’s not a measurement error because we’ve been measuring the rate of maternal death in the United States the same way for decades.
By contrast, the rate has been dropping in most other nations. In fact, we’re one of just eight nations in which it’s been rising. The others that are heading in the wrong direction with us are not exactly a league we should be proud to be a member of. They include Afghanistan, El Salvador, Belize, and South Sudan.
China was ranked 116 in 1990. Now it’s moved up to 57. Even if China’s way of measuring maternal mortality isn’t to be trusted, China is going in the right direction. We ranked 22 in 1990. Now, as I’ve said, we’re down to 60th place.
Something’s clearly wrong.
Some say more American women are dying in pregnancy and childbirth because American girls are becoming pregnant at younger and younger ages, where pregnancy and birth can pose greater dangers.
This theory might be convincing if it had data to support it. But contrary to the stereotype of the pregnant young teenager, the biggest rise in pregnancy-related deaths in America has occurred in women 20-24 years old.
Consider that in 1990, 7.2 women in this age group died for every 100,000 live births. By 2013, the rate was 14 deaths in this same age group – almost double the earlier rate.
Researchers aren’t sure what’s happening but they’re almost unanimous in pointing to a lack of access to health care, coupled with rising levels of poverty.
Some American women are dying during pregnancy and childbirth from health problems they had before they became pregnant but worsened because of the pregnancies — such as diabetes, kidney disease, and heart disease.
The real problem, in other words, was they didn’t get adequate health care before they became pregnant.
Other women are dying because they didn’t have the means to prevent a pregnancy they shouldn’t have had, or they didn’t get the prenatal care they needed during their pregnancies. In other words, a different sort of inadequate health care.
One clue: African-American mothers are more than three times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts.
The data tell the story: A study by the Roosevelt Institute shows that U.S. states with high poverty rates have maternal death rates 77 percent higher than states with lower levels of poverty. Women with no health insurance are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or in childbirth than women who are insured.
What do we do about this? Yes, of course, poor women (and the men who made them pregnant) have to take more personal responsibility for their behavior.
But this tragic trend is also a clear matter of public choice.
Many of these high-poverty states are among the twenty-one that have so far refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government will cover 100 percent of the cost for the first three years and at least 90 percent thereafter.
So as the sputtering economy casts more and more women into near poverty, they can’t get the health care they need.
Several of these same states have also cut family planning, restricted abortions, and shuttered women’s health clinics.
Right-wing ideology is trumping the health needs of millions of Americans.
Let’s be perfectly clear: These policies are literally killing women.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, May 12, 2014
“The Human Consequences”: Cost Of The Medicaid Expansion Rejection In Lives As Well As Dollars
The more research that is done on the human toll of denying people health insurance, the easier it is to place a price in lives as well as dollars of decisions like that made by nearly half the states to reject the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. At Politico Magazine (in a piece given the wonderful, Celine-esque title, “Death on the Installment Plan”) Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago utilizes the findings of last week’s study on the lives saved by RomneyCare in Massachusetts to make some suggestions for those that might be saved by making Medicaid available to more non-elderly adults:
As a matter of fiscal policy, [rejecting the Medicaid expansion] makes little sense. The federal government would initially cover 100 percent of the costs. Its share will gradually drop to 90 percent over the coming years. Over the next decade, the federal government will cover more than 95 percent of the Medicaid expansion’s total cost. Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the ACA raises state expenditures on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) by only 1.6 percent, when compared with what expenditures would have been in the absence of health reform.
Even the above figures overstate states’ true fiscal burden, since these federal dollars would cover many services such as mental health care, public hospital services and services to the correctional population that would otherwise be supported by states and localities. Medicaid expansion is a significant economic stimulus to the states that have adopted it. Even in deeply conservative states such as Texas, the expansion is strongly supported by the medical community, hospitals, cities and localities and other key constituencies.
Texas and other huge states like Florida are leaving tens of billions of dollars on the table. When asked to give an accounting of themselves, officials offer flimsy justifications to evade two obvious realities: First, Republican politicians do not want to embrace the centerpiece domestic policy achievement of the Obama presidency. Second, many of these same politicians display conspicuously tepid concern for the wellbeing of the expansion’s most obvious beneficiaries: poor, nonwhite, politically marginal residents of their own states….
Nearly 5 million low-income Americans are income-eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, yet live in states that now reject the Medicaid expansion. Within this rather small but critical low-income population, that same one-per-830 estimate [made in the Massachusetts study] implies that almost 5,800 people will die every year as a result of being left uninsured. That’s only an estimate. It may overestimate—or underestimate—the true human consequences. In my view, there’s no escaping the fact that partisan opposition to the ACA is costing thousands of actual human lives every year.
That’s a hell of a toll for scoring an ideological point.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 12, 2014
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