“Punish Them At The Polls: President Barack Obama Is Right, We Should Be Ashamed Of Gun Violence
We should be ashamed of the shooting after shooting on our streets and in our schools. We should be ashamed that Congress sits on its hands and does nothing to curb the slaughter.
That was how President Barack Obama characterized the issue of gun violence in a discussion with Tumblr founder David Karp the other day, and the president got it exactly right.
Eighteen months ago, 20 children were murdered in a grade school in Connecticut — and nothing was done to expand background checks or limit weapons clips. Since then, there have been 74 shootings at schools — the latest this week in Oregon left two dead and one wounded — and still nothing is done. And that’s just schools; that doesn’t count the shootings in theaters, temples, churches and incidents such as the recent Las Vegas spree that left two police officers, a Walmart customer and the two shooters dead.
And now, with the defeat of the No. 2 Republican in the House, Eric Cantor, the chances of anything getting done are even slimmer. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, who some critics said was too soft on defending gun rights as well as immigration reform, lost in a stunning upset to a tea party candidate in a GOP primary Tuesday. His defeat likely will both embolden the tea party wing of the Republican Party and make any remaining establishment Republicans more cautious. That means little action on issues such as gun control and immigration reform.
“The country has to do some soul-searching on this. This is becoming the norm,” Obama said Tuesday. “Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced developed country on Earth that would put up with this.”
Yes, mental health is an issue related to violence, and we have to find better ways of dealing with it. But other countries have people with mental illnesses and don’t have shootings on this scale. As Obama said, “The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people.” Yet “we’re the only developed country” that repeatedly has such terrible acts. “There’s no place else like this,” the president said.
This does not mean the end of the Second Amendment. We can respect gun and hunter rights and still curb gun violence. Australia has done it. Other countries have done it.
It’s fear of the political clout of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers that is the biggest factor in Congress’ failure to act. Obama also noted that although polls show that a majority of Americans support steps to control guns, they don’t feel passionately enough about it to punish lawmakers who disagree. “Until that happens, sadly, not that much is going to change.”
Obama called the failure to achieve reasonable gun restrictions the biggest frustration of his presidency. It should be the biggest frustration for all Americans. Voters need to not only support tighter gun control; they need to get angry with politicians who refuse to act. And then punish them at the polls.
By: Milwaukee Sun Journal, Opinion, June 12, 2014
“The Larger Answers Must Come From Within”: The VA Reform Legislation Is A “Trojan Horse” For Privatization
In the aftermath of the Veterans Affairs scandal, Democrats and Republicans are moving swiftly to pass legislation to fix the problems at the department. In their haste, though, policymakers have crafted a bill that would do more harm than good—and it comes with a hefty price tag.
On Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, the House and Senate each passed a bill to reform the VA. The bills, would both create a two-year pilot program to allow veterans who do not live within 40 miles of a VA facility, or face a long wait time, to seek care at a non-VA facility. The Senate bill also includes funding for the VA to lease 26 new facilities and hire more medical staff. Now, the two houses will head to conference over the bills to try to agree on a final version.
The bills have not received much attention this week, but that could change: the Congressional Budget Office reported that allowing certain veterans to seek care at non-VA facilities would cost $35 billion over the two-year program, as The New Republic’s Brian Beutler predicted. If made permanent, CBO estimates it could cost $50 billion a year. For comparison, the VA currently spends $44 billion a year on its health care system. CBO notes that its estimate is preliminary, but it still is much higher than the expected cost. And this is only for the partial privatization part of the bill.
While the potential for a new $50 billion a year program is worrisome, the bill would not even address the underlying problems at the VA.
The fundamental problem with the VA scandal is not about long wait times or a shortage of physicians. Those problems exist in the private sector as well. Often, they are even worse there. It’s also not about quality of care either. Veterans routinely rate their VA experience above average. That advantage may have diminished in recent years, but it still exists. At its heart, the scandal revolves around poor financial incentives and fraudulent behavior by VA employees. These problems are systemic and reforms are needed. But many of the problems veterans face are not isolated to VA hospitals. They are larger problems of the American health care system.
The reason that clinics and hospitals—at both VA and non-VA facilities—have such long wait-times is a shortage of primary care doctors. This shortage has happened for a number of reasons: Medical students face financial incentives to choose a specialty field instead of becoming a primary care doctor. State occupational licensing laws prevent nurse practitioners from performing many straightforward medical tasks. Medical schools receive billions in federal funding with little oversight for how may primary care doctors they produce. The bills’ partial privatization scheme does nothing to ease these problems.
It’s a common misconception that the VA does not contract with private sector providers. As recently as 2012 the VA was fending off attacks that they outsourced care too much. And veterans who have been waiting for a long time for care, or those who are dealing with life-threatening situations, certainly deserve the ability to seek care at non-VA facilities. In fact, President Barack Obama has already ordered the VA to do so.
Republicans have long wanted to privatize the VA, but have never had the political power to do so, owing to veterans groups’ opposition. This recent scandal, though, has changed that: Veterans groups support the bills. While the partial privatization is only a two-year pilot program, Republicans will likely push to make it permanent in 2016, potentially undermining the entire VA health care system and leading to the total privatization that Republicans covet.
“You’re already in the situation where we’re having to close really excellent VA hospitals for a lack of patients,” Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly and author of a book on the VA, said. “And now you’re going to say, ‘OK, anybody who lives 40 miles from a hospital can get free health care wherever they want.’ Now, you’re going to take revenue out of those hospitals and patients out of those hospitals. If they can’t maintain a certain volume, they can’t be safe. You wouldn’t want to be treated by a heart surgeon who only performs three operations a year.
“[The partial privatization plan] really is a Trojan horse,” Longman added. “It’s a really dangerous provision.”
Even if the legislation doesn’t cause VA hospitals to close, it could undermine the quality of care the VA provides. The VA is specifically designed to treat veterans and has vast experience doing so. Since most of its medical visits and procedures happen at its own hospitals and clinics, it coordinates care better than private sector providers do.
“The VA can treat the whole patient as opposed to one body part at a time,” Longman writes at the Washington Monthly. “And due to its near lifelong relationship with its patients, which often extends to long-term nursing home care at the end of life, the VA also has incentives for investing in prevention and patient wellness that are largely absent elsewhere in U.S. medicine.”
Beyond that, the legislation includes very little to address the management issues within the VA. That’s not Congress’s fault, per se, because those fixes must come from within the department. But government officials have the chance to use this renewed focus on the VA to improve the care it provides. By passing a bill that does not address the underlying problems, Congress might waste this opportunity.
“The access issue, which is where everyone has focused, is one important, but ultimately narrow slice of the bigger problem,” Ashish K. Jha, a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health and practicing internist at the VA, said. “What I worry about is because it has gotten all the attention, if we work on fixing this we’re not going to use this opportunity to have the broader conversation is that veterans don’t just want access to care, they want access to good care.”
In an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Jha writes with Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, the undersecretary for health during the Clinton administration, that the VA must change its performance management, reassess the VA’s use of technology to provide even better caregiver-patient connectivity, and increase its transparency so the public can evaluate its performance. The VA has already eliminated the 14-day average-wait rule that led to the rampant fraud, acknowledging that the incentive backfired, but much work remains.
What happened at VA facilities across the country was a tragedy. Former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki deserved to be fired. So do other senior VA officials. Policymakers naturally want to pass a big piece of legislation in response to the scandal. But like the American health care system, the VA system has no simple solutions. Congress can help on the margins, but the larger answers must come from within.
By: By: Dany Vinik, The New Republic, June 13, 2014
“Paralyzed By A Crazed Gun Lobby”: Gun Advocacy Has Now Become Parody
When I was growing up in the Cold War era, teachers instructed their pupils in the fine art of ducking under the desk as a shield against a strike from an atom bomb. That was a futile exercise, of course: A desktop provides no protection from the powerful destructive capacity of a nuclear weapon.
But it allowed teachers and their charges to pretend to have a defense against a frightening communist enemy whose might nearly equaled our own. It created a psychological barrier against helplessness.
These days, teachers train to protect their students from armed madmen who shoot up schools. They are taught to recognize not just the sound of gunfire in the hallway but also to hear the bone-chilling thump of an empty clip hitting the floor. They learn to hide their students; they memorize escape routes; they practice throwing ordinary classroom tools, like staplers, at an armed assailant.
As schools search for solutions, a manufacturer’s spokesman said sales of a product called the “Bodyguard Blanket,” a bulletproof covering that might offer a bit of protection from a school shooter, have been surprisingly strong. Why wouldn’t it sell quickly? Since the December 2012 Newtown massacre, there has been, on average, a similar incident every five weeks, according to CNN.
However, there’s a huge difference between the dangerous enemy we confronted in my youth and the current menace: Average citizens could defeat the lunacy now threatening our children. We are not helpless. Instead, for reasons that I simply cannot fathom, we are paralyzed by a crazed gun lobby.
It’s difficult to adequately describe our sense of defeatism in the face of the firearms fanatics. We don’t fight back when they insist on laws allowing guns in schools, in bars, in churches. We throw up our hands when they resist background checks. We shrug when another child is gunned down at school.
Oh, polls show our support for common-sense measures that would curb the death rate. After Newtown — when 20 small children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 91 percent of Americans supported background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and private sales. Yet the Senate could not manage to pass a bill that closed the “gun show loophole.”
It’s unlikely that any of the senators who voted against the measure will be called to account in the only way that matters — with defeat. While 41 Republicans (and five Democrats) voted against the bill, the GOP is expected to gain seats in November’s elections. What kind of message does that send to the gun fanatics?
Meanwhile, the gun lobby’s favorite arguments for its positions have been, well, gunned down. Gun advocates claim that widespread firearms ownership by responsible law-abiding citizens would help to stop the carnage. They insist that a would-be school shooter, for example, would be killed before he could hurt anyone if only teachers were armed.
Experience shows it rarely works that way. Earlier this month, anti-government extremists, husband-and-wife team Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers in Las Vegas, ambushing the officers as they ate lunch. The couple then went to a nearby Walmart, where they encountered an armed citizen, Joseph Wilcox, who spotted Jerad and tried to stop him. Wilcox, too, was shot dead.
Facts, however, don’t faze the National Rifle Association and its allies, who have long since descended into a lunacy that rivals parody. Consider this: Recently, gun fetishists in Texas have begun demonstrating their support for “open carry” laws by carrying their heavy-duty weapons into restaurants. They’ve posted pictures of themselves with their assault-style weapons — civilian versions of rifles such as the AK-47 — strapped to their backs as stunned diners look on.
The NRA posted an opinion piece on its website discouraging those antics: “It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates,” the writer said. Guess what? Within a few days, a backlash ensued from the gun cult, and the NRA disowned the commentary.
This is Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole madness. What does it say about the rest of us that we allow it to rule?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 14, 2014
“The Banana Republicans”: Appalling Content Of Policies Aside, When Not Torturing, They Lie, They Cheat, They Steal
If they can’t offer policies that a majority of voters will support without relentless brainwashing, they free up the billionaire beneficiaries of the policies they actually offer to help them buy elections.
If buying elections won’t give them a majority, they rig the districting so they can hold a minority of seats with a minority of votes.
If they can’t win even in gerrymandered districts, they try to keep Democrats from voting.
If they still lose, they resort to outright bribery.
In the latest case, they offered a Democratic state senator in Virginia – whose vote resulted in a tied chamber, giving the Lieutenant Governor the deciding vote – a cushy job for himself and a judgeship for his daughter if he’d resign, giving the GOP 20-19 majority.
Similar deals have been done recently in New York and Washington State, though in those cases the bribes were legislative leadership positions rather than external jobs.
I can confidently predict that a not a single elected Republican, and few if any Red-team pundits, will speak out against this grossly corrupt deal. If the state AG or the U.S. Attorney decide that it’s a prosecutable quid pro quo, Fox News and the National Review will howl about the “criminalization of policy differences.”
“Puckett” deserves to enter the language alongside “Quisling.”
The appalling content of its policies aside – the latest dirty trick is part of an effort to deny medical coverage to the working poor – the modern Republican Party is a threat to the principles of republican government. Even when they’re not torturing, they lie, they cheat, and they steal.
Footnote And note the way the Washington Post uses the morally neutral “outmaneuver” to cover the payment and acceptance of a bribe. Did the Communists “outmaneuver” Jan Masaryk? Did the House of Guise “outmaneuver” the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day?
By: Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at The University of California Los Angeles: Washington Monthly, Ten Miles Square; Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]; June 12, 2014
“Tantrums Don’t Change The Facts”: McCain Rejects Evidence, Accuses Critics Of ‘Lying’
Republican reversals on securing the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl have been jaw-dropping for much of the week. As we discussed yesterday, Republicans were happy about an American POW coming home; then they changed their minds. Republicans endorsed the prisoner swap itself; then they changed their minds. Republicans extended their thoughts and prayers to Bergdahl and his family; then they changed their minds. Republicans demanded that the Obama administration had a responsibility to do everything humanly possible to free this POW from his captors; then they changed their minds.
But perhaps no one has been quite as brazen in the flip-flop department as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who’s still treated as a credible figure on matters related to foreign policy and the military, despite his poor track record. The Arizona Republican expressed public support for the prisoner-swap, then did a 180-degree turn after President Obama pursued the course McCain endorsed.
Apparently, the senator is angry that his shameless flip-flop has been noticed.
“The details are unacceptable and for anyone to accuse me, therefore, of saying that I’d support any prisoner swap under any circumstances is lying,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“And the details are outrageous. They went to Qatar, where the Taliban has an office, and in a year they are going to be out and the deal is, like any other agreement, as I said, in the details,” McCain said on CNN, explaining his opposition to the swap. “I mean, it’s just totally unacceptable. These people would be back in the fight.”
It’s hard to know if McCain actually believes what he’s saying. Indeed, the senator has never been detail-oriented, so perhaps he doesn’t fully understand the nature of the recent criticism.
But in reality, as the New York Times’ editorial board noted today, McCain “switched positions for maximum political advantage” – as he’s done “so often in the past.”
The lawmaker can throw around words like “lying” if he chooses, but a closer look at the facts lead to only one conclusion.
As far back as 2011, the Obama administration was in talks with the Taliban about securing Bergdahl’s release, in exchange for five specific detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison, who would then be transferred to Qatar. Members of Congress, including McCain, were aware of these talks and knew exactly which five Taliban prisoners would be included in the prisoner-swap.
In 2012, McCain was asked about this during a national television interview. Though he said he’d need all of the details, the senator said he “would support” the exchange.
And then the Obama administration made the exchange, at which point McCain condemned the exact same policy he’d already endorsed.
Indeed, perhaps unaware his own position, McCain has been quite unconstrained in denouncing the swap he used to support, calling it “outrageous” and “unacceptable.” At a classified briefing yesterday, the senator reportedly “walked out shortly after shouting at an official.”
Tantrums don’t change the facts.
What surprises me is McCain’s willingness to keep digging. His audacious reversal was uncovered on Tuesday, at which point the senator could have laid low so as to not draw attention to his shameless, knee-jerk opposition to an idea he supported. Indeed, I had no intention of returning to the subject, since it was so obvious that the Arizona Republican had contradicted himself.
But McCain can’t seem to help himself. Caught in a shameless reversal, he feels the need to lash out, making matters worse for no reason.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 6, 2014
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