Government Shut Down September 29, 2013December 16, 2013 BOREF If you have an hour and some, here’s WheelTug’s recent presentation to the Toulouse branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society (which is to say Airbus), complete with more than half an hour of q&a from a sophisticated aircraft crowd. Judge for yourself, but we seem to have come a long way toward making this real. It baffles me why, at this stage, parent Borealis is still valued at only $60 million but Patience is my middle name. (Or P is my middle initial, at any rate.) NKTR Those of you who get this by email don’t see the updates I often make minutes or hours later. Usually, I just correct typos. (Thanks to those of you who catch them!) Once in a while, I make a more substantive change. Friday, I added an update on NKTR, which had just dropped sharply. In case you own it, you might want to go back and take a look. A KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT OBAMACARE When Republicans tell you that a majority of Americans don’t like it, they don’t mention that when you adjust for those who don’t like it because it doesn’t go far enough* it turns out that a majority of Americans do favor Obamacare. And yet the Republicans are dead set against it. Obamacare increases virtually everyone’s health care security, improves the health of the citizenry and improves the health of the economy . . . all achieved through increased efficiencies and incentives and through — most tangibly — a shift of several tens of billions of dollars a year from wealthy investors to the working poor and middle class. (Wealthy investors will pay an extra $380,000 on each $10 million in dividends and capital gains they earn — though still less than they were paying under Ronald Reagan.) (And yes, if you make only $300,000 a year — which after deductions and exemptions, let’s say, leaves you with $250,000 in taxable income — even you will pay $380 more on each additional $10,000 of capital gains or dividends you might earn. But it’s really not the end of the world, even for you.) *Quite rightly, they would prefer a single-payer system of the type all the other advanced nations of the world have. KENTUCKY Governor Steve Beshear, writing in the New York Times: My State Needs Obamacare. Now. By STEVE BESHEAR Published: September 26, 2013 347 Comments FRANKFORT, Ky. — SUNDAY morning news programs identify Kentucky as the red state with two high-profile Republican senators who claim their rhetoric represents an electorate that gave President Obama only about a third of its presidential vote in 2012.So why then is Kentucky — more quickly than almost any other state — moving to implement the Affordable Care Act? Because there’s a huge disconnect between the rank partisanship of national politics and the outlook of governors whose job it is to help beleaguered families, strengthen work forces, attract companies and create a balanced budget. It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change. That is especially true in Kentucky, a state where residents’ collective health has long been horrendous. The state ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in almost every major health category, including smoking, cancer deaths, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, heart disease and diabetes. We’re making progress, but incremental improvements are not enough. We need big solutions with the potential for transformational change. The Affordable Care Act is one of those solutions. For the first time, we will make affordable health insurance available to every single citizen in the state. Right now, 640,000 people in Kentucky are uninsured. That’s almost one in six Kentuckians. Lack of health coverage puts their health and financial security at risk. They roll the dice and pray they don’t get sick. They choose between food and medicine. They ignore checkups that would catch serious conditions early. They put off doctor’s appointments, hoping a condition turns out to be nothing. And they live knowing that bankruptcy is just one bad diagnosis away. Furthermore, their children go long periods without checkups that focus on immunizations, preventive care and vision and hearing tests. If they have diabetes, asthma or infected gums, their conditions remain untreated and unchecked. For Kentucky as a whole, the negative impact is similar but larger — jacked-up costs, decreased worker productivity, lower quality of life, depressed school attendance and a poor image. The Affordable Care Act will address these weaknesses. Some 308,000 of Kentucky’s uninsured — mostly the working poor — will be covered when we increase Medicaid eligibility guidelines to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville concluded that expanding Medicaid would inject $15.6 billion into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years, create almost 17,000 new jobs, have an $802.4 million positive budget impact (by transferring certain expenditures from the state to the federal government, among other things), protect hospitals from cuts in indigent care funding and shield businesses from up to $48 million in annual penalties. In short, we couldn’t afford not to do it. The other 332,000 uninsured Kentuckians will be able to access affordable coverage — most with a discount — through the Health Benefit Exchange, the online insurance marketplace we named Kynect: Kentucky’s Healthcare Connection. Kentucky is the only Southern state both expanding Medicaid and operating a state-based exchange, and we remain on target to meet the Oct. 1 deadline to open Kynect with the support of a call center that is providing some 100 jobs. Having been the first state-based exchange to complete the readiness review with the United States Department of Health and Human Services, we hope to become the first one to be certified. Frankly, we can’t implement the Affordable Care Act fast enough. As for naysayers, I’m offended by their partisan gamesmanship, as they continue to pour time, money and energy into overturning or defunding the Affordable Care Act. It’s shameful that these critics haven’t invested that same level of energy into trying to improve the health of our citizens. They insist that the Affordable Care Act will never work — when in fact a similar approach put into effect in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor, is working. So, to those more worried about political power than Kentucky’s families, I say, “Get over it.” The Affordable Care Act was approved by Congress and sanctioned by the Supreme Court. It is the law of the land. Get over it … and get out of the way so I can help my people. Here in Kentucky, we cannot afford to waste another day or another life. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, is the governor of Kentucky. GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN Yep: the Republicans are shutting it down. It’s that important to them to try to keep the middle class and working poor from having health care security, and to keep preventive care from being free. That’s OK. At some point in the next 18 days Speaker Boehner will waive the “Hastert rule” and allow the House to vote on raising the debt limit (and starting the government back up again), even though it may cost him his speakership. No one who cries as freely as he does, and is as basically a simple, decent man as he is, would allow the global economy to collapse just to retain his gavel. Even the Koch brothers (and certainly the Wall Street Journal) are urging the House to raise the debt limit (i.e., pay its bills) and stop this insanity. The markets, barely fazed, seem to have high confidence we will not needlessly self-destruct and I think they’re right. I sure hope so! But to have taken it even this far — and to have fought so hard these past five years to obstruct the things that so clearly need doing (like putting people to work repairing our crumbling national infrastructure) is little short of tragic. As were the Bush years that led us into unnecessary war and wrecked our national balance sheet. Bring back Lincoln! Bring back Teddy Roosevelt! Bring back Dwight Eisenhower! Bring back Richard Nixon (even)! Bring back Ford! Bring back Rockefeller! But until then, please vote Democrat.
I’m In Denver September 27, 2013September 27, 2013 No one blogs from Denver. At least not while they’re driving into the mountains. But this is why God invented archives. Oh, oKAY! Here’s four minutes of Jon Stewart — the already famous clip where “you don’t get a war! and you don’t get a war! and everybody doesn’t get a war!” If you haven’t seen it, click. If you have, you’re already laughing, remembering it. Oh, OKAYYYY! A few of you probably want to know why NKTR, suggested here, gave back the nice 35% gain we had in it all of a sudden this morning. Guru: “The reduction in pain is 40%. That’s exactly in line with studies by Caldwell (1999) and Roth (2000) using oxycodone in the same osteoarthritis setting. In the NKTR study, only 3% of the patients were not able to achieve pain relief, at the better end of the 2%-10% seen with oxycodone. Of those enrolled, 18% dropped out for side effects typical of opiates such as constipation, in contrast to the typical 36% for oxycodone (which also produces dizziness and nausea, not found with NKTR-181). The ONLY difference between this trial and the studies above is that in above studies, when half the patients went onto placebo, their pain reappeared by day 21, whereas in this study, the placebo patients reported NO rebound in pain. Of course, physiologically that doesn’t make much sense. Lots of possible explanations. Still, the bottom line conclusion is that NKTR-181 has the same degree of efficacy as oxycodone while having essentially none of the addiction or respiratory depression risk. Thus, NKTR can use this data to proceed to a standard opiate Phase III trial early in 2014 as planned. If the drug had performed below expectations, then there would be issues about whether the modification impaired its efficacy, but it didn’t. I continue to think this will be a blockbuster drug. In the after market, the stock dropped below 10 (as I expected), but I expect it will rally back to 11 to 12 today and work its way higher into 2014. They have an analyst R&D day October 8, they have two more pain drugs to report on this year–similarly modified like 181, but for different pain indications–and they have filed for FDA approval for a drug to relieve opioid constipation with partner Astra Zeneca. We bought aggressively below 10 and NKTR is now one of the largest positions in the fund.”
Hurray! September 25, 2013September 27, 2013 HURRAY FOR OBAMACARE Most people are going to like it. And it will make the citizenry — and the economy — healthier. This is bad why? One reason, say those who would shut down the entire government rather than allow American families better health care security, free preventive care, and the rest, is that companies will shift from full-time workers to part-time workers to avoid having to provide health care. Well, the trend toward part-time workers began long before Obamacare became law. And at least one large employer — the nation’s largest, in fact — is doing exactly the reverse. From Forbes: “Full-Time Workers-Obamacare Not Such A Job Killer After All?” And while I have you, I want to reiterate what I think is the under-emphasized driver of much of this. How is it possible for so many people to benefit from Obamacare when we all know there is no free lunch? Part of it will come from increased efficiency and better alignment of incentives. But part of it comes quite simply from leaning on the best off to shift things a little more in favor of “everyone else.” There will still be a vastly wider inequality gap than there was in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies when we had things like unions and high tax rates on the rich. (Actually: counterproductively too high rates.) But grabbing an extra $38,000 in tax on each $1 million in dividends and capital gains you earn each year will still pinch you a little, and help the single mother with a child whose health care previously she could not afford. Visit healthcare.gov and see for yourself. HURRAY FOR AUSTRALIA And our friendship therewith. And the new US Ambassador to Australia, whose introductory video is embedded here. HURRAY FOR NONDISCRIMINATION One of the (many) little noticed advances of the past five years, of little interest to most Americans, but of intense interest to hundreds of thousands who are transgender, is this: Transgender Americans are protected against discrimination in employment in all 50 states under federal law. (It was a unanimous, bipartisan decision.) You may not know any trans folks. If and when you do, you will likely find, as I have, that — as with any other folks — some are lovable, some are annoying, some are CEOs of multi-billion-dollar publicly traded biotech companies (well, one I know, anyway) and some struggle in the most difficult of circumstances. America is better when we judge people by the content of their character and their work product rather than by the color of their skin — or other personal attributes irrelevant to how well they sweep floors, code software, flip burgers, or run corporations.
Two Pauls: Ryan and Krugman September 24, 2013September 21, 2013 Clinton gave us peace, prosperity, and a balanced budget* . . . Bush, with a Republican Congress six of his eight years, gave us war, near-Depression, and trillion-dollar deficits . . . Obama has ended wars, avoided others McCain et al would have started, overseen 42 months of private sector job growth despite Republican refusal to pass the American Jobs Act, and shrunk the deficit from 10% of GDP to 4%. Is it really that simple? No. But you know what? It’s not far off. Does anyone seriously dispute that Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and — yes, Richard Nixon — would be horrified by what the Republican Party has become? That even Ayn Rand . . . she of the epic superhero comic books, super-simplistic and super fun, beloved by precocious high school girls everywhere . . . in whose name so much of this is being done, might well have recognized that what she wrote in the 1940s, with the Stalinism her family had fled threatening half the world and communism having made meaningful inroads in her Depression-era America . . . that even she, given the context of 2013, might have been just a bit horrified? That, of course, we’ll never know. Though her disciple Alan Greenspan, as close to her as anyone half a century ago, is certainly no Tea Party Republican. He writes: “Rand’s Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas.” [Like Paul Ryan!] “Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn’t, there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that the fervor receded.” [Paul? Any chance you could listen?] No, Congressman Paul Ryan and his crew, financed by multi-billionaires who’ve persuaded themselves they are John Galt, they are the job creators — they are NOT — are poised to lead the country they love, and which they have already damaged so badly, over a cliff, if that’s what it takes to keep the struggling masses (the workers) from getting a better deal on health care and the food stamps that many of them, making minimum wage, need to keep from starving. I feel quite sure they will not succeed. How could they? But it’s crazy. The Crazy Party By PAUL KRUGMAN Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart. Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party. I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past. It helps, I think, to understand just how unprecedented today’s political climate really is. Divided government in itself isn’t unusual and is, in fact, more common than not. Since World War II, there have been 35 Congresses, and in only 13 of those cases did the president’s party fully control the legislature. Nonetheless, the United States government continued to function. Most of the time divided government led to compromise; sometimes to stalemate. Nobody even considered the possibility that a party might try to achieve its agenda, not through the constitutional process, but through blackmail — by threatening to bring the federal government, and maybe the whole economy, to its knees unless its demands were met. True, there was the government shutdown of 1995. But this was widely recognized after the fact as both an outrage and a mistake. And that confrontation came just after a sweeping Republican victory in the midterm elections, allowing the G.O.P. to make the case that it had a popular mandate to challenge what it imagined to be a crippled, lame-duck president. Today, by contrast, Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president. Yet, at the moment, it seems highly likely that the Republican Party will refuse to fund the government, forcing a shutdown at the beginning of next month, unless President Obama dismantles the health reform that is the signature achievement of his presidency. Republican leaders realize that this is a bad idea, but, until recently, their notion of preaching moderation was to urge party radicals not to hold America hostage over the federal budget so they could wait a few weeks and hold it hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Now they’ve given up even on that delaying tactic. The latest news is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has abandoned his efforts to craft a face-saving climbdown on the budget, which means that we’re all set for shutdown, possibly followed by debt crisis. How did we get here? Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise. No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals. But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created. So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”? Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now. * And, with his Clinton Global Initiative, in session right now, continues to do tremendous, constructive things.
What Will YOU Pay With Obamacare? September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 As previously noted, Obamacare is going to improve the health of the citizenry and of the economy; it’s going to save people money (except those with income above $250,000, who will pay an extra $38,000 in tax on each additional $1 million in dividends and capital gains they receive); and it’s going to reduce anxiety for anyone who realizes that their current policy has a lifetime cap or that they can lose their insurance for getting sick or that a pre-existing condition could keep them from getting it in the first place. (It is also projected to reduce the deficit.) Reason enough, cry the Tea Party Republicans, to shut down the government if necessary — even destroy the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time since our founding — to repeal or defund it. The mind boggles. Right up there with climate change denial . . . and scientists from the Tobacco Institute who for decades disputed the health hazards of smoking . . . and claiming that the wealthy are the job creators (we are NOT) . . . and blocking efforts to put eager job seekers to work modernizing our D+ national infrastructure to kick start a virtuous economic cycle . . . and blocking even better, single-payer health care reform or “the public option” . . . and misleading us into a disastrous invasion of Iraq . . . and voting to cut food stamps for the working poor while continuing farm subsidies for wealthy corporate farmers. All these things — and more (discouraging the stem cell research that may now not come in time to save the life of someone you love?) — associated with the Republican Party. But I digress. As usual. With my usual defense: I’m old. I ramble. You don’t pay me enough to stay tightly focused. To see whether Obamacare may save YOU money, click here. “The calculator provides a rough estimate of costs for insurance, based on national averages and factors that may not apply to you. It will give you an idea of what someone with circumstances like yours could pay for Marketplace insurance in 2014.” The real premiums you will be offered, depending on where you live, are supposed to go live in just a few days: October 1. I assume several server farms will explode under the pressure of tens of millions of people attempting to visit healthcare.gov the site that day; but Estimates are that six in ten of the currently uninsured will be able to get coverage for less than $100 a month. Gerald Marinoff: “Your Thursday post on healthcare describes young people with group health insurance subsidizing the old. However, they, too, benefit from a subsidy that receives no publicity, namely the obscene premiums paid by people who are not members of a group. My wife is a healthy 50 year old with no pre-existing or existing medical conditions and on no daily medications. She has never had a serious medical condition. Other than for an annual flu shot, she does not see her physician. She has healthcare coverage through Oxford’s HMO, a branch of United Healthcare. This plan has co-payments for all services and drugs, and has restrictions on doctor choice — in other words, it is not a ‘Cadillac’ plan. Every year her premiums increase, always in excess of the rate of healthcare inflation. Her current premium is $1536.61/month ($18,439.32/year). People like my wife have no union or employers to advocate for them, so they suffer from this extreme discrimination in rates. If the Republican troglodytes manage to dismantle Obamacare, there is no limit to the excesses that the insurance companies will go to increase their profits. But, of course, unlimited profits for private business is what the Republican party stands for.” > It appears Gerald’s wife will save about $13,000 a year with Obamacare. Tomorrow (which you can read today): Paul Krugman on “The Crazy Party”
Hurray for the Pope September 20, 2013September 19, 2013 Yesterday’s column was posted late and you will probably want to go back and take a look if you missed it — it contains the keys to happiness. Today, the Pope speaks out. A taste: “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. We have to find a new balance.” Wow: better leadership in the Vatican, better leadership in Tehran, better leadership these past five years, in the U.S. What’s next: A stunning defeat for the Tea Party? FAA certification? We can only pray.
Happy and Healthy September 19, 2013September 19, 2013 Just a tiny bit of sarcasm before we get to the happy part: HEALTHY I don’t want free preventive care! And I don’t want others to have it either! This is important to me: Defund Obamacare before it’s too late! Kill it! I don’t want unlimited benefits if I get really sick or horribly injured — I want my coverage to run out once I reach a “lifetime cap.” Seriously: Defund Obamacare! Bring back lifetime caps! I don’t want insurers sending me refund checks if they hang on to more than 20% of the premiums they collect. I don’t want them to have to compete for business in state-wide “exchanges.” I want insurers to be able to drop me if I get sick! Or reject me if I have a pre-existing condition. And it’s not just me I’m thinking of: I want my friends and family at risk as well, and anyone else not in good health. I don’t want the “doughnut hole” closed for seniors. If they’re just scraping by, choosing between food and heat and medicine — well, that’s one place I’m pro-choice. Defund Obamacare! Because here’s the thing: I know the law is loaded with pilot programs and “incentives to adopt best practices” designed to improve the quality and lower the cost of health care delivery over time. And I’m not necessarily against that. But I also know that there’s no free lunch. All these benefits — more secure coverage, free preventive care, and the like — come at a cost that won’t all be covered by improvements in efficiency. And it’s spelled out right there in the law! In order to keep Obamacare from adding to the deficit (it’s projected to lower it slightly, in fact), taxes are raised on income above $250,000. And that’s just unAmerican and, dare I say, unChristian. Hear me proud and clear: I don’t want the well off helping the less well off. I don’t want higher income folks paying an extra $38,000 on each $1 million in dividends and capital gains they receive — I’d rather see millions of poor people uninsured and the elderly choosing between food and heat and medicine. I’d rather shut down the entire Federal government than fund this thing. That’s just the way I roll. I’m a Republican, and I’ve voted 42 times to kill it. (PS – I don’t mind the “group health insurance plans” at all those Fortune 500 companies, where the young and healthy in effect subsidize the old and diabetic — that’s capitalism. If the young and healthy don’t like it they can quit their jobs. But this? Forcing the young and healthy not already insured to to buy coverage or pay a fine? What’s next: requiring young healthy people to carry automobile insurance? Taking FICA out of their pay to support the social safety net they’re not likely to need while they’re young? I would never want to live in a country that does that. USA! USA!) (PPS – It’s not like I’m saying we don’t need some reform. But certainly not reform that places any burden on the wealthy who are, after all, [not] the job creators. Better to repeal Obamacare and let us Republicans start from scratch. Yes, we did have the White House and both houses of Congress for the first six years of this century — but at the time it just slipped our mind.) HAPPY GENE According to this, there is one — but you can help. Joy is contagious. Check it out.
7-Minute Checkup September 18, 2013September 18, 2013 KYTH This company has a treatment for double chins. Not something any of you have to worry about, but the stock closed up a further $8 or so yesterday, now nearly double what we paid four months ago. Guru writes: “If you want to hold this for a year and lower your tax rate you can. It should move into the 50s as people believe AGN will buy them. This will be an easy approval for the FDA. There will be more data at an Oct 3 medical meeting. On the other hand, they won’t file for approval till at least the end of 2013 and won’t get it until the end of 2014. Still, any partner, such as AGN can see that the data are fantastic and KYTH has a bunch of ex AGN people running it. VRX which markets Restylane facial filler would also be interested, so there should be competition to buy KYTH, which argues for a move sooner rather than later. Only 4% of patients discontinued for adverse events — a very low level. Patients are lining up for this already. The product will fly off the shelf.” MYLGF Paul O’Donnell: “What ever happened to MYLGF?” > It did a 1-for-50 reverse split — meaning that if you had bought 5000 shares at 37 cents, you’d now have 100 shares with a basis of $18.50 — and changed its name from Methylgene to Mirati Therapeutics, new symbol: MRTX. The stock is back up to around $15, after dipping to $8, and Guru writes: “Could double from here — possibly much more. I think the products really work. Now that they are on NASDAQ and they have a bunch of ‘winner’ managers running it, the story can run. On the other hand, they won’t have pivotal data any sooner than the end of 2014, or probably 2015, and they will have to raise money. The stock will trade back and forth. At 15, it’s a $130 million market cap. Could easily justify twice that for the products they have.” HEALTH CARE GENERALLY Do not miss this 7-minute overview (hat tip: Upworthy) — and then ask yourself why the Republicans are so maniacally committed to rolling things back to the way they were. They can say they, too, want to fix the system — and Romney actually did take a stab it, in Massachusetts, but once he was on the national ticket he had to join the Republican chorus in denouncing his own plan. Yet if they want to fix the system, why did they fight so hard to kill the Clintons’ proposed reform? Why did they propose no reform of their own in the eight years George W. Bush set the agenda, during six of which Republicans controlled both houses of Congress? Watch and be furious that the Republicans have devoted themselves to little more than blocking whatever the President wants to do — whether it be modernizing our infrastructure, improving our health care system, or so much else. FAILED – REALLY? Monday I dumped a bit of sarcasm on the “failed presidency” meme. I didn’t include anything on Syria, but that’s okay: Jon Stewart did it ever so much better than I could have — here. (The summary: “Pundits argue that the successful use of diplomacy in Syria is the worst defeat in American history.”)
Failed? Really? September 16, 2013September 16, 2013 BOREF Behold the WheelTug Twist and Twirl — a new 4-minute YouTube. Won’t it be nice, seated in 34C, not to have to wait that extra five or ten minutes to get off the damn plane? Or that extra 5 or 10 minutes to board? Or — even if you’re in First Class and get to board before anyone else — that extra five or ten minutes that can be cut from every flight you take while others board? And there are the environmental benefits — hence WheelTug’s ATW Magazine 2013 Eco-Technology of the Year Award, presented this past Thursday. Slowly but surely WheelTug becomes inevitable. Well, slowly, anyway. Maybe not surely. Only venture into shares of grandparent company Borealis with money you can truly afford to lose — and with “limit orders” so you aren’t gouged on the price. It remains very thinly traded. FAILED? REALLY? Bill Maher beats up on George W. Bush in the current Vanity Fair. Someone named Francesco thought Maher should have mentioned Obama’s failed presidency as well. I cannot not refrain from asking Francesco these questions: When you say “failed presidency,” is that because President Obama averted a depression and the stock market has doubled? Or because he saved Detroit and the auto industry is booming? Or because he ended two wars and restored respect among our allies? Is it because — at the expense of a modest tax increase on the best off — he set us on a course toward health care security with incentives and pilot programs to improve outcomes and efficiency? Or because he doubled CAFE standards and seeded alternative energy technologies that begin to deal, finally, with energy independence, energy security, and climate change? Is it because he saved the Court from going yet more firmly to the Citizens-United-Bush-v-Gore right? Or because he killed Bin Laden and decimated the ranks of Al-Qaeda? Is it because he won re-election with more than 50% of the vote? Because he’s done more for LGBT Americans than all 43 previous presidents combined? Or — to the extent there will be any truth to it at all when he steps down — will it be because he faced an opposition party willing to wreck the country to see him fail? Just asking. HARMFUL, REALLY? “We’re going to continue to do everything we can to protect Americans from this harmful health care law,” House Speaker Boehner said. Killing the law — which the House has now voted to do 42 times — would also kill the 3.8% surtax on dividends and capital gains that, arguably, “harms” those with more than $250,000 in taxable income: for every extra $1 million they make, they are harmed to the tune of $38,000. But it’s hard to see who else is harmed. Indeed, it is that extra tax revenue that makes the program a modest deficit cutter even as it improves health care security for almost everyone. It means that you and your loved ones will never have to fear being turned down for insurance due to a “pre-existing condition” or fear that an illness will exhaust your ‘lifetime cap” — or have to pay for preventive care. I suppose you could say that some insurance company shareholders will be harmed, but only because Obamacare requires insurers to spend at least 80% or 85% of their premium income (depending on the size of the insured group) on healthcare rather than on their own operating costs, marketing costs, and profit. Already they’ve been sending out hundreds of thousands of refund checks for the excess. Is that harmful to consumers in some way that I’m failing to grasp? There will be glitches that need fixing — Peggy Noonan found one involving 455 Oregon families, as already described — but the solution to that is to fix them. Not throw out reform that will make the American economy — and its citizenry — both healthier.
How I Get My Exercise September 13, 2013 JACOB GERSHOWITZ What a glorious four minutes. Rhapsody. Not to be missed. # WHAT YOU GOT, WHAT YOU GET If you happen to be L, G, B, or T . . . YOU GOT: Marriage! A doubled Dow! DADT repeal! An averted depression! Trans inclusion! Free preventive care! Hate crimes legislation! Ended wars! Progressive Supreme Court Justices! Hospital visitation rights, immigration equality, the Army paying to fly you to a state that allows your marriage, a President making a public point to meeting with Russian LGBT dissidents, an anti-bullying program, Medals of Freedom . . . in the words of Aretha Franklin: R.E.S.P.E.C.T. All deserved the day we were born, but only delivered in the last five years. Reason enough, it seems to me, to click here and join our LGBT Leadership Council, if you can afford it, at whatever level works for you ($32,400, for sure, but $100 a month would be great, too). YOU GET: A “free” ticket to our annual LGBT Leadership Council dinner, credit toward other stuff, and – if we have the funds to plant the crucial seed corn this year – voter turn-out sufficient to hold the Senate and take back the House next year . . . and hold the WH in 2016 (voters we register in 2014 +stay+ registered for 2016; tech advances we build for 2014 become the +base+ for further tech advances in 2016). And to flip state legislatures back into progressive hands, unseat Tea Party governors – all that. Most political giving doesn’t go to the infrastructure that powers turn out, it goes to an ocean of TV advertising. Necessary, but not nearly as leveraged. This is the seed corn. We need to be planting it NOW. Join us. We have further to go. Keep the progress coming. (If you happen not to be LGBT, feel free to join anyway — or click here to help “generically” instead. Either way, I’ll see it the minute it comes through and JUMP through the screen to say thanks. This is actually how I get my exercise.)