Daily Kos

• President Obama’s weekly address: End This Government Shutdown
  
  

   

• These are some great stories of what the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)  means to many.

  So as we near the end of week one of the shutdown, we decided to showcase some moving stories of the positive change that is happening because America finally has access to affordable healthcare.

• It is about time for those who know better speak out against both the shutdown and the insane opposition to Obamacare. 

  Leading physicians at Harvard University appealed Friday for US health care professionals to speak out against the government shutdown by contacting their elected leaders.

  The shutdown began October 1 and has sent some 800,000 federal workers home without pay. It was driven by a resurgence of Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan that lawmakers passed in 2010.

  “We must lead by example,” said the piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Drazen and executive editor Gregory Curfman.

• A congressman takes 60 seconds to show the deficiency of insurance companies, explain Obamacare and show the inhumanity of the Tea Party position on health care.
  
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• Sen. Bernie Sanders writes a comprehensive essay on where we are in health care reform and where we need to go:

  President Obama's Affordable Care Act is a start. It prevents insurance companies from denying patients coverage for pre-existing conditions, allows people up to age 26 to stay on their parents' insurance, sets minimum standards for what insurance must cover and helps lower-income Americans afford health insurance. When the marketplace exchanges open for enrollment on Tuesday, many Americans will find the premiums will be lower than the ones they're paying now. Others will find the coverage is much more comprehensive than their current plans.

  Most importantly, another 20 million Americans will receive health insurance. This is a modest step forward. But if we are serious about providing quality care for all, much more needs to be done.

  The only long-term solution to America's healthcare crisis is a single-payer national healthcare program.

• This is what the rest of the world thinks about the U.S. government shutdown:

  From Chinese bloggers to European central bankers, the world is watching the U.S. government shutdown with a mixture of bewilderment and growing nervousness that any debt default could hit struggling economies.

• This is a Supreme Court case that we should all be watching.

  Starting next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin oral arguments in a case many are calling "the next Citizens United" for its potential to vastly enhance the power of money in politics beyond its already lethal hold.

  Shaun McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission will begin court hearings on Tuesday. In the case, republican donor Shaun McCutcheon is challenging current campaign donation rules that limit individual donors to $123,000 in total spending on federal candidates and political parties during any two-year federal election cycle, known as aggregate campaign limits.

• This is how nuts Southern  States are that oppose Obamacare:

  The South Carolina state House passed a bill Wednesday that declares President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to be “null and void,” and criminalizes its implementation.

  The state’s Freedom of Health Care Protection Act intends to “prohibit certain individuals from enforcing or attempting to enforce such unconstitutional laws; and to establish criminal penalties and civil liability for violating this article.”

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir

Daily Kos Elections is pleased to announce our first set of gubernatorial race ratings for the 2013-14 election cycle. Democrats are defending 14 seats, while 24 Republican seats are up for re-election, including two next month. Given this disparity, more Republican governorships are vulnerable overall than Democratic ones.

Our full chart rating the competitiveness of each contest is below (with Democratic seats shaded in blue and Republican seats in red), along with a description of our ratings categories and an explanation for why we've rated each race the way we have.

Courtesy Stephen Wolf, we've also put our ratings into map form, with lighter colors representing more competitive races (gray states don't have governors races this cycle):

Here's how we define our ratings categories:

Safe: Barring unforeseeable developments, one party is certain to win.

Race to Watch: A foreseeable but as-yet unrealized development has the chance to make an otherwise "Safe" race potentially competitive (such as an incumbent retirement), or an incumbent faces a potentially competitive primary.

Likely: One party has a strong advantage and is likely to win, though the race has the potential to become more competitive.

Lean: One party has an identifiable advantage, but an upset victory is possible for the other party.

Tossup: Both (or all) parties have a strong (though not necessarily perfectly equal) chance of winning.

Below the fold are brief explanations of our initial ratings, grouped by category of competitiveness and following our chart from left to right and then downward.

 

In a mere 24 hours, the tea party town-criers have been reduced from dire apocalyptic warnings about the end of liberty and freedom, to whining ACA sites are loading slowly. The horror! That's an interesting twist into arguably the biggest immediate threat posed by the ACA to the GOP naysayers. It isn't just that people will come to like the low rates and guaranteed acceptance offered under the ACA over time. A more immediate problem for the usual suspects is millions of people have already found out that the dreaded Obamacare, the socialized government invasion that would bring Lady Liberty down on her knees, is really just a boring website full of insurance policies and coverage info.

Bear in mind the actual application process for any insurance is a bit lengthy. Policies offered under the ACA are no exception. If you only want to get a handle on what states are where with respect to Medicaid expansion, click the 50 state image above to go to a detailed bitmap showing that data. If all you want is an accurate estimate of how much a middle of the road policy might cost you, this tool at the Kaiser Foundation will do that for you.

If you want to know your state's progress on the ACA, I've linked a report on some to the state name. Lastly, if you want to actually shop for real rates, you'll need to click the appropriate state exchange or Healthcare.gov link below, create a screen name and password, and then follow the prompts, where you will fill in lots more information.

Be advised, one item the HIX's and fed HIX are sticklers for is identity verification. Be prepared to verify your identity several times by answering a wide array of questions to help HHS or your state HIX keep your info secure. And in part because of record traffic, and in part because the HIX websites have to interlock with many other sites to help you apply, most sites are going slow and/or will be down intermittently.

You're welcome to give these links the once over, I'm posting it as a nuts and bolts diary and to act as a one stop tool for those shopping for coverage.

Tomorrow, Oct. 7, the Idle No More movement—a broad coalition of indigenous First Nations people, Métis and Inuit, their allies in Canada, the United States, and around the world—has called for a day of action.  

This movement embodies a vision for indigenous people's rights and the environment: "Idle No More calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water."

Events are being held in Canada, the U.S., and around the world tomorrow, and will be ongoing.

“Our people and our mother earth can no longer afford to be economic hostages in the race to industrialize our homelands. It’s time for our people to rise up and take back our role as caretakers and stewards of the land.” This is a quote from the communication coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Eriel Deranger, noted warrior in the tar sands battle.

Arm in arm with Defenders of the Land, a network of indigenous communities and activists in land struggle across Canada, environmentalists and climate-change activists like Bill McKibben and other supporters are on board. There are many ways you can get involved.

Follow me below the Daily Kos border for more.

Colby King looks down the road at the Republican goal.

Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Hey, they already have the flags for it.

Maureen Dowd Looks even further into the future.

An ape sits where Abe sat.

The year is 2084, in the capital of the land formerly called North America.

The peeling columns of the Lincoln Memorial, and Abe’s majestic head, elegant hands and big feet are partially submerged in sludge. Animals that escaped from the National Zoo after zookeepers were furloughed seven decades ago migrated to the memorials, hunting for food left by tourists.

The white marble monuments are now covered in ash, Greek tragedy ruins overrun with weeds. Tea Party zombies, thrilled with the dark destruction they have wreaked on the planet, continue to maraud around the Hill, eager to chomp on humanity some more.

It's a madhouse, a madhouse! Oh, wait. It's already a madhouse. Back to the future...

Because there was no endgame, the capital’s hunger games ended in a gray void. Because there was no clean bill, now there is only a filthy stench. Because there was no wisdom, now there is only rot. The instigators, it turned out, didn’t even know what they were arguing for. Macho thrusts and feints, competing to win while the country lost.

Thomas Jefferson’s utopia devolved into Ted Cruz’s dystopia.

You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you, Ted Cruz! God damn you all to hell!

Let's see what insanity and prognostications are lose on the other editorial pages...

 

Thanks to President Obama stubbornly refusing to negotiate with terrorists (his negotiations with Iran notwithstanding), House Republicans were forced to shut down the federal government for the first time since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich was relegated to the back of Air Force One in 1995.

Without a doubt, the most visible and devastating consequence of this latest game of brinkmanship is the closure of America's national parks—which has enraged a lot of vacationers; newbies and veterans alike.

However, there have also been a number of less conspicuous (and clearly less important) negative consequences, such as: 800,000 "non-essential" workers being furloughed; Head Start programs being suspended; and millions of Americans' health and safety being endangered.

But that's not to say it's been all bad; on the bright side, the shutdown has had a slimming effect on Fox News.

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal provides the perfect encapsulation of the conservative crusade against the Affordable Care Act. On the opinion pages, columnist James Taranto mocked the story of new Obamacare enrollee Brendan Mahoney. But where news is actually reported, the WSJ's Arian Campo-Flores explained, "Why Kentucky's Health Exchange Worked Better Than Many Others." But the Bluegrass State didn't just provide a relatively smooth first-day enrollment experience. As it turns out, one of the only reliably red states to both establish its own health care exchange and accept the expansion of Medicaid to low income residents, Kentucky is already proving Republican critics of Obamacare wrong.

Those critics include Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, Kentucky's Republican senators who were caught on a live microphone in Washington admitting their real motives is shutting down the government over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. But back home, things are going pretty well for Kentucky's uninsured seeking to obtain coverage at Kentucky's Kynect exchange:

While Kentucky's health-insurance exchange experienced some glitches when it launched Tuesday, it seemed to perform better than many of its peers.

State officials and outside experts attribute the smoother rollout to a variety of factors, including intensive testing of the system, a less-flashy but more-efficient website and strong coordination among state agencies involved in the effort.

As a result, Kentucky's exchange, dubbed Kynect, logged solid results in the first day and a half of operation. As of 4:00 p.m. Wednesday, 10,766 applications for health coverage had been initiated, 6,909 had been completed and 2,989 individuals or families had enrolled in new coverage.

As the Journal suggested, Kentucky's success may be in large part to the experience of state agencies working closely together on other health care systems in the recent past, including a prescription-drug monitoring database. But the biggest factor of all is Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear, who early on opted to have Kentucky run its own health care marketplace and accept billions of dollars of essentially free money from the federal government in order to expand Medicaid to cover 308,000 lower income working residents. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Gov. Beshear explained below why "My State Needs Obamacare. Now":

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Jarman There have been several scientific studies in recent years chalking up differences between liberals and conservatives to, at least in part, differences in brain chemistry: In short, conservatives tend to have more fear-driven personalities and more binary responses to perceived threats. Knowing that such a correlation exists in laboratory settings is helpful, but how does that relate to today's political reality?

Democracy Corps has released some fascinating new qualitative research (conducted by Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner) that does a deep dive into the Republican brain; while they don't explicitly draw the link to the more rigorous studies on Republicanism and fear, much of what they elicited via focus group is, in a word, about fear ... fear of the Other, fear of losing the privilege that they've previously taken for granted, fear of losing ground. (For starters, check out the word cloud from the memo's first page, as seen above.)

Understand that the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country – and their starting reaction is "worried," "discouraged," "scared," and "concerned" about the direction of the country – and a little powerless to change course. They think Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in DC let him get away with it.

Read more about this study below the fold.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

Perspicacious online warrior/organizer Natasha Chart flagged today's 5-2 unsigned Nebraska Supreme Court decision denying an pregnant Omaha sixteen-year-old the ability to make the health decisions which she felt were right for her, instead forcing her to carry her pregnancy to term.

The decision itself is ghastly, but the process by which this young woman's rights were taken away from her was even worse.  First, today's decision.  As the Court laid out the facts:

Petitioner is 16 years old and 10 weeks along in her pregnancy. Due to abuse and neglect by petitioner’s biological parents, a juvenile court entered an order in February 2011, placing her temporary custody with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (Department). A juvenile case was initiated, and petitioner and her two siblings, ages 9 and 7, were placed in a foster home through the Department. In May 2013, the juvenile court entered an order terminating by relinquishment the parental rights of petitioner’s biological parents. At the confidential hearing, petitioner explained her desire for an abortion. She testified that she would not be able to financially support a child or “be the right mom that [she] would like to be right now.” She feared that she might lose her foster placement if her foster parents learned of her pregnancy.

Petitioner testified that her foster parents have strong religious beliefs about abortion. She felt that her foster parents “would not okay” an abortion and that “they would not just be taking it out on [petitioner], it would also be taken out on the child.” Petitioner believed that putting the child up for adoption would be worse for her and her family because her foster parents would have resentment toward her. Petitioner feared that her foster parents would tell her siblings that she was a “bad person.” The court stated that “when you have the abortion it’s going to kill the child inside you,” and petitioner responded that she understood. Petitioner answered, “Yes,” when the court asked if she would “rather do that than to risk problems with the foster care people?”

The trial court judge, Peter Bataillon, went against her at every turn, deciding that even though her biological parents had relinquished their parental rights, she still required a foster parent's consent under the law; that the "victim of abuse" exception to the consent requirement only applied to abuse by one's current parents, and not to the abuse she had suffered from her biological parents; and that she was insufficiently mature to make this decision without their consent.

Today's 5-2 decision affirmed Judge Bataillon's decisions on the facts and law, with much deference to his evaluation of this young woman's maturity:

In evaluating her maturity, a trial court “‘may draw inferences from the minor’s composure, analytic ability, appearance, thoughtfulness, tone of voice, expressions, and her ability to articulate her reasoning and conclusions.’” The latter items are matters that we cannot discern from the cold record before us and are another reason why we elect to give weight to the fact that the trial judge heard and observed petitioner in finding her not to be mature and well informed.

Below the fold, why Judge Bataillon really can't be trusted to protect women's rights to make their own health care decisions. You'll be appalled.

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• Your one stop Obamacare stop, by DarkSyde
• First Nations, Métis and Inuit: Global Day of Action, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Daily Kos Elections gubernatorial race ratings: Initial ratings for 2013-14, by David Nir
• I'm running for my life ... and a few others, as well, by Steve Singiser
• Endgame is here: Republicans are breaking, by Ian Reifowitz
• GOP Is An Insurrectionist Neo-Confederate Party, by Egberto Willies