Here is a photo with commentary by the indispensable Charles Gaba, who runs the site, ACA Signups, the go-to place for data about the Affordable Care Act:
 Apparently, 12 people showed up for the Confederate flag rally.
Mylan, a generic drug maker based outside Pittsburgh, abandoned its status as a US corporation, gaining tax advantages by moving its headquarters to the Netherlands. The move reduced the taxes the company pays on profits from sales of drugs overseas, but Mylan continues to maintain most of its operations in Pennsylvania.
Mylan was viewed by some in Congress and the Obama administration as a symbol of corporate greed when they undertook a corporate inversion that placed profits above any commitment to its home country.
But now, Mylan is demanding that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) protect it from a hostile takeover bid by an Israeli company, Teva Pharmaceuticals. Mylan asked the FTC to examine Teva’s purchase of Mylan stock for possible violation of the requirement that large purchases of stock of US firms must be reviewed by antitrust authorities, because Mylan is still listed on the NYSE. The company claims that its principal office remains in Pennsylvania, which makes it a âUS issuerâ of stock for federal anti-trust purposes.
The irony of this is not lost in Washington. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee said:
Mylan is trying to have its cake and eat it too…It is an intolerable abuse of a loophole when US corporations pretend they are based overseas in order to get out of paying their fair share and duck their responsibilities to the United States. Itâs just plain hypocrisy when one of those same inverted companies claims that it is actually a US company because it needs the special protections US law gives to American companies.
Mylan may have a case. Its plea for help from the US government could pass legal muster but, the optics of a company that abandoned its US citizenship in order to pay less in federal taxes, and then seeking the protection of a federal agency is problematic.
Compounding the farce, Mylan is attempting its own hostile takeover of Perrigo, in order to stave off Teva.
Mylanâs unabashed lack of shame is impressive. Maybe the FTCâs decision-making on this case should take quite a while.
So, wake up Congress, and deal conclusively with corporate inversions! Our wake-up calls for the next few weeks will be songs about summer. We start with the Lovinâ Spoonfulâs only #1 hit, âSummer in the Cityâ:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.
Mondayâs Hot Links:
The return trip often seems shorter than the initial trip, even though the distance traveled and the actual time spent traveling are identical. This is called the “return trip effect”. Two studies say it is real, but you already knew that.
Trucker jobs will be the first casualty of driving robots. Trucker salaries average $40,000/year. Most truck accidents are due to user error: Driving too fast, driving while tired, or driving while intoxicated. Robots don’t drink, don’t get tired, and won’t drive unsafely in order to get to a destination faster. Drivers will still be needed for inner-city driving (at least initially), but most long-haul operations will quickly vanish as soon as licensing is complete in most states.
Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2032, slightly more than Germany has today. The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produceâand their domestic consumption has been rising at 7% a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and make the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.
Privail Diagnostics, has developed a simple, portable blood test that can detect the HIV virus (not antibodies) for the first time. That means an earlier diagnosis, and reduced infection rates. Privailâs at-home testing device is like a diabetes test, needing only one drop of blood. It shows the results in a color bar, like an at-home pregnancy test or digital output, like a diabetes meter. Invest at your own risk.
Hackers have apparently cracked the computer systems responsible for issuing flight plans to pilots of every airline. The apparent weak link? The flight plan-delivery protocol used by every airline. Ground computers calculate the appropriate flight plan for planes, and someone on ground approves the plan before distributing it to pilots. Pilots receive plans before taking off, as well as enroute, when a change occurs during a flight. Plans are uploaded to planes via a datalink. Once a hacker figures out those protocols, it is possible to issue a bogus flight plan. But, the industry says, not to worry.
Your thought for the week: Giving money to poor people is socialism, or even communismâŚ..giving money to AIG or Goldman Sachs is capitalism, and that’s what made this nation grrrreat!!!
There will be limited blogging for the next seven days, as the Wrongologist and Ms. Right head to Bermuda.
It was an epic news week, from the killings in Charleston to the ACA decision by the Supreme Court, 6-3, in which Antonin Scalia wrote the 21 page dissent. Then came the Marriage Equality decision. Antonin Scalia wrote another dissent, starting with:
I write separately to call attention to this Courtâs threat to American democracy
Here is the Cliff notes version of both Scalia dissents: âI stole the 2000 election for thisâ??
They shot and missed:
Republicans secretly happy about SCOTUS decision on ACA:
Marriage equality decision not popular with everyone:
And the Supremes said, âLet them eat cakeâ:
The big change on the Confederate flag doesn’t change much:
What the Flag means:
On Monday, South Carolinaâs governor Nikki Haley announced a plan to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the SC state house. That got many Republican presidential candidates off the hook after a weekend in which most delivered waffles about the subject.
But, everything you need to know about the conservative Republican position on the Confederate flag in 2015 was summed up by Bill Kristol on the very same day:
OK. Time to talk about history. The South seceded, and then fought a war to preserve slavery. It was not a war of Northern aggression. It was a war of Confederate choice, and the choice was made first by South Carolinians, who were the first to announce their secession.
SCâs Declaration of Causes of Secession was issued on December 20, 1860, after the election, but three months before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. If you choose to read at the link, youâll see the entirety of their complaint had to do with slavery. They were angry:
⢠That slaves were escaping from their territory and Northern States were refusing to send them back
⢠That blacks had been granted citizenship in some Northern states
⢠That the election of Lincoln would lead to slaveryâs exclusion from the new territories
Here is a snippet: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that âGovernment cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,â and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
Lincoln was explicit during the early years of the war that he fought back, not for slavery, but to preserve the union. Today, some modern âconfederatesâ use those quotes from Lincoln to argue that the war wasn’t about slavery, but that is revisionist history.
The people who started the war, in every confederate state, were explicitly doing so to preserve slavery. Read the other secession statements. Read the speeches of leading confederate politicians. Read the founding CSA documents, in which the CSA states were free to do anything they wanted except end slavery. In fact it’s clear that the main purpose of even having a confederation was to preserve slavery.
The Confederate flag was basically forgotten after the civil war until the civil rights movement when the battle flag was resurrected by those in the south who were against the federal laws prohibiting lynching, segregation, and vote blocking. In other words, that flag has been used only by those promoting white supremacy. Heritage? Of course, but for a flag that represents something that existed for four years?
The flag is just a start. Why are there Civil War reenactments in the South? Battle field reenactments where they honor their defeat of the north, focused on battles they won in a war that they lost. Imagine if Mexican Americans had an Alamo reenactment where they storm the Alamo and kill Davy Crockett.
Taking down the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Capitol, along with Walmart and EBay stopping sales of the flag, and the number one Confederate flag manufacturer ending production are all important steps, but they are the just a few steps on a long road.
The next big question is will country music follow the lead of Governor Haley and distance itself from the Confederate flag? The rebel flag is deeply interwoven into country and southern rock music, that relationship is both deep and wide.
This stuff is symbolic, and a very important symbol is being phased out.
This is meaningful.
See you on Sunday.
Yesterday we explained that, although Kurds are Sunnis, they fight ISIS, which is a Sunni movement. Today, we look at an example of how the Sunni-Shia divide elsewhere in Iraq seems deep enough that it might never be resolved.
The Wall Street Journal has a report on the efforts to resettle Sunnis into areas that were held by ISIS and liberated by Shia: (brackets and editing by the Wrongologist)
ISIS was driven out of Mohamad Mutlaqâs hometown in central Iraq six months ago, and since then, he and his family have tried every few days to…go home. But…each time [Sunnis] approach a bridge to cross back into the town of Yathrib, Shiite tribesmen at a checkpoint beat the Sunni refugees, saying: âDonât even try to come back…â
The WSJ calls Yathrib a failure in Iraqâs efforts to repopulate ISIS-held Sunni areas, and it points to Tikrit as a success. Tikrit was recaptured from ISIS three months ago, and it is now at the center of a government campaign to rebuild and repopulate the area. But, the challenges are huge:
Tikrit and Yathrib, both in Salahudeen province, illustrate the challenges Iraq faces in trying to resettle…nearly three million displaced people in areas recaptured from ISIS.
Most towns and villages retaken from ISIS remain largely unpopulated as the government struggles to build a process that will return residents to their home towns. Security preparations, mine clearing and infrastructure rebuilding contribute to delays. Yathrib has been empty for six months since its 60,000 people fled ISIS. From the WSJ:
Instead, they couldnât get past the checkpoint run by a Shiite tribe known as Bani Saad. An Iraqi army unit and three Shiite militias are posted inside the town, but there is little sign of any reconstruction.
When WSJ visited, they saw pockmarked walls of empty homes. Acres of grape vineyards have gone unattended for months. The ceilings of most houses leading into Yathrib are completely collapsed, suggesting they were blown up with improvised explosive devices. Yathrib residents and tribal leaders say Shiite militias aided by the townâs Shiite neighbors have blown up some buildings, while members of the Shiite militia stationed in the town say ISIS fighters blew up the buildings before retreating:
Residents of Yathrib and its neighboring Shiite hamlets are descendants of the same tribe, split into Sunni and Shiite branches. Shiite tribal leaders accuse their Sunni brethren of enabling ISIS to stage attacks against them from the town last summer. They have demanded their Sunni neighbors be allowed to return only on certain conditions.
The neighboring Shiite tribes suggest punitive measures for Sunni Yathrib residents. They included blood money payments, buffer zones between the town and its Shiite neighbors, and even a separate water supply. The Sunni and Shiite areas would report to separate local administrations.
Some of Yathribâs Sunnis acknowledge they supported ISIS but refuse to apologize for it. The Shiite leader whose tribesmen guard one crossing into Yathrib, said his tribe would accept only blood money paid by the Sunni tribes themselves, not the government, saying:
If the government brings back the people of Yathrib without meeting our conditions, we are going to kill them all.
Tikrit is a different story. Last week, there was an orderly return of 1,400 families to Tikrit, a fraction of the 160,000 people originally displaced from the city.
Iraqâs government claims the return of Tikrit residents is an example of Sunni cooperation with the Shiite-majority militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Those forces led battles across Salahudeen province, and now are in charge of the repopulation effort. The plans for the orderly return of the population took months to get established, and local Sunni tribes that joined Shiite militias to fight ISIS have helped those militias and local officials set up an elaborate screening process. From the WSJ:
Other tensions remain. Sunni policemen stationed around Tikrit said some Shiite militiamen have refused to withdraw from the city despite government orders. In the city itself, they remain an intimidating presence, where residents complain their homes have been searched aggressively and some stores have been looted.
The Obama administration knows that the resettlement process is a make or break issue. If there isn’t a broader and successful reconciliation in Iraq, efforts to beat back ISIS will fail.
Yugoslavia went through the same thing after Tito’s death. There the conflicts were between Christians and Christians and Muslims.
The result was the creation of new nation-states organized largely around religion.
If it was ok for Yugoslavia, why not for Iraq?
The Kurds are on the verge of creating a homeland of their own, despite Iraq and US efforts to avoid it. If they do, the Middle East may never be the same. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting report about the possibility of an independent Kurdish state:
Amid an imploding Middle East ravaged by religious hatreds, the Kurds are providing a rare bright spotâand their success story is finding fresh support and sympathy in the West. By contrast with the rest of the region, all the main Kurdish movements today are broadly pro-Western and secular.
There are 30 million Kurds in the ME and only 4.5-6 million live in Iraq. Their language, Kurdish, is part of the Indo-European family of languagesâclose to Persian (Farsi) but unrelated to Arabic or Turkish.
Unlike Iranians, who are mostly Shiite Muslims, most Kurds are Sunnis. Despite that, they are confronting the Sunni ISIS, and the Shiite-supported Syrians.
Here is a map of the potential Kurdish state:
In Iraq, the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, (KRG), was adopted by the new Iraqi constitution after the US invasion. Kurds control their own affairs. This has allowed the Kurds to achieve a boom in investment and construction that has produced new highways, hotels and shopping malls.
The Kurdistan government in northern Iraq maintains its own armed forces, known as the Peshmerga (literally, âthose who confront deathâ), and no Iraqi troops are allowed in the region. The KRG controls its own borders, and Westerners can fly into the regionâs capital, Erbil, without a visa. Kurdish is used everywhere as the official language, and few young Iraqi Kurds can speak fluent Arabic.
Yet, political divisions hamper the Kurdsâ fight against ISIS, and their prospects for self-rule. Only a minority of Peshmerga brigades on the front lines are under KRG command, while the rest still report directly to one of the two rival political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
From a regional perspective, Iran has a significant Kurdish minority that it has suppressed in the past. Now, it is strengthening ties with the KRG, since Iran views the KRG as an ally in the fight against ISIS.
In Syria, the civil war has enabled Kurds to set up a wide area of self-administration in the northeast of the country, eliminating the border between Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, who now travel back and forth across it without visas.
And in Turkey, decades of outright denial of the existence of Kurds, (they called Kurds âMountain Turksâ) led to a bloody war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workersâ Party, or PKK. The fighting ended only after a cease-fire was proclaimed in March 2013. The PKK was once an ally of the Assad regime, and is still classified as a terrorist group by the US and Turkey.
But, in the just-concluded Turkish elections, Kurds voted for the Kurdish Peopleâs Democratic Party, or HDP, which won 13% of the national vote and gained 86 seats in the Turkish parliament. The Kurds demonstrated they can serve as check against the anti-democratic aspirations of Turkey’s President Erdogan.
But neither the Iraqis nor the US want an independent Kurdistan, despite the possibility that Kurdistan as an independent state would be a buffer against the expansion of ISIS. They act as a âNorthern Frontâ in the war against ISIS, and ISIS will be forced to commit resources to the area, as demonstrated by the Kurds seizing the crucial border crossing, Tal Abyad, cutting ISIS supply lines and uniting Kurdish areas that now stretch from Iraq halfway to the Mediterranean Sea.
Yes, an independent Kurdistan would mean the “fragmenting” of Iraq, which Mr. Obama does not support. But Iraq was never a real country; it was cobbled together after WW1 by European bureaucrats drawing arbitrary lines on a map, with no thought to historical or cultural realities. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one knows how to put those historical anomalies “Syria” and “Iraq” back together again. They’re going to be a mess for a while.
The Kurds are different. They have the makings of a state â an area that enjoys the allegiance of its people, has civil order that allows it to raise taxes and create an effective army. It is doubtful that the US will formally recognize a Kurdish state anytime soon, but the ME is a place where that is irrelevant.
No need to recognize the Kurds as a state, just treat them like one. Buy their oil (as Israel does), and give them weapons and humanitarian aid.
They may richly repay the investment.
Wrongologist reader Rene asks: âwhy doesnât the Wrongologist say something about the Greek crisisâ?
Most people believe that Greece needs debt relief. The creditors should discount some of the amount that Greece owes, since thereâs no way they can pay it all back. But, that hasnât happened and itâs unlikely that it will, since itâs politically impossible. Why? It is very hard to explain in a short post, but Forbes has a great summary of the facts:
The money is owed to the taxpayers of other European Union and Euro Zone countries. And whatâs more, [their] taxpayers know this.
So, this is the issue: To solve the Greek debt problem, something like 50% of their debt has to be written off. That would equal 1.5% to 2% of GDP for each country in the Euro Zone. So itâs not happening.
Even though the money has already been lost by lending it to Greece in the first place, the response by the Euro Zone is troubling. From Ambrose Bierce in the Telegraph:
The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the IMF, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.
Worse, Europe is now provoking a Greek bank run in their effort to force Greece to its knees, issuing a report that warned of an “uncontrollable crisis” if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, “an exponential rise in unemployment”, and a “collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership”.
So Europeâs guardians of financial stability are deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state, saying they are out of the Euro Zone if they donât comply.
The IMF is forcing a contradictory austerity policy in Greece â with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment. Moreover, they are applying a completely different standard in Ukraine, announcing on Friday, that it will: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
Continue to support Ukraine through its Lending-into-Arrears Policy even in the event that a negotiated agreement with creditors in line with the program cannot be reached in a timely manner.
This despite the fact that the IMF, by its rules, does not lend to nations that are likely to default.
In the case of Greece, the creditors are acting in concert. They are doubling down, assuming (possibly rightly) that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the last hour.
The European governments must approve any bailout extension, but we are now so close to the expiration of the second bailout on June 30th that it is too late to get a deal approved by then. But IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has 30 days before she has to report a Greek non-payment of âŹ1.5 billion on June 30th to her board, the real drop dead date appears to be July 20th, when a âŹ3.5 billion payment is due to the ECB.
Unfortunately, itâs hard to see how the two sides will agree to anything other than a short-term deal before the July 20th date. Any âthird bailoutâ of restructuring Greek debt as suggested in the Forbes article above, may be impossible.
In the words of Woody Allen:
âMore than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.â
So wake up Euro Zone! To help with a gentle wake-up, here as we start summer, is the last in our series of spring bird visits to the fields of Wrong. Here is the Song Sparrow:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.
Mondayâs Hot Links:
Dispatches from the Clown Car:
Rick Santorum says Iranians canât be trusted because they are theocrats. Sure. We all know that Christian theocrats are trustworthy.
Jeb Bush says a tolerant country should allow religious discrimination. Day is night. Black is white. Discrimination is tolerance. Welcome to the fun house that is Conservative politics today.
Rick Santorum Argues Heterosexual Parents Are Every Child’s âBirthright. Really? Arenât caring, loving parents a birthright? Why should we care about parentsâ sexuality as long as theyâre committed to loving and protecting their children?
Chinese physicists have developed a laser-based deep space propulsion system that harnesses more power than conventional solar sails. China is actually developing/investing in science, technology and innovation. Has anybody alerted our misleaders in Congress? Maybe we can find something else to develop besides military weapons.
Cambodia is training an elite squad of African rats to sniff out landmines. A team of 15 rats were imported from Tanzania with the help of a Belgian NGO, which trains rats to sniff out mines. The rats will try to locate the huge quantities of unexploded mines that have killed nearly 20,000 people since 1979.
Heinz says theyâre sorry for a code on a ketchup bottle that links to porn site. A Heinz Ketchup buyer was exposed to porn from a website similar to www.watchmygf.xxx after Heinz allows a domain to lapse, and an adult entertainment firm buys it.
We know that when faced with a tragedy, some people exploit it for narrow ends. But we got to see just how low Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) could go. Appearing on The View, Senator Graham at first said a couple of things that seemed mainstream:
Itâs not who we are, itâs not who our country is, itâs about this guy…and this guyâs got tons of problems and to kill people in a church after sitting with them for an hour shows you how whacked out this kid is.
Fine. Heâs going with the lone wacko meme instead of the domestic terrorist meme.
Then he goes further. Despite the fact that the Justice Department had labeled the attack a âhate crime,â Graham wouldnât go there: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)
There are real people who are organized out there to kill people in religion and based on race, this guyâs just whacked out…But itâs 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians [in order] to kill them.
Excuse us Mr. Graham, there hasnât been anything so far to indicate that this was a hate crime against Christians for being Christian. And when you suggest that it is about that, two bad things happen:
⢠It denies the legitimacy of the trauma this caused black people in and outside South Carolina, irrespective of their religious beliefs
⢠It feeds the paranoia of white Christians, many of whom already have a borderline persecution complex
He ignores that the killerâs roommate said he was âbig into segregationâ and wanted to start a race war, and that he had Confederate Flag vanity plates. The eyewitness survivors of the attack said that he complained about black people raping white people.
Under the circumstances, it is safe to say that this was a hate crime, and also that it was a hate crime directed against black people for being black. This guy turned his anger on black people. The next guy might target secularists because politicians like Mr. Graham use this tragedy to say that people are out to get Christians.
A primary job of our leaders is to tamp down paranoia when it appears. But, Sen. Graham isnât interested in calming peopleâs fears, he is a merchant of the politics of fear. He wants you to be afraid all the time, which is how he builds support for his domestic policies and his foreign adventures.
That he is consistently re-elected speaks volumes about South Carolina. Only 672,941 people of South Carolina’s roughly 3.8 million voters voted for him in 2014. Since he is now a GOP presidential candidate, he wants to win the SC GOP primary. So he is only speaking to those 672,941 SC voters.
That implies that he has no moral compass.
On to cartoons. South Carolina was the dominant story, but we heard from Pope Frank, Obamaâs trade deal passed the House, and there is a new $10 bill on the way.
We shouldnât fool ourselves about root causes:
The usual suspects offered the usual denials:
The Popeâs faith-based climate teaching met resistance:
Pope Francis has difficulty reading right-wing signals:
Obama rides Republicans towards a trade deal:
There should be no debate on who will be on new $10 bill:
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting report, âThe Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Biteâ, which reviews the current state of four-year college accreditation. It makes a case that accreditation, at least for the four-year colleges, needs an overhaul.
Who accredits colleges? The US Department of Education (DOE) recognizes 38 accreditors who act as gatekeepers of federal aid to college students. Federal student aid can only be used at accredited schools. About 90% of accredited four-year colleges are overseen by an accreditor from one of the six geographic regions. These six oversee more than 3,000 US colleges, public and private. Other colleges are overseen by faith-based accreditors, or groups that review vocational schools.
The WSJ found that in the past 15 years, those six accreditors have rescinded the membership of just 26 educational institutions. Their report is silent on how many colleges are on probation. Typically, schools on probation have 5 years to make it back to an accredited status.
They found a link between college graduation rates and student default rates on college loans:
(Some may be confused by the graphâs notation of average graduation rates and loan default rates. The red bars reflect the number of colleges with those rates, not a graphical representation of the percentages.)
The article examined graduation rates and student loan defaults. Not a bad start if you wanted to measure a school: we should want high graduation rates, and we want low student loan default rates, both as matters of public policy. They compared these numbers to a baseline, the average for schools that have lost accreditation since 2000. The question implied by the WSJ is if a school has a lower graduation rate or a higher default rate than the baseline numbers, should they keep their accreditation?
The WSJ methodology took the list of accredited colleges that were posted on the accreditorsâ websites. For each of those colleges, the Journal then examined DOE statistics on graduation rates, student aid and loan default rates. The analysis was limited to four-year colleges that offered at least a bachelorâs degree. Colleges where students received no federal aid werenât included in the analysis.
The DOE is barred by law from telling the 38 accreditors how to do their job. The Obama administration recognized the problem and in 2013, proposed an end-run, tying access to loans and grants to a new ratings system that would compare colleges on measurements such as graduation rate, student debt and income after graduation. It was greeted by mixed reviews by the education establishment, who felt as usual, that the data would be misinterpreted and bad decisions would follow.
The idea had little Republican support, since they would prefer to eliminate the DOE, not expand its brief. Most Republicans, starting with Rick Perry in 2012, object to the federal governmentâs financing of students, and have called for the downsizing or elimination of the DOE. A few candidates for 2016 have followed Perryâs lead. Itâs the position of Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who all think that setting standards should be a local responsibility.
The Republican opposition is not new. Opposition to the DOE began in 1979 when it became a Cabinet-level department. It is opposed mainly by conservatives, who see the department as undermining of statesâ rights, and libertarians who believe it is an unnecessary and illegal federal intrusion into local affairs. Republicans all believe in letting Mr. Market do his job. That of course, is the position favored by the for-profit schools who have been big donors to Republican candidates.
So, how does a family with a prospective college freshman move forward? Say they are trying to compare two schools, one with a higher graduation rate than the other. Is the school with the higher graduation rate better? Or could the other school with a lower rate be better because it takes chances on more students?
Similarly, higher loan default rates should be viewed in context. Engineering schools tend to graduate students who find jobs quickly and easily, but that doesn’t mean every school should become an engineering school.
We need to connect the dots and understand that we can’t produce more college grads by pretending all kids are prepared for it. They are not. Our colleges enroll many woefully unprepared kids, who canât make the grade, but can run up large debts.
The way to get more kids through college: Force a good K-12 education back into K-12 where it belongs.
The âlawgiversâ in DC moved forward on two deeply held Republican ideas this week, and neither stand up to close inspection.
Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill banning torture. It is an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that will permanently bar the âenhanced interrogation techniquesâ that were used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. It passed 78-21. It limits the interrogation of detainees by any US government employee or agent to only using techniques that are listed in the publicly available Army Field Manual on human intelligence collection. This is a good thing.
The 21 no votes, which are really a vote for torture, were all by Republicans. Thatâs 21 US Senators, all from one political party, including the Senate Majority Leader and his Majority whip, who voted to continue torture as an official policy of the US government.
Presumably, these 21 will run on their support for torture the next time they come up for re-election. Interestingly, the vote split Texasâ two Republican Senators, with Cruz voting for the bill, and Cornyn voting against it. The Houston Chronicle quoted an aide to Cornyn:
The senator is concerned that limiting intelligence professionals and law enforcement to interrogation techniques detailed in publicly available manuals would give would-be terrorists the ability to train and prepare against them.
Really? You think it is possible for the average jihadist to âprepareâ for the techniques described in the Army Field Manual? And that preparation will compromise our intelligence gathering? As Charlie Pierce said:
This country can be America, or it can be a country that tortures. It cannot be both.
Next, the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday released a fiscal year 2016 funding proposal that, among its provisions:
⢠Dismantles the Affordable Care Act
⢠Eliminates funding for the Title X family planning program
⢠Includes something called the Health Care Conscience Rights Act that is essentially more Hobby Lobby, although on steroids
It would eliminate Title X funding unless the program meets a certain ideological (read: abstinence-focused) criteria:
None of the funds appropriated in this Act may be made available to any entity under title X of the Public Health Service Act unless the applicant for the award certifies to the Secretary that it encourages family participation in the decision of minors to seek family planning services and that it provides counseling to minors on how to resist attempts to coerce minors into engaging in sexual activities.
And hereâs the part of the proposal that would let your school or boss determine whether or not your insurance covers contraception or any other form of healthcare they may not like:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no provision of this title (and no amendment made by any such provision) shall⌠require a sponsor (or, in the case of health insurance coverage offered to students through an institution of higher education, the institution of higher education offering such coverage) to sponsor, purchase, or provide any health benefits coverage or group health plan that includes coverage of an abortion or other item or service to which such sponsor or institution, respectively, has a moral or religious objection, or prevent an issuer from offering or issuing to such sponsor or institution, respectively, health insurance coverage that excludes such item or service.
Yes, it enables more unwanted pregnancies, less breast and cervical cancer screenings, more undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases, and more economic burdens pushed onto the states.
According to a data from the Guttmacher Institute, each dollar invested in Title X saves $3.80 in Medicaid expenses related to pregnancy and childbirth. Another Guttmacher analysis found that the services provided by Kansasâ Title X clinics in 2010 helped save the state more than $61,000,000 in public funds. According to the report:
That accounts for savings from reduced maternity and birth-related costs, along with reduced costs related to miscarriage and abortion and savings related to [sexually transmitted infection] screening and cervical cancer prevention services.
You can certainly count on Republicans. If there is an efficacious solution to a problem, as in this case, you can disregard it for a faith-first solution that costs more, while creating unnecessary cruelty and inhumanity.
Republicans want to stand the First Amendment on its head.
This is who they are. They will piss on the Pope if he speaks about climate change. And their leadership, plus a total of 39% of Republicans in the Senate support torture, since torture seems mas macho.
You have a chance on Election Day to tell them what you think about their “conscience”!