The following clip from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show is (reasonably) funny, but it points out something very serious, namely that a major initiative to help people in Appalachia, including coal miners that the president pretends to care about, is opposed by the Trump administration.
It’s a microscopic part of federal spending, and it helps, mainly with job-training programs for adults, a region that has been for generations slammed with deep poverty.
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Saturday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA featured this fun short video from southern Germany in July. Members of a local school’s astronomy club drew a chalk sundial in a city square and took turns acting as the gnomon, the bit that casts the shadow, for 10 minutes each. Pictures were taken (using a Nikon D200) at the rate of once every 20 seconds, so the participants could also perform a bit of stop-motion animation, making the resulting time-lapse a lot more entertaining. (Their explanation in English is here.)
The astronomy group includes both adults and kids. There’s also at least one dog and a human skeleton.
The video runs just over a minute and a half.
by Donald Trump has said several times that he wants the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to fail. Unfortunately, there are some things he can do to make insurance harder to get or less affordable. He’s already started doing it.
The law strives to make health insurance more affordable for people who have to buy their own. One is to give all most of them tax credits to help them pay the cost of premiums. (The credit is enough to limit their cost to a percentage of their income, based on the cost of the the least expensive silver plans available where they live.) Another is to give low-income working people help them copays and deductibles that most of them otherwise couldn’t afford. This latter part is called “cost-sharing reductions” or “CSRs.”
Some opponents of the Affordable Care Act claim that the wording of the law does not expressly appropriate funding for the CSRs, though when the bill was originally analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office and by independent organizations, and when it was debated in Congress, everyone on all sides of the issue assumed that the appropriations were automatic.
President Trump now claims that he has the right to withhold the payments. He has so far not tried to do so, but month after month, he suggests that he might decide to cancel the payments next month. This obviously puts insurance companies in a bind, since the law says they have to cut what they charge, and if the federal government breaks its promise and doesn’t pay, the companies are on the hook for the money and will have to increase premiums next year.
This has already created a crisis in Nevada, where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has elected not to offer individual health insurance policies next year in all but the state’s largest counties. Since no other insurers are likely to offer health insurance in most or all of these counties, this is a serious problem. (For more, see for example this article in The Reno Gazette-Journal.)
This isn’t the only way Trump can screw with the Affordable Care Act. Last month, health insurance blogger Charles Gaba worked out, based on a sample of insurance company rate increase requests from 20 states, that while more than a quarter of the projected premium increases in 2018 can be blamed on such things as the general increase in medical costs, fully 71 percent is attributable to politics, specifically actions (or inaction) by the administration and Congress. Gaba isn’t a neutral observer — in fact, he makes it pretty clear that he’s pissed off at the people he deems responsible — but that doesn’t make him wrong.
For more, see this video from pediatrician and medical school professor Dr Aaron Carroll:
by As previously noted (see below), PBS News Hour has broadcast a series on the antibiotics crisis, that is, the appearance of more and more deadly drug-resistant germs and the lack of new antibiotics to deal with them. Here are the most recent two installments, on how rampant use of antibiotics in farming is a major problem.
If you don’t have time to watch, here’s the short version: Farmers raising chickens, pigs, and other animals use antibiotics in feed because doing so promotes rapid growth. Pharmaceutical companies happily sell the drugs to farmers, generally at a tiny fraction of what they sell the same drugs for use in human patients or even veterinary medicine.
Not surprisingly, this overuse promotes the development of disease pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics.
Some farmers, grocery stores, restaurant chains, and so on have started advertising that they don’t allow the use of antibiotics. As I pointed out in a post back in 2016, at least one irresponsible competitor has run ads attacking them, arguing there’s no reason to avoid antibiotics because they’re not present in meat anyway and falsely claiming that no-antibiotics claims are just a way of ripping-off consumers. Of course, that completely misses the point.
Other parts of this series:
by According to National Public Radio, Purdue Farms is making efforts to raise chickens under better conditions with large windows and places for them to roost. When Leah Garces, the executive director of an organization called Compassion in World Farming, was given a tour of a new-style chicken house alongside a more typical factory farm building, she noted that while the chickens in the latter were quiet and immobile, those in the new facility were “running around, climbing on things, pecking, perching.”
Part of this is that the new facility uses a different breed of chicken, one not bred with the single-minded purpose of growing rapidly, often so rapidly that their bones can barely support them.
Purdue claims that the better-treated, more active, slower-growing chickens have better-tasting meat. The company is also under pressure from customers such as restaurant chains that want to be able to say their chickens are treated more humanely. The chickens will also be rendered unconscious by a gas before they are slaughtered.
Obviously they’re still slaughtered far short of normal lifespan, so it’s hard to argue the new practices are free of cruelty. On the other hand, we humans aren’t likely to turn 100 percent vegan anytime soon, and nonhuman predators in the wild don’t exactly treat their prey with kindness.
by Walter Shaub, until last month director of the federal Office of Government Ethics, says he is very concerned by violations of ethical norms by the Trump administration. At a news conference on July 28 he said, “We are truly in an ethics crisis, and something needs to be done about it,” according to a report from National Public Radio.
Shaub announced on July 6 that he was resigning effective July 19. He now works at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
Shaub’s public expressions of concern go back to November in response to Donald Trump’s announcements that he would not adhere to the longstanding practice of presidents to put their investments into blind trusts in order to avoid conflicts of interest, instead using a trust nominally run by his sons and a business associate. In addition, the administration has, according to NPR, hired “unprecedented numbers of former lobbyists, lawyers and industry consultants” and given many of them waivers to exempt them from the usual ethics rules. Such waivers are supposed to be public documents, but the administration for a long while refused to release them.
Previous administrations of both parties have paid serious attention to ethics rules, according to Shaub and others, such as Danielle Brian, executive director of the independent Project on Government Oversight (POGO.org), who says that in contrast with past presidencies, “we have an administration now that honestly doesn’t care.”
For just one example examined in another NPR report, Trump’s hotel in Washington leases the old Post Office building from the government, and the terms of the lease are that the lease cannot be held by or benefit a federal elected official. To get around that, Trump’s lawyers created a revocable Trust on Trump’s sole behalf, one that even uses Trump’s own personal Social Security number as its tax ID, to own the lease, and puts Donald J Trump Jr in charge of the trust. George Washington University law professor Stephen Schooner, who teaches this area of law, says the lease still benefits Trump, and furthermore under terms of the lease the rent must be renegotiated annually by the General Services Administration, which ultimately answers to the president.
The same report quotes Kathleen Clark, who teaches government ethics at Washington University in St Louis, as saying, “Donald Trump is managing his affairs in a way that enables, and frankly invites, people and companies and countries to send money his way, through his businesses, in an attempt to influence him and thereby influence U.S. government policy.” Richard Painter, White House ethics counsel under President George W. Bush, said that corporate lobbyists and foreign governments may make use of Trump’s DC hotel and other businesses in order to score points with the president, and that a revocable trust isn’t enough to avoid conflicts of interest, “And some of those conflicts are illegal.”
So Shaub is urging Congress to strengthen ethics laws and has received bipartisan support for that effort in both houses, including from Iowas Senator Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy, both Republicans.
by On Friday’s episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher the host asked how Republicans would have reacted if President Obama had said what Donald Trump says. A fair question, that. Also funny.
by This performance of the Ode to Joy from the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is very similar to one in Catalonia in 2011 (see link below), and as with that one, this was sponsored by a local bank.
The Hans-Sachs Choir and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nuremberg performed in front of the Lorenz Church in Nuremberg (Nürnberg) Germany 2014 June 14.
Other flash mob performances of the Ode to Joy:
To see the symphony’s entire fourth movement performed in Osaka, Japan, with a chorus of thousands, see this post.
by Something like the X Prize might encourage drug companies to develop new antibiotics even if they’re deliberately held off the market for a while to delay development of resistant pathogens.
Other parts of this series:
by A web article (with accompanying videos) from Raleigh’s WRAL television reports on efforts to persuade the North Carolina legislature to do something about its extreme gerrymandering. Federal courts, with the backing of the Supreme Court, have ruled that districts were drawn with clear intent to concentrate African American voters into just a few districts, so the legislature is being forced to redraw districts by September 1.
Last year the state’s voters elected Democrat Roy Cooper governor, making Republican Pat McCrory the only incumbent Republican governor in the United States to lose a bid for reelection in 2016. But thanks to the aggressive gerrymandering, the legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, by 74-46 in the state House of Representatives and 35-15 in the state Senate.
Unfortunately, the chairman of the Joint House-Senate Redistricting Committee, Representative David Lewis (R-Harnett County), has made it clear he sees nothing wrong with gerrymandering that has given Republicans a 10-3 advantage in its congressional representation. Last year he argued that the split was reasonable by declaring, “I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”
Republicans respond that Democrats also engaged in gerrymandering when they were in power prior to 2011. That’s true, but their gerrymandering was less extreme. In the 2010 election, for example, 54 percent of the voted cast for federal representatives went to Republican candidates, but Democrats wound up with a 7-to-6 split of the seats. In 2012, the first when the Republican map was in effect, Democratic candidates received 51 percent of the votes but Republicans ended up with a 9-4 advantage in the congressional delegation. (In subsequent years Republican candidates collected 53 or 54 percent of the votes but 77 percent of the seats, a 10-3 split.)
The federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year (PDF) that multiple changes in voting laws passed by the Republican-controlled legislature were clearly designed to suppress black voter turnout in the state. After the court’s ruling the state GOP invented ways to get around it, with some success. This past November, in fact, the state Republican Party issued a press release celebrating that (and I quote):
African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012.
Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.
As a share of Early Voters, African Americans are down 6.0%, (2012: 28.9%, 2016: 22.9%) and Caucasians are up 4.2%, (2012: 65.8%, 2016: 70.0%).
According to WUNC-FM (an NPR affiliate), on July 27 two federal judges expressed concern that the legislature isn’t taking the court-ordered redistricting seriously. Indeed, the committee has only just started holding meetings in the wake of court order issued more than a year ago.
Here state Democrats propose ways of conducting future redistricting that give neither party an unfair advantage. (This runs half an hour, so you might not want to sit through the whole thing.)
Below is the hearing at which people spoke on fair rather than partisan redistricting. Be warned that it runs an hour and half.
Related posts from last year:
And from last month:
(Updated 2017 August 9 to add a reference to the WUNC-FM report from July 27.)
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