Thursday, March 21, 2013

DAY'S END ROUND-UP

FROM THE BLOGS:

Assassination rocks Tunisia
Commentary's Michael Rubin worries the so-called Arab Spring may not being going according to plan, using Tunisia as a recent example.  

Republicans hit Obama, Jack Lew for violating the law on Medicare 
The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Anderson argues that the Obama administration broke the law by not outlining changes to increase Medicare's solvency.

Postal cuts are austerity on steroids
The Nation's John Nichols opines on why cutting funding for the United States Postal Service is a bad idea

Tim Geithner now a "distinguished fellow" at CFR
Slate's Matthew Yglesias offers his take on the former Treasury Secretary's next career move.

OTHER NEWS SOURCES:

Obama to nominate REI chief executive Jewell for Interior Secretary
The Hill's Daniel Strauss and Ben Geman report on President Obama's latest cabinet appointee.  

Dems propose bill decriminalizing pot 
The Hill's Pete Kasperowicz reports on the Democrats' latest plan to deregulate the purchase and consumption of marijuana.  

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Michigan GOP Would Force Women To Undergo Invasive Ultrasounds Before Getting An Abortion

Example of a transvaginal probe

Michigan Republicans introduced a mandatory ultrasound bill this week with a carefully-worded clause that threatens to stir up controversy that first erupted during the height of last year’s “War on Women.” By stipulating that the ultrasounds must use the “most technologically advanced equipment on site,” Michigan lawmakers would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive transvaginal probe.

Transvaginal ultrasound bills, which require doctors to insert a wand into a woman’s vagina before proceeding with an abortion procedure, were introduced last year in Virginia and Alabama. Widespread public outcry — including considerable derision from the national media — forced GOP lawmakers to back away from the extreme legislation, but Talking Points Memo reports that Michigan lawmakers are now ready to revive the fight:

The bill requires the use of ultrasound equipment “providing the most visibly clear image of the gross anatomical development of the fetus and the most audible fetal heartbeat.” As a practical matter, that requires transvaginal ultrasounds, said Donna Crane, the policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“It does lay bare that the real motive is to make abortion providers continue to acquire more and more and more equipment before they’re even eligible to perform an abortion,” Crane told TPM. “They’re trying to make it harder for doctors to do their jobs.” [...]

Crane said NARAL and its allies are prepared to fight to sink the legislation.

“Women should be up in arms over these types of laws,” she said. “Unfortunately they’re not new. But the fact that politicians just went through an election cycle and got spanked over how they treat women and reproductive freedoms and still introduce bills like this really boggles the mind. It’s not clear that the sponsors haven’t been living under rocks since November.”

But unfortunately for the women in Michigan, this is hardly the only recent attack on their reproductive rights. Their lawmakers already capitalized on the lame duck session at the end of last year to push through extreme anti-abortion legislation that limits abortion access for women who live in rural areas, requires doctors to prove that mentally competent women haven’t been “coerced” into their decision to have the procedure, and enacts unnecessary, complicated rules for abortion clinics and providers.

Abortion opponents often use mandatory ultrasounds as a tactic to impose additional barriers to reproductive care, as well as convince women to change their minds about having an abortion. But they don’t work. Studies have shown that nearly 90 percent of women feel “very confident” about their decision to have an abortion before they approach a doctor, and forcing them to look at an ultrasound doesn’t change their mind.


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American Action Forum Survey Of Insurance Companies Warns Of 2014 Premium Sticker Shock

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WASHIGNTON – A new survey of major health care insurers, representing the vast majority of covered individuals in the U.S., conducted by the American Action Forum (AAF) answers the question: what impact will the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have on premiums in 2014? This survey aimed to illustrate real cases in a variety of regulatory environments, representing the spectrum of rate changes cross any given geographic area, rather merely average changes across demographics.

The findings highlight the sticker shock in health care premiums that awaits the relatively young and healthy in both the small group and individual markets as the ACA is fully implemented. The survey finds cost of premiums for this group will increase by an average of 169 percent. Conversely, the survey found that the premiums of older and sicker individuals in these markets will be relatively subsidized by the ACA, with that group seeing an average decrease in premium costs of just under 25 percent.

Summary Table: Average Premium Impacts for Individual and Small Group in 2014

Younger and Healthier Individuals and Small Employers

Older and Less Healthy Individuals and Small Employers

Note: Changes due to insurance market reforms alone and do not include annual medical trend increases.  It also does not include the fact that some individuals and small employers experiencing these changes will be eligible for taxpayer subsidies through insurance exchanges.

Read the complete results and survey methodology here.

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The One Question Congress Must Ask Before Confirming Obama’s CIA Director

The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow on the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. There are a number of questions Brennan should and needs to answer but the hearing presents the perfect opportunity to get the current top Obama administration counterterrorism official perhaps most closely involved in the targeted killing program against al Qaeda to answer the fundamental question about it: when does it end?

Since his first bid to direct the Agency fizzled in 2008 after questions were raised about his role in the CIA torture program during the Bush years, Brennan has filled an at times more vital role in the Obama administration. Acting as the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, serving under the National Security Adviser, Brennan has advised the President on counterterrorism for the past four years. As such, his access to the President to weigh in on security matters domestic and international has been almost unparalleled. In the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009, Brennan authored a scathing review of what was then U.S. counterterrorism policy. While the Newtown tragedy was still ongoing last December, it was Brennan who first briefed Obama about the school shooting.

Brennan’s most controversial role has been his front-and-center position in the Administration’s military campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The use of targeted killings — most famously executed with drones — against individuals and groups suspect of connection to terrorist groups off the battlefield is by far the most visible outcome of those discussions. In a profile written in the Washington Post, Brennan is identified as the primary supporter of codifying the rules regarding when and where armed drone strikes could be carried out into what’s now called “the playbook” and the benign-sounding disposition matrix that identifies targets for strikes.

So Brennan, then, is ideally positioned to answer the fundamental question that needs to be answered to get a hold on America’s targeted killing program:

What role do targeted killings play in the broader U.S. counter-terrorism strategy and under what circumstances might we cease to employ them?

The question goes beyond the tactic of drone strikes to the conditions that cause them to be used in the first place. As a tactic, drone strikes have garnered significant opposition due to the potential for blowback among the populations where they are utilized, as well as the secrecy that surrounds the CIA’s classified program in Pakistan and moral questions about the serious harm cost in civilian lives the program carries with it. However, whether the program is achieving the ends that the Obama administration seeks, or even an explanation of what those ends are, is often left out of the debate and questioning of government officials.

Getting Brennan to explain what the Administration’s end game is is the most important step towards getting a handle on the program. Were the program to continue indefinitely, without any clear guidelines as to what sufficient success to cease killings might look like, all of the associated problems — blowback, civilian casualties, and undermining international law — would likely be exacerbated, as even a tightly regulated program would invariably carry the risks of unintended consequences. Moreover, a failure to give a clear account of the reasons why the Administration believes targeted killings are effectively degrading al-Qaeda and integrating that strategy into a legal understanding of when that degradation is enough to justify ending the program risks allowing targeted killings to continue well after they’ve become counterproductive. There’s also something intrinsically dangerous about a war without a clearly defined endpoint.

Defining what strategic victory looks like would also help get a handle on the thorny legal problems surrounding killing suspected American al-Qaeda members. According to the Department of Justice white paper released Monday night, much of the Administration’s justification for the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki stemmed from the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda after 9/11. An account of when the AUMF might no longer permit targeted killings would also provide a basic benchmark for judging when the Administration’s claimed power to kill Americans would expire on its own terms.

The Administration has clearly thought about these matters. Former Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson hinted that there was “a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured…that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” Retiring Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta similarly said that targeted killings are “not something that we’re going to have to continue to use forever.” Getting Brennan to clarify Johnson and Panetta’s remarks would go a long way towards providing some needed oversight for the targeted killing program.


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US Attorneys' office links shooting at FRC, high-capacity magazines

The U.S. Attorneys' office is using a successful guilty plea in a Washington, D.C., shooting case to press for more regulations on high-capacity gun magazines.

On Wednesday, a Virginia man pleaded guilty to three felonies, including a terrorism charge, for shooting a security guard at the Family Research Council (FRC) in downtown Washington last year.

U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen said the attack, which was motivated by the group’s opposition to same-sex marriage, was evidence that the government should limit the number of bullets a weapon can hold.

“This case highlights the dangers of access to high-capacity magazines that allow killers to inflict carnage on a mass scale in the blink of an eye,” Machen said in a statement following the guilty plea.

Obama and many Democrats have been pushing to limit the capacity of magazines to 10 rounds, arguing that it could help reduce the number of people a gunman could shoot in a mass attack.

According to the Justice Department, Floyd Lee Corkins approached an unarmed security guard at the conservative Christian group’s Washington headquarters on Aug. 15. Corkins pulled a semi-automatic 9mm pistol from his backpack, shot three times and struck the arm of the guard, who managed to wrestle the firearm away from Corkins, according to the DOJ.

Following Corkins’s detainment, police officers found two fully loaded 9mm magazines and 50 additional rounds of ammunition in his pockets and backpack. Corkins had legally purchased the gun from a Virginia store one week earlier, according to court records.

The size of the magazine Corkins used in the shooting was not revealed in court documents, but according to Corkins's statement of offense, the two additional magazines that officers found in his pockets each had 15 rounds in them.

Corkins told FBI investigators later that he was planning to go to a second organization, also known for its opposition to same-sex marriage, and carry out a similar shooting attack, but the injured guard stopped him.

Corkins was also carrying 15 sandwiches from Chick-fil-A in his backpack, which he said he wanted to smear on the faces of the people he intended to kill that day. A self-proclaimed political activist, Corkins told investigators: “Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage so I was going to use that as a statement.”

Corkins pleaded guilty to charges that he committed an act of terrorism while armed, an assault with intent to kill while armed, and the transportation of a gun and ammunition across state lines.

“Were it not for the heroic guard who tackled Floyd Corkins, he could have succeeded in perpetrating a mass killing spree in the nation’s capital,” Machen said.

“Today’s guilty plea makes clear that using violence to terrorize political opponents will not be tolerated.”

The shooting ignited a flurry of accusations lobbed between both sides of the same-sex marriage debate.

In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) placed the FRC on its list of hate groups for its statements about the gay community.

In the wake of the shooting, the National Organization for Marriage, one of the nation’s leading opponents of same-sex marriage, said the shooting was a direct result of the SPLC’s decision.

The SPLC vehemently denounced the shooting and rejected the use of the violence, but it stood by its categorization of the group, which has promoted the idea that a homosexual lifestyle is linked to pedophilia.

Wednesday’s guilty plea is the first time the government has charged someone with violating the District of Columbia’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, which qualifies a person’s terrorist intent as an attempt to “intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian population of the District of Columbia or the United States.”

Corkins’s sentencing is set for April 29. The terrorism and assault charges each carry a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, while the weapons-related charge carries up to 10 years in prison.

--This report was last updated at 5:41 p.m.

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Federal Prison Agency Agrees To Examine U.S. Solitary Confinement Practice

The practice has been deemed torture, cruel and inhumane, and worse than being held hostage in Iran. Yet in the United States, the country with far more prisoners than any other in the world, solitary confinement remains a common practice even for holding juveniles and the mentally ill. In the wake of a Senate hearing on the human rights, fiscal, and safety impacts of confining a prisoner in isolation for months or years at a time, the federal agency tasked with overseeing prisons has agreed for the first time to undertake a close examination of the practice.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons will hire an independent auditor to examine U.S. use of solitary confinement, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced this week after meeting with officials from the National Institute of Corrections, which will carry out the study. There are more than 80,000 people in some sort of isolated U.S. confinement at any given time, and in Durbin’s home state of Illinois, 56 percent of the population has spent time in isolation. Since the Senate hearing spearheaded by Durbin, the Bureau of Prisons says it has reduced the federal segregated population by 25 percent, and that the national agency that oversees state prisons has worked with Mississippi and Colorado to reduce their isolated populations.

Solitary confinement often involves holding prisoners in isolation for 23 hours a day in a small, often windowless cell with a steel door. When prisoners are let out of the cell for showers at least 3 times a week, they are taken to another small, isolated space where they are sometimes locked for extended periods of time. 

This treatment is not reserved for the most dangerous offenders. Solitary confinement is applied to children as young as 13, some of whom are in prison for charges as minimal as nonviolent burglary or drug possession. Sometimes people are placed in isolation as punishment, but other times it is merely for their own protection from other prisoners or as a purported mental health treatment. While many prisoners are held for months or years at a time in solitary, studies show the treatment has detrimental long-term psychological impacts after just ten days. Shane Bauer, who was taken hostage while hiking in Iran, called his experience in isolation – whether in Iran or at the notorious California supermax facility Pelican Bay — a “a living death.” What’s more, a remarkable piece of reporting by Bauer for Mother Jones reveals the process by which inmates are placed in isolation to be arbitrary, secret and virtually irreversible.


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Glaxo Expects a Shot of Growth in 2013: CEO

Witty's predicting mid-single-digit declines in 2013, with that already factored into Glaxo's forecast for earnings per share growth of 3 to 4 percent.

Glaxo is also accelerating its "change program" to cut costs. "There are really two major areas of focus of this change program," the CEO said. "One is to make sure we right size our European pharmaceutical business in response to the pricing pressure we've seen from European governments."

The other, Witty said, is to change the company's technology platforms to reduce manufacturing costs, improve the the carbon footprint, cut inventories, and improve cycle time.

The drug company's product pipeline is also filling up, with six new products under regulatory review. Glaxo expects to launch around 15 new products globally over the next three years, according to the company's earnings report. It is also aiming to improve its research and development returns to around 14 percent over the long term.

(Read More: Drug Pipelines Begin to Fill for Big Pharma)

Glaxo is considering selling its sports drinks business as well, but told CNBC that it has no plans to follow some rivals like Pfizer and transform into a less-diversified company. Last week, Pfizer's animal health subsidiary Zoetis raised $2.2 billion in its initial public offering.

Witty said there are strong synergies binding Glaxo's three key divisions — pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and consumer health.

The company's emerging market pharma and consumer business are also strong, Witty said, and now account for about 40 percent of the entire group.

"We are a big believer in bound together synergistic businesses," the CEO said, "We are against diversification for the sake of it."


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Five Reasons Why Fewer People Trust Fox News Than Ever Before

A poll released Wednesday by Public Policy Polling shows that fewer people than ever trust Fox News as a source for accurate news and reporting. Just 41 percent expressed trust in the network — down from 49 four years ago — while 46 percent said they distrust Fox. There’s an obvious reason why: Fox misrepresents facts and fudges its data to advance the conservative agenda. Indeed, it’s nothing like the “fair and balanced” network it claims to be. And, it seems, voters are catching on.

Here are just five recent examples of how Fox skews the news:

1. They misrepresented the unemployment rate. Fox News ran this chart showing the unemployment rate, but managed to somehow make an unemployment rate of 8.6 percent look higher than 8.9:

2. They misinformed viewers about Benghazi. When Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) were trying their hardest to smear President Obama and former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, Fox ran an “exclusive” report saying that the CIA had denied a diplomat permission to fend off an attack on the embassy. That never happened, and details later confirmed that the report — and the other conspiracy theories Fox ran alongside it — was totally unfounded.

3. They blamed non-existent ‘massive layoffs’ on Obama. Fox News runs frequent segments covering Obama’s supposed ‘War on Coal’ and the website Fox Nation even ran this glaring headline blaming the election for huge layoffs in the coal industry. But there were not massive layoffs. Just one business owner in Utah laid off employees. Under Obama, the industry on the whole has actually continued to grow tremendously.

4. They got almost all of their climate coverage wrong. An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that a full 93 percent of Fox News coverage on the topic global climate change was ‘misleading.’ Here’s the breakdown of how Fox covered the climate issue:

5. They don’t cover big stories. While the rest of the country discussed senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s ‘legitimate rape’ comments, Fox News hardly covered the controversy. They similarly ignored the conflict surrounding the death of teenager Trayvon Martin, and of New York’s same-sex marriage law’s passage.

The list of areas where Fox falls down on the job is too extensive to enumerate. But what is clear is that Fox’s method of dodging the truth and giving convenient facts won’t keep working, if they can’t gain the public’s trust.


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Why Medicaid Expansion Is Still Wrong for the States

Governor John Kasich now joins the list of governors that are looking to expand their Medicaid programs. In some instances, the logic of such a decision makes sense. Democratic governors have traditionally supported expanding the role of Medicaid. But the decision by Republican governors, such as Governor Jan Brewer (Ariz.), Governor Jack Dalrymple (N.D.), Governor Susana Martinez (N.M.), Governor Brian Sandoval (R., Nev.), and now Governor John Kasich (R., Ohio), is puzzling.

Like most government programs, Medicaid promises more than it delivers. While it consumes an ever increasing portion of state budgets — crowding out other state priorities, such as education and transportation — its track record for delivering quality health care to those in need falls short. Endorsing the expansion ignores these underlying problems and in some instances seems to make them worse.

Of these five Republican governors, four joined the lawsuit against the Obama administration regarding the coercive nature of the Medicaid expansion. It is troubling that now that the Medicaid expansion has been deemed voluntary not mandatory by the Supreme Court, these governors are perfectly happy to have the federal government coerce them into the expansion with the enticement of new federal dollars.

Second, many of these governors argue that the Medicaid expansion is actually good fiscal policy. These governors may be looking at a short-term bump in new federal dollars, but the longer view shows that over time this new revenue disappears and the cost of expansion continues to rise. A recent study in support of the expansion in Ohio supports this conclusion. There are also many underlying assumptions that raise further questions related to the true cost of the expansion.

One is the assumption that the federal funding will remain constant. However, here too the longer view indicates the opposite. As federal policymakers debate the course for fixing the country’s fiscal woes, it is inevitable that if these efforts are serious, entitlement programs such as Medicaid will need to be on the table. Although the administration is trying to distance itself from its previous recommendations on federal financing of Medicaid, it is impossible to guarantee that the federal dollars will remain untouched.

Some governors have made their willingness to expand the program contingent on the federal government’s keeping its funding promises. They that if the federal funding changes, the states will opt out of the expansion. Such an opt-out strategy seems difficult. It is the exception not the norm for a state to scale back its Medicaid program. As a matter of fact, while there may be periods of slowing enrollment, overall enrollment continues to climb. From a practical position, it also remains unclear the process by which a state would opt out and the role that the secretary of HHS would have in that process.

Some expansion supporters argue that choosing not to expand Medicaid would mean that a state opting out would just be leaving money on the table, and that this money will include money from the non-expanding state’s federal taxpayers. Rather than a race to the bottom to scoop up as much federal tax dollars as possible in support of a program with poor results, the better solution would be for the states to recommend that Congress eliminate the enhanced federal matching funds. That would remove the temptation of federal dollars to do bad policy.

By 2017, one in four Americans is expected to be on Medicaid. In states that are trying to jumpstart their economy, it seems governors should be working to reduce dependence on the welfare state, not add millions more to it. It should be focused on getting people back to work, not creating incentives that keep people out of work. And states should be focused on fixing the program for those who are on it today rather than dumping more people into an already broken government program.

There needs to be a better solution. Simply because a governor wants to expand Medicaid doesn’t mean the legislature has to agree. State officials should be advancing reforms at the state level that move Medicaid in the right direction, not the wrong one.

— Nina Owcharenko is Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies and the Preston A. Wells Jr. Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.


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