Grassley: Obama ‘inconsequential’ to gun control debate

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama's actions are “inconsequential” to the gun control debate.

“The president can do whatever he wants because it’s kind of inconsequential,” he told The Hill at the Capitol on Thursday.

When asked to elaborate, Grassley said only that “the word speaks for itself.”

On Wednesday, legislation tightening background checks on gun purchases from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) fell short of the 60 votes it needed to move forward.
Speaking from the White House after the vote, an angry Obama admonished the "minority in the United States Senate" who "decided it wasn't worth it" to vote for legislation that he said would prevent further gun violence.

The president, who was flanked by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and relatives of the Newtown shooting victims, also said the gun lobby “willfully lied” about the contents of the bill, and said Republicans opposed the legislation solely for political reasons.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday announced that the Senate would put aside the gun control bill to focus on other legislative matters.

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Why The Judge Who Struck Down Digital First Sale In New York Isn’t Helping The Copyright Debate

For those of you who were hoping that we might figure out a sane way to resell digital content in the same way there’s a thriving secondary market for used books, CDs, and movies, seem about to be disappointed after a New York judge, in a sweeping decision, rejected the idea that files are objects in the same way that other means of delivering content are:

The company believed that the lawsuit that followed was one of “first impression” insofar as the plaintiff — Capitol Records — might wish to have it declared that the first-sale doctrine didn’t apply to digital goods. Supporting ReDigi’s side was Google, which unsuccessfully attempted to file an amicus brief. Other tech companies also had a stake; Amazon, for instance, has gained a patent on a market for “used” digital music and movie files.

The record industry wasn’t seeking a big declaration. In its own papers, the plaintiff only said that letting users buy and sell previously purchased tracks on iTunes amounted to a “clearinghouse for copyright infringement.”
Nevertheless, on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan went swinging for the fences; unfortunately for ReDigi and those hoping for a vibrant e-market of used song files, the judge wound up completely rejecting the company’s position. He did so not only by turning to the law of copyright but also the law of physics, declaring the “impossibility” of what ReDigi was touting. “The first-sale defense,” he wrote, “does not cover this any more than it covered the sale of cassette recordings of vinyl records in a bygone era.”

This strikes me as a decision that goes against the interest of both consumers and content providers. If content providers want individuals to get on board with the idea that files are property, and that the transfer of them without compensation causes damage to creators, an important part of that idea is that files are distinct objects, rather than ephemera that can be copied at no loss to them from a production standpoint, or loss of their ability to sell other downloads. I also am not sure how Judge Sullivan’s understanding of physics transfer to cyberspace, but perhaps he’s never bumped up against the memory limits of an iPhone before. From a business standpoint, it would obviously be preferable to content companies if they were the only people who retained the right to sell those objects. But that’s an idea they had to surrender on with physical objects a long time ago, learning that it creates a more stable market and preserves product standards to let people resell objects they’ve purchased than to block the first sale doctrine and see illicit copies of textbooks, burned CDs, or bootlegged VHS and DVD copies of movies begin circulating among people who aren’t actually a market for those products in their new, unused form.

Digital resale, I’d think, actually represents an opportunity for content companies to get more of their money back from resale than the resale of physical objects. If resale can be brokered through the original venues that sold the tracks, movies, or books, those venues could write contracts with publishers, studios, and record labels that let artists and content companies get some money back from those resales, along with both the sellers and the venues. A stable and brokered secondary market is probably the only way to guarantee that people who sell files will really get them off their computers—I imagine iTunes could write its code such that if you resell a track through the service, then try to upload it to iTunes without paying for it again, the file would be disabled and you’d get a warning, in the same way Amazon could probably scrub all versions of a track you’ve resold from its cloud storage. Having both sides in the digital content debate acknowledge that files are objects could produce a kind of detente, in which content companies grant consumers some more rights to do what they want with the objects they’ve purchased in exchange for consumers’ acknowledging that if they’re getting money off resale, there is in fact value in individual copies of files.

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Higher Health Insurance Premiums: The Obamacare Debate We Didn’t Have

Whitehouse.govLet’s talk about Obamacare and rate shock—and how we talked about the law’s effect on premiums when it was first being debated.  

The health law’s supporters are now admitting that premiums will go up for some young and health individuals buying health insurance through the exchange. But they say it’s not entirely fair to make a comparison between individual plans bought on an exchange and today’s plans, because exchange plans offer a far richer set of benefits. Nor should this really come as a shock to anyone, because this is what people were told to expect.

This is a point that The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein made on MSNBC last night in a discussion of Obamacare’s effect on premiums with The Manhattan Institute’s Avik Roy. Roy noted that, when compared with today’s rates, individual market premiums bought on an exchange would be dramatically higher for many younger, healthier people—with rates doubling in some cases versus the rates he found online.

Now it’s true that those online rates are teasers that don’t apply to everyone; 26 percent of the market will either pay more or not get coverage. But that still leaves roughly three quarters of the market who will see far higher rates. Maybe, Roy said last night, that’s just fine, because we believe that it’s “a good thing for people to pay double for their health insurance because we’re now protecting the sick. But that’s a debate we didn’t have really in 2009.” 

Except that according to Klein, it is a debate we had: “This is a debate we had,” he said. “This is what frustrates me here. I remember doing this debate over and over and over again. So Evan Bayh wrote the Congressional Budget Office—[Bayh] was a senator back then—he said: ‘What’s going to happen to average premiums?’ The CBO came back and said, ‘Well, average premiums are going to go up a bunch. And then people like me went in and looked at what they [the CBO] said, and they said, ‘Average premiums are going to go up but that’s because people are going to have to start buying better health care because they’re going to get subsidies, because we’re going to make them pay for better health care because now they can afford it.’”

Far higher rates for younger, healthier individuals were to be expected. “This was out there,” Klein finished. “And we talked about it a lot.”

I'm not so sure. Liberal wonks like Klein may have talked about it—we’ll get to that a little later. But the president and his administration did not talk about it much at all. Rather, the overarching message from the White House, and from the law’s supporters generally, was that Obamacare would cause health insurance premiums to drop. 

Let’s go back in time to when President Obama first began to make the case for his health care overhaul. Here’s how he touted his health plan in May 2007, early in his run for office. “If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on premiums. That will be less.” On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama continued to sell the law as a way to lower health premiums, promising at least 15 times to reduce health premiums for families by $2500 on average. And as Buzzfeed notes, Obama didn’t stop pointing to lower premiums when he made it into the White House in 2009. In May of that year, he told C-SPAN that if health industry groups commit to savings—“we end up saving $2 trillion…a lot of those savings can go back into the pockets of American consumers in the form of lower premiums. That’s what we are driving for.”

From the very beginning, in other words, Obama’s message was not that the law would result in higher premiums, but better coverage. It was that the law would lower premiums, end of story.

Now maybe you think that’s not fair. After all, these statements were made before the specifics of the law had been drafted, and before experts at the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere would weigh in.

So let’s flash forward a few months, to the end of 2009, in the weeks leading up to the Senate’s vote to pass the health care law. What was the White House saying then?

A headline from the White House blog on November 4, 2009 makes it clear that the essential message about premiums hadn’t changed: “Word from the White House: Objective Analysis Shows Reform will Help Small Business, Lower Premiums for American Families.” [emphasis added] The “objective analysis” in question was a report from Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a key architect of both Obamacare and the Massachusetts health care overhaul.

The White House blog post touted Gruber’s conclusion that the health care legislation would save individuals anywhere from $500 to $3000 a year, and families even more. And those savings, the post emphasized, would “come in addition to the more generous benefits consumers would receive by purchasing insurance through the newly  created exchange”—as well as “in addition to increased protections” for individuals with preexisting conditions. Gruber even claimed that the savings would come for those who did not qualify for subsidies. Low-income individuals eligible for assistance, he said, the savings would be much larger.

This is November of 2009, long after the bulk of the legislative work has been completed. And yet the White House and a prominent Obamacare adviser were still both claiming that premiums would go down, and that benefits would go up, for individual insurance purchased through an exchange. This was the message that the administration was selling. This was the debate they were having, from the time Obama started running for office until well into the first year of his presidency.  

Of course, we still haven’t talked about the Congressional Budget Office report that Klein mentioned—the one responding to Sen. Evan Bayh’s query about how the health law would affect insurance premiums. That came out shortly after Gruber’s report. The White House wrote up that report on its official blog too. And once again, the primary message is crystal clear. The headline to that post reads: “CBO Confirms Families Will Save Money Under Health Reform.” The second paragraph says that the health law “will mean lower premiums for American families.” And the very first bullet point in the list of highlights says that “Americans buying comparable health plans to what they have today in the individual market would see premiums fall by 14 to 20 percent.”

The only hint that higher premiums might be on the horizon if the health law passes comes a little later, when the post says that “where the CBO does see premiums rising, it's not because Americans are paying more for the same coverage – it's that they’re making a choice to purchase better plans that weren't previously available to them.” And it downplays this point by suggesting that the CBO may have understated the cost-savings the law will produce.

Yet even the admission that CBO does see some premiums rising turns out to have missed the mark. Part of the reason we’re now seeing some higher premiums in the exchanges is because of the coverage requirements exchange-based plans have to meet. It’s not that individuals are making their own choices to buy more expansive and thus more expensive coverage. It’s that insurers are being told by regulators that more expansive coverage is what they must sell.

Even by the time the CBO report arrives, there’s still no mistaking the message that the Obama White House was selling to anyone who would listen: that premiums would go down, that benefits would go up, and that if premiums did happen to go up, it would only be as a result of an individual choice to buy more robust coverage.

But what about the wonks, like Klein? What kind of conversation were they having at the end of 2009? If you take Klein as representative, you find that it was somewhat more nuanced than what was coming out of the White House, and that the higher cost of individual premiums was mentioned. But the emphasis was still on lower premiums, not on the tradeoffs made to get more robust coverage.

At the beginning of November 2009, for example, Klein quoted and linked to Gruber’s paper with no commentary, under the headline “Massachusetts provides evidence that health-care reform lowers insurance premiums.”

Later that month, Klein looked at the CBO analysis requested by Bayh. In the third paragraph, he notes that in the individual market, “average premiums are expected to rise by 10 to 12 percent.” His post goes on to explain that, according to the CBO, this is because the average insurance policy purchased through the exchange will cover a much larger share of an individual’s costs and a slightly wider range of benefits. In the end, what we’re looking at, he says, is “a 10 to 12 percent increase in premiums for insurance that's about 30 percent better than what people are getting now. It's a steal.”

So this is the discussion that Klein was having: Yes, average premiums increase somewhat, but benefits increase even more. But what about others? Not Paul Krugman; one of his posts referenced the CBO’s report and conclude that “premiums would stay about the same for people with group coverage, while falling significantly for most of those in the small-group or individual markets.”

Whether Klein’s discussion of individual market premium hikes in the exchanges would have led a typical reader to expect the kind of rate increases we’re seeing in California is another question. The percentage increases he wrote up were just 10 or 12 percent, not the 100 percent hikes Avik Roy has pointed out. On the other hand, Klein was talking about averages, and the biggest hikes are concentrated amongst the young and healthy demographic. It’s not possible say with certainty what most people would have taken away from his discussion of trade-offs.

But we do have some sense of what Klein wanted people to take away. First because in Klein’s initial write up of the CBO report, he goes on to emphasize that the individual market hikes occur before the application of subsidies, which he notes will be available to about 57 percent of the market. “So in the final analysis,” he wrotes, “the effect of reform on your typical individual market purchasers is to give them insurance that's about 30 percent better but only 10 to 12 percent more expensive, and then assure them subsidies that will lower their payments by more than 50 percent.” Yes, we’re still talking about averages. But it looks fairly plain that his message is first and foremost about lower premiums, not the tradeoff of better benefits for higher premiums.

Finally, we have an idea of what Klein wanted readers to take away from his analysis of the health law’s effect on premiums, because a few days later, he followed up with another post. The concluding paragraph of that post reiterates the key points from this original. “The individual market sees costs go up, as people can purchase better insurance at a lower cost,” he wrote. “And after subsidies, most people are paying less and getting more than they would absent reform.” Indeed, “most Americans will see their premiums go down even if you account for the better insurance plans they'll be purchasing.” The headline he wrote for his post emphasizes the main point: “To repeat, the CBO found that premiums go down under health care reform.”

This is the debate that even those relatively few Americans who follow wonky policy pundits were hearing—not one that emphasized tradeoffs, but one that repeatedly emphasized that Obamacare would have mostly positive impacts on premiums, and that any negative impacts would be modest. So it’s worth asking: Was this the sort of debate that effectively prepared people for the sort of rates we’re seeing in California, and that we’re likely to see in many other states as well? Or was it, as Roy said, a debate we didn’t really have in 2009? Decide for yourself. But when you do, know when it comes to the discussion of Obamacare and premiums that people were having in 2009, this is what was out there. And this is what the law’s administration backers and other supporters talked about a lot.

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Category:Creationists who had an evolutionist renege on a debate they agreed to

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How A Court Decision Upholding A Maryland Gun Law Could Help Restore Sanity To The Gun Debate

Yesterday, a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a Maryland law requiring most gun owners to obtain a permit before they may carry a firearm outside of their home, business or their property. In the process, the court articulated a legal standard that could go a long way towards reining in the kind of ubiquitously armed society favored by fringe lobbying groups such as the National Rifle Association.

The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held for the first time in American history that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm, was not a particularly coherent opinion. It lists numerous limits on the right to bear arms, but also holds that the single most deadly weapon in the nation — handguns – enjoy special constitutional protection above and beyond that enjoyed by other, less deadly weapons. Nearly 8 in 10 gun murders in the United States are committed with a handgun. Similarly, although the opinion forbids an outright ban on handguns inside the home, it provides much less clarity about the scope of the Second Amendment elsewhere. Much of the opinion strongly suggests that the right to bear arms is far less robust outside of a person’s own home.

The Fourth Circuit’s opinion threads this needle by applying a two-tiered legal standard to gun laws. The court suggests that a law which directly burdens the core right to keep a gun in the home is subject to “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of skepticism judges typically apply to laws. But a law which burdens gun possession outside of the home is subject to less skeptical review — what lawyers call “intermediate scrutiny.”

The implications of this shift is that it allows judges to be far more respectful to the concerns animating the elected officials who enact gun laws when they determine whether or not those laws are consistent with the Second Amendment. The court’s opinion highlights numerous arguments justifying Maryland’s limits on carrying guns in public. Among them:

“Decreasing the availability of handguns to criminals via theft“: The court cites an explanation that “criminals in Maryland are constantly looking for ways to arm themselves with handguns, including by stealing them from others. It is not uncommon for criminals to obtain these guns during street altercations.”Preventing arguments from escalating into murders: Nearly half of all homicides occur after an argument or fight. As the court notes, reducing the number of guns in public places will decrease “the likelihood that basic confrontations between individuals would turn deadly.”Preventing fatal police errors: Contrary to the NRA’s claims that armed citizens will save lives by doling out vigilante justice to potential murders, the court notes that during a confrontation between police and a gunman “an additional person bearing a gun might cause confusion as to which side of the confrontation the person is on, which could lead to hesitation by the police officer and the potential for innocent victims, including the permit holder, innocent bystanders, and police officers.”Fostering good relationships between police and citizens: “If the number of legal handguns on the streets increased significantly, [police] officers would have no choice but to take extra precautions before engaging citizens, effectively treating encounters between police and the community that now are routine, friendly, and trusting, as high-risk stops, which demand a much more rigid protocol and a strategic approach.”Allowing police to focus their resources efficiently: “Increasing the number of people legally carrying handguns in the streets will also force [police] officers to spend more resources responding to reports about handgun sightings and engaging handgun carriers to ensure they are doing so lawfully.” Additionally, “[p]olice officers would also have a harder time identifying potential security risks if more people without good and substantial reason to carry a handgun were able to do so, making it more difficult to respond when necessary.”

To be clear, the Fourth Circuit’s conclusion that gun rights are less robust outside the four walls of a gun owner’s home is far from novel. Heller itself implies such a distinction, and previous court decisions drew a similar line to the one the Fourth Circuit relied on yesterday. If this line is ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, however, it could go a long way towards keeping dangerous guns off America’s streets.

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Sen. Wyden: Debate Over Drone Secrecy Just Beginning

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Speaking at a panel at George Washington Law School this morning, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicated that his struggle with the Obama administration for more transparency on national security matters is just beginning.

Wyden was the opening speaker at a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington event on drones, in which he laid out his position on the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s counterterrorism targeted killing program.

Wyden made clear during his talk that he believed that there are “certainly legitimate reasons” for the government to keep some matters secret, including the details of covert operations. Sources and methods — or the precise ways that intelligence is collected — are in a very different basket than keeping the law secret, Wyden explained. “Secret operations are different than secret laws,” Wyden said. What Wyden is firmly opposed to is secret interpretations of public laws by the Executive Branch without the conclusions being disclosed:

WYDEN: [W]e aren’t going to take a backseat to anybody — not anybody — on the question of protecting genuinely sensitive sources and operations. But I am also not going to take a backseat to anybody in the effort to try to make sure our public laws stay public. And that’s what this is, in effect, discussion is all about.

At the forefront of Wyden’s concerns is a set of classified memos from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel laying out the justifications for when force can be used against American citizens overseas. An unclassified white paper summarizing those memos leaked to the press last month, stirring up the current debate.

Wyden indicated that he had spent the last two years asking the administration for access to the DOJ memos on targeting Americans abroad. As part of its deal to have John Brennan confirmed as CIA Director, the White House has turned over those memos to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but has not declassified them as of yet. These memos, Wyden believes, as the official interpretation of the Executive Branch on how it reads current laws need to be made public. At present, there is no one place within the law that Americans can go to see what the standard is with regard to targeting Americans, Wyden said.

“I don’t buy that,” Wyden said when asked about whether the memos reveal too much in the way of operational details to be declassified. “That’s what we have redaction for.” Wyden was the only member of the Democratic Caucus to join Rand Paul’s nearly thirteen-hour long filibuster of John Brennan last week, though he disagreed with Paul on the forthrightness of the administration.

House Democrats earlier this week wrote to the White House also demanding the declassification of the DOJ memos, as well as answers related to the broader use of drones in warfare.

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Republicans With Influence On Immigration Debate Are Top Recipients Of Private Prison Contributions

As the immigration reform debate heats up, private prison executives have made it clear that they are monitoring how it will affect their rates of incarceration. During a call with investors last week, Corrections Corporation of America CEO assured investors that there will “always be demand for beds”, reflecting concern that incarceration rates will actually go down. With many elements of reform left on the negotiating table, the Columbia Journalism Review is showing just how much money the two major private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, have invested in the outcome:

Some of the politicians who have benefited most from this largesse are influential Senators who are now playing key roles in shaping proposed immigration reform legislation.

Among members of Congress, the top two recipients of contributions from CCA are its home-state senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker of Tennessee. The Republican lawmakers, each of whom has received more than $50,000 from CCA according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, represent important swing votes for advancing a reform bill through the Senate. Another top CCA recipient is Arizona Republican John McCain, who has gotten $32,146 from CCA and is a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that is working to draft legislation. His fellow Gang of Eight member, Marco Rubio, ranks among the top recipients of contributions from the Florida-based GEO Group, receiving $27,300 in donations over the course of his career.

In recent years, each of these senators has sponsored bills that would have increased the detention and incarceration of immigrants. Legislation put forward by Alexander in 2009, for example, would have provided for “increased alien detention facilities.” And a 2011 bill cosponsored by McCain and Rubio sought to expand Operation Streamline, a federal enforcement program that makes illegal entry a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.

Skyrocketing immigration detention numbers are attributable in part to programs like Operation Streamline and Secure Communities, which link criminal activity to immigration status. But they are also linked to record deportations, as many facing removal subject to mandatory detention while proceedings are pending, leaving judges no discretion to decide whether to release them.

A McCain spokesman told CJR that McCain stands by Operation Streamline, and that he expects it to continue whether or not comprehensive immigration is implemented “because it works.” According to ColorLines, Democratic staffers are concerned that negotiations will lead to an expansion of Operation Streamline and other programs that detain and criminalize immigrants in exchange for support on other core elements of reform.

Immigration detention has more than doubled private prison profits since 1995, and these corporations have not been shy about using their influence to lobby for incarceration-friendly policies, despite claims from both Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group that they do not take official positiions on issues. Those sentenced for immigration offenses make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the United States’ overflowing federal prison population.

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As George Tiller’s Wichita Clinic Reopens, ‘After Tiller’ Reframes The Abortion Debate

In Mother Jones today, Kate Sheppard has the news that Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, shuttered after he was murdered at his church in 2009, will be reopening under the leadership of Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller when he was alive. In Burkhart’s conversation with Sheppard, she says that she decided to reopen the clinic in part because no one else would do it, and because she wants to reframe the debate about abortion care. “I think abortion is about motherhood,” she said. “Abortion is about motherhood because by and large women coming in to have abortions are concerned about the kind of life and the future for their children. Women are thinking in a very responsible manner when choosing that.”

These are important points, and ones made at greater length in one of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, After Tiller. By first-time directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, After Tiller spends time not just with the four remaining doctors in the United States who are willing to perform late-term abortions—Burkhart’s clinic will not—but with many of their patients. It’s a set of perspectives that rarely enters the national debate about the legality of abortion procedures. The testimony of women and men who badly wanted children who have grown too sick to survive, and of doctors who help them when almost no one else will, may not convince the people who protest outside the four doctors’ clinics, and for whom the questions involved have simple and obvious answers.

But for anyone else watching the film, it will be clear, as Dr. Susan Robinson says, that no one ever wants an abortion, particularly not the kind that she and her colleagues provide. And the doctors in After Tiller are providing their services not out of some sort of attraction to the procedure that’s become their calling card, but out of a conviction that women shouldn’t be abandoned in their decision-making processes. After Tiller is a powerful reminder that abortion in America is less about desire than about need, and a matter not of carelessness, but the result of dreadful deliberations.

Many of the patients who agreed to have their consultations with the doctors filmed in After Tiller are facing the prospect of aborting children they planned to have, but whose pregnancies have gone terribly awry along the way. “It just didn’t seem fair to her,” say the parents of one child who would live in agonizing pain if she were born. Another describes a dreadful dilemma, saying “It’s guilt because we’re doing what we’re doing and guilt because if we brought him into this world he wouldn’t have any quality of life.” Monica, a patient whose child was diagnosed at 25 weeks with a debilitating illness that would cause his certain death if he were born, ultimately chooses to have an abortion rather than delay an inevitable decision to end her child’s life—better now, she ultimately decides, than to make him suffer before turning off his respirator so she can have had the experience of his brief, agonizing life. “It is hurtful because it was a planned pregnancy, and I did want this,” another patient explains.

Much of the focus of the consultations and on the planning for these families’ abortions is focused on giving them dignity and helping them process their emotions, both before and after their procedures. “The only time they get to say hello to their baby is when they have to say goodbye to it, too,” Dr. Robinson explains. As she runs through a checklist to help a couple prepare for their abortion and the burial arrangements for their child, I started to cry in the theater when the shot showed that “blanket requested” was one of the options on the list. There’s an incredible cruelty to the genetic lottery that forces parents to convert receiving blankets to burial shrouds, and an incredible courage to those parents who have their only time with a child after that child has died. Dr. Shelley Sella counsels two couples with ill children together, telling them “Both of you have babies who are really sick, and both of you have babies who would suffer a lot,” and giving them an opportunity to see that their experience is neither solitary nor shameful.

Even beyond the difficulty of the decision to have a late-term abortion itself, the procedure is daunting. Susan, a counselor who does intake at Dr. Robinson and Dr. Sella’s clinic in Albequerque, talks one patient through the fact that she’s going to have go through an actual labor and delivery. There’s no question that process is draining. But as Susan explains it, it’s necessary precisely to preserve the patients’ childbearing ability for future, unclouded pregnancies. “We want to make sure you can make a family when you cant to have a family,” she says. There’s none of the horribly stereotypical glee—much less moral distance—anti-abortion protestors ascribe to the doctors and patients whose lives they make difficult. “The woman delivers a baby. And it’s a stillborn. And that’s hard to deal with,” Dr. Sella reflects. “I think the reason that I’ve struggled is I think of them as babies. I don’t think of it as a fetus. That’s a way to distance myself from what I do.”

After Tiller also does something interesting in making clear that there are abortions the doctors won’t perform, or that they truly struggle with performing. Dr. Robinson turns down a patient from France who is 35 weeks pregnant, but has no fetal abnormalities—the woman essentially had delayed dealing with her pregnancy while traveling—and Susan counsels her to consider adoption as an alternative instead. The two women also debate whether or not Dr. Robinson should perform a procedure for a 16-year-old, pro-life Catholic who was afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant, in part because Susan is worried that the girl’s mind truly isn’t made up about having an abortion, and that her regret later could be psychologically damaging. Dr. Robinson only decides to go forward when the patient convinces her that she is determined to have an abortion.

But it’s an illustration of the challenges that stem both from respecting a woman’s decision-making process when she, herself, may not have made up her mind, and from legal requirements in some states that patients convince doctors that their pregnancies threaten them. “Kansas law required the patient to present you with a story that compelled you to believe that this pregnancy would threaten her life…I found myself being faced with patients who didn’t have the compelling reasons they had in Kansas…Where does it come from that I get to say, ‘well, why?’” Dr. Robinson asks. “What if you’re just not a good storyteller?…What I believe is that women are able to struggle with complex ethical issues and make the best decisions for themselves and their families.”

In After Tiller, there are real costs to helping women make some of the worst decisions any of us could ever be faced with, and to helping them see those choices through with compassion. Some of the doctors have paid prices in blood, whether it’s the loss of Tiller, a friend and mentor to all of them, the threats that have become sharper to Dr. Hern as he’s started his second family later in life, the stable owned by Dr. Leroy Carhart, which was burned down in 1991, killing 21 horses who were borded there, or simply the lost prospect of retirement in a world where no one appears willing to replace them.

But they persist, telling rape victims they deserve justice, telling families who are shattered by the loss of a wanted child that they owe it to themselves to be kind and to avoid self-recrimination, and performing medical procedures that echo the work many of them did bringing life into the world. Without ever needing to state it directly, After Tiller makes a forceful point that’s too easily forgotten or obscured in political debates about abortion. It’s easy to “pray for healing” for women who are having late-term abortions. But it’s abortion doctors who provide these women and their partners real physical and mental care.

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Flu Season Fuels Debate Over Paid Sick Time Laws

Timothy A. Clary | AFP | Getty Images A man is given a flu shot by at the medical offices of Yaffe Ruden & Associates in New York.

Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.

A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.

"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.

An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for the 40 percent of American private-sector workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.

Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.

Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.

The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.

Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.

But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by super storm Sandy.

Michael Sinesky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."

"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinesky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.

Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.

"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.

Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.

In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.

The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.

Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.

While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.

"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."

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Rice: Immigration debate chance to show GOP has ‘broad appeal’

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday said that immigration reform would be a pivotal issue for Republicans, who needed to prove their party had “broad appeal.”

"I think immigration is really the big issue, frankly. We sent some pretty bad signals around immigration," said Rice, as she made her debut as a CBS News contributor on “Face the Nation.”

In a panel discussion, Rice said the Republican Party needed to shift its messaging on immigration and said voters would be watching the upcoming debate on comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.

"The Republican Party certainly has to stop turning off large segments of the population. I've said it's not a strategy to keeping hoping that parts of the population don't turn out. You've got to simply broaden," Rice said. "The Republican Party has to demonstrate that it has broad appeal."

Rice also praised Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for leading the call for immigration reform among Republicans in the Senate.

Rice also said that President Obama, who began his second term Sunday, would need to remain focused on the nation’s economy.

"The first challenge is to do something about the American economy, because I do think that our international leadership has suffered both from the perception that America can't get its act together on entitlements and the deficit and so forth, and from the reality that without a stronger economy there are just some things we cannot do," Rice said.

Rice is the first African-American woman to serve as secretary of State. She formerly served as President George W. Bush's national security adviser and has faced criticism for the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war.

Rice was one of the top speakers at the Republican National Convention this summer. She is currently a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

On Sunday, "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer announced Rice's new role as a contributor with CBS News.

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Firearms Training CEO, Who Threatened To ‘Start Killing People’ Over Gun Debate, Loses Gun Permit

Tactical Response CEO James Yeager

James Yeager, CEO of Tennessee-based Tactical Response, delivered a frightening rant last week on YouTube, declaring that gun owners “load your damn mags” and “get ready to fight,” because if gun violence prevention “goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.” His followup video was not any better: Yeager clarified he does not “condone anyone committing any kind of felonies, up to and including aggravated assaults and murders, unless it’s necessary. Right now, it’s not necessary.” There was no retraction.

As a result, Yeager has had his handgun permit suspended because of “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public.” Tennessee Department of Saftey and Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons said, “Mr. Yeager’s comments were irresponsible, dangerous, and deserved our immediate attention. Due to our concern, as well as that of law enforcement, his handgun permit was suspended immediately.”

HT: Raw Story

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The question at the core of the data caps debate

By Michael Weinberg, vice president, Institute of Emerging Innovation, Public Knowledge - 01/04/13 03:00 PM ET

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) regularly insist that data caps are a legitimate tool to ease congestion on their networks and an effective way to signal value to consumers. But, as we have argued, data caps do not resolve congestion, are confusing to consumers, and lend themselves to unfair and anticompetitive behavior. ??In light of this disagreement, it is a promising sign that a recent study published by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and co-authored by Steven S. Wildman, the new Chief Economist of the FCC, moves beyond some of the previous rhetoric and takes a significant step towards focusing the debate on real areas of conflict. ??Unfortunately, it stops short of recognizing a critical distinction in understanding the heart of the disagreement. Let’s take a look:

Congestion is not the issue

The most refreshing section of the study is the one that is not there. There is no meaningful discussion of usage-based pricing as a tool to reduce network congestion or a suggestion that monthly data limits are a reasonable way to impact congestion. There is also no invocation of the mythical “data hog,” a sinful creature that can only be punished with data caps. Hopefully, the omission is NCTA’s tacit admission of two things: that cable networks are not congested and, if they become so in the future, monthly caps will do little to address that congestion.??

Price discrimination is the key

??Instead, the report focuses on usage-based pricing as a form of price discrimination. This type of value-neutral economic discrimination (in contrast to other types of discrimination that are morally, politically, and even economically problematic) appears to be one of the key motivating factors behind the imposition of usage-based pricing. At its core, price discrimination is about making people who value something more pay more for it and allowing people who value something less pay less for it. This is the way that most of the economy works and there is no reason that price discrimination per se should not be allowed for broadband pricing.

This is the report’s key argument. Price discrimination happens every day across our economy. As an economic practice it creates value generally and can do the same in the world of broadband. Furthermore, price discrimination can make a form of a good or service available to people who might be priced out without it.??

All of this is true and all of this is important to understand before having a meaningful discussion about usage-based pricing and data caps. However it is the beginning, not the end, of that discussion. But it is also where the report stops.??

Price discrimination is not the problem, data caps are??

The key question about usage-based pricing is not if the general practice of price discrimination has a place in the world of broadband. After all, ISPs have used speed to implement price discrimination since the beginning of broadband. Instead, the key question is whether using data caps or usage-based pricing to implement price discrimination has a place in the world of broadband. On that question the report is silent.??

That silence is disappointing. Public Knowledge’s position is that data caps and usage-based pricing is a type of price discrimination that is especially susceptible to anti-consumer manipulation by ISPs and can suppress activities that we generally encourage. That is why they warrant attention.??

At its core, price discrimination relies on sending signals to consumers. A consumer values X highly and therefore should pay more for it. That same consumer sees little value in Y and therefore should pay less. One of the fundamental problems with using data caps and usage-based pricing as part of a price discrimination strategy is that the signal is hard for consumers to receive. This deficiency becomes clear when usage-based pricing is compared to the existing price discrimination tool: speed.??

Speed is a signal that is easy to understand??

Imagine a consumer operating in a world where speed is used to implement price discrimination. She chooses a speed tier and begins using the internet.  Some things she wants to do work well at the speed she selected. However, other things do not work as well. Perhaps pages load too slowly for her liking or video buffers and displays at a low resolution. Every time a page loads slowly or video buffers she gets a clear signal: “your tier does not support the activity that you are doing at this very moment.” This signal is temporally connected to the activity and easy to understand – slow load times are because of a slow connection.

??At that moment the consumer can consider how valuable the activity is to her, and how often she has gotten that signal in recent days or weeks. If the activity is sufficiently important or the buffering occurs with annoying regularity, she may decide to upgrade her tier.  Having used the low tier to its fullest capacity and found it wanting for a collection of known activities, that decision is a reasonably informed one.??

Data caps are much harder

??Contrast that with a consumer operating in a world with a monthly data cap, the most popular implementation of usage-based pricing. She selects a cap tier and begins using the internet. Some things she wants to do work well at the tier she selected. Others do not.  Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell which is which because she does not find out she has run out of data until her cumulative monthly use exceeds her cap. When she receives that alert, or her bill at the end of the month full of overage charges, she gets a muddled signal: “your tier does not support something, or some combination of things, you did in the past month.” ??

At that moment the consumer likely does not remember everything that she did over the past month online, or how it compares to other months. Did she watch five videos or six? Was the website she visited two weeks ago featuring abnormally rich interactive content? Did she upload photos to share with her friends? Are any, or any combination, of those things worth paying more for?  ??

In the face of uncertainty, many consumers will come to a frustrating but reasonable conclusion: the best path is to over pay and under use. As long as they buy a higher tier than they need and avoid trying anything new online, they should be fine.

??Focusing on policy differences??

When Public Knowledge and others raise concerns about usage-based pricing, those concerns are about usage-based pricing, not price discrimination.  Price discrimination that relies on usage-based pricing, especially if it is implemented by an ISP with a pay-video business to protect, raises a number of usage-based pricing concerns. That is why our usage-based pricing white paper Know Your Limits ends with a series of usage-based pricing-specific recommendations. Assertions that price discrimination can help expand access or increase value to consumers may be true, but they are not particularly interesting or relevant to the conversation.??

The debate around usage-based pricing can only move forward when people stop talking past each other and start focusing on real policy differences. By moving past congestion and examining price discrimination, this report marks a significant step towards that goal. However any argument that focuses on price discrimination alone, or that relies on assertions that are merely true for price discrimination generally, do this issue a disservice. Hopefully the next report from ISPs will try to explain why usage-based pricing, and not just price discrimination, is a reasonable way forward for the broadband market.

Weinberg is vice president of the Institute of Emerging Innovation at Public Knowledge.

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Israel: Dems 'injected some adult supervision' into 'fiscal cliff' debate

Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) argued Wednesday that Democrats provided "adult supervision" during the "fiscal cliff" debate and should be credited with avoiding automatic tax increases and spending cuts.

"There were elements of the bill that I did not like," Israel told CNN's "Starting Point." "But at the end of the day, it was House Democrats who injected some adult supervision, some pragmatism, a sense of compromise and solutions. That’s what the country wants."

The chairman of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said he wished "that the Republicans would have produced more votes" in support of the legislation, which passed on a 257-167 vote late Wednesday night. 

House Republicans were split on the bill, with 85 — including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — voting in favor. But 151 voted no, including high-profile defectors like Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

"The best they could do was 85, 86 votes," Israel said. "So even though they have the majority in the House of Representatives, it was House Democrats who stopped us from going off this cliff.”

The late-night vote will indefinitely extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts on all household income under $450,000, extend unemployment insurance and delay automatic spending cuts for another two months.

Israel also blasted House Republicans for tabling a vote on Hurricane Sandy aid until the next Congress. 

Republican leaders have argued the $60 billion Senate bill was bloated with excess spending, while a bipartisan group of legislators from New York and New Jersey — the areas hardest hit by the storm's landfall — have urged quick passage of the relief bill.

"Just when we avoided one cliff, the House Republicans threw us over another," Israel said. "We rushed to aid ... Kabul and Baghdad when they had damage, but when it comes to aid to New York and New Jersey, the House Republican leadership decided we weren't worth it. It is indefensible."

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