“Hobby Lobby was hugely significant as a matter of legal doctrine, as it effectively eradicated the old rule that religious objectors many not undercut the rights of third parties. But the Court’s opinion in that case appeared to be fairly limited in scope. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court leaned hard into the fact that, rather than requiring all employers to provide birth control coverage directly to employees, the Obama administration could have achieved the same goal more indirectly.
Under this indirect approach, an employer could “self-certify that it opposes providing coverage for particular contraceptive services.” Once that happened, the government could make a separate arrangement with the insurer that runs the employer’s health plan, which would ensure that the employer’s workers receive coverage for birth control.
After the Obama administration took up the Supreme Court on its suggestion that it use this more indirect method of providing contraceptive care, some religious employers objected to the process the Supreme Court appeared to endorse in Hobby Lobby. The result was a second round of litigation, which culminated in the Zubik decision.
Yet with the Court apparently split 4-4 on the proper outcome in Zubik, that decision did little more than punt the case back to the lower courts. The broader question of whether employers can wield their religious objections to deny birth control coverage to their employees remains unresolved.”
“Republicans know such aid is necessary just as well as Democrats. They say in the press that these are concessions, things they are giving up, but why should anyone else adopt that absurd framing?
By theatrically “conceding” money for hospitals, Republicans get the optics of a bipartisan achievement while ensuring that they define the limits of the possible.
Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is saying that it wasn’t a concession at all to give up funding for states, that governors are just being “impatient,” and that the next stimulus bill will contain state and local aid “in a big way.” She envisions a thoughtful, phased approach, based on demonstrated need. But there’s little reason to think Republicans will cooperate.
Think back to the debt ceiling fight of 2011. Raising the debt ceiling was also something every independent analyst agreed was necessary to keep the economy healthy. But Republicans framed it as a Democratic ask, something for which they could extract enormous concessions. They were entirely willing to gamble with the economy.”
…
“When Democrats pushed for state aid and McConnell suggested that it was a “blue state bailout,” an attempt to rescue fiscally irresponsible blue-state governors who had let their pension obligations get too large, he knew full well that it was bullshit. There is no moral hazard in a pandemic. There’s no point means testing states. It’s not a reward to states to bolster their budgets when consumers are literally being told by the government to stay home. It’s one reason the federal government exists.
And red states need money too — there are, after all, red-state governors pleading for help.
It makes no sense, but McConnell’s not trying to make sense. He’s just trying to put Dems on the defensive and force them to fight for the basics. He wants to frame state aid as a concession to Democrats and send a signal to the right-wing base that Democrats are up to something shady. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about pension obligations. This is a 1,000 percent cynical maneuver. (Now Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has picked up this nonsense and run with it.)
The same goes for McConnell’s sudden concern that stimulus spending might raise the deficit too much.
Oh, please.
More than almost any other purported GOP principle, deficit concern comes and goes depending on the party’s immediate interests. It was nowhere to be found in 2017 when McConnell’s own Congress passed a giant tax cut for corporations that will add $2.6 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. It was nowhere to be found when Trump ran up the deficit, or when George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan ran up the deficit.”
…
“for the last 15 years, McConnell has heard pundits tell him that it’s risky to obstruct too much, attack too hard, violate norms too flagrantly, or act too openly against the national interest for partisan gain. Pundits wring their hands endlessly about such things.
Democrats have heard and internalized those messages. They worry about how they look to the media and political class. But McConnell has completely ignored them, and it has redounded to his benefit again and again.
When he refused to hold confirmation hearings on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, everyone in the political ecosystem (outside of conservative media) warned him of the dangers, the grave risk to comity and tradition and institutional integrity. He blew them all off. For his troubles, he got Brett Kavanaugh.
(Last month, McConnell said that he would happily hold a confirmation vote on a Trump Supreme Court nominee, even in the last year of a Trump presidency. Critics accused him of hypocrisy. He didn’t care.)
McConnell used the filibuster to block everything Obama tried, and then when Democrats killed the judicial filibuster, he used that to pack the federal bench, winning on both sides.”
“using the Our World in Data website’s coronavirus statistics, helps put Sweden’s situation in perspective. It compares countries’ rates of coronavirus deaths per 1 million people.
As the chart shows, Sweden is actually faring worse than other Scandinavian nations and even worse than the United States, which has the highest number of confirmed total cases in the world.”
…
“Following the advice of the country’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, the Swedish government chose not to impose strict lockdowns, curfews, or major border closings because the government felt it would hurt the economy and would only push the crisis further down the road.”
…
“while experts say the vast majority of Swedes followed the government’s social distancing guidelines and voluntarily stayed home, those who continued to drink at bars and shop at stores likely spread the disease around.”
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“Sweden’s public health officials now admit: That “more than 26 percent of the 2 million inhabitants of Stockholm will have been infected by May 1.””
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“Where Sweden does compare favorably to the US is the country’s death rate when compared to New York City’s (not the whole US). About 12,000 reported deaths as of April 28 in a city of 8 million is surely worse than 2,300 deaths in a country of 10 million.
But there are three main reasons why the Big Apple would be worse off than the entire country of Sweden, experts say.
The first is population density: New York City has more than 38,000 people per square kilometer, while Sweden has just 25 people — meaning it’s harder to socially distance in New York.
Second, some hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed while Sweden still has about 250 hospital beds unoccupied. There are indications, though, that the hospital surge in New York City is declining.
Finally, there is significantly more international travel to New York City than there is to Sweden, which means there were more opportunities for people from countries suffering from severe outbreaks to spread the virus to the city than to the European country.
But when zooming out, it’s clear that Sweden as a whole is worse off than the US as a whole. That could, of course, change down the line, but any current arguments that Sweden got its outbreak response right are premature at best and dangerous at worst.”
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/20/365484670/sen-mitch-mcconnells-political-life-examined-in-the-cynic
“As of April 28, Russia reported nearly 100,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 1,000 deaths. Those numbers make Russia the eighth-hardest-hit country in the world.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday admitted that the country had a shortage of critical personal protective equipment for health care workers, and warned that the worst the pandemic is yet to come.
“Ahead of us is a new stage, perhaps the most intense stage of the fight against the epidemic,” he said in a national address, in which he also announced an extension of his nation’s lockdown until May 11. “The risks of getting infected are at the highest level, and the threat, the mortal danger of the virus persists.”
“Russia has managed to slow down the spread of the epidemic, but we haven’t passed the peak yet,” Putin continued.
His pessimism is warranted. Hospitals have become overrun with patients, leaving ambulances stuck idling in long lines outside hospitals just to deliver sick patients. At least one driver had to wait about 15 hours. Moscow might run out of intensive care unit beds before the end of this week. And nurses have quit en masse to protest poor working conditions and low pay.
Millions of Russians could lose their jobs this year due to the lockdown and oil revenues, which make up a significant portion of Russia’s economy, have dropped sharply as people around the world have stopped traveling and business have shuttered due to the coronavirus.”
“More than 3,000 meat processing workers across the country have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, leading to additional spread in their communities, and more than 15 have died. Dozens of facilities have been forced to close temporarily or indefinitely.
Executives at America’s largest meat and poultry processing companies have warned of disastrous consequences for consumers should these facilities stay closed: Tyson Foods chair John Tyson said on Sunday that the “food supply chain is breaking.” Livestock prices have plunged because farmers have nowhere to send their animals for slaughter, while the price of consumer-ready meat has spiked.
While supply chain experts don’t anticipate a nationwide shortage of meat in light of the recent closures, they say there could be spot shortages at local grocery stores of certain types or cuts of meat.
But reopening the plants could come at great cost to their workers, who assert that their companies are doing too little to protect them from the virus. They say companies are failing to enforce social distancing on the production line and only recently beginning to offer additional protective equipment, if they do so at all.
Many employees also say they don’t have paid sick leave, health benefits, or substantial savings, offering them little assurance should they get infected and incentivizing them to work while sick.”
…
“Trump’s executive order instructs the Department of Agriculture to ensure that meat and poultry plants can continue operating uninterrupted as much as possible while abiding by guidance for Covid-19 preparedness issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The executive order leaves room for the agency to provide personal protective equipment to workers or issue additional regulations concerning worker safety — but it doesn’t explicitly provide any additional worker protections.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/29/21241601/facebook-coronavirus-pandemic-users-advertising-growth-making-losing-money-users-q1-2020-earnings
“Unfortunately for the theory, it’s based on some false assumptions.
For one thing, it assumes that there is currently a national marketplace for things like auto and life insurance. There isn’t. In the United States “national” insurance companies like Geico and Progressive are really networks of state-based companies. When you buy insurance, you’re buying it from a company with an office in your state, licensed to do business in your state. If you want a better deal from another state, you have to physically migrate to that state. But the good news is when you do, you can usually transfer your coverage fairly easily. Say you buy auto coverage in Virginia, and then move to Colorado. Geico of Virginia hands you off to Geico of Colorado with a few mouse-clicks. Happily, state legislatures have worked to make these sorts of handoffs seamless, by harmonizing their insurance laws.
Yes, some states have over-regulated their health insurance markets. Badly. So why not allow customers to vote with their keyboards instead of their feet? To understand why that’s not a sound idea, in our system, consider a thought experiment. Imagine if we let people pick their “governing state” with respect to taxes instead of insurance. I could, for example, opt to pay South Dakota’s dirt-cheap tax rates while still living, and using the roads and police, in high-tax New York. Why would New York stand for that? Why should it? Under our Constitution, state sovereignty isn’t a suggestion, it’s the law.
Notice how nobody is clamoring for interstate purchase of auto and life insurance. That’s because those markets work pretty well, and that’s because the coverage is individually owned. Most health insurance, alas, is not. Most Americans don’t actually own their health insurance. They participate in a prepaid group health benefit plan, usually provided through an employer or the federal government. By definition, such a plan isn’t portable because of who owns it (i.e., not you).
Half the U.S. population relies on employer-sponsored group health benefits, not because of state mandates, but because of federal tax subsidies for employer-sponsored group health benefits. End those subsidies, and more Americans will own their health insurance, and it’s a sure bet health insurance will begin to look more like auto and life.”
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“Instead of trying to create an unnecessary “national marketplace” in insurance, which only makes Uncle Sam even more of a national insurance commissioner than he already is, states should simply streamline their regulations and promote portability via an interstate agreement approved by Congress.
In fact, such a compact already exists. Its purpose is to facilitate interstate comity in most forms of insurance. It just needs to be updated to cover health insurance. States haven’t bothered to update it because Uncle Sam is sitting on their chest.
So if we want to revive the true insurance market — a competitive, state-based market — we have to get Uncle Sam off the states’ chest and out of their business. And we have to change the tax laws to stop favoring group health benefits over true insurance.
Individual ownership is the holy grail. When most Americans own their insurance, it will be portable and affordable. But there is only one road to the holy grail, and it does not end in Washington. It ends in your state capital.”
“Earlier this month, a McDonald’s restaurant in Guangzhou, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, was forced to remove a sign warning that “black people are not allowed to enter.” Upon removing it, McDonald’s told NBC News in a statement that the sign was “not representative of our inclusive values.”
That sounds like what it almost certainly is: a product of the company’s communications department, called in to do damage control. And while we can accept that the McDonald’s corporation itself is not, on the whole, racist, the sign does unfortunately represent China’s values.
As NR’s Jim Geraghty has noted, the incident is an example of the “xenophobia and racism” on display just now in China. This phenomenon is not new to the PRC, but the government has an extra incentive to lean into it now, because it helps the government’s concerted campaign to deflect blame for the global coronavirus pandemic.”
“It’s pretty hard to find any important issue that he hasn’t switched positions on at some point or another when it was convenient for him. Whether it’s abortion or campaign spending or many other issues, he just switches like a chameleon when he needs to and I hadn’t really realized how many times he’s done this and how easily he did it.”
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“I interviewed one of McConnell’s biographers, Alec MacGillis, and he pointed to the same thing: There’s just no consistent commitment to anything in McConnell’s political life except for winning the next election.”