Open Thread: Guns, Guns, and More Bloody Guns

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This is an open thread dedicated to what the National Rifle Association wants you to believe is as necessary as air along with ~13,000 gun homicides each year, and seven children and teen gun deaths each day.

Freedom — we have it at gun point.

For the record, my household has guns. They’re used for hunting. Half the meat this household consumes is venison harvested from family property. They’re secured in a gun safe when not in use.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban in force from 1994 to 2004 didn’t impede the ability of this household to hunt its annual venison. Mass shootings were markedly lower during the ban, however, though increasing use of high capacity magazines eventually thwarted the effects of the ban.

Do I believe in the Second Amendment? Sure — including the part about a “well regulated Militia.”

The NRA doesn’t believe in that part of the amendment because it affects their actual clients’ profit motive; regulating a militia means gun makers can’t sell more guns.

At some point gun makers and their lobbyists at the NRA need to face reality: the market is saturated, which is why Remington is going into bankruptcy. There are no more arguments to be made to increase gun sales when there are more guns in the U.S. than Americans.

There are no more arguments to be made to sell more guns into a saturated market when gun proponents care more about their guns than the shattered children in classrooms.

Or when gun proponents’ arguments rely on augmentation and dispersion by foreign agents.

Bring your discussions about guns here. Keep them out of other threads so that others can have uninterrupted discussions on topic.

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[Photo by Piron Guillaume via Unsplash]

Another Kind of Recovery: Post-Maria Puerto Rico and Health Care Critical Infrastructure

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I was away most of the last several weeks because I was recovering from surgery. I was lucky, not only because surgery fixed a life-threatening problem, but because I had IV bags and tubing for saline and pain medication.

lt doesn’t seem like this should be a big thing but it is for many critical health care situations. Imagine having major abdominal surgery, followed by days of post-surgery care. The pain could be debilitating without a continuous drip pain medication. Imagine the extra labor required to administer pain medication if automated IV drip feeds aren’t available.

Now imagine caring for an unconscious influenza patient suffering from dehydration. Imagine a ward filled with these patients, including children and elderly who may be difficult to hydrate by mouth. Imagine not having enough IV bags and tubing for a severe flu season.

No need to imagine this; hospitals have been dealing with this very shortage for more than a month. Some hospitals are administering Gatorade by stomach tube because they don’t have enough IV bags for hydration.

I hate to think of the challenges for patients in treatment for cancer and other long-term illnesses.

Why the shortage? It’s because Hurricane Maria affected the largest U.S. manufacturer of IV products. Baxter International’s three Puerto Rican plants make 44% of IV bags used in the U.S.

Most Americans aren’t aware 46% of Puerto Rico’s economy is manufacturing. Pharmaceuticals represent the lion’s share, including IV products. This industry represents 18,000 jobs, $40 billion in pharmaceutical sales, and $3 billion in federal tax revenues.

Hurricane Maria may have caused other pharmaceutical shortages. If so, production increases in other locations or substitutions remediated the effect. But there aren’t alternatives given IV products’ manufacturing concentration in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration has done a pissy job handling post-Maria hurricane recovery in every respect. It almost looks personal, as if he’s punishing the island for a Trump-branded golf course’s failure.

But here’s the kicker: the Federal Emergency Management Agency says it’s done with emergency response in Puerto Rico. It’s pulling out though many residents are still without water and lights. Chalk it up to more bad faith on the part of this administration.

Why hasn’t the administration treated Puerto Rico’s pharmaceutical industry as critical infrastructure? The National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) lists health care as critical.

Is it because former President Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 21 (pdf) established the NIPP? Trump has systematically unwound 20 or more Obama policy directives to date.

Trump’s proven he could give a rat’s patootie about brown-skinned people. If Trump mentions Puerto Rico in his SOTU speech tonight he’ll call federal response a success. FEMA gave him a news peg with ample time for his speech writer to stuff it into tonight’s hypocritical bloviating. He counts on the mainland blowing off Puerto Rico now the way it has sloughed off the island’s thousand-plus hurricane-related deaths.

But with the IV products shortage and the ongoing flu season’s severity, this indifference isn’t affecting only Puerto Ricans. It may already have cost lives while increasing health care costs here in the continental U.S.

Heaven help the rest of us if we face a mass casualty event or a pandemic before we fix Puerto Rico — and Trump.

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Graphic: Quino Al via Unsplash (mod by Rayne)

Three Things: Take Action on Tax Bill, Net Neutrality, and a Courtroom Virgin

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There’s a lot of crappy stuff going on, but three things need your urgent attention and action: Tax cuts for wealthy, net neutrality, and an unqualified federal judicial appointment.

~ 3 ~

So-called Tax Reform Legislation

Tax cuts for people who don’t need them and won’t even feel them, paid for by the people who can least afford them — it’s a recipe for disaster. If Putin wanted to damage our economy he couldn’t have done a better job in one go. I could rant all day about the stupidity required to believe trickle-down or supply-side economics work, but this wealthy dude does a succinct job. As he says it’s a trickle-down lie; this bill is simply a wealth transfer from the lower deciles to the upper deciles.

You can also bone up by reading this Forbes article, and this Forbes article, and hello, another Forbes article.

This is a nightmare in the making which will tank our economy and literally threaten American lives by reducing access to healthcare. The only real driver behind this bill is extortion — the GOP’s biggest donors have threatened to shut their wallets if they don’t get their tax cuts, and GOP members of Congress are too fucking weak to tell them to pound sand.

Go ahead, selfish billionaires, primary GOP incumbents. You think you can rustle up more sycophantic (and pedophilic) candidates like Roy Moore and still retain control of the House and Senate in 2018, even if you suppress the vote? Hah.

More than half this country struggles to scrape up enough cash to pay for an emergency, like a car repair or a broken appliance, and the GOP thinks increasing their taxes and undermining their health care will magically make the economy better?

And now the kicker: Alaska’s Senator Murkowski, who has been a champion for health care, just agreed to support the repeal of the individual mandate included in this tax bill. The stupid, it burns. Or perhaps it’s some ill-considered kickback burning its way through Murkowski’s cred.

Here’s a script for your use, provided by the ever-helpful @celeste_pewter. Call Congress’ switchboard at (202) 221-3121 or look for your senators’ closest in-state office and leave a message there — all senators are home this week.

~ 2 ~

FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s Blowjob for ISPs

It’s really far more than a blowjob and it’s definitely obscene. Allowing ISPs to discriminate against bits in the pipe by throttling, blocking, or additional charges to further their agenda is absolutely unacceptable. There’s far too much at risk, beginning with the end of moderately priced internet. Some industries will be damaged — filmmakers, for example, already have problems with releasing films across the U.S. over the internet, as users do not have the same quality of network. Streaming providers like Netflix will also experience problems; angry users will blame them for poor service, when it may be the ISP throttling them. Marketplace’s Molly Wood does a pretty good job reviewing the problems with Pai’s proposed changes and the challenges with the existing regulatory framework.

Let’s be frank: your porn will be affected, too, as removing net neutrality means ISPs can audit the content you request and block/throttle/demand more to release it, or strong arm you into using their brand of porn using a combination of price differentiation and delivery constraints.

And then there’s the issue of Pai’s handling of comments on this change, which New York’s AG Eric Schneiderman has been investigating — little cooperation with Schneiderman to date and a decision made based on a manipulated feedback process — all suggest the FCC is taking illegitimate action.

So, so shady. Ajit Pai should never have been approved by this Congress as FCC chair; Congress needs to reign in his overreach by legislating net neutrality. Could the existing FCC regulations be improved? Sure, but Pai’s proposal does nothing of the sort — Congress should address this.

ACLU’s prepared a short-and-sweet script for you use. Use the ACLU’s call routing through their website, or call Congress’ switchboard at(202) 221-3121.

@Celeste_pewter offers more detailed script with a more thorough ask at this link.

Also via miracle worker @celeste_pewter, here’s a script for writing to Ajit Pai at FCC. Please personalize your message — don’t just cut-and-paste. Take a stand.

~ 1 ~

Incredibly Wretched Judicial Nominee Talley

What. The. Fuck? I can’t even begin to explain how awful a nominee Brett Talley is; he should never have been allowed to get this far. Read up on their hideousness here. How can the Senate Judiciary Committee think for a moment that ghost-hunting,White-House-lawyer-married, ABA-‘unqualified’, courtroom-virgin Talley, is well qualified for a lifetime appointment? This is a complete rejection of the Senate’s power to advise and consent.

Call your senators at (202) 221-3121 or their home state offices and ask them to vote NO on Talley, deny their consent. We can and must do better with these lifetime appointments. Need a script? Once again, Celeste is on top of it.

In my opinion, the Senate should refuse to approve any more judiciary nominees before the 2018 election. Talley is the latest of four Trump nominees the ABA found ‘unqualified’. If somebody is drafting articles of impeachment, these nominees should be cited as an example of Trump’s failure to faithfully execute this country’s laws.

~ 0 ~

There’s so much more that’s wrong, like the lack of funding and inadequate labor for Puerto Rico and California wildfire recovery, Puerto Rico’s Medicaid funding, another horribly qualified nominee for U.S. Census, attacks on the DREAM/DACA/SECURE Acts, or the lapse of CHIP putting the health of NINE MILLION AMERICAN CHILDREN at risk. But the three issues listed above are the ones which will have the greatest affect on the largest number of Americans.

If you have Republican legislators, your calls are even more important, though Democratic and Independent legislators do need to hear from you so they can validate their resistance. Call your elected representatives pronto — don’t take this crap without a fight. Get out in front of these turkeys.

This is an open thread. Bring your comments here which are off topic in other threads, thanks.

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[graphic: Hurricane Maria, 20SEP2017, via NASA GOES]

Three Things: Was Slow Response to Hurricane Maria Deliberate?

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NB: First, a call to action at the bottom — come back and read this after you’ve read the call. Don’t let last night’s tragedy swamp effective action; Congress continues its work no matter what tragedies befall the rest of us.

Having worked in both site and systems administration with responsibility for business continuity, I can’t help wonder why the post-hurricane response to Puerto Rico’s devastation was so bad — so bad it looks deliberate.

~ 3 ~

As an administrator, I looked ahead a year or more to mitigate both costs and risks to my employer and stakeholders. Budget roof repairs expenses for this year, budget roof replacement capital next year; replace the analog alarm system with digital system, budgeted last year. It’s pretty dull stuff but all it takes is one break-in, or one bad storm, and the losses from damage and business disruption could easily surpass capital and expense budgets combined.

But what of states and territories? State/territory, local and federal governments do what they can within the plodding framework of legislation, regulation, and budgetary requirements and restraints. Sometimes things just can’t be addressed preemptively, like major storms. Fortunately, there’s adequate monitoring to help predict when they will hit and what the likely impact will be, and there’s the awesome power of the largest military in the world to deploy as needed.

We have monitoring like NASA’s GOES satellite imaging, which visually tracked Hurricane Maria from birth to death as a weakened tropical storm.

And NOAA’s Hurricane Center, which makes accurate assessments of timing and strength of a storm’s impact.

Not to mention whatever additional monitoring and reporting the Defense Department had to offer.

We know with certainty the U.S. government was aware from NASA and NOAA reporting that Maria was a Category 5 storm as it approached Puerto Rico. The National Hurricane Center issued 17 reports over four days warning of the storm’s size, strength, and timing of landfall. I can’t imagine government agencies offering any less now than they did under the last administration.

And yet the Trump White House did virtually nothing to prepare for storm response.

You’d think that a guy with experience managing real estate and businesses for continuity would have utilized these best-on-earth notifications to mitigate and recover injury and damage to Puerto Rican Americans and their property. But for some reason this same guy now occupying the White House spent his time harping about NFL players and golfing instead.

~ 2 ~

This tweet thread crossed my timeline last week; I wondered who leaked and why there was so little followup, because the claim it makes is quite serious. (Click to expand the thread in Twitter.)

If this claim is accurate, the Trump White House sat on its tiny mittens and did absolutely nothing to approve a response to a major catastrophe which was expected with a very high degree of certainty to devastate an American territory home to ~3.5 million citizens.

If this happened five days AFTER landfall, was nothing done by the White House BEFORE Maria made landfall?

It’s not as if taking proactive action was difficult, either. I am certain government agencies and the Defense Department were ready to move with plans they’ve had prepared for some time, tweaked for this particular event. All it would take is a simple verbal Yes to proceed.

Or an executive order which we all know this White House can produce like so much facial tissue.

~ 1-a ~

All the monitoring and reporting provided to the White House, from NOAA and NASA to Defense Department, was budgeted and authorized by Congress for the purposes of serving American citizens. The public expects a level of performance for the taxes they pay; monitoring and reporting on weather and risks from weather are but part of their expectations.

American citizens expect and pay for their government to deliver effective and timely response when their domestic tranquility and general welfare are disrupted, whether nation-state or weather- and climate-based threats. They do not expect to be left without clean water, no minimum shelter, no emergency health care, let alone an empty wallet depleted by taxation which paid for common defense they didn’t receive.

Why have Puerto Rican Americans not received the same level of government responsiveness and services their fellow citizens have received post-hurricane Harvey and Irma?

Why can’t we get a straight answer about the White House’s planning in response to Hurricane Maria two to three days after landfall? Is it because the lack of any response is as bad as the lack of preparation — utterly missing, perhaps deliberately so?

At some point this isn’t about the White House and its executive function. It’s about Congress which has failed to ensure the executive knows exactly what is expected of it and what action should be nearly automatic from the executive office.

Oh, but that’s too much legislation, conservatives will say. No — it’s inadequate existing legislation which has incorrectly assumed for too long a competent manager will execute U.S. laws. It’s too many sick, injured, dying, dead Americans in the wake of ineffective governance.

And it’s inadequate action on the part of Congress to tolerate an incompetent executive.

To be concise, more than one branch of government failed Americans.

And those branches now have blood on their hands.

Do something about this before more Americans die. Do more than hold a hearing.

~ 1-b ~

By the way, FEMA’s Brock Long has proven himself an idiot. He should be given the boot.

An under-funded agency could land two rovers successfully on Mars and operate them for years to conduct research, but humanitarian response to a predicted hurricane utilizing the largest standing military on earth is too complicated? Fuck that.

And fuck this guy — I don’t even know who this pasty slack-handed suit is, but he can take his lies and shove them sideways. The storm did NOT cause you and your co-workers to be idiots and liars, boy.

~ 0 ~

Call to Action: Congress continues to work on bills regardless of the tragedy in Las Vegas or the growing catastophic death toll in Puerto Rico. Your efforts helped kill the last ACA repeal attempt formerly known as Graham-Cassidy. These are our next challenges.

CHIP expired at midnight Saturday night. Congress left for the weekend allowing health care funding for 9 million American children to expire. Not much better than President Cheeto going golfing while ignoring Puerto Rico. Call your representatives and demand CHIP funding be addressed immediately. Script for the Wyden-Hatch bipartisan CHIP bill here — note also you may need to call your state officials as well.

Net Neutrality is back on the bubble. FCC chair Ajit Pai has consistently attacked it throughout his brief tenure, sucking up to the telecom industry while ignoring the public’s best interests. Call your representatives and demand net neutrality be assured by voting NO on another five-year term for Pai as chair. Script for your call here. VOTE IS SCHEDULED TODAY — HURRY. Get a leg on this before AT&T persuades the Supreme Court to wade in.

Guns on schedule this week: a bill to approve the sale of gun silencers. Las Vegas’s mass shooting last night should be proof enough that “hearing protection” for shooters is the last thing Congress should worry about. The bill also allows the sale of armor-piercing ammunition. Hell, no. Script for your House rep, and script for your Senators.

A vote to make abortion illegal at 20 weeks on tap tomorrow. No. No freaking way. You may not like abortion, but read this piece — imagine the emotional and physical horror for a woman and her family as she is forced by law to carry a non-viable fetus to term. This decision should be between her, her partner, and her doctor. Make the call.

Congress’ switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. Don’t be like the guy in the White House when you can see action is needed.

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Three Things: So Many Questions, September Edition

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It’s been a little busy in my neck of the woods, trying to tackle a long accumulation of honey-dos. But questions piled up, needing answers, so much so that I had to take time out to put bits and pixels to digital paper. Let’s begin, shall we?

~ 3 ~
PUERTO RICO POST-MARIA

Where the hell is the USNS Comfort, dispatched in 2010 to help after Haiti’s earthquake, and why isn’t it docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico, right the fuck now?

Why did we send 24,000 military personnel to help Japan after the 2011 earthquake but can’t muster them for a U.S. territory with a former navy facility and an active facility at Fort Garrison in San Juan?

Is Trump deliberately ignoring Hillary Clinton’s plea to send the USNS Comfort to PR because — well, it’s Hillary? (Yeah. Check that link. Even Fox News noted Hillary’s request.)

Has Trump deliberately ignored Puerto Rico’s urgent plight out of personal pique over the bankruptcy and losses from a Trump-branded, Trump-managed golf course located in Rio Grande, PR? He was trying to prop it up on Twitter back in 2013.

Are Trump’s tweets complaining about Puerto Rico’s debt yet more projection, since the failed golf course was built with government-issued bonds?

Why did the Senate approve as FEMA director — who only left to tour the island FIVE GODDAMNED DAYS AFTER MARIA MADE LANDFALL — the man who was the Hurricane Program Manager for FEMA under the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina?

This, from The New York Times:

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, has received widespread praise for his handling of the federal response to Hurricane Harvey, the first major natural disaster faced by the Trump administration.

Somebody get me a concrete citation of a real accomplishment attached to some of this “widespread praise” for anything besides being “a calming presence in press briefings.” Has the bar slipped this low that calmly stringing together cogent sentences is worthy of accolades? Can the NYT stop fluffing Trump and his band of co-conspirators?

Because right now American citizens are suffering and likely dying as a result of this administration’s gross ineptitude and negligence, if not outright malignance.

Now Trump says he’s going to Puerto Rico next Tuesday. That’s TWO WEEKS after the storm. Can’t disrupt his golf game over last or the next weekend, don’t you know. What I particularly despise about Trump’s response to this crisis is that he makes this guy’s fly-by two days after Katrina look so much better.

Call your members of Congress and demand action. Yeah, that’s not a question. Suck it up; you’ve got electricity, communications, and access to clean water if you’re reading this. Millions of your fellow Americans in Puerto Rico don’t. Let’s fix this.

~ 2 ~
GRAHAM-CASSIDY-HELLER-JOHNSON NOT-A-HEALTH-CARE BILL

Have you called your senator and asked them to vote NO on the debacle Sen. Bill Cassidy can’t explain and over which Sen. Lindsey Graham is ruining any cred as a rational human being, while disabled health care activists recover from being hauled away by capitol police yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on the bill?

Have you documented and shared publicly your senators’ position on Graham-Cassidy, especially if they are up for re-election in 2018?

The number is (202) 224-3121 if you don’t have it memorized already.

Need a script to make it easier? Here you go.

As wretchedly bad as this obscene joke of a bill is, I can’t help wonder if GOP members of Congress and their staff are gaming this. Have they been working on something even worse than previous attempts at ACA repeal just to game the stock market and make a few bucks on the backs of worried citizens?

[graphic: Health Insurance stock chart, via Google Finance]

For grins you should look at Aetna’s chart for last Friday and note the jump it took when Sen. McCain expressed his reluctance to support Graham-Cassidy. Price jumped about the same time capitol police arrived to arrest protesters. Easy money, that, conveniently ahead of the market’s close.

~ 1 ~
IRAN ~AND~ PUERTO RICO

What question do these two disparate places prompt?

First, Trump tweeted about an Iranian missile launch as if it had ~just~ happened, within 24 hours of a reconstituted travel in which Iran is listed. But the missile launch ~didn’t~ just happen; it took place more than six months ago but was mentioned only this week in Iranian news.

Second, Trump took his fucking sweet time ensuring FEMA went to Puerto Rico; Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20th, visible to anyone who watched weather networks, NOAA, and NASA reporting.

Is Trump ignoring any and all U.S. intelligence and government experts on matters foreign and domestic, relying instead on some other criteria for responding to events, including cable TV? Should we believe for a second he’s simply and accidentally flooding his source of information?

In the case of Iran’s missile program, it looks more like he deliberately used stale news to defend a new travel ban while making propagandistic false statements to the public. The Supreme Court canceled hearing the travel ban after the travel ban was rejiggered — does this suggest his manipulation of perception worked, not only on the public but on the Supreme Court?

~ 0 ~
One more time: call your Senators to ask NO on Graham-Cassidy and get their position on the record. Call your members of Congress to ask for urgent response and funding for aid to Puerto Rico. The number is (202) 224-3121. Put it on speed dial.

Viajar bien, mis amigos y amigas.

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The “Liberal” NY Times Focuses on the Next Disastrous GOP Daddy

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It is never enough for the “liberal” media. Despite how the “liberal media” gets relentlessly dumped on and marginalized by the right wing nut machine, they are ALWAYS there to hand out some candy to the nutters.

Here are the estimable Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in the Only Bunk That’s Fits To Print Gray Lady:

WASHINGTON — Senators Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse have already been to Iowa this year, Gov. John Kasich is eyeing a return visit to New Hampshire, and Mike Pence’s schedule is so full of political events that Republicans joke that he is acting more like a second-term vice president hoping to clear the field than a No. 2 sworn in a little over six months ago.

Well, crikey, good that the paper of record is covering this. What else they got?

It may get worse, said Jay Bergman, an Illinois petroleum executive and a leading Republican donor. Grievous setbacks in the midterm elections of 2018 could bolster challengers in the party.

“If the Republicans have lost a lot of seats in the Congress and they blame Trump for it, then there are going to be people who emerge who are political opportunists,” Mr. Bergman said.

Well, sorry I asked, turned out it was some entitled crap from a “petroleum executive”. Great call guys!

Swell. Excellent follow up to all those “Ignorant average Trump voters still ignorantly averagely love Trump” reports that are rampant in the beloved balanced media.

Today’s GOP, fronted by Trump and his ilk, is NOT an aberration, but rather the culmination of where the Republican party has been headed for decades, since at least Reagan’s bigoted opening salvo in Philadelphia Mississippi. It is the party of nationalism, racism, bigotry, scientific ignorance and revanchism.

But, hey, never underestimate the ability of the national media to keep on singing like they don’t know their actions helped put this country in the lurch it is in (Her Emails!!). And that their continued refusal to unequivocally call out the current President for the blithering dangerous loon he is, may lead to making the lurch far worse.

The answer to America’s ills do NOT come from the discredited daddies in the GOP, whether older like Mike Pence and John Kasich, or younger like Ben Sasse. We have seen this movie before, and it sucks in a very disastrous way.

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A Sword Never Kills: The Trump Administration’s Increasing Deadliness

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This was absolutely revolting news:

It’s but one example of the increasing mortality under Trump’s administration. A Dreamer — an example of the former magnanimity of U.S. policy who could have been a stellar spokesperson for this country — baked to death in a trailer.

But wait, there’s more. Much more:

… Monitoring group Airwars, in new figures provided to The Daily Beast, estimated that the coalition killed over 2,200 civilians in ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria between Trump’s inauguration on January 20 and July 13. This represents more than 360 civilian deaths a month and at least 12 a day since Trump entered the White House.

According to the coalition’s figures, its strikes have killed 603 civilians since the beginning of the airstrike campaign against ISIS in 2014. Of those, Airwars estimates that around 40 percent of them came after Trump’s inauguration, alluding to the possibility of a greater disregard for civilian life at a time when ISIS’s hold on its self-styled caliphate is coming to an end. …

More unnecessary, unwarranted civilian deaths, at least double the rate of the previous administration since Inauguration Day — the utter sloppiness with which the military has now been authorized to operate against ISIS will only increase radicalization as it sows death.

This sloppiness was foreshadowed early in this administration with the January 29 raid in Yemen, resulting in the death of a Navy SEAL and 30 civilians including mothers and children. Whether any truly ‘actionable intelligence’ was obtained is up in the air; Trump, however, obtained public relations material for his first State of the Union address. How fortunate for him.

Yes, how fortunate for Trump that the American public has yet to realize he is not careful and judicious when it comes to human life. He is, instead, cruel, mean, selfish and reckless.

Today the Senate votes on a Motion to Proceed with the next iteration of Trump’s desired Repeal-and-Replace-ACA attempt. If the GOP succeeds in carrying out Trump’s aims to end ACA, people will be forced off health insurance keeping them alive today.

We’re all in the back of an over-warm trailer. We’re all in a house in ISIS-held Syria. But we don’t have to be.

Seneca the Younger said, “A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.”

Take the sword out of the killer’s hand. It’s within our power.

Call your senator and ask them to reject any effort to repeal and replace the ACA, for starters. Millions of Americans will thank you, some of whom you surely know, many of whom we can save from death. We can start there.

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[Photo by Piron Guillaume via Unsplash]

Call to Action: Senate Vote Ahead – Stop Trumpcare

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I’m going to let Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explain what’s going on in his eight-tweet thread from last evening — and then we are getting down to business.

@ChrisMurphyCT tweet thread dd. 23JUL2017

Here’s HuffPo on status of this latest iteration of Repeal-and-Replace-ACA. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said, “It appears we’ll have a vote on Tuesday but we don’t know whether we’ll be voting on the House bill, the first version of the Senate bill, the second version of the Senate bill,” sounding very unhappy about being kept in the dark.

Agreed — this is not how a democracy is run.

Two more things you need to know:

— Trump’s administration is trying to crash the ACA; it terminated contractors in 18 cities to help with signups. Think of this as the equivalent of voter disenfranchisement by eliminating polls, only in this case, it could have deadly affects on citizens.

— Trump “asked” Navy service members to call their senators to vote to repeal ACA. This is an abuse of power; an “ask” by the commander-in-chief is an order, and in this case it’s an order to U.S. military to take action against their own interests and against their fellow citizens. This may already have had a negative effect on counts based on reports last night on Twitter.

What’s next?

CALL YOUR SENATOR NOW before the vote and ask them to vote NO on the Motion to Proceed, and NO on any subsequent vote to repeal and/or replace ACA.

Tools you can use:

Here’s calling scripts prepared by the ever-helpful @Celeste_Pewter, one each for GOP and Democratic senators. (Celeste has an updated status on the impending vote, too.)

No on BRCA (GOP) via @Celeste_Pewter

No on BRCA (Dem) via @Celeste_Pewter

Switchboard telephone number: (202) 224-3121

Free fax by internet to Congress by Faxzero: https://faxzero.com/fax_senate.php

Help keep track of responses at: https://5calls.org/ (not for use on mobile)

For more information on BRCA vote:

Follow  @benwikler – MoveOn’s Washington DC director, who is all over this legislation.

Follow @make5calls

Follow @icalledmyreps

If you have any more resources to follow on the health care vote(s) this week, please share them in comments.

Lastly, if you live in Alaska, West Virginia, Ohio, Maine, you are a Most Valuable Player right now because your senators are on the bubble. Please make calls to your senators — thanks!

IMPORTANT: This is NOT an open thread. Health care comments here only; all other comments may be posted in the last open thread. Thank you.

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‘Look, You Can Live on Minimum Wage!’ Say Modern Slavers

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[Sample budget via McDonald’s and VISA]

Jesus fecking Christ on a pogo stick. I can’t believe McDonald’s and VISA were stupid enough to put together this oh-so-helpful budget estimate showing how fast food workers can get by and still have money left over.

After looking it over, here’s my assessment: A couple corporations need to do drug testing among white-collar staff. Somebody had to be be out of their gourd to think this was accurate, let alone an effective marketing tool to promote their businesses.

As many folks have pointed out, an immediate glaring error on this ‘budget cheat sheet’ is the lack of heating/cooling expenses. Sure, some apartment complexes included HVAC in the rent they charge, but this can’t be assumed as a norm.

Every line item included is grossly flawed. I’ll look at three points:

1) First job’s NET salary of $1105 based on an estimated 21% income tax equals ~$1400 gross salary. Based on current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that’s ~193 hours worked in a month, or ~44.6 hours a week.

This is NOT a part-time job. Most fast food jobs are deliberately limited to under 32 hours a week to avoid paying unemployment taxes or other benefits.

2) Second job’s NET salary of $955 — HAHAHAHAHAHAH Right. That’s another ~167 hours of labor per month at current federal minimum wage and 21% income tax rate.

To make this sample budget work, either two people MUST live together, MUST work a combined ~83 hours a week at current federal minimum wage. Or one person must do all this and simply have no time to do anything beyond eat/sleep/bathe/maybe laundry.

If two people lived together to make this budget work, they MUST share a tiny/cheap/ratty car, or hope like hell there’s public transportation which costs less than $150 a month to get to/from ~83 hours of work, grocery store, school, so on.

The rest of the assumptions in this budget are just plain trash. Like health insurance for two people versus one. Or savings of $100 which is really half that, spread between two people, as is the discretionary daily spending.

Some trollish account said, “But nobody stays at minimum wage forever! They get pay increases!” Sure…now person working First Job only has to work 43 hours a week instead of ~44.6. The average wage at McDonald’s is $8.25 — but does that include assistant managers and shift managers? Does this include people who’ve worked at McD’s for years? Let’s be real: most fast food workers are closer to the federal minimum wage.

Perhaps with pay increase a person working BOTH jobs only has to work ~80 hours a week instead of ~83. Give me a fucking break.

3) Transportation and insurance combined = $250 — HAHAHAHAHAHAH Right, again. I checked Progressive’s website calculator for insurance on a vehicle only, assuming a 2007 4-door Honda Civic, personal use, unmarried single male driver age 18-24 living alone, who lived in the same rented home for 1-3 years, had driven for more than 3 years, had insurance for 1-3 years, assuming a 20-year old male student living in Lansing, Michigan. Car insurance alone was $219 per month AND +$400 was required upfront before coverage began.

Maybe bundling renter’s insurance would help but the cost McDonald’s and VISA used in their example budget for insurance and a used car loan is simply unmoored from reality.

And perhaps insurance is cheaper in other parts of the country, but I will bet good money some other line item in that budget increases. Like the cost of an annual automobile license (higher in FL than MI) or a mandatory vehicle emissions test (required in CA but not MI).

Roughly 50% of Americans can’t get their hands on $400 cash for an emergency. Imagine if your insurer dropped you and you’re a fast food worker living to this prospective budget. That’s where VISA comes in with an opportunity to finance your emergency, compounding the stranglehold minimum wage has on your life.

God help you if you’re trying to put yourself through college without scholarships or family assistance. Even the imaginary example student attending Lansing Community College will pay more than $65,500 for four years. How long will it take to get through a four-year degree if one works ~83 hours a week? How long will it take to pay off school loans if one manages to break out of fast food service work after graduation — let’s say they double or triple their wages to $14.50 or $21.75 hour? This prospective student faces somewhere between 12 and 15 years of payments ranging from $950 to $1050 per month, and payments may begin as early as NOW while attending school at $650 per month.

You will be in debt for much of your adult life. There will be no extra money for anything.

Maybe the rare avocado toast, if you can find one marked down in the Damaged bin or live someplace warm where fallen avocados can be found for free. And maybe if you can afford bread this week.

“But millennials buying pricey iPhones!” some out-of-touch jackass might say. Let’s say you’re a fast food worker who might have to change housing at any time because rent has increased dramatically in your city. Even my example dude in innocuous Lansing faces a +7% increase in rent each year though his wages have been stagnant. Your entire life — telephone, computer, internet access, records, more — resides in a single, portable device. Of course you’ll pay more for a phone which hails a tow truck when your ratty little car breaks down, or finds you a quick cash gig (or a plasma blood bank) to pay for repairs. That phone is your lifeline, the lifesaver you can count on unlike white-collar jerk-offs who have no clue what you’re going through to survive.

And God help you if you get sick or injured. You can’t count on your elected officials to make sure you’ll be healthy enough to show up to work those ~83 hours a week.

Indentured servitude, without a contract, that’s what this budget reflects. Product marketing by modern slavers.

And they can’t understand why millennials are killing so many things like fast food businesses. They simply can’t afford them.

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Three Things: Shocker, Badger, Vapor

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Summer doldrums are hitting hard here; it’s too steamy today to do much but watch the garden grow and the ‘hot takes’ bloom. Let’s breeze through these.

~ 1 ~

Shocker: The White House had its ass handed to it last night, alongside a serving of vanilla ice cream and peach cobbler. While it was kissing up to some über conservative Senators, Utah’s Mike Lee and Kansas’ Jerry Moran announced they would not support the Motion to Proceed on the latest POS edition of AHCA.

Excellent work on the dual tweets dispatched simultaneously at 8:30 p.m., by the way (see this one and this one). Live by the tweets, die by the tweets, Littlehands.

What I find particularly interesting is the secrecy this announcement revealed. Not just the discreet collaboration between two senators from very red states, taking advantage of the additional time afforded them by John McCain’s personal health care challenge. Apparently Senate Majority Leader Mitch “Yertle” McConnell has had such a tight grip on the legislative process that even his wingman, John Cornyn, doesn’t know what’s going on until McConnell’s office emails his deputies.

Not exactly a way to win friends and influence enemies, that.

(For some reason McConnell’s super-secret hyper control makes me think of the compartments Washington Post wrote about with regard to the Russian election hacks and the subsequent investigation. Why is that?)

~ 2 ~

Badger: Russia is pissed off about its dachas-away-from-home, threatening retaliation if they’re not returned. Uh, right. Like the U.S. suddenly decided to boot Russian occupants out of the Long Island and Maryland digs for no good reason last year. Russian Foreign Ministry “reserves the right to retaliate based on the principle of reciprocity,” forgetting that Obama took a too-measured response to repeated incursions by Russia into U.S. information systems — including hacks of the White House and Defense Department in 2015 — not to mention the ‘Illegals Program‘ spy who worked at Microsoft circa 2010. (Let’s also not forget an ‘Illegals Program’ spy worked their way close to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair.) The U.S. could and should have been far more aggressive in its response; Russia isn’t entitled to reciprocity.

This is a test for Congressional Republicans. Either cement sanctions against Russia including the ‘foreclosure’ on these two compounds, or admit complicity in the undermining of democratic process last year. The GOP needs to revisit a CRS report on U.S.-Russia relations and Executive Orders 13660, 13661, and 13662 before they give any ground. [EDIT: See also EO 13964, issued April 1, 2016 in response to “malicious cyberactivity” — this EO the GOP will probably ignore just as it has all signs of Team Trump collusion as well as Russian interference in the 2016 general election.]

If there are truly compelling reasons in the nation’s interest for conceding these compounds, give them back — but only after the buildings have been razed and permits for reconstruction are denied under sanctions. The Russian government can work out of trailers on the property, or on boats from the dock. They do not need to be any more comfortable than they have been.

~ 3 ~

Vapor: No longer a ghost — we  now know who the eighth attendee was at Donnie Junior’s June 9th meeting at Trump Tower last year. Lucky number seven is believed to be a translator — and wow, so is number eight!

Which seems kind of odd — in the information Junior dumped online, there was no mention that Veselnitskaya didn’t speak English and needed a translator, or who would be the translator. Doesn’t it seem strange that there would be no concerns about security clearance into Trump Tower or a meeting with a presidential candidate’s son and/or campaign team given the meeting requester was a foreign national?

Perhaps because there was little concern, Body Number Eight, Ike Kaveladze, purportedly showed up as Veselnitskaya’s translator only to learn she had brought her own, Body Number Seven, Anatoli Samochornov. It’s not clear from USA Today’s reporting who asked Kaveladze to attend; did Junior just let any Russian in the neighborhood attend the meeting? Aras Agalarov sent Kaveladze “just to make sure it happened and to serve as an interpreter if necessary,” Kaveladze’s lawyer told NYT. Why so many witnesses?

The room must have been a little crowded with Junior, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rob Goldstone, Veselnitskaya and two translators as well as Rinat Akhmetshin.

Given the two translators, Akhmetshin’s presence seems even more curious. Why was he there if there were two translators?

~ ~ ~

That’s that. I could go on but it’s too damned hot here. Refresh your iced tea and settle yourself in front of the fan. This is an open thread — behave.

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