Daily Kos

Faux Republican outrage over the supposed revelations of Obamacare "architect" Jonathan Gruber is in full froth. For example:
A culture of deceit! Congressional Republicans are planning hearings. Mitch McConnell says "What this insider is saying confirms that they were spinning tales from the beginning that they did not tell the truth about ObamaCare."

The Republicans would now have you believe that Gruber was sitting on President Obama's lap, writing the whole of the Affordable Care Act. Now he's suddenly one of the people in charge of creating the whole law. But a search of Nexis (or even Google) from the time period when Congress was working on the legislation shows no acknowledgement by Republicans that Gruber was the creator of it. Think back. You've heard "Obama's healthcare law," "Nancy Pelosi's healthcare law," and "Harry Reid's healthcare law." Was it ever, even once, before this video statement of Gruber's was revealed this week, "Jonathan Gruber's law"?

Gruber is rightfully called an architect of Romneycare (remember that one, Republicans)? He helped write it. And the economic models he created for how that law was financed were used by him in consultation with the White House and Congress while they worked on the Affordable Care Act. But he wasn't sitting in the committee rooms or congressional offices while members and their staff wrote page after page of the law.

Republicans are just trying to create another Benghazi level scandal with this, since that whole Benghazi thing has fizzled out and they need a scandal. Maybe they think they can whip up such a big scandal that Obama won't veto their repeal bill, and millions and millions of Americans who will lose their health insurance will thank Republicans for uncovering this dastardly plot.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir With Democrats smarting badly from terrible midterm turnout, here's a truly great, outside-the-box idea: Let's move some gubernatorial races to presidential years. It's not as crazy as it sounds. As Kevin Cate, an advisor to Charlie Crist, explains, Florida's quadrennial contest for governor used to coincide with the presidential election, but segregationists grew worried that increased turnout would threaten their grip on state politics.

So they amended the state constitution to move the governor's race to the midterm cycle, which meant that the winner of the 1964 election, racist Jacksonville Mayor Haydon Burns, served only two years. But from then on, gubernatorial contests were held every four years, always during midterms.

(Incidentally, Cate says that the Dixiecrats were worried that liberals like JFK would act as "a drag on the (conservative) Democratic ticket," while scholars cited by Wikipedia elaborate that coattails from strong Republican presidential contenders where that the old political establishment feared. In any event, the gambit failed. Burns lost to a more liberal candidate in the 1966 primary, Miami Mayor Robert King High, whom he'd defeated two years previously. Burns wouldn't endorse High afterward, and the intra-party split led to Florida electing its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk.)

Now, though, there's no reason why Democrats can't simply return things to the way they once were. Cate thinks that a measure to move gubernatorial races back to the presidential cycle would cost just $4 million, though that's just for signatures. Actually getting the 60 percent needed to amend the constitution would cost a lot more. But Crist spent almost $50 million this year to fall just short of beating GOP Gov. Rick Scott, and now that money is gone.

By contrast, a successful ballot measure (which would entirely bypass the Republican legislature) would pay dividends for years to come—and if Crist could have run in 2012 or 2016, he'd surely have won. It might also be possible to push similar shifts in states like Michigan and Ohio. Republicans will surely howl that Democrats want to "rig" the system, but all these changes would simply be aimed at increasing the voter pool for important races. It's not a silver bullet, and there are still many other things the party has to work on, but it's still the right thing to do.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson This is new: Walmart workers are staging a sit-down strike at a Los Angeles Walmart. Holding signs urging Walmart to "stop the illegal threats" and wearing tape over their mouths to highlight the silencing of worker activists, the group sat down near the Crenshaw store's clothing racks and cash registers. According to a press release from organizers, the group includes workers from stores around California, with some having participated in the first-ever Walmart strike in 2012.

A rally with supporters is planned outside of the Pico Rivera Walmart at 5 p.m. The situation inside the Crenshaw store is developing, with managers talking to the strikers—clearly with the goal of getting rid of them, but constrained by protections for worker organizing. You can follow developments at @ChangeWalmart and Black Friday Protests.

1:10 PM PT: After two hours, the workers moved on to go to the second planned protest.

Perpetual investibator Darrell Issa will be losing his chairmanship of the House Oversight Committee, a less-than-satisfying denouement to his transformation of the group from an "oversight" committee into the go-to stop for every half-baked conspiracy theory ever to cross House Republicans' doorsteps. But who will get that gavel, and how wingnutty will they have to be to get it?

Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who is trying to leapfrog five more-senior members, and Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, who is No. 3 in seniority, have spent months furiously lobbying the members of the House Republican Steering Committee, which will meet next week to consider their cases.

But all the lobbying may not matter. Boehner has five votes, his leadership team will follow him and vote in a bloc and the speaker has sway over most of the remaining votes, many of whom are his allies. He has, thus far, refused to weigh in even privately with his leadership team or closest allies.

The problem is that Boehner holds the keys, and as usual it's not clear how far he's willing to go in mollifying far-right members while balancing the need to make the overall party not look like raving lunatics. A new face may allow a few years of the same base-pleasing but ineffectual muckraking without Issa's accumulated baggage, or a new face might seek to put on the back burner the various conspiracy theories about Benghazi! et al as part of the two-year push to tone down House Republican rhetoric ahead of the next presidential race.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz is perhaps the most Issa-like of the contenders, and he's lobbying hard for the job. He's tying his bid to his past history of being in the middle of all the things Darrell Issa ever sunk his teeth into while still not being Darrell Issa:

“Everything from the Secret Service [scandal] to Benghazi to the IRS, Fast and Furious, I’ve been right in the heart of the major investigations of the committee,” Chaffetz said.

If I'm John Boehner, I'd be running away from a pitch like that as fast as my legs would go. (Then again, if I was John Boehner I wouldn't drink before noon or allow Louie Gohmert to appear in public without a ball gag in his mouth, so what do I know about it.)

We'll see. This single chairmanship may set the planned tone for the entire House Republican caucus leading into 2016, and it'll be interesting to see which path they take. If you're asking me to guess I'd say the conspiracy theorists are in a strong position because Boehner has proven (most recently by stripping Issa of the Benghazi! investigation while keeping said investigation firmly in the hands of people just as conspiracy minded as Issa) that he's willing to give the far-right what they want so long as the optics can be managed. A fresh new face on the exact same behavior may be exactly what he and the rest of his team are eager for.

• Today's comic by Ruben Bolling is Who's looking out for Lucky Ducky?:
  
  
• The word "Solyndra" will never be uttered by a Republican again:
  

  Lost in the hubbub following President Obama's climate agreement with China was a smaller bit of surprising environmental news Wednesday: the Department of Energy's loan program is expected to make money for taxpayers.

  Most people are familiar with the program because of Solyndra, a solar-panel manufacturer that went bankrupt in 2011 after borrowing $528 million from the federal government ...

  You can't avoid defaults when you lend money, though, and on balance, the loans are being repaid ... the loans and guarantees will earn at least $5 billion over 20 years or so, according to a Bloomberg article citing a single anonymous source.

• Thanks, dad:
  

  Outgoing Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe says he is planning to pardon his own son for a decade-old pot conviction.

• Forty years ago today:
  
• Pootie-lovers alert:
  

  Cat lovers in Northern California are pouncing at the chance of spending time with feline company at a new cat cafe in Oakland.

  Cat Town Cafe is giving dozens of visitors a chance to mingle with furry friends while sipping coffee and nibbling on cat-themed cookies.

• On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin on climate deal, new Senate & CT-GOV details. WV elects an actual used car salesman. Obama chews gum! Time now edited by comments section. KXL Hail Mary. School bd. erases holidays rather than add Muslim one.
  
  
• A school board in Arizona reacted to a page covering contraception in a high school biology book that they disgreed with much like a small child would--by ripping it out. Team Blackness also discussed a Florida man serving jail time for trying to start a "race war" and the questionable motives of Domino's Pizza's founder.
  
  

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi keeps getting That Question—roughly, aren't you a little old for all this? Shouldn't you step aside? And she has a damn good counter-question:

“When was the last time you asked Mitch McConnell … ‘aren’t you getting a little old, Mitch?’” said Pelosi of the Republican senator from Kentucky.

McConnell, who is 72, has been in Senate GOP leadership since 2003 and the minority leader since 2007. He was earlier on Thursday elected Senate majority leader for the 114th Congress.

At 74 years old, Pelosi has been in House Democratic leadership since 2002 — and has been at the very top of the caucus power structure since 2003.

In 2012, asked a similar question by Tim Russert's little boy Luke, Pelosi offered some context for why she only reached leadership in her 60s:

I came to Congress when my youngest child Alexandra was a senior in high school and practically on her way to college. I knew that my male colleagues had come when they were 30. They had a jump on me because they didn't have to, children to stay home. Now, I did what I wanted to do, I was blessed to have that opportunity to sequentially raise my family and then come to Congress. But I wanted women to be here in greater numbers at an earlier age so that their seniority would start to account much sooner.

Now, let's get back to that McConnell question.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Jeff Singer Several races remain uncalled as of Thursday morning. We recently ran through them here and here is an update for each race where we have new information. You can check who has won each key race at our uncalled races tracker.

• CA-07: We'll lead off with some good news for Team Blue. On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530-vote deficit to a 711-vote edge.

There are about 19,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 in the 7th District. On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.

Republican Doug Ose would need to win the remaining votes by about 7 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since election night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the Champagne just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.

Head below the fold for a look to find out what races have concluded since Wednesday, and where other uncalled contests stand.

This would be welcome news, if true.

President Obama will ignore angry protests from Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan. [...]

One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.

Republicans are already gearing up for a massive freakout, because that is what they do.

Republican lawmakers blasted the White House on the heels of a Fox News report that President Obama is planning to unveil a 10-part plan for overhauling U.S. immigration policy via executive action as early as next week – with one GOP leader warning there will be “an explosion” if the president moves too soon. [...]

"He will make the issue absolutely toxic for a decade,” Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., said Thursday. [...]

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., said Thursday if Obama acts before the spending bill is done, there will be an “explosion.”

There seems little risk of making the "issue" any more toxic than it has been, and pushing reforms forward over Republican objections seem the only way to achieve any reforms at all. Despite Republican theories to the contrary Obama is still the sitting U.S. president, and like past presidents he therefore can set executive branch policies in keeping with his preferred agenda.

Senate Democrats are capable of learning. Last Tuesday's election taught them they probably need some help on messaging and policy, and they looked to precisely the right person for it.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gained a leadership position in the Senate Democratic caucus Thursday, giving the prominent progressive senator a key role in shaping the party's policy priorities.

Warren's new role, which was created specifically for her, will be strategic policy adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, helping to craft the party's policy positions and priorities. She will also serve as a liaison to progressive groups to ensure they have a voice in leadership meetings and discussions, according to a source familiar with the role.

More proof they're learning—Sen. Harry Reid strongly supported Warren for this role precisely because of what happened in the election.

"If the ballot measure results are any indication, actual progressive policies remain popular with voters in red and blue states. I believe you’ll see a Senate Democratic caucus fight on behalf of those policies and provide the votes if and when Republicans are ready to act," Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Reid, told HuffPost earlier this month.

There's no one better at shaping the progressive populist message in Congress than Warren, and Congress needs it for 2016. The Democrats as a whole need it for 2016. And here is where Warren can have a real effect on the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton is not going to run a campaign that's discordant with what the Senate Democrats—with Warren shaping the policy and the message—are running on.

There's ongoing discussion in LtPower's recommended diary.

Republicans have more ammunition for their Obamacare repeal quest in the form of stupid and disparaging remarks made in 2013 by Jonathan Gruber, the guy who was instrumental in creating Romneycare in Massachusetts, and was a technical consultant to the White House on the Affordable Care Act. That's a key thing to keep in mind—Gruber is an economist and he had a bunch of models from developing Romneycare that he used to game out various funding scenarios on the federal law. He was a consultant who was doing number crunching, and while influential was not in on the messaging or the actual bill writing. To wit:
It's also worth keeping in mind that these renewed attacks are coming from Republicans who gave us "death panels" and "government takeover" and "illegals" getting health insurance and the $716 billion Medicare cuts, not to mention Sen. Mitch McConnell and his argument that Kentucky could keep Kynect after Obamacare is repealed "root and branch." These are not people who are bastions of truth on the healthcare law.

To the meat of it, here's what Gruber said—and has subsequently apologized for—that has conservatives so riled up right now.

The bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [CBO] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it's written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money—it would not have passed...Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.

Extremely impolitic yes, but also not true as anyone who followed and wrote about the debate during the months the legislation was developing knows. ThinkProgress's Igor Volsky is among those people, and details how Gruber overstates his case. And this tweet from another healthcare writer makes a pretty good point, too.
To find out more about the tax/fine non-distinction, and more, head below the fold for that.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Workers serving food, cleaning buildings, and working other low-wage jobs under federal contracts in Washington, DC, are striking again Thursday—and they're expanding their fight again:

Although federally contracted employees organized under the banner of Good Jobs Nation have walked off the job nine times before, Thursday’s strike will be the first to include food service workers from within the U.S. Capitol building itself. Workers who typically serve food to both tourists and members of Congress will instead gather on the Capitol’s lawn and demand changes to labor standards within the building.

Reginald Lewis Sr., a food service worker in the Capitol Visitor Center, said he plans to go on strike for higher pay and benefits — and to gain respect.

"As Americans, you want to live the American dream, and this would help out a whole lot," said Lewis, who currently makes $12 an hour. He said that when he was hired he was told he would be able to work 40 hours a week, but that he sometimes gets scheduled for as few as 30.

In addition to including workers from the Capitol, Good Jobs Nation is, like fast food workers across the country, asking for "$15 and a union." They're pushing for an executive order promoting collective bargaining and asking the federal government to give preference in awarding contracts to companies that pay a minimum of $15 an hour, above the $10.10 minimum wage President Obama established for future federal contracts. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is backing the workers.

In the District of Columbia itself, the minimum wage is rising to $11.50 in 2016.

The demands of the striking federal contract workers are more or less the same as those of fast food workers across the country because the fight is basically the same. The main difference is that the government should do better than McDonald's. Under President Obama, the federal government has taken steps in that direction, but it could and should do even better.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson

According to the editorial board of the Washington Post, the way to "a solvent Postal Service" is through cuts. Cuts to services, cuts to jobs, cuts cuts cuts cuts cuts. It's "the bipartisan way," according to the Post. Dean Baker reminds us of another solution, one that's been embraced by both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the USPS inspector general. That would be postal banking:

This route takes advantage of the fact that the Postal Service has buildings in nearly every neighborhood in the country. These offices can be used to provide basic services to a large unbanked population that often can't afford fees associated with low balance accounts. As a result they often end up paying exorbitant fees to check cashing services, pay day lenders and other non-bank providers of financial services.

A postal banking system would provide competition for the private financial system, which undoubtedly explains why so many politicians are unwilling to consider it as a route to addressing the Postal Service's financial issues. In the past politicians have often intervened to protect the private sector so that it would not lose business to the Postal Service. For example, in 1999 many members of Congress intervened on behalf of FedEx and UPS, who were concerned that they were losing business due to an effective ad campaign by the Postal Service.

So we're talking about something that could provide banking services to some of the 68 million Americans who effectively don't have access to banking services, and could provide those services in their hometowns, even in rural areas. But somehow this proposal that could both help the Postal Service and underserved Americans isn't taken seriously in the policy debate.

But then, banking isn't the only thing Congress doesn't want to stop the Postal Service from doing because it might compete too effectively with business. Online bill paying. Selling postal-themed clothes. On and on. There are so many things that the vast national network of buildings and workers there to provide a service that is actually mentioned in the Constitution could be doing to better serve Americans. Proposals include not just banking but notary public services, hunting and fishing licenses, copy and fax services. Shoot, right now the Postal Service isn't even allowed to ship wine and liquor. Allowing that would be a pretty basic step for strengthening a shipping service.

But no. Congress is much more interested in telling the Postal Service what it can't do, then telling it to cut services because it's not making enough money, than in thinking about ways to make it more profitable and more useful to more Americans.