Daily Kos

Another investigation into Chris Christie ends up with decidedly non-resultish results:

New Jersey lawmakers probing politically motivated traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge last year have found no evidence that Gov. Chris Christie was involved in the scheme. They did not rule out the possibility, however, as they have been unable to interview several witnesses. [...]

"At present, there is no conclusive evidence as to whether Governor Chris Christie was or was not aware of the lane closures either in advance of their implementation or contemporaneously as they were occurring," according to the report. "Nor is there conclusive evidence as to whether Governor Christie did or did not have involvement in implementing or directing the lane closures."

The problem is that some of the key witnesses, such as the Port Authority's David Wildstein, refused to answer questions, and that there's still nothing in the evidence that clearly exonerates Christie, who claims his aides did these crooked things without his knowledge. And then there's the matter of the missing text messages:

[A] new report shows there were 12 text messages exchanged between the Governor and a top aide during an explosive day of testimony a year ago. [...]

But phone records subpoenaed from AT&T show the governor initiated the exchange, sending a total of three texts to Egea on December 9, 2013. Egea returned the text, and sent nine in total, all during the 6 hours of testimony by Port Authority officials [...]

In Egea's own testimony last summer, the new report notes, she referred to a single text she sent that day as "not at all substantive." She said she "couldn't recall" a response from the governor.

So a dozen texts between them during the dramatic and highly publicized hearings into the exact thing being investigated, all of them deleted by both parties, while the aide testifies she only ever sent one and Christie says he doesn't remember anything "of import" in that one admitted message. Yeah, that clears everything up. I can't imagine why people still continue to believe Chris Christie's isn't telling investigators the whole truth.

From a report describing the use of Twitter by the two 2012 presidential campaign teams, a staffer describes the inner workings of the Romney operation.

[W]hether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone for approval. Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it.

And the campaign bus had fifteen steering wheels, and each Romney talking point had to be approved by a committee of elders that met on the top of a snowy peak only during the solstice. Now that's a finely tuned political machine.

He might run again, you know.

An honest question: Is there really no person in America suited for Treasury Department positions other than Wall Street investment bankers?

[Sen. Elizabeth Warren] is leading the charge to derail another Wall Street-friendly Obama nominee: investment banker Antonio Weiss. Last month, the president tapped Weiss to become the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance, a position with immense power over big banks. If confirmed, consumer advocates fear, Weiss may not go to bat for average Americans while helping craft banking rules and battling Republican-led efforts to gut financial reform.

It seems to be some radical, out-there proposition that maybe the people who run monetary policy and the people who make great mountains of money on their ability to manipulate that policy should not be the same people. There's no one in America who has a good grasp of the issues involved but does not work in the Wall Street banks we regulate? Really? Even setting aside the relative merits of any one individual, it seems like you would want a more diverse farm team than that. And when we're not setting aside the relative merits of any one individual, we get, every last sodding time, this:

The administration source says that Weiss' resumé does not mean that he would work to weaken rules on the financial industry. The source adds that if Weiss is confirmed, he would no longer have ties to his former employer; ethics rules require that he divest his holdings or put his investments in a blind trust.

Bully for us for putting rules in place saying the people at Treasury can't keep their side jobs making money off the things they themselves are simultaneously regulating, but that's only really part of the point. The other bit is that all these people taking administration-nominated jobs governing the titans of Wall Street who themselves are big wheels in those firms know that being a Treasury official is a short-term job, after which they will go back to their previous careers, providing they have not done anything that might damage those needed relationships. It's a bit hard to, say, shut down one of the most profitable products or divisions of a major financial institution on the grounds of that product or division being fundamentally crooked, then go back to the same company a few years later with resume in hand. Nobody likes to have those conversations, and so the individuals that have taken those revolving doors have tended to not shut down crooked products or divisions at all.

It would be much like staffing the Environmental Protection Agency principally with prominent oil tycoons because they know the ins and outs of polluting things. Whether they are graciously willing to put their oil money in a "blind trust" for a few years while they set themselves to the task of regulating or not-regulating the industry they will then immediately go back to doesn't really make it a better idea.

Weiss' defenders—including Gene Sperling, a former senior economic policy maker in both the Obama and Clinton White Houses, and Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress—say that his policy stances largely line upwith Warren's positions. He has called for higher taxes on the rich and a more progressive tax code. Treasury Secretary Lew told the New York Times last month that Weiss opposes US companies moving overseas to avoid domestic taxation—even though his firm has helped companies do just that.

But his firm only did that because it was legal, and because they could make money on it. No doubt his desire to stop it is sincere, and will continue to be sincere even as his old colleagues explain to him how cracking down on such a thing would damage the Freedom of the Market greatly.

Again—we can freely assert these things to be true, but these are the same rationales advanced for every single Treasury nominee being momentary pulled off the Wall Street treadmill for a temporary regulator's job. They're all putting their millions in a blind trust, they all have America's best interests in mind, they all will act against their industry without bias. And yet, somehow, our policies towards damaging Wall Street practices never get any tougher, and the consolidation of power in that same small collection of companies continues to grow, and our focus never quite spreads out to the needs of the non-investment-banking nation.

So maybe that's not working out, then. Maybe filling the top Treasury positions with a steady stream of individuals whose interests lie in one and only one facet of the nation's monetary policy has led to stiflingly narrow thinking. This isn't a question that any Senator should have to "lead the charge" on; after the repeated financial screw-ups of the last few decades it should be bloody obvious.

The Republican National Committee has delivered its take on today's blow-out jobs report. Courtesy of Reince Priebus. And it's hilarious. You can tell by the historical chart above just how serious the GOP is in the matter:

“The months of incremental job gains we’ve witnessed are not enough. Creating 300,000 jobs in one month shouldn’t be a new high; it should be the minimum we expect. Today’s jobs report shouldn’t be an aberration; it should be the norm. Sadly, it’s not. The Obama-Clinton Democrats have prioritized other things like ObamaCare regulations, energy regulations, and small business regulations. Translation: they pushed job-killing policies when we needed job-creating policies.

“Thankfully, the American people spoke out last month and sent a Republican majority to the Senate, so next year we can begin passing the pro-growth, pro-jobs legislation that has gone nowhere in the Democrat Senate. That includes the Keystone Pipeline. Soon, it will be up to President Obama to decide if he wants to stand with American workers or continue siding with liberal special interests.”

Sure, Reince. If Mitt McCain were president and today's job numbers—and the ones for the rest of the year—were announced, y'all would be demanding Congress allocate funds for bronze sculptures of the guy placed in every state capital, with offsets to pay for them from the Head Start program.

The good news underlying today's report is that we are gradually seeing an end of the acute economic crisis that took away people's savings and homes along with their jobs. And that means there is space to deal with the chronic economic problems that pre-date the Great Recession.

We are still not where we need to be seven years after the recession wrecked the hopes and dreams and tenuous financial well-being of so many Americans. We don't have policies in place to ensure it doesn't happen again. The duration of long-term unemployment is still 50 percent higher than the pre-recession peak. Unemployment among African Americans is still outrageously high. The unemployment rate, however you calculate it, is still way beyond anything that could be considered full employment. The majority of new jobs pay less and provide fewer benefits than the ones that were lost. And while there appears to be positive movement on the wages front, Americans are for now barely keeping up with the official inflation rate.

These—and other related issues—need to be dealt with. There are, to be sure, many elected Democrats who ought to be retired because they are not up to dealing with them. But listening to Republicans say they are the ones to fix things given their abominable record adds new meaning to stand-up comedy.

They've stood in the way of every job-creating initiative the Obama administration has put forth. They've fought against measures designed to improve workers' lives, such as increases in the minimum wage. So hard have they fought against reforms that proposals like the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for people interested in unionizing to do so, never even managed to emerge from congressional committee.

Saying things would be better if Republicans were in charge conveniently ignores history and the fact that today, as usual, they have no agenda for making things better for the 99 percent, only for the 1 percent. And they prove it every time they get hold of the reins.

When someone is killed, few things tell you more about how the the person who did the killing thinks and feels about the deceased than what they choose to do in the immediate aftermath of the killing itself.

For instance, when Michael Dunn, after shooting and killing teenager Jordan Davis, went back to his hotel room, ordered himself a pizza, fixed a Coke and rum, and went to bed, it gives us a glimpse into the peculiar mindset of the killer—who has since been convicted for his crime.

Scott Peterson, immediately after killing his pregnant wife, Laci, "went fishing," came back home, took a shower, washed his clothes, and, coincidentally, also ate some pizza. On its face, his behavior was out of the ordinary and we later learned that his "fishing trip" was to dump Laci's body, which later washed ashore in the San Francisco Bay.

In real life, or any every television crime drama told for the past 30 years, what a killer does in the immediate aftermath of the killing is extremely telling. It reveals either concern or callousness, sincere compassion or selfishness, humanity or depravity.

As new and extremely troubling details emerge concerning the moments immediately after the shooting deaths of Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner at the hands of local police, it would only be fair to wonder aloud what we can learn from the actions, or lack thereof, of the officers who killed these unarmed men.

What you will see, in each case, is that the officers demonstrated what can only be called criminal and unethical neglect for human life. Follow below the fold for more.

A comprehensive bill that protects LGBT people from discrimination in housing, employment, education, public accommodations and credit is finally in the works at the federal level. From Sheryl Gay Stolberg at the New York Times:

As barriers to same-sex marriage fall across the country, gay rights advocates are planning their next battle on Capitol Hill: a push for sweeping legislation to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination, similar to the landmark Civil Rights Act that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964.

That's the good news. The bad news is that some Washington LGBT groups are already dashing their own hope, saying the landmark legislation "could take a decade or longer" to pass. Wow. Not the 114th Congress, not the 115th Congress, not the 116th Congress, not the 117th Congress. Maybe, just maybe, in the final stretches of the 118th Congress. Or maybe not. Maybe longer.

Are you kidding? This is the exact problem with most Washington-based groups. They're nearly incapable of articulating a grand vision and then letting people be inspired by it, believe in it, and get behind it.

Fortunately, most of the LGBT legal groups aren't based in Washington. In fact, the people who have really led the marriage equality drive are mostly based outside of Washington—Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), Lambda Legal, ACLU, Freedom to Marry, National Center for Lesbian Rights—all driven by leadership outside of Washington (though some have representatives or satellite offices in D.C.).

And look where that effort is—same-sex couples can now marry in 35 states and counting. Sure, it takes some time to sell new things to the preternaturally conservative culture on the Hill. But the salespeople should not be in the business of being preternaturally conservative.

The reality is that the politics of LGBT issues are working for the movement, not against it. The millennial generation is around the same size as the baby boomers. They will soon dominate election demographics. And guess what many of them consider the defining cause of their time—LGBT equality. Fully 51 percent identify as "supporters of gay rights" according to Pew, nearly 20 points more than those who identify as environmentalists, for instance.

If Republicans want any piece of the demographic pie, they're gonna have to let votes be taken on pro-LGBT bills and some are even going to have to vote for those bills. But those votes will only be taken if the issue is forced, rather than giving lawmakers a "decade or more" to mull it over.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Something very unusual happened in the Granite State on Wednesday—very unusual indeed. After a century of Republican dominance, New Hampshire's enormous, 400-member state House has become notoriously subject to the winds of change, switching hands four times in the past five election cycles, including the most recent. So with the chamber now back under GOP control after last month's wipeout, it seemed a given that the party would re-appoint its former speaker, Bill O'Brien, who led the body following the 2010 wave.

O'Brien, though, is an extremist and a bully, and his incendiary leadership style earned plenty of blame from fellow Republicans when the House went back to the Democrats in 2012. Of course, those kinds of attributes certainly haven't stopped lots of other Republicans from advancing (or re-advancing) through the ranks, but when the full chamber gathered to pick a new Speaker, O'Brien failed to capture a majority on the first vote against Democratic Leader Steve Shurtleff.

The House actually uses a secret ballot, but it's clear what happened: A handful of renegade Republicans, sick of O'Brien's abuse, sided with Democrats to deny him a win. At that point, Shurtleff dropped out and state Rep. Shawn Jasper, a Republican, entered the fray. After two more ballots, enough Republicans joined with Democrats to give Jasper an outright victory, making him speaker.

While this of course is a debacle for O'Brien and his hardline supporters, it's good news for Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, who'd make a very appealing candidate for Senate and at least won't have to face a state House bent on destroying her for the next two years. And needless to say, this coup has conservatives in New Hampshire enraged beyond measure. The wife of one loyalist Republican said that serving in the House "is like being trapped in a bad marriage" with a "traitor as Speaker." Ahh. You can almost smell the fuming. But after some exciting nuptials, Democrats might actually be in for a much more relaxing honeymoon.

• Today's comic by Mark Fiore is Who killed Michael Brown?
  
• What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...
  

  • Book Review: To the Far Right Christian Hater ..., by DarkSyde
  • The victim-blaming hypocrisy of Rep. Peter King, by Dante Atkins
  • New York's foulest - serve and protect whom, by Denise Oliver Velez
  • Why I want Bernie Sanders to run in the 2016 Democratic primaries, by Meteor Blades
  • Democrats have a built-in edge in the Electoral College. But it guarantees them nothing for 2016, by Steve Singiser
  • Are prosecutors above the law, by Susan Grigsby
  • President Obama's nuclear option on torture, by Jon Perr
  • Five races to watch in 2015, by Jeff Singer
  • White man's burden, by Mark E Andersen
  • Narrative must not change while police keep killing innocent Black men, by Egberto Willies
  • Corporate profits are sky high, wages down. Yet extending corporate tax breaks is an urgent issue, by Ian Reifowitz
  • H8ers Gotta H8: A conservative view of the liberal media, by Steven Payne

• These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook December 4:
  

  St. Louis Rams Players Receive Death Threats After "Hands Up" Gesture, by Steven D

  Wait A Minute--Let's Hear From Some Actual Police Officers Before We Rush To Judgment, by Dartagnan

  These 17 States Just Sued Obama for Wanting to Keep Families Together, by therehastobeaway

• Intelligent alien life may be everywhere in the galaxy, just not near us:

  Using the new Kepler data, astrobiologist Amri Wandel did some calculations to estimate the density of life-bearing worlds in our corner of the universe. The exciting news is there are probably millions to billions of biotic planets in the Milky Way.

  But before we start packing our bags, a sobering reality check: Our corner of the cosmos may be dark. Wandel’s math shows the closest life-bearing world is ten to a hundred light years distance from Earth. And that’s just to find a world that harbors single-celled life. The closest intelligent aliens may be thousands of light years further.

• Here's what your city will look like when the ice sheets melt.
• F&**@# the government:

  Regulations.gov offers an online database of public comments on proposed federal regulations that include some of our more popular/extreme swear words.

  Philip Bump has compiled the results in a handy chart.

  “There were two words that we focused on in our analysis, one of which starts with an F and one of which starts with an S. … F and S  have been replaced below with the words ‘FUDGE’ and ‘SHOOT.'”

  One example: “You Crazy FUDGErs Are Out Of Your Minds . What the FUDGE Is Wrong With You Cretinous SHOOT-Heads ? S T O P Your INSANE , G R E E D Y BEHAVIOR N O W .”

• Today in 1933 Utah ratified 21st Amendment, ending prohibition and leading up to one of the greatest headlines ever http://t.co/...
  — @pourmecoffee

  
• Fascinating genetic study shows how science can tell if your great-grandparents were strikebreakers: Well, maybe not your great-grandparents. The story can be found in Christine Kenneally's new book, The Invisible History of the Human Race. You can read a quick synopsis in an interview with Kenneally by Indri Viskontas at Mother Jones of how DNA was used to offer a solution to a puzzle. Genetic data showed that sometime in the 1800s, all eight of one person's great-grandparents had migrated from the same part of Devon to Newcastle. They had all intermarried, as had their descendants, instead of marrying the locals, as would usually be the case. The reason, the researchers eventually concluded: They were among the people brought to Newscastle by mine owners to end the strikes that had begun in 1831. Eventually, the owners won by starving the miners out. Naturally, the locals resented the outsiders. "People would not have wanted to talk with them, let alone to marry them and have children with them," Kenneally says. She adds that's it's only a theory, but a plausible one.
• Team Blackness discussed the case of the nine Cleveland police officers who are suing for racial discrimination after being involved in a high-speed police chase in which two black people died. The officers fired 137 shots at the unarmed couple. Also discussed were protests around the Eric Garner case, further incompetence in police departments around the country, and some revenge porn to lighten the mood. Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin rounds up the news; Armando joins in presenting "The War of the Roses & You"; Rosalyn MacGregor spotlights MI's lame duck shenanigans, and "education reform" ideas ranging from the terrible to the outright criminal.

It was nearly a given that Sen. Rand Paul would say that it was cigarette taxes that killed Eric Garner, not being suffocated to death by New York police, because that is what Sen. Rand Paul does. That is his schtick.

Watching other conservatives take up that mantle is a bit awkward, though. Fox News seems to have pinned themselves to Paul as their own personal horse in the next presidential race—again, why I couldn't tell you, but sometimes you have to go with the one that will lick your face—so I suppose they now feel they have stake in whatever Rand Paul does.

During the December 4 edition of Fox News' Hannity, host Sean Hannity invited Senator Paul to discuss his comments that taxes played a role in the death of Eric Garner. Hannity agreed with Paul, arguing that there "are cops whose full-time jobs" are to check stop black market cigarette sales and that this played a role in Garner's death. [...]

During the December 4 edition of Fox News' The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld argued that taxes on cigarettes were to blame for Garner's death. Gutfeld claimed that "unnecessary laws" like "crazy taxes" on cigarettes, "have consequences, and in this case that consequence was death."

Is this going to be a thing, or was it just the momentary reflex of needing to defend Their Guy? I hope the latter, but it does fit with the usual reductive reasoning that is so common in thinky-brainy conservatism. By the same token you could say that a man killed by police after running a red light proves that we shouldn't have traffic lights at all—otherwise this never would have happened—or that a child killed in a public park for playing with a toy gun proves we shouldn't have public parks, because if the damn kid lives in a house without his own personal backyard then maybe he shouldn't be playing outside at all, hmm? You can use it to justify anything your ideology might justify, which is how you know that it is a stupid, embarrassing argument to begin with.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) makes a similar case when he argues that the police didn't know Eric Garner had asthma so being more vulnerable to a police chokehold was his own damn fault. Or perhaps this proves that Obamacare is a waste of money, because if we just let the asthmatics die childhood deaths we wouldn't have to worry about accommodating them anymore. Or perhaps excessive police force on a public sidewalk is really the fault of the American government providing sidewalks, which are much harder and less forgiving than the mud-and-manure paths that proceeded them. Or perhaps the death is the result of campaign finance reform, which has required our nation's politicians to pander to voters with ridiculous tough on cigarette taxes policies rather than ignoring the rumpled masses to cater to the five or ten Americans that paid them the most cash and being done with it.

The problem with New York police officers killing a man over selling cigarettes on the street is ... that we have cigarette taxes? See now, maybe our central problem is that we keep electing legislators that say these self-serving, self-promoting things rather than giving a damn about what the actual problems in front of them seem to be. Maybe Eric Garner was killed by a generation of politicians who have never given a shit about Eric Garner, and aren't about to now.

Here we go again with a bill protecting the religiously persecuted from evil LGBT citizens hoping to pay for services and participate in the U.S. economy. Michigan's GOP House Speaker Jase Bolger pushed through a "Religious Freedom Restoration Act," which is now headed to the state Senate for consideration.

It's a similar bill to the one we saw in Arizona earlier this year. Michigan Republicans apparently felt a real sense of urgency after they quashed an effort the day before to help LGBT individuals hold down jobs and be productive members of society.
 

The 59-50 party-line House vote occurred just one day after competing proposals to add gay rights protections to Michigan’s anti-discrimination law stalled in committee due to a dispute over including transgender residents.

On that pitiful note, studies have shown that fully 90 percent of trans employees experience varying forms of harassment and mistreatment at work. It's also totally legal in the Great Lake State and 31 others to fire people simply because of their gender identity. Only 18 states protect gay and transgender workers from discrimination on the job.

Speaker Bolger was the lynchpin to the whole deal, according to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer.

“There were religious leaders from all faiths at the Capitol yesterday calling on the legislature to end discrimination, not further sanction it,” said Whitmer, (D-East Lansing). “It's offensive enough that the Speaker won't allow the anti-discrimination to move forward despite a majority of the House willing to support it, but to try to justify it with religious intent is simply disgraceful.”

Naturally, the Michigan Catholic Conference set itself apart from other faith leaders by celebrating the victory.

“Religious liberty is neither right nor left, liberal or conservative,” Tom Hickson, vice president for public policy and advocacy, said in a statement. “The free exercise of religion without threat of government interference is paramount and deserves swift consideration from the State Senate.”

It's just so Christmassy—people of good will coming together to keep other people from being full citizens of the country.

Politico declares in a headline, "House sends Obama message with immigration vote." Well, yes they did, but it might not be a message on immigration at all, as some key paragraphs in the story reveal. The message behind that vote is that the Speaker John Boehner has no more control over his members now than he did before the election.

The question is whether the vote will grease the wheels for a deal on a government-funding measure next week. Some conservatives had wanted to tie Obama’s action on immigration to a funding deal and Speaker of the House John Boehner and his allies in leadership hope the vote today will satisfy them, instead. […]

Tea party star Rep. Ted Yoho, a large-animal veterinarian from Florida, drafted the legislation. He explained it's meant to send Obama a message. […]

Even the bill's biggest supporters admit the vote is more about symbolism than substance.
When asked by a reporter whether Republicans were taking the Yoho bill seriously, Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) replied: "I don't even know if Ted [Yoho] is."

"I think people believe that it's a very symbolic gesture," Salmon added. "Everybody knows it's going to end up in Harry Reid's drawer anyway."

Just like those 50-plus Obamacare repeal votes. Yes, the House Republicans demonstrated once again that they're really good at voting on "messages" to President Obama, but not so good at doing stuff. This is all too reminiscent of the march toward the shutdown just over a year ago, where they were whipped by Sen. Ted Cruz into making a meaningless statement on Obamacare defunding and doing something really stupid.

The message they're really sending to Obama is that Boehner still isn't capable of leading, and that for the next two years the House is going to be as fucked up as it has been for the past four.

Yep, it was another pretty damned good week for Obamacare, if you don't count that whole impending Supreme Court doom part. Here's what we found out this week.

This one is particularly salient for a Supreme Court considering stripping subsidies away from millions of people: the uninsured rate dropped more than 30 percent from September 2013 to September 2014. The Urban Institute has been releasing quarterly data since the implementation of the law, and has found that the uninsured rate for adults under age 64 has been significantly lowered, across genders and races and age groups. But not economic groups—the working poor and the middle class saw the largest drops because of the combination of Medicaid expansion and federal tax credits, or subsidies, for the middle class. In other words, the law is doing exactly what it was intended to do. At least in the Medicaid expansion states.

Thanks in part to some of the Medicare provider reforms and incentives in the law, healthcare spending in the U.S. grew slower in 2013 than it had in 53 years. Half a century. Lowest healthcare spending growth. It's worth repeating that the shrinking of Medicare spending has already cut the deficit more than any of the austerity-minded plans that anyone has come up with—Simpson/Bowles, or Paul Ryan, or anyone else.

There's this, too: 50,000 lives saved because hospitals have been made safer. The law included both penalties and incentives for hospitals to reduce readmissions and thus to cut down on the incidence of things like patient falls, poor sanitation practices that increased hospital-based infections, or patients being given the wrong prescriptions. This is all critical in saving lives, but incidentally helped in that whole spending less money on health care part, particularly for Medicare.

Finally, the good folks at the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of their research into state marketplaces. They found that premiums under Obamacare are being held largely in check for 2015 thanks to the fact that lots of insurers have decided to join in, and are creating competition. As the law intended. That doesn't mean that health insurance premiums aren't still too high for a lot of people, particularly people whose wages aren't keeping up with the growth in healthcare inflation, but it is helping.

What does all of this tell us? That our healthcare system can be made to work better and more efficiently and can save more lives. This is all under a complicated, cumbersome system that still maintains the profit incentive for insurance companies. Imagine what more could be accomplished if Republicans in Congress were to finally accept that it's the law and it's working and can be built upon? Ok, that's a pipe dream. But imagine what could be accomplished if Democrats realized that it's working and can be built upon and start campaigning on that right now for 2016?

The flip side, of course, is not hard to imagine because we've seen it. If the Supreme Court does indeed decide to gut the law by revoking subsidies for millions of people, then those millions will be where the millions who live in states that didn't expand Medicaid are: shit out of luck.