Later On

This is helpful information:

Yesterday CBO released a letter responding to a request by the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Finance for additional information about health insurance coverage among nonelderly unauthorized immigrants under current law and under proposals being considered in the Senate and the House.

Current Law

Estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population residing in the United States are derived from survey data that identify foreign-born individuals but do not specify their legal status. As a result, CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) must use statistical methods to impute legal status when modeling the effects of proposals affecting health insurance coverage. Although the best available information is used in that process, the data have substantial limitations, and the estimates described in CBO’s letter are subject to a significant amount of uncertainty.

Under current law, CBO projects that the nonelderly unauthorized immigrant population will total about 14 million in 2019. Of those individuals, nearly 60 percent (about 8 million) will be uninsured. A further 25 percent (about 4 million) will have employment-based coverage, and about 7 percent (1 million) will have some alternative form of insurance (other than Medicaid). The remaining 10 percent (about 1 million) will make use of some Medicaid coverage, reflecting the current law that allows unauthorized immigrants—who are not eligible for full Medicaid benefits—to receive limited Medicaid coverage for emergency care if they would be eligible for the program apart from their unauthorized status. The number using Medicaid may also include some unauthorized immigrants who manage to obtain full Medicaid coverage even though they do not qualify for it; however, we believe that state agencies administering the Medicaid program successfully screen out most ineligible individuals.

Proposed Legislation

Under the proposal put forth by Senator Baucus-the Chairman’s mark for proposed health care legislation released by the Committee on Finance on September 16 (the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009)- unauthorized immigrants would not be eligible to participate in the new insurance exchanges or receive refundable tax credits for health insurance coverage; that proposal indicates that the verification process might be similar to what is required under current law for Medicaid. The effect of those provisions would depend on the legislative language that is drafted to reflect those specifications and the rules that are ultimately developed to enforce them. More stringent enforcement procedures would increase the likelihood that unauthorized immigrants could not obtain insurance or subsidies through the exchanges, but they could also discourage eligible individuals from seeking coverage. More rigorous methods would thus reduce subsidy costs; they would also increase administrative costs to some extent. For the people who would not obtain insurance under more stringent rules, the amount of medical care they would receive and the source of financing for that care are difficult to predict.

CBO and JCT have completed a preliminary analysis of specifications for the Chairman’s mark that were provided by committee staff, rather than the Chairman’s mark itself. Moreover, we have not reviewed legislative language that would specify the policies involved and their enforcement provisions. In the absence of such language, we assumed that enforcement mechanisms would be in place that would be highly effective at keeping ineligible individuals from receiving tax credits. However, we have also assumed that there would be some noncompliance—resulting from misreporting of income, family circumstances, or other qualifying conditions to obtain more generous subsidies. Illegal participation by unauthorized immigrants would fall into this category. We have no basis for quantifying those factors separately for this or other proposals.

The same conclusion applies to H.R. 3200, the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, as it was introduced in the House in July 2009.  That bill also indicated that unauthorized immigrants would not be eligible to receive premium and cost-sharing credits for health insurance coverage. As was the case with Senator Baucus’s proposal, our preliminary analysis of H.R. 3200 took into account a variety of factors that would affect compliance with its requirements, but again, CBO cannot provide a specific figure for coverage of unauthorized immigrants under that proposal.

Maybe that’s the strategy. Daniel Schulman in Mother Jones:

During his first confirmation hearing, Scott O’Malia got off easy. The nominee to the nation’s commodities watchdog agency was never asked about his role, years earlier, as a top lobbyist for a firm accused of Enron-style abuses, including manipulating California’s energy market and contributing to a statewide electricity crisis. That is, the very same type of market misconduct that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is charged with policing, if not preventing.

O’Malia, a Senate staffer who spent nearly a decade working for Mitch McConnell, was originally selected to serve as a CFTC commissioner by George W. Bush. But, after clearing the Senate agriculture committee, his nomination stalled. President Obama recently nominated him again, and O’Malia will soon face another confirmation hearing. This time around, though, he may face some tough questions about his two-year stint as the director of federal legislative affairs for Atlanta-based Mirant. Following a story by Mother Jones on his lobbying past, a spokeswoman for new agriculture committee chair Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) says O’Malia will be questioned about his history working for a company that pushed for deregulation and was the subject of a litany of lawsuits alleging unscrupulous business practices. "The confirmation process exists to fully vet nominees," Katie Laning Niebaum, Lincoln’s communications director, told me. "Chairman Lincoln will address this matter in the hearing and looks forward to complete, transparent answers from Mr. O’Malia and all nominees." (The hearing, which will include testimony from two other CFTC nominees, has yet to be scheduled.)

O’Malia’s nomination comes as the Obama administration is laying out a sweeping financial reform agenda—or, as the president himself put it last week, "the most ambitious overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression." In the past, the CFTC has often been seen as a feckless regulator, and strengthening its oversight of the futures and derivatives markets features prominently in the Obama administration’s agenda. That’s why some consumer advocates question why an ex-lobbyist for a company that gamed energy markets—Mirant eventually settled a spate of California lawsuits to the tune of a half billion dollars—has been chosen to fill this important seat. "This does not send a signal that wrongdoers are going to be held accountable," say Tyson Slocum, the director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program and a member of the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee.

A White House official explained …

Continue reading.

Good news for those who don’t like pedophile enablers. Steve Lopez (of The Soloist fame) writes in the LA Times:

Last week was not a good one for Cardinal Roger Mahony, and there may be no letup in weeks to come if a certain monsignor continues to testify in a deposition being taken as part of a civil case against Mahony and the diocese.

Msgr. Richard Loomis, former vicar of clergy for the archdiocese, said under oath that in the year 2000 he wrote a memo advocating that the archdiocese inform police about allegations of sexual abuse by a now-defrocked priest named Michael Baker. Mahony, Loomis testified, directed him not to report the allegations.

That testimony grabbed the attention of those who have followed the years-long molestation scandal, in which Mahony has fought like a tomcat to withhold documents sought by investigators and has had PR teams build him an image as a reformer.

In all that time, no one from Mahony’s inner circle had dared stand up and point a finger at the cardinal until Loomis did so last week. With the testimony by Loomis, there wasn’t just a challenge to the archdiocesan leader, but a suggestion that a paper trail exists.

Loomis testified that when he found out Baker was still performing baptisms despite allegations of abuse in the 1990s and orders to discontinue ministry, he sent a memo to Mahony recommending that they call the police. He testified that Mahony "wrote on the memo and initially his response was to proceed but then through the general counsel’s office I was told . . . that we were going to wait," said Loomis.

The monsignor also testified that Mahony ordered him not to inform parishes where Baker had worked of allegations against the priest.

Nobody was more surprised by Loomis’ candor last week than a young man known in court records as Luis C., a former altar boy who was one of Baker’s victims beginning in the mid-’90s…

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Interesting sounding book:

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

by Rebecca Solnit

A review by Brian Sholis

Rebecca Solnit agrees with one aspect of commonplace thinking about disasters: once a hurricane’s winds subside, an earthquake’s upheavals abate, or an explosion’s concussive force dissipates, the trouble is far from over. But the premise of Solnit’s forceful new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, is that nearly everything else we are told about the aftermath of such events is wrong. Conventional wisdom suggests that the veneer of civilization is so thin as to be nearly translucent, and that at moments of desperation we regress to a Hobbesian state in which self-interest predominates to the point of violence. We expect looters to cart off large-screen televisions from the local Best Buy. We assume survivors will hoard water, food, and clothing. In such situations, we believe, compassion extends only as far as one’s family, or perhaps to one’s immediate neighbors. To counter this potential anarchy the full weight of institutional law and order must be brought to bear upon the devastated area — not only cops must patrol the streets but so, too, must the National Guard. And the recovery efforts must be managed by large organizations experienced in such relief work, whether governmental (FEMA) or non-profit (The Red Cross). Or so the story goes.

Solnit, however, contends that in the wake of disaster, altruism, purposefulness, and a sense of commonality bind people together. She was inspired in part by her experience of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco, in which the ruptured earth created a parallel breach in normal priorities that led to a strange elation among the city’s residents. Everyday worries ceased to matter, if only temporarily. As she described it elsewhere, "the long-term perspective from which so much dissatisfaction and desire comes was shaken too: life, meaning, value were close to home, in the present." In subsequently researching the 1906 earthquake (and fires) that wiped out much of the same town, the 1917 explosion of a French cargo ship carrying munitions through the narrows of Halifax Harbor, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York, and Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005, Solnit has uncovered a deep vein of benevolence, unselfish charity, and equanimity, all characteristics that contribute to what William James called the "civic temper." There is Anna Amelia Holshouser, who set up a soup kitchen in Golden Gate Park three days after the 1906 quake and eventually served food to thousands of strangers. There is Vincent Coleman, a Halifax train dispatcher who lost his life rushing back to a telegraph office to warn incoming trains not to proceed. There are the hundreds of people who volunteered to escort through New York City nervous Arab American women and children in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.

In the process of presenting this evidence, Solnit marshals a vast array of …

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I think. Dishes done and put away, cat litter changed, books and magazines picked up, etc. Megs wanted me to spend my time here, throwing her mousie for her to bring back for another throw.

Paul Krugman comments on the fury of the Chicago school of economists when it’s pointed out how very wrong they are:

So Justin Fox reports that Chicago really, really didn’t like my article. Surprise.

What I think you have to understand here is that for a long time — in fact, for three decades — the Chicago position has been that Keynesian economics was nonsense that has been utterly refuted. Now, you might have thought they’d at least slightly reconsider that position with the rise of New Keynesian economics — an approach that involved plenty of math and lots of hard thinking, and generated a large literature in major journals.

I have my problems with New Keynesian analysis, but surely it demonstrated that Keynesian insights had something to them. When it comes to the current debate, the key thing is surely that New Keynesian models do, in fact, show that fiscal policy can raise output and create jobs.

That’s why the debate over fiscal policy has been such a revelation. It’s perfectly OK to question the desirability of a fiscal stimulus, or challenge the specifics of the Obama plan. But no macroeconomist who has been paying attention for the past 20+ years would assert that fiscal policy is useless as a matter of principle.

Yet that, of course, is exactly what the freshwater types asserted en masse — along with claims that nobody, or anyway nobody at a quality economics department, believes that fiscal policy can do any good. Sneers take the place of actually engaging the argument.

Brad DeLong does a yeoman job of collecting the fallacies. As he says, they show famous economists making sophomore-level errors, again and again. They also show that the Chicago School has spent the past generation looking entirely inward — paying no attention to ideas and research elsewhere. Basically, their worldview has been frozen in amber since around 1978.

And that, in turn, explains the sheer rage over my article. It was actually written in a fairly cool tone — but it did say that the emperor had no clothes, that people who have been posing as the sole guardians of sophisticated macroeconomics have, in fact, been revealed as being remarkably ignorant. Fury was the inevitable reaction.

Again, read those quotations Brad has collected. These are the reactions of people who just can’t accept that they might have missed something — having been caught out in elementary errors, their reaction is to try even more sneers and putdowns, in an attempt to retain their sense of superiority.

What a sad spectacle.

The act to defund ACORN would also defund all major military contractors. Read Glenn Greenwald for an explanation, and note this pointer appended:

On a different note, the so-called "new state secrets policy" which the Obama DOJ is set to unveil is such a self-evident farce — such an obvious replica of all the abuses that characterized the Bush/Cheney use of that privilege which Obama himself has spent the last eight months embracing — that I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it.  It would not have altered a single one of the controversial uses and is a complete non-sequitur to the objections raised to its abuses (including, once upon a time, by Obama himself).  Fortunately, both Emptywheel and The American Prospect‘s Adam Serwer laid out all of the reasons why this is so.

Instant movies are addictive. I watched most of Romancing the Stone, to see whether I had missed anything the first time around. No, it’s still a mediocre movie, though the young Kathleen Turner was truly a beauty—and Michael Douglas strikes one as suffering perhaps from an excess of vanity.

Today I need to organize that Watch Instantly queue. The Roku is great.

I finished Stephen L. Carter’s latest novel: Jericho Falls. It was interesting enough that I want to look at his other work, which is now awaiting me on the hold shelf at the library.

I got a second pair of MBT shoes on sale—a pair of slip-ons, for travel (assuming the US continues its lonely course of requiring air travelers to remove their shoes—no other nation does this).

The fragrance of QED’s Patchouli/Tea Tree/Peppermint shaving soap is truly a waker-upper: pleasant  but powerful. I did remember to soak the Semogue 2000 before using, but still got just two passes of lather, the second one skimpy. But I just recharged the  brush for the third pass, and all was well. The Merkur 1904 Classic with a previously used “Swedish” Gillette blade did an exemplary job, and Blue Floïd made a fine finish.

Today is cleaning day, so I’m getting ready for the ladies.

After reading this article in Wired, I immediately ordered a Roku. It came today, and is very easy to set up.

You can connect to the Internet via Ethernet or via a wireless connection. One of my reasons for buying the router (which led to buying the laptop) was to get a Roku, and it turns out to work flawlessly.

After connecting it to my TV and the power, I used the remote that comes with it to pick the wireless network and to enter the password. The Roku immediately downloaded a software upgrade and installed it and rebooted. Again I had to log into the network, but it did remember my password. It then gave me a code to type into Netflix on my computer, thus identifying to Netflix which account has this unit.

It seems to download either the entire movie or a good chunk of it before starting—that takes about 90 seconds. Then the movie plays seamlessly, with no pauses or jumps.

No subtitles as yet, which I often use in films with marked accents (e.g., Scottish films). Obviously, I would imagine you get English subtitles if you watch a foreign film.

The biggest drawback so far is navigation—being able to search movies effectively by title or genre. I haven’t figured that out yet—or perhaps they haven’t figured it out. — Ah, I see: when I step through the movies on Roku, I’m stepping through my “Watch Instantly” queue.

Anyway, great little device.

I made it. I pretty much followed the recipe, making 1/2 the recipe, with these changes:

1 Granny Smith apple, cubed (I eat the core, so this is simple for me)

1 Yukon Gold Potato, cubed

I made the cubes the same size, so that when you eat you don’t know whether a given cube is apple or potato. And, although I did use 2 Tbsp flour, I used more milk in proportion—probably 1/2 cup. I didn’t want the half-recipe to burn.

Very good. This one’s worth making again. I think it would work well even at 1/4 recipe.

Elaine Morgan’s book, The Scars of Evolution, is highly recommended.

Good post at MakeUseOf.com. It begins:

Learning is a pursuit which can only be positive for us. Even if we learn something that we don’t think we need to know, it may serve you in an unexpected way at some point in your life.

Not all of us can stay in school forever though, so I present to you some of the great sites for college and university level video lectures. No offense meant to people from other countries with top notch institutes, yet a lot of these sites are from the United States of America. Of course, there’s always the Video Professor too!

Continue reading.

Bookmark for Friday afternoon.

:sigh: I very much wish the GOP would straighten up. Lying constantly is bad politics. Michael Scherer points out the current effort.

From a Greenwald column:

It’s worth noting that, almost invariably, the people who beat the drum for endless, debt-creating wars and a bankruptcy-inducing imperial foreign policy love to parade around as "fiscal conservatives" and "deficit hawks" when it comes to providing actual services to Americans.  They support constant war and occupation which burns trillions of dollars and turns us into a debtor nation, and then run around lecturing everyone on the need to restrain spending.

That’s the title of a very popular course in law at Harvard University, which is now available on-line. Here’s the first lecture:

Dan Colman comments:

Harvard University and WGBH Boston have posted online Sandel’s very popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” How popular is it? Over 14,000 Harvard students have taken this course over the past 30 years. The course takes a close look at our understanding of justice by exploring important, contemporary moral dilemmas. Is it wrong to torture? Is it always wrong to steal? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth?  We have posted the first lecture above, and you can watch the remaining 11 lectures here on Harvard’s YouTube Channel. We have also added this course to our collection of Free University Courses. It’s filed under Philosophy. You can learn more about this course over at justiceharvard.org.

I was in Whole Foods the other day and discovered among the jalapeños some few that were ripe. I’m making pepper sauce from these today.

UPDATE: Pepper sauce has lots of vinegar and salt. Apparently you should take extra care in rinsing the blender blade—I didn’t, and the old blade is rusted solid. Just went out and bought a replacement blade, so the pepper sauce is now simmering.

UPDATE 2: Made exactly 1 pint.

This article by Gretchen Reynolds in the NY Times discusses the bad effects of taking ibuprofen to prevent pain and inflammation from exercise or running. From the article:

… Those runners who’d popped over-the-counter ibuprofen pills before and during the race displayed significantly more inflammation and other markers of high immune system response afterward than the runners who hadn’t taken anti-inflammatories. The ibuprofen users also showed signs of mild kidney impairment and, both before and after the race, of low-level endotoxemia, a condition in which bacteria leak from the colon into the bloodstream.

These findings were “disturbing,” Nieman says, especially since “this wasn’t a minority of the racers.” Seven out of ten of the runners were using ibuprofen before and, in most cases, at regular intervals throughout the race, he says. “There was widespread use and very little understanding of the consequences.” …

Read the whole thing. I certainly found it convincing.