Instead impose fines later if anything goes awry

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote about the Becerra v. Braidwood case to come before the Supreme Court. It challenges the constitutionality of preventive care requirements in the Affordable Care Act. These are things like testing for sexually transmitted diseases and coverage for PrEP, the drug that can prevent transmission of HIV, used by a lot of gay men. The case is brought by a company owned by Christian conservatives who don’t like STD testing and PrEP because they are “complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior.” Conservatives are attacking the ACA in court (they failed in Congress) with a two part plan. First, try to overturn people getting basic health care. Second, overturn mandating coverage for things evangelicals object to. This case does both. The case has already been through the court of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas. He was appointed by Bush II. He gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted and more. Here’s where it’s really a problem. O’Connor blocked all preventive care requirements for insurance plans.

So, no more zero-cost coverage of heart statins (drugs that lower cholesterol), lung cancer screenings, and drugs that reduce the risk of breast cancer. Physical therapy for older people to decrease falls? Gone. Prenatal nutritional supplements? Gone. Screening for depression? Gone.

The 5th Circuit Court, reliably conservative, agreed, though they said O’Connor’s ruling applies only to the conservative company that brought the suit, not to the nation as a whole. However, that’s an invitation for more companies to sue for the same ruling. So both parties requested the Supremes take the case.

Perhaps worst of all, the conservatives on the Supreme Court lack compassion. Justice Samuel Alito will not be swayed by the fact that preventive-care requirements help increase health equity, ensuring better outcomes for women of color. Justice Clarence Thomas will not be bothered by the fact that upholding O’Connor’s decision could eliminate nearly three-quarters of the ACA’s preventive care for women, infants, and children. Justice Amy Coney Barrett will not care if getting rid of PrEP coverage causes HIV rates to skyrocket. This case gives the conservative justices a chance to make life harder for people they hate while also making the work of government much more difficult. It’s hard to imagine they’ll pass up the opportunity to do just that.

Alex Samuels of Kos worked from a report from the Associated Press discussing career civil servants who work in the National Security Council, the people who do the work to make sure the nation is secure. These people are being scrutinized for their fealty to the nasty guy. As one might expect, many are quitting. That might be what the nasty guy wants. But that means the NSC will be understaffed, maybe for quite a while. And that leaves our national security exposed. Andrew Mangan of Kos wrote that the nasty guy’s desire to make Canada a US state would backfire. The reason is simple. While Canada has five parties represented in their Parliament, even the most conservative party would correspond to centrist Republicans with the rest further to the left. That means if they were a part of the US in the last election they would have added three times more votes for Harris than for the nasty guy. Canada has 41.5 million people, about two million more than California. That means it would get 48 House seats. Democrats would get 31 seats and Republicans 17, which would flip the chamber. Yeah, gerrymandering would balance that out a bit. As for the Senate, would all of Canada be one state? If so, Democrats would not flip the Senate. But if each province became a state that would be twenty more Democratic senators. Alix Breeden of Kos discussed the real reason why the nasty guy wants Greenland. He has said the US needs Greenland for national and economic security. That’s because...

Greenland is a treasure trove of minerals the U.S. needs to compete with China, and the island hasn’t been quick (enough) to fork them over. More specifically, Greenland has neodymium and dysprosium. These extremely rare elements—used for electric motors, wind turbines, and other electronics—are found in healthy amounts and lay widely untouched across Greenland. Thanks to climate change, the once iced-over minerals are now up for grabs. ... With Greenland’s minerals—not to mention their untapped oil resources—the U.S. would be able to rely less, or not at all, on China’s supply.

The nasty guy isn’t the only one trying to grab, though the locals are pretty good at giving the boot. China has tried, as have the UK, Canada, and US billionaires. Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla are well known. He has others, including The Boring Company, as in boring holes in the ground. Daniel Rothberg of ProPublica and Dayvid Figler of City Cast Las Vegas, in an article posted on Kos, did some research into that company. Musk proposed an idea, a way to reduce traffic. He would bore tunnels under a city and supply electric cars to whisk people through those tunnels. Sounds pretty sweet! But California said no. So did Illinois. And Baltimore/Washington. The reasons for the rejection is that Musk’s environmental impact studies were woefully inadequate. Finally, Las Vegas said yes. Well, the Convention and Visitors Authority did. They started with a loop under the Convention Center, a 0.8 mile route that opened in 2021. It’s a private project and receives no federal funding. There are plans for more later, perhaps 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels under the city and to the airport.

The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.

Impose fines later if anything goes awry? I hope you’re enough of an environmentalist to understand the gigantic flaw in that statement. Tunneling underground encounters groundwater. It may contain contaminates or the boring process may introduce them. Improper disposal of that water pollutes the disposal area. And cleaning up that contamination is much harder than preventing it. The consequences of “gone awry” can be quite severe. Its victims may be permanently harmed. Paying fines may not repair or compensate for the harm. That’s especially true if the company pays top lawyers to litigate the case to avoid paying the fine. I don’t intend to declare that all construction should be banned because someone or something might be harmed, perhaps severely. But we have environmental and workplace safety rules so that companies know the ways to reduce the harm, to learn from and understand the situations that have happened in the past and have a chance of happening now. Musk wants to avoid all those “regulations,” better understood as worker and environmental protections. Yeah, the boring encountered groundwater. And Musk is accused of handling it in ways that increase the damage. Boring workers have also filed complaints about other workplace hazards. Yet, Musk still has been working to circumvent oversight. Tunneling to the airport means complying with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal environmental reviews. So the company plans to end its tunnels perhaps a mile away. And that does nothing for congestion at the terminal – which better traditional mass transit could relieve. Even with the abysmal environmental record the Las Vegas City Council is still in favor of extending the tunnels. That’s because hotels are pleading for better ways to move the crowds around. Musk has the nasty guy’s ear. Musk wants to operate without consumer, worker, and environmental protections. Consumers, workers, and the environment will be harmed. He’ll work to block the fines. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos are several cartoons about how close Musk and other billionaires are to the nasty guy. And exlrrp posted a meme:

Musk’s Wealth 2012: $2 billion 2024: $447 billion Bezos’s Wealth 2012: $18 billion 2024: $249 billion Zuckerberg’s Wealth 2012: $44 billion 2024: $224 billion USA Minimum Wage 2009: $7.25 an hour 2024: $7.25 an hour

In the comments of a pundit roundup that has been hiding in my browser tabs since early August is a meme posted by user Proginoskes.

Bubba: I vote Republican to keep Foreigners, Minorities, Women, Socialists, Gays, and Liberals from ruining my life. Billionaire: I vote Republican to keep this moron from realizing I’m the only one ruining his life.

Is this school better? You're not allowed to know.

I visited the Detroit Auto Show this afternoon. My purpose was to talk to representatives of the various car companies to ask if they have an electric car that meets my needs. My needs are straightforward. I want a car. Not an SUV or a truck. A car. And it doesn’t need to be very big. I want one car. I don’t have space for two. I want an electric car with a sufficient range to visit by brother on one charge. He lives about 275 miles away. The trip is short enough that I don’t want a lengthy recharging stop halfway through. Any farther than that and I’ll likely stop for a meal and could include a charge. The bad news is car companies are not there yet. The good news is they’re getting close. Several said they have vehicles with a 300 mile range or close to it. Alas, most of these vehicles are SUVs and bigger than I want and costing much more than I want to pay. Stellantis has a nice little electric car, but it gets only 150 miles on a charge. Jon Paul Sydnor is a writer for Street Prophets, a progressive Christian community on Daily Kos. He recently wrote that concepts of God matter and he proposed a progressive concept of God. The post discusses a lot of theology, most of which is of no interest to me (and likely to you). However, this is one idea that is interesting and is related to conservative Christianity.

Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. ... Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform. Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus.

Eli Hager, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, discussed the school voucher program in Arizona. The example in the story was Title of Liberty, a private Mormon school in Mesa that went out of business. It’s source of income was voucher payments through the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. There were some reasons why this particular school failed. But there were other reasons related to the way Arizona set up their voucher program. Some of them: The law that created the ESA provided zero transparency into a school’s finances, or academic quality. Parents has no information on whether this school was better than that school (or any good at all), had a solid or shady past, and was financially healthy enough to stick around for the entirety of their child’s education. Public schools in Arizona are tightly regulated and their performance is known. That’s not true of charters. Schools that take public money yet have no public accountability is baffling to many educators and parents. The vouchers benefit the rich, who could afford the tuition anyway. They don’t benefit the poor mainly because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods. Parents who send their kids to private schools can speak at public school board meetings and vote in school board elections. Public school parents cannot attend the board meetings of a private school. Defenders of vouchers say the American education should be a free market of options. But if the quality of a school is a secret a parent can’t make good purchasing decisions. A parent needs quality assurance. The No Child Left Behind law, a big legislative achievement of Bush II, was big on transparency and accountability. Schools had to prove they were educating kids up to state standards. The same standards applied to schools accepting vouchers. About 2017-2020 studies “found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.” The declines were blamed in part on overregulation, which prompted no regulation and secrecy. Is the school you’re considering for your child better? You’re not allowed to know. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans are so eager to blame various people for the Los Angeles fires and their severity. Willis includes several examples of their accusations. Their tirades aren’t just about the fire and they’re not new. California is frequently targeted because it is highly Democratic.

Over the decades, conservative politicians and right-wing media have frequently used California as subject of scorn and derision because of the state’s liberal politics. California has embraced many progressive policies on the environment, gender equality, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial equality, while also being the home to the entertainment industry and much of the tech industry. When something bad happens in California, conservatives flock to the issue to use it as “proof” that liberalism and the Democratic Party are also bad.

In the case of the fires the severity can partly be blamed on conservatism and their climate change denial. Willis also reported that this time Republicans aren’t content to lay blame. They’re now talking about politicizing the fires. There is talk to link relief funds to a plan to raise the federal debt limit. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. With the way the government is spending money (to soon be made worse by renewing tax cuts) the debt limit has to be raised. Not doing so means a government shutdown. Also, because of the House Freedom Caucus Republicans on their own don’t have enough votes to raise the limit. So enticing Democrats to vote for the increase by throwing in wildfire aid might be good. But it is also bad because it sets a precedent. If done once there will be a next time. And next time the pairing may not be with raising the debt limit, but with such things as tax cuts for the rich, or efforts to remove LGBTQ books from school libraries, or authorization to invade Greenland. I also remember that a big reason why the nasty guy wants the debt ceiling raised is so he can extend tax cuts to billionaires. That’s bad. But he is going to do that anyway. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Edward Helmore of The Guardian:

The politicization of the Los Angeles fires could be showing signs of intensifying. To opposing political factions, the ruin of parts of Los Angeles offers an inviting but deadly tableau on which to lay out their contrary agendas. To Democrats, the intensity with which the fires took hold, propelled by the late-season Santa Ana winds, is evidence of climate change that some Republicans deny as a political hoax. To some Republicans, including Trump, the fires are evidence of mismanagement under Democrats’ racial- and gender-equity drives. ... Warren Davidson, an Ohio representative, called on Friday for federal disaster relief to be withheld from California unless the state reforms its forestry management practices.

And from Parker Malloy of The New Republic:

The same people who spent years telling us climate change isn’t real are now trying to blame the fires on the fact that the L.A. Fire Department’s chief is a woman. Never mind that Kristin Crowley worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. Never mind that the department’s leadership is still predominantly male. The right has found a way to combine their favorite bogeymen: diversity initiatives, California governance, and climate science. ... This is the playbook we’re going to see for every climate disaster going forward. Rather than acknowledge the role of climate change, rather than have honest discussions about infrastructure and emergency preparedness, the right will search for ways to blame their cultural grievances. Everything becomes evidence of their preferred narrative: Hydrant failures become proof of Democratic mismanagement, female leadership becomes proof of “woke” politics gone wrong, and the actual causes get buried under an avalanche of manufactured outrage.

In the comments of a second pundit roundup is a cartoon by Mike Luckovich. It shows a person at the base of a devastated hillside crawling for help. A person labeled “GOP” says, “You want aid? Put on this MAGA cap.” And exlrrp posted a meme:

Over a MILLION acres of wildfires in Texas last year. Funny that it wasn’t blamed on poor water resource management, black or female firefighters or [Gov.] Greg f---ing Abbott.

The power of the Justice Department, FBI, IRS, and CIA

My weekend movie came Saturday afternoon in a showing of Hugo at the Detroit Film Theater. When the film first came out in 2011 it didn’t sound interesting. When I encountered it again a few months ago it sounded intriguing. And when I saw it on the DFT calendar I had to see it. This is one of Martin Scorsese’s films and is set in 1931. The title character is Hugo Cabret, twelve years old. He learned how to fix mechanical things from his father, who also showed him an automaton, a mechanical person, created to write. But his father died before they got it working. Hugo’s uncle takes him to the train station where the uncle lives and tends the clocks. After teaching Hugo how to do it the uncle disappears. So the boy now tends the clocks while living in the maintenance spaces of the station and swiping food from the various vendors. His nemesis is the station inspector, who has sent orphan boys to the orphanage. He also gets on the wrong side of the toy vendor, whose mechanical toys enchant him. Even so, he manages to befriend Isabelle, the toy vendor’s ward, who is ready for adventure. Hugo gets the automaton working, hoping it would write out a message from his father. Instead it draws an image of the Man in the Moon with a spaceship hitting one eye. This is a famous image (one I had seen before) from the movie A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès who made fantastical movies before World War I. Of course, that sets Isabelle and Hugo on that adventure to discover how all this ties together. Along the way there is a flashback to watching Méliès make his films. So part of the story is an homage to that early filmmaker and early films in general. Since this story mostly takes place in a train station there are frequently crowds. Hugo and Isabelle of course get caught in them at critical moments. I became impressed at how well the crowd scenes were done. I quite enjoyed this film and recommend it. This was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Actor Asa Butterfield, who played Hugo, did a marvelous job. I may have to see the mini Georges Méliès festival the DFT will host at the end of March. The IMDb trivia page for this movie says it is based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick that came out in 2007. Another bit of trivia is the movie was filmed in 3D, though the version I saw was not. IMDb also has a page on Butterfield, who has maintained his acting career and is now 27. Kos of Daily Kos wonders if the nasty guy’s infatuation with Greenland and his desire to invade it is based on how huge Greenland looks on a typical Mercator Projection map. A Mercator map was great for 18th century navigation. But there are big problems when it is used in modern life. Yeah, it makes Google Maps easier. But the farther from the equator a country is the larger it appears. And since much of the world’s land is significantly north of the equator countries in the global south looks much smaller in comparison. @neilrkaye created a Mercator map that also shows the true size of countries. In a Mercator map Russia looks huge (which is why Putin love Mercator maps). But Russia is actually smaller than Africa. Canada looks much bigger than the US, but they’re actually almost the same size. I found the site MapPorn, which, is one I may have visit frequently. Posted in the last couple days is one the compares the size of Greenland to other areas of earth. The US is 4.5 times bigger than Greenland, South America is 8 times bigger, Africa is 14 times bigger (though a Mercator projection shows them about the same size), India is 1.5 times bigger. When trying to represent a sphere with a rectangle something is going to be distorted, usually shape or size or both. Another Greenlander has responded to the nasty guy’s claim on the country. Emily Singer of Kos reported Pipaluk Lynge-Rasmussen, a member of the Greenland Parliament, talked to Politico Europe in response to nasty junior flying there and posing with locals to show they were in favor of the nasty guy taking over. She said the event was staged and a sham. She also said their natives are similar to Alaska’s Inuits and the Greenlanders have seen how America treats the Inuits. So no thanks. The nasty guy’s hush money case was in the news this past week. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported the Supreme Court narrowly decided the nasty guy could be sentenced on Friday. The case went to the Supremes because his team said the appeals should be allowed to play out during the transition, meaning he wouldn’t be sentenced before getting presidential immunity. So, on Friday the sentence was handed down. Singer reported the details. The case is from New York and is about the 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money. There could have been jail time, a hefty fine, or simple probation. But Judge Juan Merchan said there was only one lawful sentence, that of “unconditional discharge.” Singer wrote:

The fact that Trump is escaping pretty much unscathed from the legal jeopardy he found himself in is a miscarriage of justice. He was able to escape accountability both because of an unprecedented decision by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, which dragged its feet before ultimately ruling in July that Trump was immune from anything deemed an “official act” in office.

There was also foot-dragging by other judges in other courts and by the nasty guy team delaying other cases long enough that he was able to avoid them by being voted back to the White House. This post includes a cartoon by Clay Bennett that shows the nasty guy in prison clothes digging himself out and surfacing in the Oval Office. The way I understand the situation is that a judge or jury may convict a person of a crime, but that conviction isn’t official until the sentencing. So while there was no jail time, fine, or even probation the sentencing says yes, the nasty guy is a felon. He is officially the first felon in the Oval Office. Last week I had lunch with my friend and debate partner. He said surely the judge could have ordered probation. He was hoping for the prospect of the nasty guy having to check in with a parole officer once a month, even if it was through Zoom from the Oval Office. I like his idea. Scott Detrow and Domenico Montanaro of NPR talked to Law Professor Kim Wehle of the University of Baltimore on issues related to the case. First, the Constitution does give immunity to members of Congress. So it’s authors knew about immunity. The Constitution does not give immunity to the president. So when the Supremes said he does have immunity they invented it out of nothing and rewrote a portion of the Constitution. And that essentially turns the president into a king. Of a second issue Wehle said:

Well, law, at the end of the day, is about incentives and disincentives. We have laws and constraints to disincentivize bad behavior, but those constraints don't mean anything if there's no consequences. So the Supreme Court, through this process, has removed any consequences for committing crimes using official power. That's the scary stuff, right? It's not the unofficial private power that is going to lead to some real abuses against individuals. It's the power of the Justice Department. It's the power of the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, the military. It's the stuff that Donald Trump will have at his fingertips that no one else on the planet has. That's the power that needs to be disincentivized to abuse, and that's gone. So we really are moving into a new era of American history and American law.

A third issue: Special prosecutor Jack Smith has been working to get some or all of his report on the nasty guy’s classified document’s case made public. From the effort the nasty guy’s lawyers are putting into blocking release means there is more information and it is likely highly damaging. The big question in that case is about the empty folders that supposedly had contained classified data. “Who got it? Is there a threat to national security that was created in that scenario?” After that discussion was recorded Jack Smith resigned. Singer reported House Republicans have posted a list of federal programs they want to trim or cut. Some of what’s in the list: Letting current subsidies for Obamacare expire. Require work requirement to receive Medicaid, even though many who are cut because of the rule are working. Cut food stamps by redefining what a healthy diet is and how much it costs. Yes, the cuts will make life harder for low income workers and people in poverty. The purpose of the cuts is tax breaks for billionaires. Republicans want to use the budget reconciliation process, which can’t be filibustered and thus cuts Democrats out of the process. However, using that process means the legislation must be budget neutral – tax cuts must be matched by spending cuts. And, on their own, these tax cuts would explode the national debt.

Meanwhile, the document Republicans are circulating that outlines the possible budget cuts is Orwellian as heck, labeling cuts to food stamps as "ending cradle-to-grave dependence;" cuts to Medicaid as "making Medicaid work for the most vulnerable;" and cuts to Obamacare as "reimagining the Affordable Care Act." Apparently to Republicans, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

All that reminds me that the rich don’t measure the greatness by the size of their net worth, but by the difference between that and the (perhaps negative) net worth of those low in the social hierarchy. It isn’t enough to have over $400 billion (as Musk does). They also need to take away the scant resources of those in poverty. Oliver Willis of Kos reported a coalition of over 17,000 doctors sent a letter to the Senate, asking them to not approve Robert Kennedy’s nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The Committee to Protect Health Care said in its letter that Kennedy is “not only unqualified to lead this essential agency—he is actively dangerous.” The group describes Trump’s decision to nominate him as “an affront to the principles of public health, the tireless dedication of medical professionals, and the trust that millions of Americans place in the health care system.” Chief among the group’s concerns about Kennedy are his years promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines and his activism against vaccination. The letter describes Kennedy’s support for these unscientific notions as “direct threat to the safety of our patients and the public at large.”