Daily Kos

Reposted from Lisa Lockwood by kos Editor's Note: From the diaries. Our infrastructure is crumbling. You'd think someone might want to do something about it. -- kos From KOMO.News in Washington-

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. -- The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed Thursday evening, injuring a unknown number of people.

Both the northbound and southbound portions of the bridge dropped into the river sometime before 7 p.m., according to Washington State Patrol trooper Mark Francis.

Francis said several cars were on the bridge when it collapsed, and many are now in the water.

It's unclear how many people were injured or killed in the collapse.

This is a developing story that will be updated when more information is available.

And the inevitable:
 

Bart Treece with the Washington State Department of Transportation was unsure when the bridge was last inspected.

"All of our bridges in the area are pretty old," he said.

Marcy Wheeler is the author of Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy. At Salon, she writes Obama admits "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare”—but fails to offer way out:

Four years ago, President Obama gave a  seminal counterterrorism speech in front of the Constitution arguing we “uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe.” Today, amid controversies over his Administration’s killing of American citizens in drone strikes, efforts to break hunger strikes by Guantanamo Bay detainees who have long been cleared for transfer, and seizures of the call records of national security journalists, Obama tried to reclaim those cherished values in his fight against terror. Marcy Wheeler In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama tried to redefine that fight and at least rhetorically end the war. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’” In the speech, Obama proposed a number of policies that would return us closer to the values. He directed his aides to consider proposals—like a drone court or an additional Executive Branch review—to add oversight to targeted killing. He instructed Eric Holder to review Department of Justice guidelines “governing investigations that involve reporters” by July 12 (the only deadline in the speech). He even argued for the use of more foreign assistance rather than just military force in combating terrorism, though suggested people in both parties opposed such assistance. Obama also promised to “engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing“ and threatened to veto any proposal that expanded this war. Obama has failed to make good on such veto threats in the past, and he made no mention of the Iraq AUMF, which remains in force two and a half years after the last troops were withdrawn from Iraq. So it remains to be seen whether his stated commitment to rework the AUMF will survive the political difficulties it has not in the past. Obama’s most substantive proposals recommitted to closing Guantánamo Bay, a commitment that seemed to arise out of a focus on his own legacy. “[H]istory will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it,” he reflected. […] For all the answers Obama did offer today—some convincing, others not so much—ultimately some of the big questions remain.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Torture: This shouldn't need to be said:

Let's put this straight right off the bat: favoring the use of torture is not a political position, it's a mental illness. Any further discussion of torture should be unnecessary. However, since our our national media seems to be enthusiastically pimping depravity as a governing principle, we might as well point out that the guys that have been there, done that, seen the elephant show and lived to come home? They say it doesn't work, isn't worth it, and they want nothing to do with it. If you need further evidence, check out Mike Ritz, a former SERE instructor who worked with our servicemen and women to prepare them for harsh interrogations torture, and who went on to found his own private "stress laboratory" where he could "use just about any technique" he had read about to "see what kind of results he could get." Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator who questioned prisoners in several locations, including Abu Ghraib. In other words, these are two people who have tortured other people, neither of them is shy about that fact, and they are willing to talk about that experience. Both men appeared on NPR's Tell Me More (audio link). The guys who have really done this stuff to actual human beings do not exactly back up the words of American's biggest Dick. First off, they discussed the difference between what service people in the intelligence field had been trained to do, and what they were then asked to do by the Bush administration.

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Tweet of the Day:

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin on the lingering controversies and the variations in polling on the AP story. Also: the strange case of Josh Barro. On the IRS, Republicans now insist the President knew all about it, and if he didn't, that's evidence of a cover-up, too. Make your own untraceable AK-47 at a "build party." McCain looks to defuse a "nuclear option" showdown. Lamar! pretends not to see the difference between the ACA & Iran-Contra. A shocking chart on the shift in sources of federal revenues. "Why Private Schools Are Dying Out." When it comes to income inequality, the Medicis were pikers!

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High Impact Posts. Top Comments.

Reposted from Daily Kos Economics by Roosevelt Institute

By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal

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What’s in millennials’ wallets? Fewer credit cards (LA Times)

Emily Alpert talks to Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz about why young households are carrying less and less credit card debt. According to Aronowitz, it’s all about fear of an uncertain future.

• Roosevelt Take: Aronowitz discusses why she thinks Millennials should be called the Crash Generation.

Why Suburban Poverty Is Less Visible and More Insidious (The Atlantic)

According to Emily Badger, suburban poverty is an incredibly isolating phenomenon. In areas where children play in back yards, not public playgrounds, and commuters drive instead of taking the subway, communal support for the poor all but disappears.

Elizabeth Warren Grills Treasury Secretary on Too Big to Fail (MoJo)

Erika Eichelberger characterizes Jack Lew’s response to Sen. Warren’s questioning on breaking up the biggest banks as nothing but avoidance. In the linked video, Lew sticks to name, rank, and serial number while Warren pushes for a direct answer on capping bank size.

How Budget Cuts Could Lead To Higher Costs From Tornadoes (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reminds us that sequestration is still happening and is causing furloughs at the National Weather Service. The NWS warned residents of Moore, Oklahoma, about the tornado 16 minutes before it touched down, and we can’t afford to cut it much closer.

Fed Endorses Stimulus, but the Message Is Garbled (NYT)

Nelson D. Schwartz explains that it doesn’t look like the Fed will be cutting back its bond-buying program just yet. Bernanke’s testimony yesterday showed a sense of caution, despite the apparent signs of improvement in the job market.

Robert Kaiser on Dodd-Frank: ‘This example of Congress working also illuminated why it works so rarely.’ (WaPo)

Neil Irwin and Robert Kaiser discuss why no one would want to emulate the process required to pass Dodd-Frank, with months of negotiations for bipartisan support collapsing and the bill barely scraping by. Instead, we get no negotiation and no legislation, saving everyone time.

Why Obama’s Scandals Won’t Lead to Reform (Bloomberg View)

Ezra Klein points out the disconnect between who is upset about the policy problems raised by the IRS and AP scandals, and who wants to make a fuss about them. With those categories split, he doesn’t think we will see any changes in anonymous political spending through 501(c)(4)s or legislation to protect journalists and their sources.

U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh (NYT)

Steven Greenhouse says major U.S. retailers are worried the accord that many European retailers have embraced will open them up to legal liability. Apparently the real risk isn’t sending workers into a death trap; it’s all the paperwork and billable hours that could result.

Throughout the tenure of George W. Bush, many of us to the left of center warned that unchecked presidential power was putting Americans' civil liberties in jeopardy. Now with the revelations that the Obama Justice Department seized AP phone records in one leak case and monitored a reporter's communications in another, some on the right are finally furious about infringements of our First and Fourth amendment rights. Apparently, all it took for this belated conservative change of heart was a Democrat in the White House and a Fox News reporter in the government's crosshairs. After all, when Americans learned of President Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping by the NSA, many of the same voices called for the prosecution of the New York Times. Then, Republican Sen. John Cornyn warned in a GOP talking point regurgitated by myriad conservative mouthpieces, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Word that the Justice Department obtained emails and phone records for James Rosen of Fox News after the publication of his June 11, 2009 story which references CIA findings from "sources inside North Korea" produced a torrent of criticism from the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other liberal voices. Over at Fox News, anchors and guests announced they were "appalled" at the "dangerous lunacy" of DOJ snooping on Rosen, calling it an unindicted co-conspirator "a huge assault on the First Amendment" (Charles Krauthammer) and "Big Brothers stuff" (Sean Hannity). Fox News executive vice president Michael Clemente issued a statement declaring:

"We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter. In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press."

Of course, when Republican George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office, the shoe was on the other foot. And Fox News and its right-wing allies wanted to kick the New York Times' ass with it.

On Dec. 16, 2005, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times reported that President Bush had ordered the National Security Administration (NSA) to intercept Americans' overseas electronic communications without first obtaining a warrant as required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Three days later, President Bush raged about what he deemed "a shameful act" that is "helping the enemy" and added "the Justice Department, I presume, will proceed forward with a full investigation." On Dec. 30, 2005, that investigation was announced, when White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy told reporters that the Justice Department department "undertook this action on its own" and that Bush had only learned about it from senior staff earlier in the day. Then in May 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested on ABC News' This Week that the New York Times itself could face prosecution over its publication of the NSA domestic surveillance program story:

On the talk show, when asked if journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information, Gonzales responded, "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility."

He was referring to the 1917 Espionage Act, which made it a crime for an unauthorized person to receive national defense information and transmit it to others.

The next month, Deputy U.S. Attorney Matthew W. Friedrich told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bush DOJ thought that journalists or "anyone" could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information.

As it turned out, those words came as music to the ears of Fox News and the conservative commentariat. After all, as you'll see below, they had been cheerleading for the Bush administration to prosecute the New York Times for months.

Faced with the terrible, horrible, wrenching decision of whether to quit encouraging bigotry and allow gay scouts and scout leaders, the Boy Scouts decided to cut the baby in half and allow gay scouts, but not gay scout leaders:

“I’ve waited 13 years for this,” said Matt Comer, now 27, who was forced out of his scout troop at age 14 after he started a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school. Since the fourth grade, he said Thursday, he had dreamed of becoming an Eagle Scout and was crushed when he was denied the chance.

“Today we finally have some justice for me and others,” he said. “But gay youths will still be told they are no longer welcome when they turn 18.” [...]

The vote was a bittersweet one for David Knopp, 86, who spent much of his life in scouting as a boy, as a professional staff member and later as a volunteer with a council in Connecticut. He had tried to keep his sexual orientation a secret but one day, he said, two scout officials said, “We found out you are a homosexual” and forced him out.

“I see this as a good step but with a lot of misgivings,” he said of the limited opening to gays.

Of course, even letting in openly gay scouts only to ban them on their birthdays is a bridge too far for some:
Expect an outcry from people announcing that they're pulling their sons out of the Boy Scouts—a noisily self-righteous contrast to the boys and men who've been forced by bigotry to leave over the years, slipping away one by one.

Here's another shift in health care to go along with shrinking rate of growth in health care spending over the last few years: For the first time, primary care doctors are driving more revenue on a per/physician basis for hospitals than specialists. That's the finding in a new survey of hospital financial officers by physician recruiting firm Merritt Hawkins.

For 2013, the median revenue per primary care physician ascribed by about 3,000 hospital chief financial officers is nearly $1.6 million, and it is a little more than $1.4 million for specialists. In 2010, the last time Merritt Hawkins did such a survey, primary care was at more than $1.4 million, and specialties were at nearly $1.6 million. Specialists have outpaced primary care in Merritt Hawkins' survey, which began in 2002, continued in 2004 and has been conducted every three years since. The survey includes both inpatient and outpatient revenue generated for hospitals, and it does not give an aggregate total of the revenue generated by primary care and specialty physicians. [...]

“A seismic shift is taking place in medicine, away from specialists and toward primary care physicians,” said Mark Smith, president of Merritt Hawkins, in a statement. “Primary care physicians are increasingly employed by hospitals and in new delivery models, such as accountable care organizations. They are taking a greater role in driving both the delivery of care and the flow of health care dollars.”

Note that this is among physicians who are employed by hospitals, not independent providers. Researchers attribute much of the shift to the emphasis the Affordable Care Act puts on primary care, and the increasing role of primary care physicians in health care delivery because preventive services are now provided for patients with insurance without co-pays. Demand for these services is increasing, just as demand for primary care physicians will be increasing. Medicare provider cuts are also a factor. Not mentioned in the story, but another potential factor in the decline in specialist revenue is the recession and how people have curtailed spending because of it.

Given that the Affordable Care Act is going to create demand for primary care providers that will be a challenge to meet, it's good that these doctors are also increasing revenue for hospitals—that should drive more hiring and potentially better pay for these providers. Better pay could drive more medical school students into primary care instead of specialities.

By now you've heard about Kiera Wilmot. She's the Florida teen who was arrested for setting off a small explosion in her science class:

Kiera, 16-year-old junior, was arrested after the incident, which happened outside about 15 minutes before the school day began. No one was hurt, nor did she cause any damage.

The school's resource officer arrested her on two possible felony charges, possessing a weapon on campus and discharging a destructive device. Kiera was suspended for 10 days, sent to an alternative school, which she still attends, and told she faced expulsion.

Her headline-making nightmare hit one NASA veteran hard:

The explosion struck a chord with 18-year NASA veteran Homer Hickam, a former lead astronaut training manager for Spacelab, and later for the International Space Station.

In the late 1950s, Hickam had a brush with law enforcement for allegedly starting a forest fire. State police came to his high school and led him and his friends away in handcuffs, but his high school physics professor and school principal came to the rescue, clearing him of wrongdoing.

Hickam became determined to see Kiera Wilmot succeed:

"I couldn't let this go without doing something," Hickam said. "I'm not a lawyer, but I could give her something that would encourage her. I've worked closely with the U.S. Space Academy, and so I purchased a scholarship for her."

Great news! But it gets even better:

Learning of her twin sister, Hickam raised enough money so Kiera and Kayla could attend space camp together. Hickam runs several scholarships for kids with potential, and hopes to create an ongoing Space Academy scholarship. The twins will attend in July.

Both Wilmot sisters are headed to the Space Academy! Sometimes good things really do happen to good people. Three cheers for Homer Hickam!

It's going to take a while, but the trends are clear:

A poll conducted this month for Vanderbilt University found that 49 percent of Tennesseans support gay marriage or civil unions while 46 percent are opposed to both, suggesting the state is now evenly divided on whether to extend legal recognition to same-sex couples.

Meanwhile, 62 percent of Tennesseans say health insurance and other employee benefits should be extended to the domestic partners or spouses of gays and lesbians. Thirty-one percent oppose the idea.

When the homophobes have lost even deep-red places like Tennessee, there's not much left for them. It also makes House Republican efforts to prop up the Defense of Marriage Act, which arbitrarily denies benefits to same-sex couples, look even more ridiculous.

Saints be praised, this guy is amazing. Aficionados of the GOP's new move towards abject batshit insanity have found a new poster boy in inexplicable Virginia lt. gov. nominee E.W. Jackson. He's Allen West, but more prone to irrational fury. He's Louie Gohmert, but more incoherent. He's Steve King and Michele Bachmann, but with the hatefulness dialed up to eleven and a half. How the hell is it that the Republican Party just discovered this loon now? I would have thought they'd have shaken every tree in the conservative nut orchard by now, but no. Here comes a new guy, and he's Akin to be worse. (Get it? Get it? Ha, it's been months since we could use that one.) No, this guy seems to have been specially cloned in a Republican Lunatic Candidate vat, and you don't want to even know what they pump into that thing.

Jackson seems to have no intention of pacing himself, either. Are we really going to have to have a Daily Jackson Roundup? Here's just the stuff brought up recently:

• He says that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is just "claiming" to be Mormon. For folks like Reid, he says "they don't believe it or feel it in their hearts." Bonus points to EW for telling this to Glenn Beck, who otherwise would be reduced to interviewing soup cans in his kitchen.
• He says that the federal government shouldn't be involved in disaster relief—and that he doesn't think there's "any constitutional authority to do it." Forget budget offsets, silly Sens. Inhofe and Cornyn—the new crazy Republican position is that states that face devastating natural disasters can get bent.
• In 2009, he founded his own tea partyesque group called STAND. While the top issue of the hardcore social conservative group was to create a yearly American History Month, in part to help offset the "balkanizing" influence of things like Black History Month and Gay Pride Month, the second "top issue" was to call for "an end to the hyphenated American." That this made it onto the list before such social conservative mantras as the anti-abortion and anti-marriage-equality planks is odd, and the nice text at the top of his web page declaring Jackson as "Standing Up For The Judeo-Christian History And Values Which Made America Great" would be outright embarrassing, if that really were a hyphen there describing Americans. It's not, though—that's just an ant on your computer screen. That's another ant on his left-hand sidebar, which means you must have been eating at your computer again.
• He's on Twitter, and it's exactly what you'd expect.
• As for his history of spectacularly nasty rhetoric calling homosexuals "sick people," Democrats "slave masters" and Planned Parenthood "the Ku Klux Klan," etc., Jackson isn't backing down. "I say the things that I say because I'm a Christian," he told reporters, adding "attacking me because I hold to those principles is attacking every church-going person." Well, glad we've cleared that up. He also says, "I do not retract anything that I said."

So he's an ardent social conservative who's into rhetoric about how the other side is like the Klan, who doubts other people really are the religions they say they are, who doesn't believe the federal government should help disaster victims, who thinks gays are "sick" and "ikky" and who wants to unite some hyphens against the other hyphens in order to end hyphens, all the while saying that if you attack him for being a f--king insane hatemonger you're persecuting him and all his fellow Christians. Was I right about him being cloned in a GOP "batshit crazy" vat, or what?

Welcome, Mr. Jackson, to the Republican big leagues. Oh, you're gonna fit right in. And if the Republicans don't erect a statue to you in the next few years, I am almost positive the Democrats will do it for them.

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow

(Click for larger image)

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) has been making a big splash with his supposedly Jesus-inspired opposition to the government helping to keep poor people alive by giving them food stamps. As could be totally expected, Fincher's Bible-quoting is highly selective and hugely misinterpreted, because that's what wingnuts quoting the Bible do.

Fincher should include in his Bible study the plethora of verses that address hypocrisy. Because, when it comes to where the funding in the Farm Bill is allocated, he's among the biggest.

Using Agriculture Department data, researchers at the Environmental Working Group found that Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, Tenn., collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012. The data is part of the research group’s online farm subsidy database from which the group issues a report each year.

In 2012 alone, the data shows, Mr. Fincher received about $70,000 in direct payments, money that is given to farmers and farmland owners, even if they do not grow crops. It is unclear how much Mr. Fincher received in crop insurance subsidies because the names of people receiving the subsidies are not public. The group said most of the agriculture subsidies go to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country. These farmers have received $265 billion in direct payments and farm insurance subsidies since 1995, federal records show.

Fincher voted for $20 billion in cuts to the supplemental nutrition program over the next 10 years. He also voted to increase the farm subsidies he's on the receiving end of. It's likely that the bulk of Rep. Fincher's income is provided entirely by taxpayers, from these farm subsidies to his congressional salary. Flincher also, of course, is an enthusiastic supporter of Paul Ryan's budget that decimates social spending, presumably because he cares so much about the deficit. As long as the deficit cutting is happening to someone else.

He's also not much a true-believer when it comes to the sacred free market.

Fincher has said his farm would have shut down without the subsidies, which he argued protect American farmers from more heavily subsidized foreign competition. "We would be all for not having government in our business," Fincher told the Washington Post in 2010, "but we need a fair system."

He needs a fair system, but everybody else is on their own. Spoken like a true Republican.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson If all you care about are test scores, one of the big advantages charter schools have over traditional public schools is that they don't have to take every kid who shows up. Charters can push out the weak students, leaving them for someone else to deal with. That certainly looks like what's happening in Nashville, Tennessee, where the eight schools with the highest net loss of students are all charter schools, WSMV's Dennis Ferrier reports. The only schools losing more than 10 percent of their students are charters, which are losing up to 33 percent.

The highly regarded national KIPP chain's Nashville school lost 18 percent of its students, a situation its principal says is unacceptable. Which it might be easier to believe he really meant if it wasn't such a common occurrence and if it didn't work out so well for his school:

[Metro Nashville Public Schools[ feels it's unacceptable as well, because not only are they getting kids from charter schools, but they are also getting troubled kids and then getting them right before testing time.

"That's also a frustration for the zoned-school principals. They are getting clearly challenging kids back in their schools just prior to accountability testing," said MNPS Chief Operating Officer Fred Carr.

Nineteen of the last 20 children to leave Kipp Academy had multiple out-of-school suspensions. Eleven of the 19 are classified as special needs, and all of them took their TCAPs at Metro zoned schools, so their scores won't count against Kipp.

Then those kids' test scores—the scores the charters didn't want to have on their records—get held against public schools. And we're told charters are such an amazing answer to all the problems our school systems supposedly have. If charters are so great, they should be great for all kids, not just the ones it's convenient for them to take.

(Via Diane Ravitch)