Dicks

This Is What Happens When You Invite Corporations to Design Public Policy

UnitedHealth Group, the largest U.S. health insurer, announced Tuesday that as of 2017 it would minimize its active participation in Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges to just a "handful" of the 34 states where it currently offers individual plans. The company warned in November that this may happen as the market ended up being smaller and financially riskier than anticipated.

  The Week

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The New 60s

[New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams] gave a great opening speech for Bernie [...] After quoting a Daily News editorial that accused Bernie of being at “war with reality,” Williams responded, “You’re goddam right!…Maybe if you’re not at war with reality, you’re not focused enough.” [...] And then Williams added, “So all we’re asking is: The people who say that it cannot be done, please move out of the way of the people who are doing it.”

  Corey Robin

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And So It Goes

The Rhode Island Board of Elections has announced that it will open only 144 of Rhode Island’s available 419 polling locations for the upcoming April 26 presidential primary. Officials are reducing the number of sites by two-thirds in an effort to cut costs, according to WPRI.

[...]

The executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island John Marion had an alarmingly nervous way of expressing his support for this move, saying he was “cautiously optimistic” that the primaries would go smoothly.

Marion said he was mostly concerned that many voters don’t even know these cuts are happening. “I don’t think enough has been done to make sure voters know that they likely won’t be casting their ballot at the same location as they did in November of 2014,” he said.

Many are especially concerned with Cumberland, RI, which normally has thirteen polling locations in a general election. Next week it will only have three.

  US Uncut

[T]he number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Board--now that the election is over.

[...]

But whether party hacks shoplifted New York or not, that’s small potatoes. Scrubbing voter rolls is not a “New York value.” It’s a nationwide epidemic, a disease eating away at the heart of our democracy.

Voting officials learned a lesson from Katherine Harris the Florida Secretary of State who purged Black voters in 2000. They learned how to repeat the purge, expand it and carefully hide it.

I’ve been traveling the nation, from Ohio to Georgia to Arizona and back—and finding the voter-roll purging machinery running at full speed.

[...]

US Civil Rights Commission statistics tell the story. The chance of a ballot “spoiled” – not counted for one reason or another – is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re White.

[...]

OK, we didn’t know about the New York purge beforehand. But I’m telling you this now: My team is uncovering an unjustified ethnic cleansing of voter rolls from Ohio to Florida to Texas.

[...]

As I look upon the wreckage that was the New York primary, I see the prelude, the test run, for the catastrophic failure, the well-planned failure, of the voting system in November.

  Greg Palast - author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" - to be made into a film

Why do you need to vote anyway?

USA Freedoms

Remember back just a short way (last summer) to when post-Snowden reforms (otherwise known as the USA Freedom Act) to our scandal-ridden domestic spying machinery included appointing a civilian's representative to the FISA court.  Here's how that's working.

An independent lawyer assigned to represent Americans’ privacy interests before the nation’s top-secret spy court failed to persuade a judge to block FBI agents from searching intelligence databases to hunt for evidence of traditional crimes rather than restricting them to national security probes, according to a newly declassified court opinion.

  LATimes

Case closed.  I bet that attorney tried really, really hard.

FISA judges have approved the spying effort each time it has been submitted for review since 2008. But Hogan’s 80-page opinion was the first to rely on advice from an outside privacy advocate, known as an amicus curae, to help him determine the legality of the initiative.

The advocate was attorney Amy Jeffress, a former top national security prosecutor at the Justice Department who is now a defense attorney in Washington.

  LA Times

A privacy advocate who was a top national prosecutor at the DOJ. Hmmmm.

It is only the second publicly disclosed instance in which the court has used an outside lawyer to examine an aspect of the government's spying programs.

Last September, the court asked attorney Preston Burton to examine whether the government could retain bulk telephone metadata that it had been told to destroy. Investigators wanted to keep the data for an extra few months so it could ensure the accuracy of information it would attain under the more targeted procedures enacted last year by Congress. Burton agreed that it was permissible to do so.

Keeping Americans free.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We're NOT Number One?

Reporters Without Borders has ranked the world on press freedom for 2016. We're not in the top ten.

Oh, there we are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

National Anxiety and Depression Awareness Week

What Does Depression Feel Like? ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Opposition

Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing lower house deputy, [...] dedicated his vote in favour of impeachment to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ultra, the colonel who headed the feared Doi-Codi torture unit in the 1970s.

[...]

Bolsonaro – who is planning to run for president in the next election – used his brief statement at the microphone during Sunday’s vote to laud the military leaders who beat and tormented leftwing leaders after the 1964 coup.

“They lost in 1964, and now they have lost in 2016,” he said. He then dedicated his vote to “the memory of Col Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dread of Dilma Rousseff”.

[...]

During a 2014 debate on a Truth Commission report on the murder, rape and torture carried out during the dictatorship, he lashed out a female deputy with the words, “I wouldn’t rape you. You’re not worth it.

[...]

In Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro won more votes than any other candidate during the last election.

On Facebook, he is the third most “liked” politician in Brazil.

  Guardian

Donald Trump's Brazilian twin.

Rousseff was asked to respond to [Bolsonaro's remarks praising the torturer] at a press conference with foreign journalists on Tuesday. She paused briefly for composure, then replied with dignity: “It is regrettable that this moment in Brazil has opened a door to intolerance, hate and to this kind of statement,” she said.

Avoiding any mention of names, she continued: “I was arrested in the 1970s and I did, in fact, meet this man he refers to. He was one of the biggest torturers in Brazil and was accused of torture and killing.”

[...]

Rousseff, a former guerrilla, was imprisoned at the time and tortured. She rarely goes into details, but once described how she was beaten, given electric shocks and left naked on the floor. Other women political prisoners from that time have said they were raped.

By Hook Or By Crook

Coming soon: the disenfranchisement of Alabama’s black voters in @margaretlbrown's The Black Belthttps://t.co/2ncCwuxbZa

— Field of Vision (@fieldofvision) April 20, 2016

DNC Money Laundering Scheme

[Last August, HRC campaign officials] urged state officials to sign on to an ambitious fundraising endeavor that would allow Clinton’s presidential bid, the DNC and the state parties to scoop up and share big checks from wealthy donors[after a] 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that knocked down a cap on how much donors could give to federal campaigns in a single year.

A record 32 state parties signed on to the fund, allowing the committee to solicit donations 130 times greater than what a supporter can give to Clinton’s campaign for the primary.

[...]

Establishing a victory fund the year before the election allowed the Clinton campaign and DNC to ask wealthy backers to give the $356,100 maximum annual contribution twice: once in 2015 and again this year.

[...]

The fund is run by Clinton campaign staff, and its treasurer is Clinton’s chief operating officer [Elizabeth Jones].

[...]

She controls how the money is transferred to the states and the DNC.

[...]

Last year, the fund reimbursed the [Clinton] campaign nearly $1.5 million for salary and overheard.

[...]

For every state party that joined the Hillary Victory Fund, officials were able to increase the maximum annual donation from an individual by $10,000.

[...]

[T]he states have yet to see a financial windfall. Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign has been a major beneficiary, getting an infusion of low-dollar contributions.

[...]

Many states were wary of joining the effort, worried that such a partnership would be perceived as an endorsement of Clinton and might interfere with their efforts to raise money from home state donors. But campaign officials — including Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns — emphasized that this was a way to strengthen the party at its roots.

[...]

So far, the state parties have served only as a pass-through for their share of the funds. Campaign finance records show that nearly $2 million in donations to the fund initially routed last year to individual state party accounts was immediately transferred to the DNC, which is laboring to pay off millions of dollars in debt.

[...]

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lawrence Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who is now with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “Joint victory funds are not intended to be separate operating committees that just support a single candidate. But they appear to be turning the traditional notion of a joint committee into a Hillary fundraising committee.”

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.