Hasta La Gadget!

Merriam-Webster defines the word “bailout” as “a rescue from financial distress.” The concept is pretty simple: Someone does something that results in a bad outcome, and someone else helps them out of the jam. The word itself refers to bailing water out of a leaky boat, so the metaphor fits.

In the midst of the financial crisis that happened in the last decade, President George W. Bush and Congress bailed out the giant banks that caused the problem, concluding that this distasteful action was better than the alternative, which could have been a worldwide collapse of the financial system and a depression that would’ve made the Great Recession look like a boom time. President Barack Obama bailed out the auto industry. And President George H.W. Bush bailed out failing savings and loan institutions back in the 1980s.

People don’t like these government bailouts. They really, really don’t like them. The idea that a business made decisions so bad that the only way to prevent a catastrophe is for taxpayers to fix it doesn’t sit right with Americans.

That’s why “bailout” is a go-to insult politicians like to use to to describe things they don’t like. This pejorative has been especially popular with Republicans in recent years. Take President Donald Trump, seen here using the term to describe a part of the Affordable Care Act. 

Trump and members of his administration, along with a few GOP lawmakers, recently have started talking like this. It’s nonsense.

So what’s Trump referring to here? It’s a once-obscure, difficult-to-explain element of the Affordable Care Act called cost-sharing reductions. Right now, it’s about the most fraught subject in health policy.

Trump is threatening to cut off the money that makes cost-sharing reductions work, which would deal instant damage to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance system and the people who rely on it. This threat might sound familiar to anyone who has followed Trump’s lengthy history of not paying his business partners.

Remember Merriam-Webster: A bailout is an action taken after something bad has occurred to help the party that did the bad thing, or at least is suffering from that bad thing. What a bailout isn’t is when someone pays a bill for services rendered, or when the federal government carries out a program as written. (This isn’t the first time Republicans have called an existing part of the regular structure of Obamacare a “bailout.” It wasn’t true before, either.)

As most people know, the Affordable Care Act offers tax credits to low- and middle-income households that reduce the monthly premiums for health insurance policies purchased via the law’s exchange marketplaces. But the lowest-income enrollees are eligible for a second kind of financial assistance ― those cost-sharing reductions, sometimes called CSRs.

Here’s how they work: A person goes to the exchange and shops for coverage. If their income is low enough — up to 2.5 times the federal poverty level, which is $30,015 a year — their plans will come with lower deductibles and copayments. It’s a huge benefit for these enrollees who can, for example, take a deductible in the thousands of dollars and shrink it to just hundreds. More than 7 million people ― 58 percent of Obamacare enrollees ― received these subsidies this year.

Health insurance companies are required by the law to reduce these out-of-pocket costs and to pay the difference to the hospitals, doctors and other medical providers who treat their customers. Then the federal government pays the insurers back.

That last part is what Trump controls. No matter what he does, the insurers must lower these costs for their policyholders. But if Trump refuses to pay the companies back, some states would allow them to cancel their customers’ policies and leave the market altogether this year. And the companies that do continue to sell insurance through the exchanges would dramatically hike premiums next year to make up for the lost money. The White House went so far as saying they’d halt the payments next month, but backed down Wednesday.

Paying this money is not a “bailout.” These health insurance companies didn’t screw up and come to Uncle Sam with their hands out. They entered into contracts with the government to sell certain kinds of health insurance under a certain set of rules, and one of those rules is they’d get the money they’re owed.

Acting in bad faith with a business partner is part of Trump’s modus operandi, but it doesn’t really fly when it’s the federal government doing the reneging. That’s a big reason why a slew of health care and business groups are urging Trump and Congress to stop messing around and pay the money.

Here’s a partial list of the organizations making this plea: the American Medical Association; the American Hospital Association; the Federation of American Hospitals; America’s Health Insurance Plans; the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association; the American Benefits Council (a group of large businesses); and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The nation’s governors are worried, too. The National Governors Association — which represents all 50 governors from both political parties — asked Congress to fix this. It’s not often that every single governor agrees about something, and this is one of those times.

The power to blow up the health insurance market is in Trump’s hands because of a lawsuit House Republicans filed against the Obama administration in 2014. Lawmakers argued that Obama was making these cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers in violation of the law, because Congress authorized them, but didn’t approve the specific spending.

A federal court ruled in favor of House Republicans last year, but allowed the Obama administration to continue making the payments while the case worked its way through appeals. When Trump became president, his administration became the defendant in the case, and along with House Republicans, asked the appeals court to delay proceedings on the lawsuit while the two parties figure out what to do.

In the meantime, the money keeps flowing to the insurance companies — but no one knows for how long, because Trump keeps saying he might cut them off. The result, as Molina Healthcare CEO Mario Molina explained to HuffPost this week, would be millions more uninsured, fewer choices for consumers because some insurers would refuse to sell plans under these circumstances, and much higher premiums for the insurance that remained.

Put all that together, and it’s the American people who are going to need a bailout.

Politics hurt too much? Sign up for HuffPost Hill, a humorous evening roundup featuring scoops from HuffPost’s reporting team and juicy miscellanea from around the web.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues to insist that by more aggressively prosecuting immigrants for the crime of crossing the border illegally, the Justice Department is somehow cracking down on violent crime.

But data he cites himself indicate the opposite is true.  

You wouldn’t know it hearing Sessions’ words to a group of law enforcement officials at Central Islip, New York, on Friday. His speech focused heavily on illegal immigration, conflating it with the problem of transnational criminal gangs like MS-13 who make up a minuscule portion of the undocumented population of 11 million. “The President made a promise to make America safe again,” Sessions said, according to a draft of his prepared remarks. “And that is exactly what we are doing at the Department of Justice.”

Except when they aren’t. In reality, about half the federal criminal docket is clogged with immigration prosecutions that largely duplicate the work of the civil enforcement system. Sessions wants to prioritize those prosecutions even further, painting undocumented immigrants as disproportionately criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.

“The Bureau of Justice Statistics just released a report showing that 42 percent of defendants charged in U.S. district court were non-U.S. citizens,” Sessions’ remarks read. “And according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in 2013, 48 percent of all deported aliens who were convicted for coming back to the United States illegally were also convicted of a non-immigration related crime.”

A closer look at the details in the BJS report he cites shows that Sessions uses incomplete data and twisted logic to craft a misleading argument. 

The fact that 42 percent of those charged in U.S. district court were non-citizens should disturb Americans, but not for the reasons Sessions argues.

The truth behind that statistic is that the federal courts don’t prosecute much in the way of violent crime at all. Only 1.9 percent of federal prosecutions involved violent crime in 2014, according to the BJS. Instead, DOJ focuses on the crimes of “illegal entry” (a misdemeanor) and “illegal re-entry” (a felony). 

But Sessions’ comments elide even that basic reality. Let’s start with the fact that it’s clear he focuses his remarks on undocumented immigrants, who actually made up 37 percent of the defendants in U.S. District Court in 2014.

That figure in itself is misleading. Most illegal re-entry cases are pled down to misdemeanor illegal entry charges and disposed of in Magistrate Courts near the border as petty offenses, despite the fact that virtually all of them result in conviction and carry a jail sentence. Around seven in 10 immigration prosecutions in 2014 took place in Magistrate Court, not U.S. District Court.

Had Sessions chosen to present a fuller picture of the data, his audience would hear that immigration prosecutions made up 53 percent of the federal criminal docket in 2014. 

If he had, those listening might have wondered why DOJ spends its time that way, rather than going after more serious cases involving violence or white-collar crime. Millions lost their homes in the wake of the fraud-plagued 2007 housing crisis, but the Justice Department didn’t spend half its time prosecuting that.

At any rate, Sessions sticks with the U.S. District Court data, which generally means felony re-entry cases. They often involve people living far from the border, many of whom established their lives here years ago. And he uses the stats to make the related point that about half of those defendants had some other non-immigration crime on their record, citing the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

There’s a few problems with this. First, we don’t know how many of those criminal records include petty offenses like marijuana possession or more serious crimes like homicide.

If pressed, Sessions would be forced to admit that last year only 4.4 percent of illegal re-entry offenders last year had criminal histories that put them in the most serious level of Category VI, according to the Sentencing Commission. The most common criminal history level, at 28.6 percent, was Category I, the least serious. And regardless of what they include, a person with a conviction who has served a jail sentence has done their time. But enhancements defined in federal law can boost the maximum sentence for illegal re-entry from two years all the way up to 20.

Second, disregarding the Magistrate Court data means leaving 69 percent of the total 2014 caseload for immigration prosecutions out of the picture. That results in Sessions wildly elevating the number of people with criminal records unrelated to immigration. Those who end up in U.S. District Court facing illegal re-entry charges were often targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and later referred for prosecution precisely because they had some sort of criminal record.

That leads to the third and most important problem with Sessions’ assertion. Another way to phrase what he said is that just over half of the felony re-entry prosecutions in U.S. District Court for 2013 involved someone with no criminal record at all, with the possible exception of an immigration offense. The fact that the Justice Department prioritized cases like those well before President Donald Trump took office shows the degree to which the federal courts have transformed into a parallel immigration enforcement system that often punishes offenders more harshly than the detention and deportation system run by ICE and Border Patrol.

The federal courts and the penitentiary system are both finite resources. But every president since Bill Clinton has chosen to increase the DOJ’s attention on the crimes of crossing the border illegally and returning to the United States after deportation.

Half the federal criminal caseload isn’t good enough for Sessions. He sent a memo this month to U.S attorneys in all 94 districts directing them to consider bringing felony re-entry charges for any person apprehended with a deportation on his or her record. The only thing they need to lock someone up for illegal re-entry is to show a federal judge proof that a defendant has been deported in the past.

This is easy work for the Justice Department. But don’t expect it to make the country safer.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The New York Times took a lot of heat for hiring Bret Stephens, a former opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, as its newest columnist. There was a lot to criticize. In his storied tenure on some of the most radically conservative pages in print journalism, Stephens accused Arabs of suffering a “disease of the mind,” railed against the Black Lives Matter movement and dismissed the rise of campus rape as an “imaginary enemy.”

But Stephens’ views on climate change ― namely that the jury is still out on whether burning fossil fuels is the chief cause ― drew the widest condemnation. ThinkProgress admonished the Gray Lady for hiring an “extreme climate denier,” and famed climatologist Michael Mann backed them up in the critique. DeSmog Blog, a site whose tagline reads “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science,” reported on a letter from climate scientists who are canceling their subscriptions to the newspaper over its latest hire. In These Times’ headline pointedly asked: “Why the Hell did the New York Times just hire a climate denier?”

Even the Times’ own reporters publicly questioned the hire.  

Late Friday afternoon, Stephens made his debut. In a column boldly titled “Climate of Complete Certainty,” he provocatively compared the climate activists’ surety to that of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign managers.

“Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong,” he wrote. “Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

He couches this, of course, by denying that he’s denying anything.

“None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences,” he wrote. “But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”

Sure, that’s a fair general point about science, but it misses the problem with climate science denial altogether. Environmental consciousness didn’t used to be partisan. Lest we forget, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. But NPR’s On The Media did a nice job of explaining how Democrats, under President Bill Clinton, co-opted the environmental movement for political purposes, clearing the way for Republicans to fight against climate regulations as a sort of zero-sum game.

Over the last three decades, the proliferation of right-wing infotainment masquerading as news has constructed a massive echo chamber in which politically inconvenient facts are easily drowned out by the shouts of bombastic TV and radio hosts. Stephens, from his perch at the Journal, continued to give intellectual cover to fossil fuel interests well after the evidentiary scales tilted overwhelmingly in the direction of scientists who believe in manmade climate change. As Samantha Ahdoot, a Virginia pediatrician who joined a group of medical professionals advocating for climate science, recently told HuffPost: “If doctors waited for absolute certainty, they’d never treat a single patient because there’s nothing that we do that’s based on certainty. There’s only best available evidence. That’s what doctors use to care for patients. The best available information today, as determined by over 97 percent of climatologists and every legitimate scientific organization in the world, is that rising greenhouse gases are warming our planet.”

In that spirit, if you must read Stephens’ op-ed, I humbly also prescribe these 13 other stories I read in the last week. They will leave you much better informed about the state of climate science than anything in the opinion pages of our country’s newspaper of record, at least today.

• At The Intercept, Sharon Lerner interviewed Jerry Taylor, a former professional climate-change denier who once led the energy and environment task force for the American Legislative Exchange Council and served as vice president of the Cato Institute. Now the director of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that works to convert climate skeptics into climate activists, he discusses how he discovered the lies behind the climate denial movement and changed his ways.
• At Mother Jones, Rebecca Leber made a formidable entry to the bonanza of assessments about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days with a story examining how climate change deniers, relegated to fringe conspiracy theorists under the Obama administration, have enjoyed a powerful return to the mainstream over the last three months.  
• At The New Yorker, Tom Kizzia probed at the paradox facing Inuit whale hunters in Alaska, whose traditional hunting grounds face the threat of climate change caused by the oil industry they depend on financially.
• At Texas Monthly, Sonia Smith writes about Katharine Hayhoe, a global warming expert at Texas Tech who is trying to sway more of her fellow evangelical Christians to accept the scientific consensus on manmade climate change.  
• At The New York Times ― in its news section ― Justin Gillis chronicled the looming fate of Tasmania’s aptly named Isle of the Dead, site of an infamous British penal colony. The island, ironically also home to a defunct coal mine, is, as Gillis writes, “being chewed away by the sea” as tides rise thanks to melting polar ice caps.  
• At InsideClimate News, whose oil pipeline coverage won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, Nicholas Kusnetz wrote about the exodus of energy giants from Canada’s tar sands, a particularly dirty blend of clay, sand and viscous oil that produces a low-grade fuel. The Keystone XL pipeline project, which Trump restarted on his fourth day in office, would carry tar sands oil down to refineries in Texas, the product from which would be sold for export.
• At The Guardian, 24-year-old activist poet Devi Lockwood issued a callout to readers to meet her on Saturday in Washington, D.C., where she’ll be collecting hundreds of climate change stories for her oral history project, 1,001 Stories.
• At Vox, Matteen Mokalla published a video interview with Debbie Dooley, the Tea Party activist behind the group Conservatives for Energy Freedom, which advocates for the expansion of renewable energy and notes that her ideological bedfellows have “been brainwashed for decades into believing we’re not damaging the environment.”  
• At The New Republic, Emily Atkin makes a compelling case for why Bill Nye, the ubiquitous science advocate and host of a new show on Netflix, is the wrong person to lead a climate fight that has become increasingly urgent under the Trump administration.
• At The Washington Post, Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin took at a look at the schism within the White House over how, or whether, to deal with climate change.
• At Bloomberg, Eric Roston ― who last week launched a new vertical at the financial news giant dedicated to climate change ― goes deep into how local meteorologists have begun explaining the weather in the context of how global warming is reshaping forecasts. “The safe and familiar on-air meteorologist,” he writes, “with little notice by viewers, has become a public diplomat for global warming.”
• At Climate Central, Bobby Magill dug into a Columbia University report that examines how small a role environmental regulations played in the decline of the coal industry.
• At HuffPost, my talented colleague Dominique Mosbergen found some new compelling ways to make us think about the tremendous amount of plastic pollution in the oceans.  

If you’re in the D.C. area, thousands of people are planning to protest in the People’s Climate March on what could be a record-breaking hot day. Take from that what you will.  

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

It’s time to talk about climate change. Because Bret Stephens wants to. Stephens, as you may know, is the recently hired New York Times columnist known for holding ugly, entirely unremarkable ideas (Black Lives Matter is “thuggish,” there’s no data to support a campus rape epidemic) that will supposedly “diversify”…

Read more…

T-Mobile is planning to one-up its competitors by launching its own-branded phone, according to sources, a model that will be inexpensive compared to the high-end features it will offer. In addition to launching its own phone, T-Mobile reportedly also plans to change the way the devices are paid for, though details on that are still slight at this time. Assuming … Continue reading