Hasta La Gadget!

Former Attorney General Eric Holder says it’s “shameful” Republicans are seeking to implement photo ID laws and other measures that make it more difficult to vote.

Holder, who is leading a national redistricting reform effort, accused Republicans of trying to suppress potential voters who are less likely to support them. He made the remarks during the National Action Network’s annual convention in New York City on Wednesday. 

“Some Republicans have declared, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, change the rules.’ Make it more difficult for those least likely to support Republican candidates to vote,” he said. “This is done with the knowledge that by simply depressing the votes of certain groups, not even winning the majority vote of these groups, elections can in fact be effective.”

“The attempts in certain states to make even registration more difficult are shameful,” he added.

Holder went on to cite a 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office showing that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout among young and African-American voters.

“If one were to try to find vote fraud or a rigged election system, that is exactly where it is,” he said.

The comments come after Arkansas’ governor signed a voter ID bill last month. Iowa’s governor is considering a similar measure, and New Hampshire is also contemplating legislation to toughen its proof of residency requirements. There are laws in 34 states requiring voters to produce identification when they vote. 

Holder addressed President Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election, saying the president was fueling the perception that elections lacked integrity.

“And with recent claims by Mr. Trump of ‘rigged elections’ based on fraud ― again, without any proof, save the bluster of the candidate ― this mistaken belief in voter fraud becomes almost hard-wired,” he said.

Such a perception, he added, makes voter suppression efforts easier.

“The nation’s attention and laws should not be focused on these phantom, illegal voters,” he said, adding that officials should instead focus on registering eligible voters.

Holder acknowledged the U.S. voting system is far from perfect. He pointed to a 2012 Pew report ― the same one cited by Trump to justify his claim of widespread voter fraud ― noting that 1 in every 8 voter registrations in the country is outdated.

“This is not a result of people trying to game the system. It is an indication that the system itself is inadequate. That the system itself is at fault,” Holder said.

He also called for more states to adopt automatic voter registration, so voters are automatically registered to vote whenever they have any meaningful interaction with the DMV.

Oregon became the first state in the country to implement the system last year and saw major gains in youth turnout and registration by people of color, according to one report. 

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A photo of a funny sign at a Little League game has become a hit.

Evan Primakow, the father of a 7-year-old in Milwaukee, was watching his son play in the “rookie” league of Glendale Little League when he noticed a sign posted on a field’s fence.

He liked the message, so he decided to snap a photo of it.

The sign reads:

PLEASE REMEMBER

1. These are KIDS.

2. This is a GAME.

3. Coaches are VOLUNTEERS.

4. Umpires are HUMAN.

5. Your child is NOT being scouted by the Brewers today.

“I think it works in that it is a reminder, that is very visible at games, that these are just kids and there’s no reason to let things get out of hand,” Primakow told HuffPost.

Primakow decided to post the picture to the popular content-sharing site Reddit, and it soon got a decent amount of attention, receiving over 700 comments.

John Diedrich, the president of Glendale Little League, told HuffPost that there are actually four of these signs (one for each of the league’s fields) and they went up about four years ago.

One of the league’s board members had seen a photo of a similar sign posted at a baseball park in California and decided it would be a good addition to their park.

The signs were not posted because of one specific incident, according to Diedrich. Rather, they were put up to address the fact that some parents — both watching and coaching — tend to get a little zealous when they watch Little League games.

“That overly competitive attitude has led to strife among parents at games at times,” Diedrich told HuffPost. He said that parents have also made “inappropriate comments” to the umpires, who are older children who also play in the league.

The nonprofit Positive Coaching Alliance was founded in 1997 to help combat this issue. The organization offers workshops that provide coaches, parents and administrators of schools and youth sports organizations with skills that make playing in a sports league a more positive experience for children.

But readily available tools like these haven’t completely eliminated the problem.

Mike Matheny, who is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, wrote the “Mike Matheny Manifesto” in 2009, after coaching Little League baseball for a year.

His seven-page letter begins: “I always said that the only team that I would coach would be a team of orphans, and now here we are. The reason for me saying this is that I have found the biggest problem with youth sports has been the parents.”

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In the third episode of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” viewers are exposed to a quotidian site seldom shown on television: a shock of red, sitting plainly in the heroine’s underwear, delivering the news that she’s started her period, and isn’t, as she thought, pregnant.

Menstruation is part of many women’s daily (or, monthly) lives, but the visual display of it remains a taboo in media. Just last year, a tampon company made waves by showing women boxing and climbing, and getting bloody as a result. Before that, depictions of bloody periods didn’t usually make it to TV, barring a few exceptions from “Degrassi,” “Mad Men,” and “Broad City.”

So, the choice to include a splotch of blood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a bold one. But, in an interview with The Huffington Post, showrunner Bruce Miller was matter-of-fact about the decision. “Our version needed to be unflinching if it was going to be successful.” Many women menstruate and bleed, he said, “and if people are uncomfortable with that, tough.”

This is in keeping with an inflammatory comment made by the cast during a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, that they’ve since wheeled back. “It’s just a story about a woman,” actress Madeline Brewer said, when asked whether she got involved with the story because of its feminist themes. “It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights,” the show’s star, Elisabeth Moss, said.

The remarks caused a stir, and were blamed on Hulu’s marketing team, even though Atwood herself has made similar claims. The author has taken issue with certain aspects of early feminism, which took a stand against feminine modes of self-expression; she’s also said that the story is about power dynamics more broadly, and could’ve been told from a man’s point of view.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, the author wrote, “[I]s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ a ‘feminist’ novel? If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are ‘feminist.’”

In other words, Atwood makes a distinction between her intention as a storyteller and the implications of the book for readers and scholars. As a novelist, she aims to tell a story about an individual’s struggles, her daily wants and hopes and fears. The character doesn’t explicitly observe that her biological womanhood is an integral part of her oppression and her experience of the world, as a feminist essayist might; instead, she observes that she’s feeling scared, or mad, or happy. But, to create a woman character who thinks and feels on her own terms is a feminist act, and certainly to read the book is a feminist experience.

Like Atwood, Miller discusses the show as Offred’s story, first and foremost. Early on, in hiring a director and costume designer, the team decided that filming close-in on Offred, to create a claustrophobic effect that would emulate her oppression, would be stylistically key.

“The book has a sense of anecdotal remembrance. She’s remembering things that’ve happened to her. So you don’t want to forget that she was there ― there’s no objectivity, it’s Offred telling stories of herself, of her life. You don’t ever want to lose that feeling of the book, that it’s a very personal narrative of Offred’s,” Miller said. “One of the strongest things about the book was not knowing everything else that was happening. We’re so used to being able to hop on the internet or watch TV or ask somebody a question, and she’s lost all of that. And that, to me, was so scary and so frustrating.”

To this end, the team worked to design custom bonnets that would let light through, so that scenes filmed close to Moss’s face would be possible. “You feel every emotion go across her face, even when she wants to hide from the rest of the world,” Miller said.

Staying true to the heroine’s point of view was key for Miller, who said he wanted to keep as much of Atwood’s original story intact as possible. Most of the updates were tethered to technology. In the book, Serena Joy, the woman who Offred serves as a handmaid for, is an evangelical personality on TV; in the show, she’s an author.

“If it isn’t real ― if you can say, ‘Oh, that’s not the real world’ ― then it’s less scary. The more it feels like the real world, the scarier it becomes, at least to me,” Miller said.

As it relates to today’s political climate, Miller thinks the show will encourage viewers to, “appreciate the freedoms that we have, and see little ways that they’re chipped away and what that can lead to.” Although the show was conceived before last year’s presidential election, Miller thinks its themes are relevant.

“There’s been just an unrelenting assault on […] women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, that’s been happening at the state level and the national level, that’s been head-spinning,” he said.

Again, he steered the conversation toward Offred’s personal struggle, and what readers and viewers can glean from it.

“Every single part of her life is so truncated. Yet, she still finds ways to keep her brain alive, she still finds ways to manipulate and move the world around her to increase her chances of survival,” Miller said. “I think to me that’s super inspiring, because I always feel like ― the problems that we have, the government seems like an intractable force, a big, faceless force, but if Offred could do something, I should get off my ass and do something as well.”

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President Donald Trump could be just weeks away from fulfilling his threat to explode the Obamacare market by halting crucial payments to health insurance companies, and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has declared he’s not planning to do anything about it.

During a telephone call Tuesday evening, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that the Trump administration may withhold next month’s distribution of cost-sharing reduction payments, or CSRs, according to a House Democratic aide who asked not to be identified. Those payments reimburse insurers who serve the lowest-income people who get coverage from the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges.

Democrats have been pushing to make sure those payments continue ― either by having the Trump administration continue to dispense them, by relying on its own authority to do so, or by having Congress appropriate the money directly. An obvious vehicle for the latter would be the omnibus spending bill, now under consideration in Congress, that is supposed to fund government operations past April 30.

“Pelosi reiterated the Democratic negotiators’ position that CSR payments must be included in the omnibus. Mulvaney indicated that, while the Trump administration had continued the CSR payments, they had not yet decided whether they would make the May payment,” the aide wrote in an email.

A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget disputed some parts of this account, but did not deny Mulvaney’s comments about the possibility of stopping insurer payments after May. And in written statement, Mulvaney made clear the administration was not eager to see the subsidies as part of the omnibus spending bill ― calling them “an 11th hour bailout of Obamacare.”

Over on Capitol Hill, Ryan confirmed that the omnibus spending bill won’t include the funding. “Obviously CSRs, we’re not doing that. That is not in an appropriation bill. That is something separate that the administration does,” Ryan said.

The consequences of halting these payments to health insurance companies could be devastating for people who buy coverage on their own, rather than through employers. Insurers would face higher costs, and in many states they could respond by cancelling coverage for the rest of 2017.

Even to the extent insurers decided to stay in the markets, this year or next, they would have to raise premiums for 2018 by an average of 19 percent, according a projection by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The possibility doesn’t appear to be hypothetical. On an earnings call Wednesday morning, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, the nation’s second-biggest insurer and largest player on the health insurance exchanges, said it expected to raise rates by 20 percent ― or maybe pull out of markets altogether ― if CSR funding stopped.

That’s why the insurance lobby, other health care interest groups and business organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have made maintaining this funding a key priority.

Trump repeatedly has threatened to allow the Obamacare insurance markets to wither under his watch either through inaction or by halting federal payments to health insurance companies. He’s made the threats both before and after last month’s collapse of the House Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and enact a measure that would cover 24 million fewer people.

Trump’s odd gambit is that voters will blame Democrats ― the party that enacted the Affordable Care Act ― rather than Republicans ― the party that controls the entire federal government now ― for the fallout from his actions. Polls have repeatedly indicated the opposite ― that voters will hold Trump and the Republicans responsible for what happens to health insurance.

But amid House Republican indecision about health care reform overall and the messy process of keeping the federal government from shutting down despite GOP control of Congress and the White House, Mulvaney’s and Ryan’s statements indicate that threat could become a reality soon.

Cost-sharing reduction payments have been a critical part of the Affordable Care Act since its benefits took effect in 2014, not a post-facto provision added to the law to “bail out” insurance companies as Mulvaney implied.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the poorest enrollees into private health plans purchased through the exchanges receive two forms of assistance. The first are the tax credits that reduce monthly insurance premiums, which are available to people who earn up to four times the federal poverty level, or $48,240 a year for a single person. Those whose incomes are below 250 percent of poverty, or $30,150 for a single person also are eligible for cost-sharing reductions that make out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and co-payments lower, as well.

Health insurance companies are required by the law to reduce these out-of-pocket costs for qualified customers, and then the federal government is obliged to reimburse them for the lost money. Insurers would still have to cut cost-sharing for enrollees even if the government payments weren’t made, and absorb the losses that would result.

The reason the money may stop flowing and that Trump has the authority to unilaterally end them stems from a 2014 lawsuit House Republicans filed against former President Barack Obama’s administration. The House GOP argued that Obama unlawfully made these payments without Congress authorizing the spending.

While the Affordable Care Act sets out the obligations on insurers to provide lower cost-sharing to eligible customers and the process by which the government pays them back, Republicans maintain Congress still needs to appropriate the actual dollars.

Last year, a federal judge ruled for the GOP, prompting the Obama administration to appeal. The judge agreed to stay the decision, allowing the federal government to continue making payments as the case works its way up through the courts.

When Trump became president, his administration became the defendant in the case. The Trump administration and House Republicans obtained delays from the appeals court while they decided how to proceed.

Like Obama, Trump has continued to make the payments in the meantime, but has always had the power to end them at any point. That point may come next month. Congress could have appropriated the funding earlier and resolved the dispute in that fashion. At several points in the last few weeks, prominent Republicans indicated they were inclined to go along ― perhaps as part of the spending bill that Democrats and Republicans are now negotiating.

But Ryan made clear Wednesday that’s not currently on the table, as far as he’s concerned.

Matt Fuller contributed reporting.

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