Tartan Tambourine

Being a member of Florida’s House is a pretty sweet gig. This group, the ones who went against the will of their governor, their citizens, the health care community and common decency in refusing to expand Medicaid in their state, voted themselves a smoking good deal on their own health insurance.

House members will pay just $8.34 a month for state-subsidized health care next year, or $30 a month to cover their entire family.

Well, everyone in Florida should have known the gist of this story. But the details are even more appalling than we might have imagined. Read the whole story.

Ruth Marcus writes:

Sputtering adjectives — outrageous, appalling, intolerable — can scarcely do justice to the fiasco involving the Internal Revenue Service’s reported targeting of conservative groups.

But the current scandal obscures — and, ironically, threatens to prevent action on — another, equally corrosive failure on the part of the IRS when it comes to scrutinizing political groups.

This less-noticed scandal is the mirror image of the one dominating the front page. It’s not that the IRS has been too tough on such groups — it’s that the agency has been too lax. Groups on the right and left have taken advantage of the tax laws to intervene in elections while hiding their donors from public view.

In the three decades after World War II, the government stimulated the economy by constructing interstate highways, sending veterans to college and supporting home ownership. Taxes on the rich were among the highest in the nation’s history. The economy thrived and income inequality declined. Opportunity for every child increased. Republicans want to kill the government that accomplished that. They want to go back to Downton Abbey days. The rich stay rich; the poor stay servants.

Presumably few Republican operatives have a better handle on the national Repubublican party’s efforts to court Hispanic voters than Pablo Pantoja, a native of Puerto Rico, and Florida State University alum appointed by the Republican National Committee to oversee Hispanic outreach in Florida last year. He also worked as a field director in the 2010 midterm elections. Now - amid another debate over immigration reform and a widely touted Heritage foundation study on immigrants touted by a fellow who used to argue that Hispanics have a lower IQ than non-Hispanic immigrants - Pantojo has decided he’s more comfortable joining the Democratic party.

Some of the most memorable pages here restate an argument Camus had already developed at length in “The Rebel”: not all means are acceptable, even when employed for noble ends; terrorism and torture destroy the very goals they are supposed to serve. This position was criticized as “idealist” (it was the reason for the famous break with Sartre), but Camus sticks to it — admirably, in my opinion: “Although it is historically true that values such as the nation and humanity cannot survive unless one fights for them, fighting alone cannot justify them (nor can force). The fight must itself be justified, and explained, in terms of values.”

Scientists are warning the planet has now reached a grim climate milestone not seen for two or three million years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm threshold has been an important marker in U.N. climate change negotiations, widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming. We speak to leading climate scientist Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University and author of the recent book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.” Mann warns that, “We have to go several million years back in time to find a point in Earth’s history where CO2 was as high as it is now. … If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple of decades. With that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what could truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.”

And why wasn’t this story 1A news in every American newspaper? I really have no idea.

And I think most real journalists would not either.

Toxic waste sites in 31 countries are damaging the brains of nearly 800,000 children and impairing the health of millions of people in the developing world, two new studies have found. Toxins and pollutants in the environment are major sources of illness and reduced life spans globally. The impacts on health in some countries are on par with malaria, said Kevin Chatham-Stephens, a pediatric environmental health fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Frank Bruni’s piece from Sunday doesn’t lend itself to easy summary but it’s worth reading. The bottom line is that Americans need to be better informed or our democracy will never again flourish.

A Colorado elections overhaul that includes same-day voter registration and mailing ballots to all voters has been signed into law. Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper signed the bill Friday afternoon.

According to one rights group, consumers would barely feel safety enhancements in faraway factories.

Eugene Robinson writes:

Those who are trying to make the Benghazi tragedy into a scandal for the Obama administration really ought to decide what story line they want to sell. Actually, by “those” I mean Republicans, and by “the Obama administration” I mean Hillary Clinton. The only coherent purpose I can discern in all of this is to sully Clinton’s record as secretary of state in case she runs for president in 2016.

That’s not a particularly noble way to use the deaths of four American public servants, but at least it’s understandable. Attempts to concoct some kind of sinister Whitewater-style conspiracy, however, don’t even begin to make sense.

If anyone in Congress was interested in solving the problems that led to this attack, that would be interesting and constructive. But Congress seems uninterested in solving problems or being constructive. Just more partisanship and stupid partisanship at that. I’ve watched these games for years and I’m tired of them. Aren’t you?

The former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide on Friday after a court found him guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the slaughter of 1,771 Mayan Ixils in the 1980s. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. It is the first time a former head of state has been found guilty of genocide in their own country.

(Source: dragonsdrum)