Thursday Open Thread [12.11.14]

First Read:

“Two weeks after announcing a sweeping executive order to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, the White House has significant reasons to feel pretty good about how it’s played out so far. Per Gallup, the president’s approval rating among Latinos got a turbocharge, jumping 14 points since the announcement to a year-high of 68 percent. Another poll from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while the overall public is divided about the way Obama implemented the changes, seven in ten Americans support the underlying policy.”

“And so far, he’s only gotten a slap on the wrist from congressional Republicans in return for the executive action (more on that later). With the current trajectory on the Hill — and the just-launched 17-state lawsuit challenging the policy — this fight is sure to stretch well into next year. With both sides firing up their base, that seems to suit Republicans and Democrats alike just fine.”

The uninsured rate dropped more than 30 percent from September 2013 to September 2014. The uninsured rate for adults under age 64 has been significantly lowered, across genders and races and age groups. The working poor and the middle class saw the largest drops because of the combination of Medicaid expansion and federal tax credits, or subsidies, for the middle class. In other words, the law is doing exactly what it was intended to do.

Healthcare spending in the U.S. grew slower in 2013 than it had in 53 years.

The shrinking of Medicare spending has already cut the deficit more than any of the austerity-minded plans that anyone has come up with, including the Simpson/Bowles Plan, or Paul Ryan’s End Medicare as we know it Voucher Plan.

Obamacare has saved 50,000 of your human lives because hospitals have been made safer. The law included both penalties and incentives for hospitals to reduce readmissions and thus to cut down on the incidence of things like patient falls, poor sanitation practices that increased hospital-based infections, or patients being given the wrong prescriptions.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of their research into state marketplaces and they found that premiums under Obamacare are being held largely in check for 2015 thanks to increased insurer participation in the marketplaces, thus creating more competition. Man this socialist government healthcare plan sure does have a lot of free market capitalism in it.

A new Munich Re survey finds 83% of Americans now believe the climate is changing and 60% say the climate is changing due to man-made causes. The survey findings “indicate that national sentiment over whether or not climatic changes are occurring has finally reached a tipping point.” Of course, polls about facts are completely useless. It is like saying 83% of Americans now believe the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that the Earth is round, rather than flat.

Ed Kilgore is fascinated by the conventional wisdom of the GOP Establishment regarding their 2016 candidates:

I continue to be amazed at the confidence of GOP elites in the political strength of Bush, Christie and Romney. The first two continue to do relatively poorly in both nominating contest and general election polling; Bush in particular is saddled with problems that will never go away. And Mitt Romney would be the first defeated presidential nominee to attempt an immediate comeback since Hubert Humphrey in 1972. That’s a long time ago.

Lower gas prices and their continued fall seems to indicate that President Obama will have a much better 2015 than 2014, or so the Wall Street Journal thinks.

Low oil prices now appear likely to be with us deep into next year, at least, and they are shaping up as a win-win for the president. It’s hard to imagine a single development that carries so many upsides and so few downsides. The domestic economic benefits are obvious; more intriguing but less obvious are the ways low oil prices benefit American strategy around the world.

Perhaps the cowardly Democrats in the General Assembly can use this opportunity to fix our damn roads now.

Now, someone said this upon signing the UN Convention on Torture:

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of [this] Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

That someone was President Ronald Reagan. He says that each state party, i.e. each nation that has entered into the UN Convention Treaty on Torture, is required to either prosecute torturers or extradite them to other countries for prosecution. Thus, President Ronald Reagan has called for the prosecution of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and if we don’t do it, some other more exceptional nation than the United States must.