Nearly 2.6 million Texans could qualify for tax credits to purchase
health insurance in 2014, according to a report released Thursday by
Families USA, a nonprofit that advocates for health care consumers.
The tax credits will be offered through the health insurance exchange
— an Orbitz-style online marketplace for health insurance — that the
federal government plans to launch as part of the Affordable Care Act in
October. Beginning in January, families with an income of up to 400
percent of the federal poverty line, between $47,100 and $94,200 for a
family of four, will be eligible for a tax credit subsidy to purchase
insurance through the exchange. The tax credits will be offered on a
sliding scale, so that lower-income families will receive larger
credits.
“These are typically the families where folks are working, sometimes
more than one job,” U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, said of the
report. “Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, I think
that’s something we can all support.”
Nearly 5.8 million Texans — nearly a quarter of the state’s
population — are uninsured. The Health and Human Services commission
estimates the tax credits offered through the health insurance exchange
and other provisions in the Affordable Care Act will lower that rate to
16 percent. If Texas also expanded Medicaid — an unlikely scenario given Gov. Rick Perry’s opposition — the uninsured rate could be lowered to 12 percent. Perry says that Medicaid is a broken system and has called the Medicaid expansion of federal health reform “fiscal coercion.”
“Given the large number of people in Texas that are uninsured, many
of whom are poor, this is an extraordinary opportunity,” said Ron
Pollock, executive director of Families USA. He said it was
“short-sighted” for the state’s leadership to oppose Medicaid expansion,
as it would bring billions of federal dollars to the state, and
increase job opportunities.
You can see the report for Texas here, and for other states here.
In Texas, Medicaid expansion would mean adding an estimated 2 million residents
to Medicaid, for whom the federal government would cover 100% of that
extra cost for the first three years, and then 90% after 2019. That
would bring to the state an additional $13 billion a year, totaling
roughly $100 billion before the end of the decade.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) doubled down earlier this month in his opposition to
expanding Medicaid under Affordable Care Act, even though
opposing it could cost Texas $90 billion. At a press conference Perry argued expanding the
health insurance program for the poor would make Texas “hostage” to the
federal government. “It would benefit no one in our state to see their
taxes skyrocket and our economy crushed as our budget crumbled under the
weight of oppressive Medicaid costs,” Perry said at the state capitol. Perry was flanked at the press conference by top Texas Republicans, including rising conservative star Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John Cornyn.
Republicans will, if they again gain full control of the federal government, repeal the Affordable Care Act, convert Medicare into a private insurance voucher program, and turn Medicaid into a severely underfunded state block grant program. The Republican controlled U.S. House has voted 33 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act over the last three years and has passed multiple budget bills to convert Medicare into a private insurance voucher program.
The fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, on Wednesday (April 17) is bringing increased attention to the thousands of facilities nationwide that store or manufacture fertilizer, especially ammonium nitrate, an explosive chemical often used in agricultural fertilizers. [LiveScience.com: Infographic: Why Fertilizer Is Dangerous]
Ammonium nitrate is believed to be the cause of the fireball that was seen about two hours after the blaze started on Wednesday (April 17) evening. In February, Adair Grain (the owner of the West Fertilizer Co. fertilizer plant) informed the Texas Department of Health Services that it was storing up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate at the facility.
The West, Texas, plant is just one of about 6,000 facilities scattered across the country — located in residential neighborhoods, small towns and urban areas — that manufacture, store or sell ammonium nitrate products, a spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group, told NBC.
And most county and municipal zoning regulations don't prevent these facilities from being located near schools, hospitals, homes or other businesses. The nursing home and school damaged by the explosion in West were built several years after the fertilizer plant began operating about 50 years ago.
The explosion in West is not an isolated incident. In 2011, a chemical
plant explosion in nearby Waxahachie forced the evacuation of about
1,000 residents, according to the Dallas Morning News, including people living in houses that were just 100 feet (30 meters) away.
Around the world, ammonium nitrate has been implicated in dozens of deadly explosions in recent years, including the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history when almost 600 people died in Texas City, Texas, after two ships carrying the chemical exploded in 1947.
The West, Texas, explosion points to the need for stricter regulation of plants that manufacture, store and use large quantities of hazardous chemicals.
Modern conservatives ignore the failures of their generally accepted
conservative principles, like deregulation, as enacted over the last several decades. Republicans claim that eliminating government regulations will unleash business and create jobs. We did deregulate, but it didn’t create jobs. It did, however, create a
worsening of our environment. Deregulation also created the worst
financial disaster since the great depression.
Tommy Muska, the mayor of West, Texas, said Thursday that 35 to 40 people are believed to be dead in a massive fertilizer plant explosion, “because they are unaccounted for and still missing.” Sen. John Cornyn, in statements on Friday, said 60 people remain unaccounted for in the small Central Texas town. Two hundred people were injured in the powerful blast.
Among those who are missing and believed dead include as many as six firefighters and four emergency medical technicians.
The explosion occurred Wednesday night, heavily damaging or destroying buildings within a half-mile radius and causing broken windows and other damage to structures up to double that distance. The factory exploded Wednesday with the force of a 2.1-magnitude earthquake.
The West Fertilizer Company has not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. “Texas relies on federal investigators, and has not made its own
investment at the state level to inspect facilities, to make sure they
are complying with federal safety standards,” said Alex Winslow,
executive director of Texas Watch, a non-partisan group that is a
corporate accountability group in the state. “We believe, and have
supported in the past, efforts to beef up state inspections to
compliment the federal inspections.”
Since 2006, only six fertilizer plants in Texas were inspected; West Fertilizer Company was not among them. The explosion is a spotlight to lax inspection standards in Texas. Under the leadership of Governor Rick Perry, who has been visiting states like Illinois and California to woo businesses to Texas, the state has advertised its low taxes and “predictable regulations” as part of its allure, begging the question whether the state’s “business friendly climate” has taken a step too far away from safety.
“Loose regulations” in Texas may be a nice pitch for out-of-state business, however, in 2010 the state accounted for 10% of all workplace-related fatalities in the country. In 2011, Texas had the second-highest number of fatality investigations from OSHA (California was first), in 2010, Texas led the nation in Latino worker fatalities.
West Fertilizer Company in particular hadn’t been inspected by any government agency in five years. In a report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the West Fertilizer Company stated that the “the worst possible scenario” for a fire or explosion would be a “10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one.” The second-worst scenario, according to the report, would be a leak from a broken hose that would cause no injuries. West Fertilizer Company's risk management plan, filed with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, made no mention of ammonium nitrate storage.
At times the plant had up to 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia available at the facility. This particular compound, according to the report, is at risk for explosion when it is inside a container.
The West Fertilizer Company had informed a state agency in February that it was storing up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate – the highly explosive chemical compound used in the domestic terror attack on the Oklahoma City federal building. The Oklahoma truck bomb used just two tons of ammonium nitrate to destroy or damage 324 buildings within a sixteen-block
radius, destroy or burn 86 cars, and shatter glass in 258 nearby
downtown buildings.
It's not clear whether the ammonium nitrate, which was not initially
reported as being present at the site in the wake of Wednesday's massive
blast, was responsible for the explosion, or whether volunteer
firefighters battling a fire at the facility knew of its presence. Under
state law, hazardous chemicals must be disclosed to the community fire
department and to the county emergency planning agency, in addition to
the state. News reports on Thursday focused on tanks of anhydrous
ammonia –a less volatile fertilizer.
Adair Grain, doing business as West Fertilizer Co., told the Texas
Department of Health Services on Feb. 26 that it was storing up to
540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, along with up to 110,000 pounds of
the liquid ammonia, according to the disclosure report. (Read the document provided by the state.) The company's disclosure was first reported Thursday evening by The Los Angeles Times.
The West Fertilizer Co. stored 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that
would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security. Fertilizer plants and storage facilities must report to the DHS when they hold 400
lb or more of the explosive chemical. Filings to the Texas
Department of State Health Services listing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate in storage were not shared with DHS by West Fertilizer Co. or any Texas state government agency. Gov. Perry is on record promoting Texas' lack of business regulation statutes and enforcement as a selling point for businesses to relocate to Texas.
Ammonium Nitrate is an explosive that is also useful for fertilizer. It has not been used much as a military explosive in its simple form since WWII, but when
mixed with other explosives it is encountered frequently in
military explosives. Ammonium Nitrate mixed with fuel oil is typically the explosive of choice in the mining industry.
In the video below, Rachel Maddow reviews the history of ammonium nitrate as an explosive
and then as a fertilizer and reports the latest details of the
fertilizer plant explosion that ripped through the town of West, Texas.
Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday declared McLennan County, Texas - home to West, the small community devastated by the fertilizer plant explosion - a disaster area and announced that he asked President Barack Obama for a federal disaster declaration as well.
Federal disaster assistance available under a major disaster declaration falls into three general categories:
Individual Assistance - aid to individuals, families and business owners;
Public Assistance - aid to public (and certain private non-profit) entities for certain emergency services and the repair or replacement of disaster-damaged public facilities;
Hazard Mitigation Assistance - funding for measures designed to reduce future losses to public and private property. In the event of a major disaster declaration, the county is eligible to apply for assistance under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.
In related news, all three members of the Congressional delegation representing West, Texas (Republican Senators Cornyn and Cruz and Congressman Flores) joined in vowing to 'assist' the people of West. What they mean by 'assist' is that they're going to do all they can to steer federal disaster aid to the city of West, Texas.
All three of them -- Cornyn and Cruz and Flores -- voted against the bill that delivered federal disaster aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy call that aid “pork” and “wasteful spending.” ~ PoliticusUSA.com
Plano, TX – Women Organizing Women Democrats (WOW Dems), a new North Texas-based organization, announces their kickoff meeting on Thursday, April 18th @ 6:45 p.m. The first official meeting of WOW Dems will be held at Harrington Library, 1501 18th St., Plano TX 75074. This event is not sponsored by the Plano Public Library System or the City of Plano.
Thursday April 18, 2013
April
18
The mission of WOW Dems is to expand the participation of women in politics: increasing their political engagement; raising awareness about women’s issues; and recruiting, supporting, and electing women Democrats for partisan and non-partisan offices.
After the business meeting, there will be a panel discussion on Legislative Advocacy. Panel members will include Denise Rodriguez of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas and Jeanne Rubin of Equality Texas. The panelists will discuss legislative issues that affect their individual organizations, their unique involvement in the legislative process, and the process in general followed by an audience Q&A.
After the program concludes, refreshments will be served and guests will have the opportunity to join WOW Dems.
To learn more about WOW Dems, contact Amy Lawrence, President at president@wowdems.org.
Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's newest annual report on health of American journalism shows a continued erosion of news gathering reporting resources in the traditional news media industry.
As the influence of traditional news media wains, Pew finds that those in politics, government, business and others are increasingly more adept at using digital media channels to directly
broadcast information into the public arena and to inject their messaging into the traditional media's news narratives.
As traditional news outlets have continually cut news-gathering staff and cut budgets for reporters to find and investigate news leads, reports increasing follow and report on what news-makers themselves broadcast online.
The traditional news media industry is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. Findings from Pew's public opinion survey finds that nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a traditional news outlets because they no longer provide the news and information or the delivery format they want.
Military veterans who put their lives on the line for our country are threatened by cuts to Texas' Hazlewood Act veterans education program.
Texas' institutions of higher education are now telling veterans that they and their children place an unbearable "burden" on the state's public universities and colleges by using their eduction benefit.
The Hazlewood Act is a Texas law providing veterans with tuition and fee exemptions to public universities and colleges of up to 150 hours.
The law was first enacted in the 1920s to assist soldiers who fought in World War I. It evolved and expanded in ensuing years, reflecting the state's tradition of strong commitment to its veterans. The law was eventually named after state Sen. Grady Hazlewood of Amarillo because he championed a major amendment to the law in 1943. Texas lawmakers passed the Hazlewood Legacy Act in 2009, allowing veterans to pass along any unused portion of the 150 hours of free tuition to their children.
Thousands of additional combat veterans returning from the wars in Iraq, and now Afghanistan, have substantially increased college and university enrollments of veterans, or their children under the Hazlewood program.
In the last three years, the number of students receiving some form of Hazlewood benefit has ballooned by 129 percent. Institutions had to forgo $24 million in tuition and fees in fiscal year 2009, but by fiscal year 2011, the total statewide had grown to $72 million. Enrollments under the program are likely to further increase as the U.S. brings troops home from Afghanistan.
The costs of providing free college tuition and fees for veterans and their children is emerging as a looming budget issue for the 2013 Legislative Session due to the more than $1 billion in higher education budget cuts made during the 2011 Legislative Session.
University and college officials are telling Texas lawmakers that the costs of providing the free tuition and fees to veterans has become an untenable unfunded mandate on their institutions due to funding cuts and increased Hazlewood program enrollments.
The budget-writing House Appropriations Committee is beginning to address the education portion of the Texas 2014-2015 biennium budget. But Republican Texas lawmakers are so far unwilling to reverse their 2011 budget cuts and adequately fund the educational needs of all Texans, including Texas' veterans.
University and college officials are telling the Legislature they must either increase higher education funding or make cuts to the Hazlewood Act veterans education program.
Yesterday, Governor Rick Perry gave his 7th State of the State address outlining his priorities for the state of Texas. Left out of the list of Republican prioritiesthat Perry outlined in his
45-minute address are the legislative priorities being pressed by
Democrats in the Texas Senate and House.
Progress Texas recently published a brief on the major issues concerning Texans and the 83rd Texas Legislature - clicking on the links take you straight to that issue:
Gov. Rick Perry gives his 7th State of the State address. Texas Democratic legislators respond to Gov. Perry's 7th State of the State address.
Democratic priorities include plans to fix the state's business tax, end what they called accounting gimmicks to make the state's books appear balanced, making improvements to infrastructure and to restore funding to the Women's Health Program.
One House Democrat said the governor painted an unrealistic picture of the state. "Not sure what parallel universe Gov. Perry is living in, but it's not the same one as the people in my district," said Rep. Naomi Gonzalez, D-El Paso. "We need to restore money to education and health care."
Two years ago, Perry declared there would be "no sacred cows" immune to deep budget cuts as the state struggled with a $27 billion budget deficit amid an economy still feeling the effects of The Great Recession. Lawmakers responded by passing deep cuts across-the-board, including slashing $5.4 billion from public schools and billions more from state Health and Human Services programs. (Gov. Rick Perry's State of the State Speech - 2011)
Politico: National Democrats are taking steps to create a large-scale independent group aimed at turning traditionally conservative Texas into a prime electoral battleground, crafting a new initiative to identify and mobilize progressive voters in the rapidly-changing state, strategists familiar with the plans told POLITICO.
The organization, dubbed “Battleground Texas,” plans to engage the state’s rapidly growing Latino population, as well as African-American voters and other Democratic-leaning constituencies that have been underrepresented at the ballot box in recent cycles. Two sources said the contemplated budget would run into the tens of millions of dollars over several years - a project Democrats hope has enough heft to help turn what has long been an electoral pipe dream into reality.
At the center of the effort is Jeremy Bird, formerly the national field director for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, who was in Austin last week to confer with local Democrats about the project.
In a statement to POLITICO, Bird said the group would be “a grass-roots organization that will make Texas a battleground state by treating it like one.”
“With its diversity and size, Texas should always be a battleground state where local elections are vigorously contested and anyone who wants to be our commander in chief has to compete and show they reflect Texas values.
Yet for far too long, the state’s political leaders, both in Austin and in Washington, D.C., have failed to stand for Texans,” said Bird, who recently founded a consulting firm, 270 Strategies. “Over the next several years, Battleground Texas will focus on expanding the electorate by registering more voters — and as importantly, by mobilizing Texans who are already registered voters but who have not been engaged in the democratic process.”
In his Inaugural Address, Pres. Barack Obama's gave an unapologetic defense of America's social safety net program and refuted Paul Ryan's often repeated charge that Social Security recipients are "takers not makers." In interviews on conservative media channels this week, Paul Ryan questioned the President's choice of rhetorical devices as a "straw-man" and denied ever making the "takers vs. makers" claim. But by weaving together comments Paul Ryan made on the presidential election trail last year about entitlements and "takers vs. makers," as well as citing the former VP nominee's own experience with government assistance, Stewart cheekily "proves" in the final seconds of his commentary that Obama plagiarized Ryan in his inauguration speech.
Particular passages from President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address strike a cord within most Americans for the promise of equality and fellowship that inspires the spirit of America —
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
"Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed."
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”
Many younger Americans, who were not alive to witness or do not know of the events at places called at Stonewall, Selma, and Seneca Falls, may not fully appreciate the President’s references to those places.
Seneca Falls — The Seneca Falls Convention—held on July 19-20, 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York—was a gathering organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in conjunction with a group of radical Quakers displeased with the state of women’s rights in the United States. The event is widely considered to be the start of the women’s rights movement in the United States.
Selma — A series of three protest marches that took place during the month of March, 1965 in Selma, Alabama, that forever altered the public’s perception of the Civil Rights movement, mobilized President Lyndon Johnson and quickly led to the introduction and passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Stonewall — The event that is widely regarded as “the opening shot” in the gay rights movement in the United States took place early in the morning of June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in the Greenwich Village section of New York City.
