The single biggest proponent of SB562, California’s single-payer health care bill, is the California Nurses Association. But here’s something I didn’t know until yesterday: the CNA is aggressively using support for SB562 as a litmus test for being a true progressive. The bill is basically unpassable, but it’s being used as a way of whipping up the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party against traitors who fail to support it.

Apparently this applies even to B-list bloggers. I got an email today from Chuck Idelson, communications director for CNA’s umbrella organization, National Nurses United. Here’s how it ended:

Having seen two years of your hatred for Bernie Sanders, it’s not surprising you would be equally hostile to ideas he champions like single payer, but it would be nice if you were a little more honest with your readers, or maybe you can recommend the name of your magazine be changed from Mother Jones – who actually fought for working people – to Milton Friedman, which would better reflect your class sympathies.

It’s good to see that progressive organizations are learning communications skills from the Trump administration. But I wonder if this kind of attitude is helpful in attracting and maintaining support for progressive causes?

POSTSCRIPT: Just for the record, I’ve supported single-payer health care for at least the past 25 years. But for a variety of reasons, it needs to be done at the national level. No state has ever been able to make it work.

Jim West/ZUMA

It looks like environmentalists have accidentally won a battle after all:

Keystone XL is facing a new challenge: The oil producers and refiners the pipeline was originally meant to serve aren’t interested in it anymore.

….Much has changed in the oil markets since TransCanada first filed an application with the State Department in 2008 for a cross-border permit….Refiners want the flexibility of being able to buy oil from wherever it is cheapest. In a world awash in low-price oil, Canadian crude doesn’t look as attractive as it once did….Meanwhile, uncertainty about output growth from Canada’s oil sands has given producers pause about signing long-term agreements for space on a pipeline they may not need, people familiar with the matter say.

Oh well. It was being built with foreign steel anyway.

Here’s the latest from the NRA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE

I’m not sure this video is even unusual for the NRA, which, these days, is more a purveyor of wholesale culture war zealotry than it is just a gun rights group. But it’s still a pretty spectacular appeal to the seemingly bottomless resentment of liberal sophisticates that eternally haunts conservatives despite controlling virtually the entire political apparatus of the United States. If there were a secret version of this video that ended with a call to march on Hollywood and raze it to the ground, I wouldn’t be surprised.

This raises a question for “both sides” apostles: Can you think of a recent video anywhere near as vicious as this one from a left-wing group? I don’t mean some dude on Twitter. I mean some significant organization associated with mainstream liberalism. It’s an honest question. I don’t watch a lot of propaganda videos, so I could easily have missed something. Any takers?

This seems like a bad thing:

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled against Google on Wednesday in a closely-watched intellectual property case over whether judges can apply their own country’s laws to all of the Internet. In a 7-2 decision, the court agreed a British Columbia judge had the power to issue an injunction forcing Google to scrub search results about pirated products not just in Canada, but everywhere else in the world too.

….“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.

Hmmm. It is not an order that restrains speech, it is merely an order to de-index websites. I’m pretty sure I tried out similar kinds of sophistry in high school, and it did me no good. Apparently I just wasn’t aiming high enough.

But it doesn’t really matter. This issue has been burbling along at barely radar level for years, and eventually it’s going to explode. In the print era it was never a big deal. Occasionally issues of a magazine or newspaper would be banned from a country, or China would demand that the Economist delete a chart from copies sold in their country. But this kind of thing was infrequent, and it didn’t affect anyone else. Likewise, autocratic regimes could ban publications entirely. But again, it didn’t affect anyone else.

It’s not entirely clear to me why the internet is viewed differently, but it is. I don’t think, for example, that the Canadian Supreme Court would dream of ruling that a printed index of corporate profiles had to delete the entry of a company that had violated the law. And they definitely wouldn’t try to demand that it be deleted in every copy sold around the world. But if it’s a Google search result? Sure.

Partly, of course, this a response to the loss of sovereign control that the internet has spawned. If a printed book were banned in Canada, the ban would be pretty effective. There would still be some underground copies circulating, but that’s small beer. A digital listing, however, is a whole different thing. Ban it on google.ca and it takes only a few seconds to search google.com instead. The ban is all but useless.

So how will this play out? At some level, the world will either come to a consensus that censorship is hopeless, or else every country will have its own little internet. Today’s Canadian decision is hardly a big deal, but what happens when China or Russia or Vietnam demands that Amazon stop selling something everywhere in the world, not just in their country? Or that Facebook change its news feed for the whole planet? Or that Google globally delist sites insulting to Dear Leader?

Will it still be no big deal then?

Every tedious old argument in the world is being regurgitated lately in service of the final, desperate defense of the Republican health care bill. The latest hotness is the old “we’re not cutting, we’re just slowing the rate of growth” argument for Medicaid. So let’s make this easy. Here’s the basic chart of federal Medicaid spending since 2000:

Sure enough, spending continues to rise under BCRA. But even a high school freshman knows that you have to adjust for inflation in any time series like this. Here’s the chart for real spending:

There’s a reason this is called real spending. As you can see, Medicaid spending isn’t “slowing down,” it’s being cut. Spending in 2026 is 18 percent lower than spending in 2017. And here’s the result:

The CBO estimates that the reduced spending will result in 15 million fewer people receiving Medicaid. Unsurprisingly, that’s a reduction of about 18 percent. It’s pretty simple.

NOTE: Historical Medicaid spending from CMS here (NHE Table 3). CBO spending projection here (page 13). CPI-M here. I used a conservative 3 percent as the CPI-M over the next decade—a bit lower than the average over the past decade. CBO Medicaid enrollment projection here (page 17).

This is not my usual beat, but I’m curious about something. Like millions of others, I sometimes watch the home renovation shows on HGTV. Or I catch bits and pieces while Marian is watching. And I’ve noticed that almost universally, the finished homes have no place for a TV in the shared living spaces (family room, living room, etc.). And if they do, it’s mounted above the fireplace about eight feet off the ground, which is a terrible viewing position.

If this were a photo spread in Architectural Digest, then sure. They’re pretending to be so posh that they don’t watch TV. But this is a TV show! And yet they never have TVs in their houses.

What’s up with this?

What are Orange County’s most famous attractions? At a guess, I’d rank them something like this:

1. Disneyland
2. Knott’s Berry Farm
3. Christ Cathedral (aka the Crystal Cathedral)
4. Mission San Juan Capistrano
5. Huntington Beach pier
6. Richard Nixon library
7. Balboa Island
8. Little Saigon
9. South Coast Plaza, a famous shopping mecca
10. Other
19. stuff
20. The Great Park balloon

I don’t have pictures of any of the other things, but I do have a picture of the balloon. If you’re ever in Orange County, come on out and take a ride. It’s a tethered balloon that goes up 400 feet, that being the length of its steel cable, and the view at the top is…OK, I guess. Be sure to check the weather first, since they halt balloon “flights” at the merest hint of wind. Tickets are ten bucks.

On Monday, the White House warned that Syria would “pay a heavy price” if they launched another chemical attack. So how did that go? It’s yet another victory for Donald Trump!

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis claimed Wednesday that the Syrian government backed down after the White House said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were preparing for another possible chemical attack. “They didn’t do it,” Mattis said.

I would like to formally announce that if Russia kills my mother in a nuclear attack, there will be grave consequences. If my mother is still alive tomorrow, that will show that they’ve backed down. I’ll let you know.

Conservatives sure are touchy. Here is Alexandra DeSanctis over at National Review:

In a piece yesterday, Cosmopolitan senior writer Rebecca Nelson highlighted seven women who are supposedly “generating 2020 buzz,” and every single woman on her list is either a Democratic politician or a public figure committed to the left-wing cause.

The list doesn’t mention Republican Susan Collins, who has been a GOP senator from Maine for over two decades. It also disregards the GOP’s remaining four female senators, several of whom have been in office longer than the Democratic senators Nelson names.

Likewise ignored are female Republican governors across the country who outnumber their Democratic counterparts four to two. Nelson snubs U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who served a successful six years as governor of South Carolina and who is widely considered one of the GOP’s rising stars.

I dunno. The article is specifically about people who “could be our first female president,” and I guess Cosmo is assuming that Donald Trump will run for reelection in 2020. This means that no one, male or female, is generating “2020 buzz” on the Republican side of the aisle. Am I missing something here?

California’s assisted suicide act went into effect last year, and today the Department of Public Health released statistics for 2016. A total of 191 people requested prescriptions for aid-in-dying drugs, and 111 used them. However, because the program is very new, and only covered half the year, these numbers are certain to go up significantly in future years.

Unsurprisingly, the initial statistics confirm what we know from other states that have similar laws: assisted suicide is barely used at all among non-whites.

The reasons for this are not entirely clear. Among Hispanics, it’s probably partly related to religion, since the majority of Hispanics are Catholics and the church forbids suicide. More generally, it’s probably also related to a distrust of doctors among minority groups. Beyond that, I’m not sure anyone really has a persuasive explanation.

Generally speaking, though, the main demographic for assisted suicide is professional, college-educated white folks who are used to being in charge and dislike the idea of losing control over their lives. This was true in the 90s and aughts, when it was illegal and done under the table, and I believe it’s true in every state that’s legalized assisted suicide since then.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Forrest Sholars points out that assisted suicide is mostly an option for the elderly, and the demographics of those over 60 is different from California’s overall demographics. That’s true, especially for Hispanics, and I intended to mention this in the original post. It just slipped my mind before I published it. So here it is:

There’s still a considerable racial disparity, but it’s somewhat less dramatic than it is when comparing to all age groups.