pacino wrote:24% approval rating for Graham-Cassidy

On Monday, Andrade-Tafolla, 46, was accompanying his wife after she appeared in Washington County Court in Hillsboro. Andrade-Tafolla said a group of people followed them outside the courthouse and approached him.

A volunteer with the ACLU caught the confrontation on camera. It showed the group asking Andrade-Tafolla for his name and identification, while refusing to identify themselves. Andrade-Tafolla said they only showed him a picture of a person they thought was him.

“The lady said, ‘Well I have this photo of you,’” recalled Andrade-Tafolla. “I said, ‘So what? I'm questioning who are you! Why do you need my information?’”

It turned out the group was comprised of ICE agents. In a statement to KGW, ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice, described the scenario.

“In this instance, our officers went to a specific location seeking a particular individual and interacted with someone whom they believed resembled our arrest target,” said Kice. “It turned out the man was not the target and no further action was taken."

In April, Oregon's Chief Justice Thomas Balmer, asked ICE to stop targeting courthouses for illegal immigrants. Since then, the ACLU has documented continued arrests around courthouses, which they fear will scare some people from going to court.

Fertility rates decreased by 12% among Flint women, and fetal death rates increased by 58%, after April 2014, according to research by assistant professors and health economists David Slusky at Kansas University and Daniel Grossman at West Virginia University. The pair examined vital statistics data for Flint and the rest of the state of Michigan from 2008 to 2015, zoomed down to the census-tract level.

That post-April 2014 time period is significant, because that's when — in an effort to save money — the city of Flint switched from water supplied by the city of Detroit to using the Flint River as a drinking water source, without adding needed anti-corrosives to the water. Lead levels in drinking water supplies spiked as a result.

The problem, however, wasn't acknowledged by Gov. Rick Snyder and state health and environmental officials until late September 2015 — months after Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manager Miguel Del Toral alerted state and federal officials of their concerns, and weeks after Flint pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha's own research showed children's lead blood levels were rising in Flint.

Additionally, state health officials confirmed 91 cases, including 12 deaths, from Legionnaire's Disease, a respiratory infection, in Genesee County in a 17-month period in 2014-15. Though not conclusively tied to the Flint water crisis, cases spiked after the city switched its water source.

Flint has since switched back to Great Lakes Water Authority-supplied water.

Fifteen state and local officials have been criminally indicted as a result of their alleged actions and inactions in the Flint water crisis, including Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon, state Chief Medical Executive Eden Wells, and Liane Shekter-Smith, the fired head of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's drinking water unit.

Many insurance companies dispute that claim. On Wednesday, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association warned the Cassidy-Graham bill “would allow states to waive key consumer protections, as well as undermine safeguards for those with pre-existing medical conditions.”

In June, [Tom] Price spoke at a physicians association conference in San Diego, where he vowed to wring out wasteful spending in the government’s health care programs. Getting “value” for spending “is incredibly important,” he said.

Price took a private plane to get to the meeting, which was one stop on a five-state sprint of charter travel that cost $50,420.

"No one is quite sure what [Price] is doing,” a senior White House official said. “You look at this week, we're doing a last final push trying to get this over the finish line, and he's nowhere to be found."

slugsrbad wrote:So the "scary" from McCain's statement on his no on GC bill is that he would happily support it with regular process (hearings, amendments, etc.). The good, is that this was probably the last best chance to get rid of ACA as Congress is currently constituted. Reconciliation window ends at the end of September, meaning any new bill would have to have 60 votes to pass cloture. Trump has been constantly calling for the end of the legislative filibuster, so we'll see if Senator Turtle will go that route.

I wonder how that will sit with Mr. Process. I assume that if they still have the debates, hearings, etc., than McCain would be fine passing it, even if the filibuster was eliminated to do so. That's just my baseless opinion though.

Bucky wrote:what does 60 votes have to do with filibuster? i have no idea how this stuff works

Bucky wrote:what does 60 votes have to do with filibuster? i have no idea how this stuff works