DISPATCHES

FOX’S ‘OBAMACARE’ SMEARS CAN’T STAND SCRUTINY

When Eric Stern watched three couples on Fox News talking with Sean Hannity about their horror with “Obamacare” (10/11), recounting stories of canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on, “stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected, none of the stories smelled right to Stern, who knew something about the Affordable Care Act since he was a senior adviser to then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-Mont.) and helped Schweitzer deal with the new federal rules.

Stern tracked down Hannity’s guests, talked to them by telephone and wrote about it at Salon.com (10/18). First he spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C., who with his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.

“Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.’ What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.”

Next he called Allison Denijs, who had told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums. She said she had recently gotten a letter from Blue Cross saying that her policy was being terminated and a new, ACA-compliant policy would take its place. “She says this shows that Obama lied when he promised Americans that we could keep our existing policies,” Stern wrote.

Stern noted that Allison’s husband left his job with benefits at a big company a few years ago to start his own business. Since then they’ve been buying insurance on the open market, and are now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500 deductible per family member, with hefty annual premium hikes. One of their two children is not covered under the policy because she has a pre-existing condition that would require purchasing additional coverage for $600 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to around $20,000 a year.

“I asked Allison if she’d shopped on the exchange, to see what a plan might cost under the new law. She said she hadn’t done so because she’d heard the website was not working. Would she try it out when it’s up and running? Perhaps, she said. She told me she has long opposed Obamacare, and that the president should have focused on tort reform as a solution to bringing down the price of healthcare.

“I tried an experiment and shopped on the exchange for Allison and Kurt. Assuming they don’t smoke and have a household income too high to be eligible for subsidies, I found that they would be able to get a plan for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter. This would be about a 60% reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market.”

Finally, he called Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn. Robbie is self-employed as a Christian youth motivational speaker. The couple told Hannity that they, too, were recently notified that their Blue Cross policy would be expiring for lack of ACA compliance. They told Hannity that the replacement plans Blue Cross was offering would come with a rate increase of 50% or even 75%, and that the new offerings would contain all sorts of benefits they don’t need, like maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth. Their kids are grown and moved out, so why should they be forced to pay extra for a health plan with superfluous features?

“When I spoke to Robbie, he said he and Tina have been paying a little over $600 a month for their plan, about $10,000 a year. And the ACA-compliant policy will cost 50-75 percent more? They said this information was related to them by their insurance agent.

“Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, or 63% less than their current bill. It might cover things that they don’t need, but so does every insurance policy.”

Stern concluded: “I don’t doubt that these six individuals believe that Obamacare is a disaster; but none of them had even visited the insurance exchange. And some of them appear to have taken actions (Paul Cox, for example) based on a general pessimistic belief about Obamacare. He’s certainly entitled to do so, but Hannity is not entitled to point to Paul’s behavior as an “Obamacare train wreck story” and maintain any credibility that he might have as a journalist.

“Strangely, the recent shutdown was based almost entirely on a small percentage of Congress’s belief that Obamacare, as Ted Cruz puts it, ‘is destroying America.’ Cruz has rarely given us an example of what he’s talking about. That’s because the best he can do is what Hannity did — exploit people’s ignorance and falsely point to imaginary boogeymen.”

He added that to check the plans he used a calculator from the Kaiser Family Foundation <http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/>.

OHIO EXPANDS MEDICAID UNDER ‘OBAMACARE.’ Ohio joined the list of states expanding Medicaid for Americans under 133% of the federal poverty line (10/21), after a special seven-member budgetary oversight panel made up of state lawmakers gave final approval to Gov. John Kasich’s (R) decision to grow the program via executive order.

Kasich got approval from a special panel of seven lawmakers in order to actually spend the federal money that facilitates the expansion. That approval came in a 5-2 vote, securing Kasich a long-sought victory and setting the stage for inevitable legal challenges questioning the legality of the maneuver.

Senate Republicans who objected to the expansion said they’d try to pass a $400 mln income tax cut, taking the money from Ohio hospitals that would get federal funds from the expansion. Joan McCarter commented at DailyKos.com (10/22): “If Kasich wasn’t already likely to have a tea party challenger in 2014, it’s a given, now. Obviously, for most of these Republicans, getting health care to more low-income Ohioans is the worst thing imaginable.”

Medicaid expansion, a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, is expected to cut Ohio’s uninsurance rate by over 60% and extend basic health benefits to 275,000 of the poorest Ohio residents. According to the Advisory Board Company, 26 states are moving forward with some form of Medicaid expansion, 15 are refusing the federally funded expansion, 7 are leaning toward not participating, and 3 are leaning toward participating.

OREGON CUTS UNINSURED POPULATION BY 10% IN TWO WEEKS. While the Republican-dominated media focused on the problems with the federal healthcare website as a sign that the Affordable Care Act was failing, Oregon signed up so many low-income residents for health coverage that the state has cut its uninsured population by 10%, state officials said. The majority of those people are newly eligible for public insurance plans thanks to the expansion of Medicaid. The Oregon Health Plan, which is what the state calls its Medicaid-funded program for poor residents, has enrolled 56,000 new people through mid-October, thanks to a fast-track system that allows people to easily sign up. More than 250,000 food stamp recipients in the state received a notice informing them that they’ve become eligible for the Oregon Health Plan, and explaining that they can either make a phone call or fill out a form in order to complete the enrollment process.

FARM BILL SHOWDOWN OVER FOOD STAMPS. House and Senate conferees will try to resolve differences between drastic cuts in food assistance for the needy in the bill the House passed in mid-September, and a much smaller cut in the Senate bill. The House bill would eliminate about $39 bln from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) budget over 10 years, which would drop as many as 6 mln people from the program at a time when unemployment remains high and food charities are already overstretched. The Senate’s bill would tighten eligibility processes and cut $4 bln, or about 0.5% of the program’s current projected costs over the next decade.

Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress.org noted (10/18) that the White House has threatened to veto the House’s steeper food stamp cuts on two occasions. The $20 bln cut initially proposed in the House earned a veto threat and so did the $39 bln cut that passed in September.

In any case, SNAP will be scaled back in November because the law that increased benefits in 2009 to help people affected by the recession ran out of money. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included a provision to boost the benefits. The program serves more than 23 mln households with nearly 48 mln people, according to the USDA, with an average monthly benefit of $275 per household. The exact reduction depends on the recipients’ situation but a family of four with no other changes in circumstances will receive $36 less per month, according to the USDA.

Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that can be a major hit for a family that is already struggling with such low wages that they can’t afford food on their own. “For those of us who spend $1.70 a day on a latte this doesn’t seem like a big change, but it does kind of really highlight that millions of families are living on an extremely modest food budget,” she told NBC News (10/21).

Back to the farm bill, the two chambers have fewer differences on farm policy, Pyke noted, but price supports are likely to be a sticking point. When the House moved to go to conference, it also approved a measure instructing its conferees to support limits on crop insurance subsidies for wealthy land owners. While Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) reportedly opposed the measure, which makes farmers with adjusted gross incomes above $750,000 per year ineligible for the most generous insurance subsidies, he and other conferees have been officially instructed to support it in negotiations with the Senate, whose farm bill included the same provision. Regardless, the crop insurance program as a whole is likely to expand, as both chambers agree on the general shape of the program despite its well-documented propensity to enrich Wall Street and its relatively high vulnerability to fraud and abuse.

Price supports are another matter. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and fellow House Agriculture Committee Democrats decried the price support levels in the House bill as overgenerous. The same bill which would cut food assistance to the poor by billions would also lock in profits for specialty rice growers and other farm owners. The Senate bill sets lower price supports, and establishing consensus on those price levels will be key to the conference committee’s success, Pyke noted.

It’s not clear whether or not farm policy and food policy will remain linked. The House nutrition bill is only written to last three years, while its agriculture bill is written to last five years. While the House re-merged the two bills in order to go to conference, the differing timelines will have to be resolved if the traditional coupling of farm and food policy is to continue. Splitting the two exposes the programs that benefit the poor to serious risks in the future, experts told ThinkProgress.

Of course, cutting out food assistance doesn’t give urban-oriented reps and senators much of an incentive to support a farm bill, Dispatches notes.

KOCHS SEE $100B PROFIT FROM TAR SANDS PIPELINE. The International Forum on Globalization reported that right-wing billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch, stand to make as much as $100 bln in profits from their holdings in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, if President Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline.

IFG’s special report reveals that Koch Industries’ role in KXL includes:

• 2 million or more potential acres in Alberta with tar sands (and emissions) exceeding Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips combined;

• $53 million in Koch Cash for front groups and politicians who are pushing to fast-track KXL;

• $100 billion in potential profits due to KXL, or 1 million times more than the average KXL worker’s wage over the life of the pipeline.

The resulting rise in the pace and scale of Canadian crude oil consumption will make more money faster for the Kochs, who stand to personally profit from KWL more than any other individuals, even Exxon executives.

Approval of the pipeline, the report’s authors add, would give the Kochs “more money to ramp up their already successful attacks against Americans’ voting rights, labor rights, pollution controls, and other public interest protections.”

The Kochs, with a combined net worth of $92 bln, have been the leaders in financial support for climate change denialist propaganda, surpassing even Exxon’s massive support for such lies, as well as denying candidates and lobbying meant to spur lawmakers away from pollution controls, Meteor Blades noted at DailyKos.com (10/21).

The authors conclude: “No single permit or pipeline will itself solve our Earth’s deepening crisis of economic inequality and ecological collapse, but rejecting both can build awareness and popular pressure to reduce the role of private money polluting politics, the underlying problem obstructing our global economic transition from today’s delusion of endless industrial growth to ecological sustainability and social justice.”

Because it would cross the boundary between Canada and the US, the pipeline, which would connect the tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, requires a presidential permit based on US national interest. A decision isn’t likely until early 2014.

LABOR LEADER WARNS DEMS: DON’T CUT SOCIAL SECURITY OR MEDICARE. As Republicans and Democratic “fiscal hawks” continue to float the prospect of a “grand bargain” to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of a new austerity plan, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warned them to knock it off. He said the labor federation would “never stop working” to end the political careers of Democrats who cut entitlement programs.

“No politician … I don’t care the political party … will get away with cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. Don’t try it,” Trumka said in Las Vegas, Nev., HuffingtonPost.com reported (10/21).

According to the prepared speech, which was supplied to HuffPost by the AFL-CIO, Trumka stressed his point for Democrats who may be wobbly on the issue. “This warning goes double for Democrats,” he said. “We will never forget. We will never forgive. And we will never stop working to end your career.”

The AFL-CIO has long opposed any cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, and the labor federation has suggested in the past that it would consider pulling support from Democrats who help make those cuts happen. But Trumka’s remarks on the issue (10/21) amounted to a far more aggressive threat: That the AFL-CIO would actively use its war chest to unseat Democrats on the other side of the issue.

An AFL-CIO spokesperson clarified for HuffPost that the federation still considers so-called “chained CPI” to be part of the off-limits cuts to which Trumka was referring. A chained CPI inflation index would alter the way cost-of-living adjustments are made for Social Security recipients, slowing increases and reducing the benefits for seniors and the disabled. Many Democrats have shown an openness toward chained CPI, and the measure was included in President Barack Obama’s 2014 budget, where it was paired with extra money for the elderly and poor.

Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO’s policy director, told the Washington Post (10/17) that chained CPI was “the vampire of American politics,” saying that it “keeps being shot through the heart and it keeps reviving.” Silvers told the Post that the AFL-CIO also opposes a form of Medicare means testing in the president’s budget.

SANDERS NAMED TO BUDGET PANEL. A vocal defender of Social Security and Medicare, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was named to the 29-member conference committee to resolve differences between the Senate and House budget proposals and create a long-term budget plan by 12/13. “I am excited about being a member of the budget conference committee and I look forward to working with my Democratic and Republican colleagues to end the absurdity of sequestration and to develop a budget which works for all Americans. In my view, it is imperative that this new budget helps us create the millions of jobs we desperately need and does not balance the budget on the backs of working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor,” Sanders said in a news release.

“The Senate budget protects Medicare while the House version would end Medicare as we know it by providing coupons for private health insurance,” Sanders noted. “Unlike the House budget, the Senate resolution does not repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would prevent more than 20 mln Americans from getting health insurance. The House version would eliminate grants for up to 1 mln college students while the Senate plan protects Pell grants. The House version would kick up to 24 mln Americans off of Medicaid while the Senate budget would protect their benefits. The Senate budget calls for new revenue while the House version would provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks mainly for the wealthiest Americans and profitable corporations offset by increased taxes on the middle class.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) are chairs of their respective committees.

Don’t expect a quick resolution of those and other differences.

SEQUESTRATION CUT 1.2M JOBS. The $24 to $31 bln cost of the federal government shutdown that House Republicans forced from 10/1-16 is nothing compared with the $700 billion cost that the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimates the Republican “crisis-driven” fiscal policy has cost the US economy in the past four years.

While Republicans repeatedly charge, without substantiation, that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer, the report, done for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, found that the repeated manufacturing of partisan fiscal crises has created sufficient uncertainty to reduce growth since 2009 by as much as 0.3 percentage points annually — eliminating as many as 900,000 potential jobs. The austerity-driven cuts in federal discretionary spending caused by budget sequestration — the Republican “solution” to the 2011 debt crisis — reduced annual growth by 0.7 points since 2010 and raised unemployment by almost a full percentage point, or 1.2 mln lost jobs.

The report also examines two possible economic scenarios that could follow a Treasury default: a “brief” recessionary interlude that would see unemployment jump to 8.5%, costing 2.5 million jobs, and a longer, deeper, more volatile recession in which joblessness would rise to 8.9% and more than three million jobs would be lost.

JOBS REPORT SHOWS JOBS NEEDED, NOT THEATRICS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported (10/22) that the labor market gained 148,000 jobs in September, fewer than the average monthly gain of 185,000 jobs over the past year. The report does not include data on the government shutdown and its impact on the labor market market. The unemployment rate fell slightly, to 7.2%, but that does not include potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. It shows the number of jobs needed to restore pre-recession labor market health is still over 8 mln. “Clearly a return to a healthy labor market remains in the distant future,” said Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “Policymakers should focus on addressing our severe jobs crisis and not slow the recovery with political theatrics.”

CRUZ GAINS FROM GOV’T SHUTDOWN. Tea Party fans keep saying that Sen. “Ted” Cruz (R-Texas) is a smart fellow, though he didn’t show us much during his 21-hour talkathon and his understanding of arithmetic and democracy appears to be sketchy. His performance during the federal government shutdown show talents that run more toward “grifter.” When asked what he accomplished during the budget standoff, Cruz noted that more than 2 mln people signed a petition to defund Obamacare. That petition was run by the Senate Conservative Fund, a political PAC that supports Cruz. (65 mln Americans voted for Obama and his signature domestic program last year.) But while popular support for the Affordable Care Act grew and support for the Tea Party wing disintegrated during the shutdown, the publicity has endeared Cruz to the party’s right-wing base, as Cruz’s own PAC pulled in $797,000 during the third quarter, more than twice as much as he pulled in the previous quarter. Heritage Action, which has threatened conservatives who voted to reopen the government and extend the debt ceiling, raised $330,000. Asked who won those two weeks of shutdown, Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) told Politico it was “the people that managed to raise a lot of money off this.”

SCHWEITZER MULLS DEM PREZ RACE. Former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) suggested that he might run as a populist Democrat for president in 2016, even if Hillary Clinton also enters the race.

“I still hold the people of Iowa and New Hampshire in high regard,” Schweitzer told RealClearPolitics, alluding to the sites of the first presidential caucus and primary. “The people of Iowa are a whole lot like the people of Montana. And, of course, New Hampshire’s a lot like Montana. We don’t have a sales tax. ‘Live Free or Die’ — we understand that notion in Montana.”

Although Clinton is widely viewed as a lock for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Schweitzer recounted how President Barack Obama used a triumph in the 2008 Iowa caucus as a springboard to the White House.

“Who would’ve thunk Obama would come out of this thing when you had, my God, Dodd, Biden, Billy Richardson, Hillary Clinton,” Schweitzer told RCP. “So the nice thing about the people of Iowa is they ain’t going to let the rest of America make up their minds for them.” 

Schweitzer announced in July that he won’t run in 2014 for the seat being vacated by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

BIZ LOBBY BACKS AWAY FROM COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM. The Chamber of Commerce appears to have given up on the prospect of passing comprehensive immigration reform through the House, though Chamber President Tom Donohue thinks the House may pass “three or four things.” John Stanton noted at BuzzFeed.com (10/21) that Donohue is hopeful the House and Senate will “go to conference, [and] have the president sign” immigration reform quickly.

But David Weigel noted at Slate.com (10/21) that Government Affairs VP Bruce Josten was more tempered, saying that it is his “guess” that the House and Senate won’t turn to immigration in a serious way until they get past the next set of deadlines on spending and debt in February.

“Donohue’s sounding more amenable to the House conservatives’ approach to immigration reform, splitting up enforcement provisions (easily passed in the House) from legalization provisions (not as easily), not allowing a conference committee to merge the proposals,” Weigel wrote. “Josten is talking up the conference committee without making demands. The chamber isn’t nudging the GOP to do anything more than conservatives are asking. So much (again!) for a Tea Party-business split.”

SAILOR DESCRIBES OCEAN AS DEAD. The Newcastle Herald, of Australia, has a tragic, lyrical piece that follows a single route through the sea — from Melbourne to Osaka to San Francisco — through a sailor’s reminiscences of the way things have changed. It’s called, simply and heartbreakingly, “The Ocean is Broken.”

Just ten years ago, yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen told the Herald, “all he’d had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.” On his most recent trip, said Macfadyen, there were no fish to be found:

“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”

More horrifying, even, was what he did see, en route from Japan to California:

“In a lot of places we couldn’t start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That’s an unheard of situation, out in the ocean. ...

”On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn’t just on the surface, it’s all the way down. And it’s all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.

Hearing just how bad things have gotten from someone who’s witnessed it on such a personal level drives home the reality of the oceans’ decline in a way that numbers and reports aren’t always able to. For anyone who isn’t aware of just how “broken” the seas are — and it seems impossible that anyone truly could be — the piece is a must-read. (Lindsay Abrams, Salon.com, 10/21)

STATS: ‘OBAMACARE’ ISN’T CREATING PART-TIME ECONOMY. Politicians and media figures opposed to Obamacare regularly insist that the health law is creating a part-time economy. But independent analyses and monthly employment data reveal that claim to be false.

The monthly jobs report that was released on 10/22 found that the US economy had added 148,000 jobs in September and that the national unemployment rate fell to 7.2%. And as University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers pointed out on Twitter, the report also found that the economy has been adding full time employment while actually shedding part-time jobs.

In fact, full time employment rose by over 1.6 mln between September 2012 and September 2013. The number of people saying they worked a part-time job for economic reasons — such as part-time work being the only kind available — fell by nearly 700,000 in that same time period.

The hard numbers confirm earlier studies showing that very few employers have actually cut workers’ hours because of the health law. In fact, a September survey of chief financial officers found that American companies actually intend to increase their ranks of full-time workers by nearly two percent over the next 12 months, even as Obamcare’s mandate that large companies provide basic health benefits to their full-time employees goes into effect. (Sy Mukherjee, ThinkProgress, 10/22)

NEW VOTER ID LAW ALMOST BLOCKS TEXAS JUDGE FROM POLLS. A Texas district judge who has been voting for five decades was almost barred from the polls, thanks to the state’s newly implemented, stricter voter ID law. As she told KIII-TV News in Corpus Christi, Judge Sandra Watts was flagged for possible voter fraud because her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name, while her voter registration has her real name.

This was the first time she has ever had a problem voting in 49 years. “What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” she said.

Watts worried that women who use maiden names or hyphenated names may be surprised at the polls. “I don’t think most women know that this is going to create a problem,” the judge said. “That their maiden name is on their driver’s license, which was mandated in 1964 when I got married, and this. And so why would I want to use a provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last 49 years?”

Many married women do not update their IDs after taking their spouse’s surnames, as the process is arduous and costly, Aviva Shen noted at ThinkProgress.org (10/23). Women must present original documents verifying their name change, such as a marriage license, or pay $20 to obtain new copies. Under the new voter ID law, these women are potential voter fraud risks.

Watts is hardly the only woman who has encountered problems. Dorothy Card, 84, of Lufkin, Texas, was denied a voter ID three times even though she has voted for more than 60 years and provided extensive proof of identity. The problem apparently is that Angelina County officials can’t find her marriage license.

CNN POLL: OBAMACARE MORE POPULAR THAN GOP. A CNN poll demonstrates that Republicans really did shoot themselves in the foot with their government shutdown and debt ceiling brinksmanship. The survey found 54% said it’s a bad thing that the GOP controls the House, up 11 points since December 2012. Only 38% said it’s a good thing the GOP controls the House, a 13-point dive from the end of last year. The same poll found that while 41% say they favor the law, 12% said it was not liberal enough. That means that 53% either support Obamacare or say it’s not liberal enough.

TEXAS REP TO DISABLED VETS: EVERYBODY’S GOT TO SACRIFICE. When US Rep. Blake Farenthold (R) visited his hometown of Corpus Christi after the government shutdown was resolved, the NBC affiliate TV station, KRIS, asked him about the people who say he’s lost their vote; people like retired veterans who were on the verge of losing their disability checks next month.

He said the stalemate in Washington was necessary to achieve party goals.

“I feel like my mandate when I was elected was to go reduce the size of government, lower taxes, and increase freedom, and freedom isn’t free, and sometimes you have to make a small sacrifice to move forward with what you’re after,” Congressman Farenthold said.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2013