This week’s Sift will have two featured articles. The first one, “The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela”, should be ready to post within the next hour or so. In that article, I use Mandela as an example of a phenomenon you can also see in Martin Luther King: We talk about great leaders “ascending” to a kind of secular sainthood. But often what happens is that the Saint archetype descends and wipes out any part of the a person’s reputation that doesn’t fit. In the public mind, the new saint becomes a generic wise man and nice guy, whose mantle can be claimed by anyone, including the people who fought against him in life. I argue instead for admiring Mandela as the person he was, rather than using his name to cover whatever each of us happens to think is good.
The second I hope to post around 10 or 11 Eastern time. It will be called “Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic”. In it, I call out the unpatriotic tactics conservatives are using to sabotage ObamaCare. There’s nothing wrong with opposing something the president and his party wants to do, and even trying to get it repealed via the usual legislative process. (I, for example, opposed the Iraq War and consistently voted for candidates who promised to end it.) But it’s a different thing entirely to work against a project that your country has taken on and try to make it fail. (I did not help the Iraqi resistance, interfere with the American war effort, or crow over the corpses of our troops. That would have been unpatriotic.)
The efforts Republicans are making to prevent Americans from learning about their rights under the law and to actively confuse Americans that the law could help have crossed that line. They aren’t just partisan, they’re unpatriotic. That needs to be said.
In the weekly summary, I’ll also discuss the improvements in HealthCare.gov, President Obama’s inequality speech, Christmas’ war of aggression against our other holidays, and a few other things, ending with the most minimal nativity scene ever.
The Distress of the Privileged got its 300,000th page view on Saturday. If you liked that post, check out my recent article “Political Empathy” in UU World. It isn’t exactly a sequel, but builds on some of the same ideas.
This week everybody was talking about Pope Francis
and neocons were wailing about not going to war with Iran
For about a decade, it’s been an article of faith among neocons that war with Iran is inevitable: The Iranian leadership is insane, you can’t negotiate with them, all they understand is force, and so on. Sooner or later they’re going to build an atomic bomb, so we’d better attack sooner rather than later. As recently as a week ago, John Bolton told us, “an Israeli military strike is the only way to avoid Tehran’s otherwise inevitable march to nuclear weapons.”
By and large, the people saying this are the same ones who sold us the Iraq War — Saddam was likewise insane and building nuclear weapons, we’d be welcomed as liberators and all that. So it’s a continuing mystery why they get major-media platforms from which to make “expert” predictions that never pan out in reality.
The recent interim nuclear deal President Obama worked out with Iran creates a real possibility that sane Americans might get what we want — Iran without nuclear weapons well into the future — without blowing up anything or killing anybody. This comes on the heels of a deal to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons, again without firing a shot. (Neocon Brett Stephens described this as “the administration … worming its way out of its own threat to use force to punish Syria’s Bashar Assad.”)
If that possibility becomes real, then the whole neocon worldview collapses, as it should have years ago, when it became clear that everything they had predicted about the Iraq War was false.
The result has been a lot of, well, squealing like stuck pigs. Neocons used their inexplicable media power not to dissect the agreement and find its flaws, but to shout “Munich!” and “Worse than Munich!” at the top of their lungs. I agree with Daniel Drezner’s assessment:
the Munich analogy has been degraded to the point where #worsethanMunich deserves it’s own Alanis Morisette song that permanently devalues the term.
Reading these articles will teach you virtually nothing about the content of the agreement or how it might yet go wrong. Instead, you’ll get a lot of polemic, a lot of bad historical analogies, and more in the endless neocon series of scary-but-divorced-from-reality predictions.
and everybody wondered whether healthcare.gov is fixed yet
The White House says it will work for more than 80% of users, that it can handle 800,000 users a day, and that it will continue to improve.
The important thing, though, is the back end: Does the data you enter get delivered accurately to the appropriate insurance company, who can then cover you? It’s going to be a while before we can assess that. Ezra Klein (who has been following this more closely than just about anybody) comments:
So there remain reason for concern. But here’s what’s indisputable: HealthCare.gov is improving, and fast. Or, to put it differently, HealthCare.gov will be fixed. In fact, for most people, it is probably fixed now, or will be fixed quite soon.
And if you’re wondering how the government is going to convince 20-somethings to sign up for ObamaCare, it isn’t. Their moms are going to do it.
Never fear, the true scum can always rise to the top: Derbyshire started his November 20 column talking about “12 Years a Slave” (which he admits he hasn’t seen), labeling it “abolition porn” and going on to argue that slavery wasn’t really as bad as all that.
Bang! He’s back on the national radar. ThinkProgress, Alternet, Rightwing Watch … nobody on the Left could resist such artful trolling. Congratulations, John. You made us look.
OK, it’s the holidays. You eat, you get depressed about gaining weight and sitting in front of the TV, so rather than go jogging you think: Why bother? I can’t possibly run far enough to burn off that second piece of pecan pie.
New research explains why you should bother. Exercise doesn’t just burn calories, it changes the way your body operates. A mere seven-day experiment showed a significant difference between over-eating-and-sedentary young men who did short-but-vigorous daily exercise and those who didn’t.
the volunteers who had exercised once a day, despite comparable energy surpluses, were not similarly afflicted. Their blood sugar control remained robust, and their fat cells exhibited far fewer of the potentially undesirable alterations in gene expression than among the sedentary men.
Many Quakers are pacifists, so they object to being drafted into combat roles or even (for a smaller number of them) paying taxes that fund wars. They deal with this moral conflict by agreeing to alternative non-combat service or “by making sure they don’t make enough money to incur tax liability.” In other words, they recognize that conscience has a price, and they willing pay that price.
Now along comes Hobby Lobby, demanding a consequence-free exemption to paying for birth control on the grounds that it violates their conscience. …
If the Green family’s conscience really forbids them from meeting their legal obligations under the Affordable Care Act, then they have the option to arrange their lives so as not to incur those obligations. They can choose not to run a two billion dollar corporation.
But if they’re not willing to make those sacrifices–if their ‘conscience’ only compels them so far as they can follow it for free–then they are not conscientious objectors.
And they and their fake conscience objection can get the hell off my lawn.
The most sinister aspect of NSA spying isn’t the crimes they might find, it’s the legal-but-embarrassing stuff that they can use to intimidate or discredit people they don’t like.
Is Pope Francis’ denunciation of “unfettered capitalism” new? or long-standing Catholic doctrine most Americans have ignored and forgotten? Either way, does it matter?
The church in recent American politics. In recent years the public face of the American church has been turned primarily towards sexual issues: abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. And so the bishops have become allies of the Republican Party; the American politician most publicly identified as Catholic has been Rick Santorum. American cardinals have denied communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians like John Kerry and Kathleen Sebelius, but when a Catholic conservative like Paul Ryan proposes slashing programs that help the poor, a letter of protest is deemed sufficient. (Cardinal Dolan, then president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, subsequently described Ryan as “a great public servant”.)
Liberal Catholic tradition. Unknown to much of the American public, though, the Catholic Church has a long history of liberal economic positions, going back at least to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.
I encountered this tradition myself in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II, when I went back and read his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens. In that encyclical, the Pope re-examined the relationship between capital and labor, and rejected a point of view he called economism (that workers are just another factor of production, like tools or raw materials, rather than divinely created beings with souls), which he saw underlying both capitalism and communism. He also assigned a secondary and functional role to the institution of private property: If a system of private property leads to a better society, fine, but it’s not an end in itself.
He then made a series of conciliatory statements. About gays:
When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.
And running through all of his statements was an awareness of the poor, those who have been cut off from the abundant produce of the planet God created to sustain all people.
So far, so good. But would he actually change anything?
Evangelii Gaudium. A week ago yesterday, the Vatican published an “apostolic exhortation” from Pope Francis. Apostolic exhortations are what the name implies: They’re meant to nudge people into action, not announce new doctrine.
Evangelii Gaudium (“the joy of the gospel”) is no different. Its purpose is to “encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality”. Most of the text has nothing to do with politics or economics; it ranges through subjects as diverse as how the faithful should motivate themselves and advice to priests on preparing good homilies.
[In a couple of subjects — abortion and women priests — he announces that there will be no new doctrine, though he does make this interesting and enigmatic statement:
The reservation of the priesthood to males … is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.
Time will tell whether that is a fig leaf for continued patriarchy or an indication that women could come to have more power in the Church, even if they aren’t serving mass.]
But a document encouraging Catholics to make their faith felt in the world has to say something about what, specifically, the world should be made to feel. And here he did not focus on sexual issues, but on economic ones.
Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully a part of society.
Each individual and every community. Not “the poor — that’s somebody else’s gig — I’m fighting against same-sex marriage”.
Catholic economics. Consistently through the years, Catholic economics has revolved around two ideas:
God created the world for everybody. Pope Francis is not staking out any new territory when he writes: “we must never forget that the planet belongs to all mankind and is meant for all mankind; the mere fact that some people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.”
God did not institute any particular economic system. Economic systems are human constructions, so they are not proper objects of veneration. God is not a capitalist, a communist, or anything else. So economic arrangements have to be justified in practical terms, by their results.
So even something as basic as private property or the freedom to buy and sell has only a functional justification. Protecting property or upholding economic freedom has no value in itself. Rather
The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good. … Sadly, even human rights can be used as a justification for an inordinate defense of individual rights or the rights of the richer peoples.
This position puts the Church fundamentally at odds with Rand-style (or Ryan-style) libertarianism, in which property rights and economic freedom are moral values, not just useful tricks for increasing production. In Randism, the produce of the world rightfully belongs to the people who own the world; if those who own nothing are to survive, they must appeal to the charity of the owners. The owners are the Makers, the poor are the Takers.
Francis observes this position with horror:
We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.
He calls on Catholics not just to give alms, but
to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor … We are not simply talking about ensuring nourishment or a “dignified sustenance” for all people, but also their “general temporal welfare and prosperity”. This means education, access to health care, and above all employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive labour that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives. A just wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common use. [quotes from Pope John XXIII]
This can’t happen without political action that leads to structural change. The market won’t do it.
We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.
A mind that worships the Market can only see God as dangerous.
[E]thics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement.
And a society that writes off the poor can never know peace or be safe from revolution.
Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. … When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear.
Is this new? No, this is Catholic economics as it has stood for more than a century, with roots going back even further. What’s new is a pope who seems willing to make this the center of his papacy. He has not changed any doctrine — at least not yet — but he has announced a new emphasis away from sex and towards economic justice. As he said in an interview shortly after taking office:
We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. … The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
But the Pope’s re-prioritization of doctrine is going to be a problem for a lot of American bishops. As Jesuit Priest Thomas Reese wrote:
the bishops as a conference have been embarrassingly silent on economic justice during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. … Many bishops fear that speaking loudly about economic issues would help Democrats and undermine their alliance with the Republican Party on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty. Some even think that the conference’s earlier letters, “Economic Justice for All” and “The Challenge of Peace,” were mistakes because they hurt their friends.
Conservative Catholic response. I recommend reading a thoughtful article by the conservative Catholic NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat observes that the shoe is now on the other foot: For years liberal Catholics have had a yes-but relationship with the Vatican, remaining faithful by their own lights while refusing to get in line with official pronouncements on sexual issues. Now it’s conservatives who want to pick and choose which doctrines they support:
for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.
He attempts to do so, resting his case primarily on the practical effects of capitalism’s increased production, but then concludes:
This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.
Let me state that conclusion more boldly: If capitalism is going to be justified by its practical ability to create prosperity even for the underclass, then that’s how it must be judged. You can’t talk about the wonders of increasing GDP in the abstract and then ignore the suffering of real people, or worse, blame them for their own suffering and label them as “takers” for wanting to share in the productivity of the planet God made for everyone.
Are you listening, Paul Ryan?
* They’ve been so successful at voicing their manufactured outrage that I need to explain this: Catholic institutions are not required to buy contraceptives for their employees or promote their use. The institutions in question are just required to provide health insurance (or pay a fine). Employees can use their health insurance for contraception if they decide to, just as they can use their wages to buy all sorts of things the Catholic Church disapproves of. The moral onus of choosing contraception (or not) falls on the employee, as it should.
As I have said at length elsewhere, construing this situation as some kind of moral issue for the employer is just passive aggression. They are hyper-extending the sensitivity of their consciences in order to control other people.
The Sift comes to you this week from Santa Fe rather than New Hampshire, which means everything will appear around two hours later than usual.
The featured article this week is about Pope Francis. I’ve been curious about Francis ever since his election, when he was saying all the right things about poverty and making symbolic gestures of humility. I am, in general, skeptical of such first impressions; I well remember the 1980s, when each new leader of the Soviet Union was rumored to have been a secret liberal for many years, and then turned out to be just another Brezhnev. But eventually Gorbachev really was different than the others, so maybe Francis could be different too.
On November 24, the Vatican published Francis’ first major work, Evangelii Gaudium, which caused Rush Limbaugh to denounce the “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.” So I decided to see what the fuss was about.
In this week’s summary post, the neocons are lamenting how President Obama is screwing up their marvelous plans for a war with Iran; everybody else is talking about whether HealthCare.gov is finally fixed; John Derbyshire manages to create a furor by explaining why slavery wasn’t really that bad; and a Quaker explains the difference between conscientious objection to the draft and the “conscience exemption” Hobby Lobby wants from ObamaCare.
This week everybody was talking about anniversaries
Tuesday was the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The NYT’s Disunion blog has been following the Civil War “as it happened” with a 150 year time lag. Its coverage of the Gettysburg Address emphasized how the speech’s meaning has changed through the decades.
At first, the world really did “little note nor long remember” what Lincoln said.
By the 1890s, however, when the Gettysburg Address finally entered America’s secular gospel, most people conveniently forgot what Lincoln actually attempted to convey in his brief remarks.
During that early-Jim-Crow era, the address was interpreted as a generically patriotic honoring of the war dead. The “new birth of freedom” was played down, and the speech was read at Blue/Gray veterans’ reunions commemorating the heroism of soldiers on both sides.
It would take several decades before the modern civil rights revolution compelled most white Americans to reacquaint themselves with the ideological aspects of the Civil War. In so doing, they would come to rediscover a speech that was first forgotten, then remembered and finally, a century after its delivery, understood.
Friday was the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. For many people in my generation, JFK’s assassination is the first news story we remember.
I was in second grade, and my grandfather had died just a few days before. The assassination happened on Friday. Sunday after church my family gathered at my grandparents’ house to discuss what my grandmother should do next. The grown-ups had their serious conversation in the kitchen, and they parked me in front of the TV in the living room, where I watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald.
When I ran back to the kitchen to tell people what had happened, no one believed me. I was confused, they explained. Oswald had killed Kennedy; no one had killed Oswald.
Culturally, the assassination marked the real beginning of “the Sixties”, a period of generational rebellion when all received wisdom had to be re-examined. For me personally, the lesson came through loud and clear that first weekend: You have to trust what you’ve seen with your own eyes, and not what your elders tell you.
a triumph. It contains nothing that any American, Israeli, or Arab skeptic could reasonably protest. Had George W. Bush negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic prowess, and rightly so.
It’s a six-month agreement in which western nations unfreeze some of Iran’s assets and Iran takes certain steps to make its uranium stockpile less threatening. During those six months, the nations hope to negotiate a permanent deal. If they don’t, the agreement expires. Kaplan says it’s
a first step. In a year’s time, it may be seen as a small step and a brief, naive step at that. But for now it’s a step rife with historic possibilities; it’s a step that should be taken with caution but also with hope and gusto.
Thursday the Democratic majority in the Senate finally did something about it: eliminated the filibuster on nominations other than the Supreme Court. After Senate Republicans blocked all three of President Obama’s nominees to the D. C. Court of Appeals on the grounds that they didn’t want that Court’s current balance between Republican and Democratic appointees to change, Democrats really had no choice. As Salon’s Brian Beutler explained:
It would be an act of political negligence, and of negligence to the constitution, for [Majority Leader Harry Reid] to allow the minority to nullify vacant seats on the judiciary, simply to deny the president his right to leave an ideological imprint on a court. The logical extension of the GOP position — that “there is no reason to upset the current makeup of the court” — is a semi-permanent suspension of all appellate and Supreme Court confirmations.
So rather than asking why Reid finally did what he’s been threatening for years now, the better question is: Why did Minority Leader Mitch McConnell push him over the edge? Republicans probably could have gotten away with continuing to nudge Obama’s nominees further to the right. (They’re already pretty moderate now. None represents a radical revisioning of the Constitution comparable to Bush nominees like Janice Rogers Brown.) But simply revoking Obama’s constitutional prerogative to appoint judges was an obvious slap in the face, just one step away from the Birther position that Obama isn’t really president. Obviously Democrats couldn’t let that stand; so why do it?
Beutler believes that the recent ObamaCare-rollout-related dip in the Democrats’ favorability has encouraged Republicans to believe that they’ll retake the Senate in 2014.
Getting Democratic fingerprints on the nuclear rule-change precedent, will provide Republicans the cover they’ll need to eliminate the filibuster altogether in January 2015.
Even if that turns out to be the case, the filibuster needs to go. It has become part of the larger conservative strategy of minority rule (outlined here), which has been undermining the foundation of the American republic. If Republicans gain short-term power by winning elections, so be it. In the long run, they are trying to hold back the tide, which they can only do by ruling from the minority with tactics like the filibuster.
Today, the political system changed its rules to work more smoothly in an age of sharply polarized parties. If American politics is to avoid collapsing into complete dysfunction in the years to come, more changes like this one will likely be needed.
Mitch McConnell’s response to the nuclear option showcased the new Republican style of argument: Every point ends “because ObamaCare”, no matter how stretched the connection might be. It’s like Cato’s “Carthage must be destroyed.”
McConnell argued against the nuclear option like this:
Let me be clear: The Democratic playbook of double standards, broken promises, and raw power is the same playbook that got us Obamacare.
We don’t want a repeat of what’s going on now with Obamacare. That bill, constructed as it is by the Senate, last-minute-ditch effort to get it across the finish line … let’s be mindful, Madam Speaker, of what happens when you put together a bill like Obamacare and the real consequences to millions of Americans right now, scared that they’re not going to even have health care insurance that they have today come January 1.
Speaking of minority rule, that’s what’s behind this crazy idea that is popular among conservatives, but flying below the radar of the general public: repealing the 17th Amendment, the one that lets the people elect senators rather than having them chosen by state legislatures, as they were until 1913.
Whether you want to repeal or just sandbag the 17th Amendment, the point is to gerrymander the Senate. The reason Republicans control the House isn’t because the voters want them to. (Democratic House candidates got 1.3 million more votes than Republicans in 2012.) It’s because Republican legislatures in many key states (like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) have drawn House districts to segregate Democrats into a few districts. Similarly, the districts of state legislators can be gerrymandered, which is probably how a blue state like Michigan can have large Republican majorities in its legislature.
So if the 17th Amendment were repealed, a gerrymandered legislature could pick the state’s senators. So long, Democratic senators like Carl Levin (re-elected in 2008 with 63% of the vote) and Debbie Stabenow (59% in 2012).
and George Zimmerman
I feel vaguely ashamed of my interest in the further adventures of George Zimmerman. The important issues are racial bias in the justice system (I outlined the evidence of it here) and laws that encourage citizens to shoot each other (Ohio‘s House just passed one Wednesday by a 62-27 vote), not what kind of guy Zimmerman is.
But here’s why I find Zimmerman’s run-ins with the law so hard to ignore: During the trial that acquitted him for killing Trayvon Martin, the right-wing and left-wing media painted two very different pictures of Zimmerman. Right-wingers presented Zimmerman as a public-spirited man who just wanted to keep his neighborhood safe. Left-wingers (like me) saw him as a violent man who went out looking for trouble and found it.
We were right.
Monday, police arrested Zimmerman in a domestic violence incident, the second such run-in (with two different women) since his acquittal. He has been charged with assault.
What’s striking are the two 911 calls, one by his girlfriend to get the police to come, and the other by Zimmerman after the police arrive but before he lets them into the house “because I want people to know the truth”. In his call, Zimmerman concocts a story in which a conversation about his girl friend’s pregnancy (which she denies) leads to her “going crazy” and destroying stuff. Why she wrecked her own stuff and then called the police on herself is unclear.
Ta-Nehisi Coates sarcastically comments: “It may well be true that, against all his strivings, trouble stalks George Zimmerman.” Coates then lists all the strange coincidences that hypothesis entails. The parallel with his claim that Martin attacked him is obvious. Also with the claim that Zimmerman’s ex-wife’s iPad got smashed in the September incident because she attacked him with it. (iPads are such popular weapons, after all.) And that her father’s glasses got broken because he threw them down before charging at Zimmerman. (“He knows how to play this game,” Zimmerman’s girlfriend told the 9-11 dispatcher Wednesday .)
Whatever happened with Trayvon Martin, Josh Marshall renders the clear verdict about Zimmerman’s character:
Zimmerman is a liar and a habitually violent and frequently out of control man who should never have been allowed to possess a gun.
Miniver Cheevy takes it one step further and compares liberal and conservative intuitions. The same pre-trial Zimmerman/Hannity interview that conservatives found so compelling gave him the creeps:
Watching that, to my eye, it’s obvious what kind of person Zimmerman is. I know that guy. He has no self-doubt. He could have done what I described and rationalized himself as being in the right, no sweat.
Conservatives, he writes, “are dead suckers” for that Oliver-North-style “earnest self-righteousness”.
Liberals have a deep-rooted skepticism about [earnestness], because we think that one needs self-doubt to check one’s self. … [C]onservatives are far too credulous about it, which makes them too supportive of the smug and self-righteous. And they never seem to learn.
and you also might be interested in
John Boehner tried to make a stunt out of his attempt to sign for ObamaCare. But then he succeeded. Probably got a good deal, too.
There’s a new world chess champion: 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen of Norway. His resemblance to Good Will Hunting is just a coincidence, despite the April Fool’s article a few years ago that claimed Matt Damon as Carlsen’s American cousin.
Magnus or Will?
The First Thanksgiving story is a little less heart-warming from the other side.
I get embarrassed whenever somebody posts a map of the states that haven’t accepted the federal government’s offer to expand Medicaid. Most of them are where you’d expect: in the South and the Great Plains. But there’s a little island of hostility to the working poor in the Northeast: Maine (where the legislature has passed Medicaid expansion, only to see the state’s Tea Party governor veto it) and my own state of New Hampshire.
New Hampshire got hit by the Tea Party sweep of 2010 worse than most states. For two years we had one of the most far-right legislatures in the country, with the power to override the governor’s veto on many occasions. Fortunately we reversed that in 2012, with Democrats regaining control of the House and getting the Republican Senate majority down to 13-11.
From a state’s point of view, this is free money. The federal government is committed to pay 100% of the cost for three years and 90% thereafter. By shrinking the number of uninsured people who show up in emergency rooms, Medicaid expansion lowers costs for both the state and its hospitals. By helping people stay out of bankruptcy — medical bills are among the primary causes of bankruptcy — the program benefits a state’s economy across the board.
And the primary beneficiaries are the working poor, people who ought to have everyone’s goodwill. We’re not talking about the stereotypic bums who want a free ride. Medicaid expansion applies mainly to people who make 100-133% of the federal poverty line: up to $30,675 for a family of four in 2012. In other words: households juggling several part-time minimum-wage jobs, and probably working harder under worse conditions than most of the rest of us.
Arkansas and West Virginia are enlightened enough to see the sense of Medicaid expansion. New Hampshire isn’t. The shame, the shame.
Sabadell is an old city in the Catalan region of Spain, not far from Barcelona. In the public square, a girl puts a coin in a hat to see what a frozen cellist will do. She gets a whole orchestra.
I’ve pointed to musical flash mob videos before. I find them wonderful and inspiring. They act out the old fairy-tale theme: If you start something, unexpected help may show up.
But as the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scene from Cabaret shows, that primal human power can work for either good or evil. Where does a generation of children first grasp the viral magic of the larger community: in the creation of beauty and wonder, or in the transmission of hatred and destruction? That’s one of those underlying cultural questions that determine a country’s political future.
You can’t compromise with people who aren’t working on the problem.
Compromise is great when it works, but it only works in a certain setting.
You can compromise with people who want to solve the same problem through different means. American households do this all the time. You can compromise with your spouse on what car to buy, because ultimately you both want to drive something. Similarly, the kids need a school, we have to live somewhere, we all want to eat something for dinner … so the details will work out somehow.
But without that sense of a common challenge, negotiations have nowhere to start. If I don’t think my drinking is a problem, if one of us wants children and the other is happy without them, if we disagree about whether monogamy is a good idea — those are the kinds of things marriages founder on, because without recognition of a common problem, you can’t both win.
The same thing is true in politics. Mainstream pundits never tire of writing pox-on-both-your-houses columns that praise bipartisanship and compromise, but compromise is impossible when only one side wants to solve the problem, or admits there’s a problem at all.
Historically, slavery was like that. Skillful politicians managed to work around the edges of the conflict and so delay the confrontation for almost a century, but ultimately Northern abolitionists thought slavery was a problem and Southern slaveowners didn’t, so there was nothing to talk about. One side or the other had to lose.
Once you recognize that pattern, the current stalemate in American politics makes sense. Because increasingly, the United States faces problems that Republicans either deny or would rather not solve.
1. Americans without health insurance. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, 47 million Americans had no health insurance, and perhaps has many as 30 million had “junk insurance” that would be useless in the face of a major illness. So if they got seriously ill, maybe as many as 1 out of every 4 Americans would have had to choose between not getting treatment and going bankrupt.
A Medicare-for-everybody system would have been the simplest way to solve that problem, but the conventional wisdom said that was too “socialist” for this country to swallow. So we wound up with ObamaCare, which isn’t a complete solution but will cut the numbers down considerably.
The Republican slogan about ObamaCare is “repeal and replace”. Since they took control of the House in 2011, Republicans have voted dozens times to repeal ObamaCare. But no Republican replacement plan has even come to a vote.
As for the repeal-and-then-we’ll-think-of-something option, remember that the Republicans had an alternative proposal to HillaryCare in the 90s. (That proposal is actually an ancestor of ObamaCare.) But as soon as they had disposed of the Democrats’ plan, they lost interest in any alternative. Expect the same thing this time, if Republicans ever succeed in repeal.
2. Climate change. Republicans don’t all agree on global warming. Some ignore the issue while others ridicule it. Some think it’s a conspiracy to establish global tyranny while others just think that all proposed actions are too expensive. But they all agree on this: Do nothing.
The exception that proves the rule is an NYT op-ed written by former EPA heads from past Republican administrations — back in the days when Republicans did occasionally try to solve problems. As you can see in the comments, they were quickly denounced as RINOs. So was Jon Huntsman, the only Republican presidential candidate to take climate change seriously.
3. Decaying infrastructure. The occasional bridge collapse makes headlines, but every day Americans face delays and disruptions caused by worn-out or obsolete infrastructure.
We sit in traffic. When it rains, we lose power. Our cars wear out faster. Our internet is slower. And as for new technologies like bullet trains, smart bridges, or smart grids — who do you think we are, China?
The current situation is perfect for dealing with this problem: Real interest rates are negative, people are unemployed, and inflation is low. So borrow money to invest in the upgrades we need to grow our economy, hire people to fix stuff, and pay back (in inflation-adjusted terms) less than you borrowed. What’s not to like?
President Obama has made repeated proposals along these lines. The most recent was full of plums Republicans should like, like lower corporate tax rates. Its price tag was far lower than the $134-$262 billion per year that a bipartisan commission estimated we need. Republicans panned it as “tax-and-spend”; they made no counter-proposal.
Instead, the Ryan budget calls for cuts in all forms of discretionary spending, including infrastructure. When it came time to fill in the details, House Republicans were unable to do it.
4. Undocumented immigrants. Something like 11-12 million undocumented immigrants are currently in the United States. The existence of such a large class of people off the grid creates a wide range of problems, from security to public health. (Someday there will be another major epidemic, and undocumented disease carriers will be afraid to show up at hospitals.) Most of all, undocumented workers can’t avail themselves of the protection of police or the courts, so employers can exploit them at will. That atmosphere of exploitation makes it harder for documented American workers to claim their rights.
Some Senate Republicans, to their credit, took this problem seriously enough to join Democrats in passing an immigration reform bill. That was five months ago. In the meantime, the Tea Party dominated House has done nothing, and has no plans to do anything. Not only won’t Speaker Boehner bring the Senate bill up for a vote, in the unlikely event that the House passes an immigration bill of its own, he says “Frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”
Once again, Boehner is not holding out for some alternate solution, so there is no deal he could be offered.
5. Gun violence. A Reddit subgroup is keeping a list of all incidents in which four or more people are shot. So far in 2013, it’s up to #320. So this year we’re averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of one mass shooting a day.
Sandy Hook was almost a year ago. At the time, it seemed inevitable that at least some changes would result. Maybe renewing the assault weapon ban that lapsed during the Bush administration. Maybe mandating smaller-capacity magazines, which would have saved lives at Sandy Hook and probably Tucson as well.
Maybe universal background checks for gun buyers, a policy that polls around 90%. (Huffington Post tried to find anything that would poll that high. Only ice cream met that standard. Kittens, apple pie … nothing else was as popular as universal background checks.)
What did we actually get out of Congress? Nothing. Even background checks died in a Republican Senate filibuster.
But maybe there’s a different Republican approach to limiting gun violence, one that ignores the gun-control approach that has worked so well in Australia. Nope. Nothing.
6. The shrinking middle class. The American middle class used to be the envy of the world. It didn’t just happen, it was the result of policies that started with the Homestead Act and really took off with the New Deal: minimum wage laws, protection for workers forming unions, a social safety net, anti-trust laws, and tax policies that limited the accumulation of wealth.
The result was that median family income roughly tracked productivity growth … until the end of the Carter administration, when a new consensus started forming around de-regulation and supply-side economics.
That consensus was cemented by the Reagan administration and Bill Clinton ratified it. So now we have a situation where the median household income is declining (down 6.6% since 2000), monopolies and monopsonies are increasing, and almost all the growth in the economy is being captured by the very rich.
You can’t even get Republicans to talk about this long-term problem, or to acknowledge that income inequality is a problem at all. Their proposed solutions to the economic problems they do recognize are to do more of what got us into this situation: lower taxes on the rich and on corporations, end the estate tax, more union busting, weaken the safety net, and so on.
Post-policy nihilism. Greg Sergeant and a few others have been referring to the current GOP mindset as “post-policy nihilism“. Making policy — having actual ideas and proposals about governing — is so old-fashioned. Just say no, propose nothing, and criticize the other party for refusing to compromise with you.
So the next time you read one of those both-sides-are-at-fault columns, ask yourself whether both sides have actual proposals. If one side does and the other doesn’t, then the two sides are not equally to blame. Before you can expect people to compromise with you, you have to tell them what you want.
That’s how it works in marriage. That’s how it works in government.
The blog seems to be under a spam attack, so I’ve been deleting comments by the shovelful. I apologize if any legitimate comments get deleted by mistake. [Hint: Make sure there are no mis-spellings in your first sentence. That’s a spam trait.]
The featured article this week will be “6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve”. It points out the fundamental flaw in the pox-on-both-your-houses columns that big-name pundits keep writing: Whatever you’re working on, you can usually compromise with people who want to solve the problem by other means, but you can’t compromise with people who aren’t interested in solving the problem at all. Increasingly — on healthcare, climate change, and a host of other issues — that’s what Democrats are up against.
The weekly summary will note the anniversaries of the Gettysburg Address and the JFK assassination, point to the interim deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program (it’s too soon to tell whether it will work), and also examine the invocation of the nuclear option in the Senate, the further adventures of George Zimmerman, Will Hunting’s victory in the chess championships, and my shame as a New Hampshirite about Medicaid expansion, ending with a moving musical flash mob in Spain.
Understanding today’s right-wing insurgency as a new phenomenon only weakens our attempts to defeat it. Grasping it instead as the product of a slow, steady evolution is our only hope of stopping the cycle before it repeats itself anew.
The discouraging thing wasn’t that conservatives were pushing bogus horror stories, or even that the mainstream media wasn’t debunking them. It’s that Democrats began wilting under the pressure, just like they did before the Iraq invasion or when the fraudulent ACORN-pimp-video came out.
It sucks to have to defend people too spineless to defend themselves, but here goes: The ObamaCare Panic.
and talking about journalists who ought to be fired
As I mentioned last week, Laura Logan of CBS’ 60 Minutes has apologized on-the-air for her Benghazi report on October 27. But it was content-free apology that made no attempt to undo the damage. I agree with Josh Marshall’s assessment:
In a narrow sense, Lara Logan did say she was “sorry.” But the entire 90 seconds was aimed at obfuscating what happened.
Logan said 60 Minutes had found out Thursday that they had been “misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report.”
Include him in their report? He was the report. And even in conceding that her team had been “misled”, Logan tiptoed around the real news, which is that it seems clear that Davies’ entire story was a fabrication. He wasn’t there. So none of the stuff he [claimed to have done] could have happened and he cannot have witnessed any of what he claimed to describe.
So if you’re a 60 Minutes viewer, you saw a full segment on Benghazi that re-ignited a bunch of Fox News talking points. (Fox certainly saw it that way, mentioning the report on 13 segments totaling 47 minutes.) Then two weeks later — after you and your buddies at work had plenty of time to hash that out over the water cooler — you saw 90 seconds at the end of the hour indicating that not everything in that segment was completely correct.
A lot of people have compared this episode to the Bush National Guard report that ended Dan Rather’s career at CBS and got a few other people fired. But Rather outraged conservatives, not liberals, so the cases are completely different.
Another person who should maybe retire early is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He landed in a kettle of hot water by pointing out last Monday that the Republican Iowa-caucus or South-Carolina-primary voters Chris Christie might need to impress are a little different than the New Jersey general electorate that gave him a landslide victory. Such folks are “not racist”, Cohen assures us, they’re just different from East-Coasters:
People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.
The problem here isn’t that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn’t actually racist, but “conventional” or “culturally conservative.” Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn’t racism, then there is no racism.
In deciding whether or not it’s time for Cohen to go, I hope the Post looks at the broader sweep of his columns. In addition to the column in question, here are the last month’s worth:
On November 4, Cohen discussed how watching 12 Years a Slave was an “unlearning” experience for him. Turns out, Gone With the Wind wasn’t a documentary and slavery was really bad! Who knew?
October 28, he connected the problems of HealthCare.gov to the administration’s “inept” and “incoherent” Syria policy (which appears to be getting rid of Assad’s chemical-weapon arsenal without war), the bugging of the German chancellor’s phone, and the souring of U.S.-Saudi relations, and concluded that President Obama’s may not be as competent as Cohen had thought. It took a whole column to say that, and if you can find any more content than I just put into one sentence, please tell me.
October 21, he realized (four months late) that maybe his original assessment that Edward Snowden “expose[d] programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever Googled anything” wasn’t quite right. Ah, the shifting winds of conventional wisdom!
That’s a month’s worth of work in one of the most prestigious jobs in American journalism. I’m reminded of a Rodney Dangerfield joke: When a woman wants to break up with him, Rodney asks her, “Is there someone else?” And she replies, “There must be.”
and 2016
I’m going to break my moratorium on 2016 speculation for The New Republic‘s “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren“. Noam Scheiber is making an analogy between Hillary Clinton’s front-runner status now and her similar position in the 2008 cycle. Then, a successful insurgency was possible because she was on the wrong side of the Iraq issue. Now she’s too aligned with the 1% and Wall Street, which makes her vulnerable to a challenge from somebody on the progressive side of that issue, like Elizabeth Warren.
I agree with Scheiber’s scenario this far:
I love Elizabeth Warren. If the gods let me appoint the president, she’d be high on my list.
Along with his continuation of Bush’s war on terror. Obama’s Wall-Street-friendly policies have been the most disappointing part of his presidency. No Democrat is chummier with Wall Street than the Clintons, and nobody is in a better position than Warren to press that issue.
A lot of Democratic women (especially older women) felt robbed when Hillary was denied the 2008 nomination by a man. If that happens again I think we’ll have a problem. So (as much as I also like Sherrod Brown) the 2016 not-Clinton Democrat ought to be a woman.
So yeah, there’s logic behind the Warren-excites-the-base-and-beats-Clinton scenario. But I’m not buying it for these reasons:
Obama barely beat Clinton in 2008. There’s no room for error.
Warren is not the campaigner Obama was. As good as her policies would be for the working class, her professorial style is not going to inspire WalMart Democrats.
Obama didn’t just rally the progressive base, he excited new voters among blacks, Hispanics, and the young. Clinton might be vulnerable among younger voters and the Occupy-types love Warren, but I don’t see Warren inheriting the non-ideological parts of the Obama coalition.
In 2008 Clinton was pinned down by her undeniable vote to authorize the Iraq invasion. But in the 2016 primaries she has lots of room to slide left on economic issues. Like Romney’s rightward slide in 2012, Clinton’s leftward shift won’t be entirely believable. But it should be enough to fend off a progressive challenge.
At some point in the cycle the press will be hungry for a Clinton-is-not-inevitable story, so somebody (maybe Warren) will be cast as the progressive savior. But I expect that boomlet to fade.
you also might be interested in …
The most insightful article I saw this week was Michael Kimmel’s “America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy” on Salon. He studies white supremacists and finds that they are literally disinherited: They are the “& Son” from the business that went under, or the would-have-been heir to the bankrupt family farm.
They wind up with a worldview full of contradictions: Pro-capitalist but anti-corporate, rabidly patriotic but “the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live.”
For ordinary white conservatives, class is a proxy for race. (“Welfare queens”, the “inner city poor” … we know who they are, right?) But among the white supremacists, race is a proxy for class. “Whites” are the people who actually make stuff (that the government collects and gives away to non-whites), not the bankers and lawyers and bureaucrats and intellectuals (even though most of those people are actually white).
So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. … But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.
Eventually I’ll probably write something about all the Weimar Republic stuff I’ve been reading lately, but for now I’ll just say that the parallels are striking. In Germany of the 1920s, the “rich Jew” and “Jewish banker” stereotypes channeled class resentment into anti-semitism. It wasn’t “real” Germans who were oppressing the working class, it was “Jews”.
Ever feel like you need an expert panel to determine what’s racist and what isn’t? The Daily Show assembled one.
Ted Cruz’s Dad turns out to be a minister who is way wackier than Jeremiah Wright. If Cruz runs for president, will he face the same kind of pressure to disassociate that President Obama did? Somehow I doubt it.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains why he now believes the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The parallels to President Obama are obvious, right down to attempts to expand health care. Let’s hope things turn out differently this time.
The revolving door keeps spinning: Ex-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner becomes president of a Wall Street buy-out firm. I have no reason to believe this is anything other than perfectly legal and above-board, i.e., no quid pro quo for favors granted. But how could the pipeline from Washington to Wall Street not be a corrupting influence?
Here’s what I like least about being a Democrat: Way too often, when the conservative media machine either exaggerates or completely invents an issue, our leaders — in the media, in Congress, and even the administration — wilt under the pressure. Rather than rather than defend good policy (or even defend reality sometimes), they start legitimizing the phony issue created by their enemies.
Remember when the Obama administration fired Shirley Sherrod? On the basis of yet another video doctored by conservative activists? Even Bill O’Reilly apologized for that one.
Just last spring, Democratic Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus proclaimed the IRS scandal an “outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust” while Senator Joe Manchin railed: “The actions of the IRS are unacceptable and un-American. … The president must immediately condemn this attack on our values, find those individuals in his administration who are responsible and fire them.”
So now we get to ObamaCare. The HealthCare.gov* web site has been a problem and first month sign-ups were below expectations. That has created an atmosphere of trouble around the program, which the conservative media exploited by drumming up a bunch of ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories. A lot of them have been fabricated from nothing, and most of the rest are exaggerations.
Small business. Sean Hannity devoted a whole show to “victims” of ObamaCare. A tiny amount of follow-up by Salon’s Eric Stern showed that none of Hannity’s guests were actually victimized.
First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and 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.
There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.
Fox’ Megyn Kelly did a similar segment on a car-wash-chain owner who claimed he sold his business because of ObamaCare. Stern again followed up. It turns out Kelly had asked for no information to verify the impact of ObamaCare on the business. Stern’s interview paints a more complete portrait: The guy had been thinking about selling out for several years, he didn’t like Obama anyway, and the prospect of figuring out how ObamaCare would affect his business gave him an aw-fuck-it moment. In short, not exactly a horror story.
Hannity claimed, “These are the stories that the media refuses to cover.” But in fact the stories that aren’t getting covered are the positive ones. TPM’s Josh Marshall is in the perfect position to cover ObamaCare’s effect on small business, because TPM is itself a 20-employee business. He sums up:
[A]t least on year one in New York State, Obamacare seems to basically be a wash for us in terms of premiums versus last year. However, it’s arguably saving us money since this will be the smallest year over year premium increase since we bought our first group policy back in 2005.
I’m sure Megyn Kelly will be featuring Josh on her show any day now.
Canceled policies. The whole point of ObamaCare was to solve two problems: Nearly 50 million Americans had no health insurance at all, and about another 30 million had bad insurance; they might be insured against a broken arm or something similarly minor and fixable, but their policies either
didn’t cover the health problems they were most likely to have (i.e., complications from pre-existing conditions)
or had benefit caps that made the policy useless in the face of a major health issue,
or the insurance company could cancel the policy if they had the audacity to get sick.
Judith Goss, 48, of Macomb, Mich., believed that the Cigna plan she obtained through her job at the Talbots retail chain was “some type of insurance that would cover something.” When the store she worked at closed in January 2011, she even paid $65 a month to keep the coverage through COBRA.
“I was aware that it wasn’t a great plan, but I wasn’t concerned because I wasn’t sick,” she says. But in July 2011 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at which point the policy’s annual limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization became a huge problem. Facing a $30,000 hospital bill, she delayed treatment. “Finally my surgeon said, ‘Judy, you can’t wait anymore.’ While I was waiting my tumor became larger. It was 3 centimeters when they found it and 9 centimeters when they took it out.”
That’s what you should picture when you hear about canceled policies. Replacing junk insurance with real insurance is part of the good news of ObamaCare.
Of course if you don’t get sick, you don’t notice that your insurance sucks. Such was the case of Dianne Barrette, a Florida woman CBS found whose inexpensive policy is being cancelled. Her story went viral, so Consumer Reports looked into it:
“She’s paying $650 a year to be uninsured,” Karen Pollitz, an insurance expert at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “I have to assume that she never really had to make much of a claim under this policy. She would have lost the house she’s sitting in if something serious had happened. I don’t know if she knows that.”
Yes, President Obama did say “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” in response to the liars who claimed that ObamaCare was a government takeover that would totally disrupt everyone’s health insurance. (Herman Cain, a cancer survivor whose coverage as a millionaire CEO would have been completely unaffected, claimed ObamaCare would have killed him.) Clearly Obama overlooked the possibility that you might like your junk insurance because you’re an effing idiot.
The media is also overlooking the possibility that when insurance companies say they have to cancel your plan and your new plan will cost more because of ObamaCare, they might be lying. TPM reports:
Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended.
Real ObamaCare “losers”. The exception are these folks, a couple found by Pro Publica. Because they were in a risk group cherry-picked by the insurance company to be people who never got sick, their premiums were lower than any policy for the general public can be. Since there’s no way to solve the overall health insurance problem while cherry-picking the healthy for special rates, they end up being ObamaCare “losers”.
Having insurance, even crappy insurance, in the individual market means we are almost by definition, healthy and relatively young. If we were not, we wouldn’t be able to get coverage of any kind in the non-group market. If our ACA-compliant replacement policy costs us more, it’s likely because we’re too affluent to qualify for subsidies.
It takes a remarkable degree of self-absorption and sense of self-entitlement to be healthy, young(ish) and affluent—and yet consider oneself a “loser.” It’s a label I reject out of shame (no matter how much the lazy, superficial MSM want to fixate on me and my “plight”) NOT because there’s anything shameful about being a loser; the shame is in thinking oneself a loser when one is actually fortunate.
Again, the positive cancelation stories aren’t getting covered. This week, one of my FaceBook friends posted his experience:
I got the notice yesterday from Anthem Blue Cross that my insurance isn’t ACA compatible and will be cancelled. I’m one of the million or so Californians to have their insurance cancelled.
If I do nothing, Anthem will automatically switch me to a comparable (slightly better) plan. The good news – it will cost $265/month LESS than the old plan! Woo-hoo! I think that the difference is because I no longer have to pay the higher HIPAA premium rate because of my pre-existing conditions. Thank you, Obamacare.
Wilting Democrats. If you believe that the major news properties are liberal, you might expect a lot of front-page stories debunking the ObamaCare panic stories. Guess again.
The so-called liberal media has piled on to the anti-ObamaCare memes promoted by Fox News, like a front-page NYT story comparing ObamaCare to Hurricane Katrina. The best response I found was this chart:
But what about Democratic politicians? Surely they are outraged at the unfair coverage and are jumping up and down to defend good policy and debunk BS.
You don’t know many Democratic politicians, do you?
The drumbeat of (largely bogus) negative media is having an effect on public opinion. President Obama’s approval rating is down to 39% in one poll. So of course the Democratic response is to deflect the short-term public ire by undermining the long-term viability of the program.
Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu’s bill to let individuals decide to keep their non-compliant plans is just slightly better, but Ezra Klein points out the problem
Put simply, the Landrieu bill solves one of Obamacare’s political problems at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem: Adverse selection. Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees. The most determined enrollees are, by and large, sicker and older. So the Web site’s problems are leading to a sicker, older risk pool. Landrieu’s bill will lead to a sicker, older risk pool.
And that means premiums will go up. Similarly, President Obama’s “fix” will let insurers keep offering non-compliant plans for another year. It’s hard to tell how many insurance companies will “uncancel” canceled plans or what this will do to the risk pool. But the general effect is also to address a short-term political problem by making the long-term policy problems worse.
The most annoying thing from my point of view is that this short-term-politics/long-term-policy tradeoff probably won’t even work. It never does. Instead, it will just add to the vague public sense that ObamaCare is a bad law, rather than the huge improvement on the status quo that it is.
I’m with Chris Hayes on this one: The only way out is through. For the Democrats, the best thing to do politically is to do the best thing policy-wise. Going wobbly on ObamaCare is not going to get you any conservative votes in the next election. What’s going to get votes for all Democrats is to make this thing work.
After all, Democrats in Congress, you’ve gone squishy before in the face of short-term bad publicity. Iraq. Torture. ACORN. How has that worked out for you?
* By the way, I finally decided to try out HealthCare.gov Saturday morning, and it worked way better than press reports had led me to believe. The response time was good. Without creating an account, I was quickly able to see sample plans and rates in my area. It was easy to create an account and input information about myself and my wife.
I stopped short of applying for insurance, because we like the insurance we get through my wife’s job. (And like the man said, we can keep it.) So I can’t vouch for the end-to-end process, which apparently was still having problems as of Friday. But if you need or want health insurance and the horror stories have been keeping you from trying to get it, you should definitely make an attempt and see what happens. Probably, you’ll at worst get to a point where you’re one click from success. And then at some point the back end will be fixed and you can go do that click.
This was a depressing week to be a liberal, because the party that is supposed to represent us went completely AWOL. I’m talking about Democrats from my own Senator Jean Shaheen to President Obama himself getting panicked by the barrage of largely bogus ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories and putting forward “fixes” that undermine the overall policy. In the House, 39 Democrats even voted for a Republican plan to sabotage the risk pool.
In this week’s featured article, “The ObamaCare Panic”, I’ll draw the parallel to other times when Democrats have run for cover rather than defend their ground (or even just wait to see if the media hype is true): authorizing the Iraq invasion, firing Shirley Sherrod, piling on to the “IRS scandal”, defunding ACORN, and so on. Nobody looks back on those moments proudly, and they won’t this time either.
The weekly summary will cover the CBS-Benghazi and Richard Cohen gag-at-mixed-race-families controversies, the speculation about Elizabeth Warren as a challenger to Hillary Clinton, an up-close look at what makes white supremacism attractive (and who it attracts), The Daily Show‘s racist-or-not-racist panel, and a few other things.
I’m hoping to get the ObamaCare article out by 10.
The Weekly Sift 