The fucktards at Liberty University are trying another attack on the ACA (Obamacare). Actually, this is an old case, but it is now going forward. The college has two problems with the healthcare reform law: employer mandate and birth control coverage. This is a scattershot approach to destroying legislation that they don’t like. But let’s look at this a little more closely.

Liberty University is the pretend college founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971. It was originally called “Lynchburg Baptist College” and slowly migrated to its current name. And that name is telling. Modern American Christianity has little to do with Christ and lots to do with conservative politics. Consider, for example, Patrick Henry College—you know, “Give me liberty or give me death”? These groups are big on the sort of liberty they think people wanted in the late 18th century: the liberty to force everyone to do as they say.

Kill the Pill

The attack on the birth control mandate in the ACA doesn’t make any sense. No employer will be paying for this. But it is the part of the law that is likely to get the most interests from Scalia and Alito. I have long said that if the right ever managed to outlaw abortion, they would next work on banning birth control. This is obvious now. As the conversion about abortion moves to whether rape victims ought to be allowed one, those on the leading edges of “liberty” are already calling for birth control bans.

The official line from Baptists is that they think birth control is fine as long as it prevents conception. Thus, they’re against using hormonal birth control: the pill. The problem here is that the pill works in two ways: it stops the egg from becoming fertilized and if it does get fertilized, it makes it harder for the egg to get implanted in the womb. There is no killing of fertilized eggs here. Basically, the pill works the way that condoms do. Having a problem with one but not the other shows a shocking lack of understanding of how the pill works.

Employer Mandate

The attack on the employer mandate shows the “good” Christians at Liberty University to be the hypocrites they are. It is one thing for Christian groups to claim that the government shouldn’t be in the “giving a shit about people” business because that’s their own gig. But a Christian college claiming that they don’t want to provide healthcare for their own employees?

I’m sure that the people at Liberty College would argue that they have no problem providing healthcare. They would say that they already do provide healthcare for most of their employees. It is just that the government shouldn’t dictate their behavior. But if that is the case, why the fuss? Does Liberty University really plan to keep their options open in the event of bad economic times? Do they really admit that God would do that to them? And even if He did, wouldn’t he expect them to do the right thing and continue to provide healthcare and close the budget gap some other way, like lowering the university president’s salary?

All of the complaints I’ve heard from conservative business owners sound very immature to me. “You’re not the boss of me!” And, “You can’t tell me what to do!” Coming from the likes of Papa John’s, this is about par for the course. But coming from supposed Christians? It’s just awful.

You all know how much I admire reasonable Republicans. Or at least, you know how much I would admire them if they existed. For the record: any Republican who is reasonable has already become a Democrat. The people like David Frum are not reasonable. This is very simple, people! “Not crazy” does not mean “reasonable.” Instead, “not crazy” means less— perhaps, “reasonable fascist.”

Ross Douthat is a supposed reasonable Republican. How do I know? He’s a Republican and he is sometimes on Up with Chris Hayes. But unlike Josh Barro, who often makes a lot of sense, Douthat just annoys me. In fact, what most annoys me is that he is a Catholic, yet doesn’t evidence much in terms of Christian compassion. Also, he doesn’t write nearly as well as Garry Wills.

Most recently, Douthat tells us about, Our Enemy, the Payroll Tax. It’s a bit weird, because he is making sense but in the cause of evil. He says we should turn Social Security into a plain old-fashioned tax.

Yes! We should do that! If we did that, we could get rid of the Social Security cap. The problem with the way it is now is that people think of it as an insurance program: the more you pay in, the more you get out. And this justifies billionaires paying in a pittance, because they will only get what they consider a pittance out. But if Social Security is just a tax like any other, there is no justification for this most regressive of taxes. In fact, we might even be able to make it a little progressive. But for the time, making Social Security a flat tax would be a huge improvement. (And that ought to give you some idea of how awful the system is today.)

Douthat isn’t for turning Social Security into a regular tax for this reason. He thinks that by making it a regular tax, Social Security will become just another social safety net program. And this will make it easier to cut or even destroy. (Do you see what I’m saying about Douthat’s Catholicism? Forcing the old into poverty just doesn’t strike me as Christ like.)

I think Douthat is completely misreading the situation. Social Security is not sacrosanct because people think of it as an insurance program. It is sacrosanct because it is used by the elderly, and the elderly vote. So this is a fight that I welcome. Let’s make Social Security and Medicare programs like any others. Let’s soak the rich (as much as we are soaking everyone else). And let’s have this fight. I’m certain the forces of evil (Douthat leading his modern Inquisition torturers) will lose.

Bring it on.

Will sent me to this:

A couple of weeks ago, my father asked me about a 60 Minutes segment in which some manufacturing executive complained that he couldn’t find skilled workers who knew trigonometry. My father didn’t know exactly what trigonometry was, but it seemed like some advanced math. So he was confused why a job that required advanced math only paid $12 per hour. I agreed with him. Really, if such works are in demand yet scarce, surely the solution is to raise the rate of pay.

I explained to my father—who is naive in many ways—that this was an old story. The executives should be honest and say, “We can’t find high skilled workers for low skilled pay.” The truth must be that they don’t really want to hire people—they just want to complain. The truth is that if they were truly desperate for workers, they would hire smart people and train them—like companies used to.

Last week, Adam Davidson wrote a very interesting article at the New York Times, Skills Don’t Pay the Bills. He talks about the fact that employers are lying about the “skill shortage.” This is embarrassing:

Note that Isbister doesn’t just pay poorly.[1] Of the qualified people he found, he fired 60% of them because he doesn’t abide strict work rules. What could that mean? State mandated breaks? Occupational safety? I don’t know, but it is clear that there are a lot more reasons to not work for Isbister than the poor pay. But I don’t want to make too big an issue of this. Eric Isbister is just a good example of the assholes who head America’s businesses.

Davidson notes a very damaging aspect of all this fake talk of a skills gap: it is creating a real skills gap. Young people who go to school to get these vaunted in-demand skills quickly learn that they are qualified to take jobs that pay no more than McDonald’s. And so they leave the profession for something that will pay their bills—or at least where they don’t have to deal with assholes like Eric Isbister. Currently, highly skilled manufacturing workers are old and will soon retire from jobs that pay reasonable salaries. Who will be around to take these jobs? Will these employers go the way of GenMet and lower their wages in the hope that that will draw the workers in?

[1] Given that Isbister is so cavalier about finding workers, I can see how he might think of himself as the mythical job creator. In his case, he clearly doesn’t care about maximizing the amount of product he can produce. He just staffs his factory with people he considers deserving. Of course, this makes him a very bad businessman. And that makes him very bad for job creation. If he just tried to maximize profits, he would employ more people. So Eric Isbister isn’t just an asshole, he’s also an idiot.

As I reported before, last weekend, I went to see Lincoln. It was a surprisingly good film. My only real problem with it is that the ending doesn’t particularly work. Or perhaps more accurately, the film goes on too long. It is, after all, about the passage of the 13th Amendment. (In fact, I thought that the title 13th would have been better than Lincoln.) The truth is that although Lincoln is very important in the film, the story is not specifically about him.

The character who most stands out is then Speaker of the House, Thaddeus Stevens. He is one of these men who pepper American history by being so far ahead of their times that they would be considered radical today. My favorite example is Thomas Paine—the atheistic socialist who is probably more important to the founding of this country than any other single man. Stevens was equally radical. Many of their beliefs would today be dismissed as non-starters—just as they were in his own time.

I’m inclined not to tell you too much about the man, because I think everyone should go out and see the movie. I don’t want to ruin any of the film’s twists and turns. But to give you some idea of the main, here is a bit from Wikipedia:

All that stuff about equality and justice would certainly put him well to the left of President Obama, just as it did so 150 years ago under President Lincoln.

Since his death, most portrayals of Stevens have not been kind. This is not just in things like D. W. Griffith’s racist visual screed The Birth of a Nation. Historians have generally portrayed him as kind of an arrogant asshole who wanted to stick it to the south. To a large extent, I can’t blame the man. When you are on the right side of one the greatest wrongs of your nation, I think a bit of arrogance is forgivable. And if I had been around at the time, I’m not sure I would ever have been able to forgive the south.

But I don’t know that much about him. I just got Hans L. Trefousse’s Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian. I’m very much looking forward to the book. Lincoln has always been kind of a disappointment as a hero. Although enlightened by the mores of his time, he was still a racist. His proposal to create a South American colony for former slaves still strikes me as vile. Just the same, I expect to find Stevens more of a mixed bag than Paine. While Paine never had the curse of power to soil his character, I’m afraid that Stevens did. But I’ve never expected perfection from my heroes.

Again: go see Lincoln; it will be good for your soul. The film has four intertwined stories that would all be worthy of their own books. The story of Thaddeus Stevens is but one.

Afterword

Here is Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens:

Earlier this week, Suzy Khimm (the only member of the WonkBlog staff to respond to my request for a WonkBlog twitter account) wrote, The Inconvenient Truth Facing Deficit Hawks. In it, she noted that for all of the squawking of the deficit hawks—”Any day now, bond interest rates will skyrocket!”—the bond markets themselves show no concern about government credit worthiness.

In addition, today, Paul Krugman wrote, Franc Thoughts on Bond Vigilantes. He goes further, noting that if bond prices did as the deficit hawks claim, it wouldn’t be bad for the economy at all:

He then goes on to talk about the fact that there is neither theory nor historical example that indicates anything else.

This brings to mind an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a while: owners can predict their futures. Rentiers—people who own for a living—know that inflation is bad for them. If they have loaned, say, $100,000 at 10% for 30 years, any rise in inflation is bad for profits. But for actual entrepreneurs, the future is unpredictable. High inflation? Low inflation? These are not primary concerns, if they are concerns at all.

So of these two groups, one has a very real incentive to try to control politics: the rentiers. So all of the deficit hawks running around talking about how inflation is just around the corner and how horrible this is going to be are just rentiers and their propagandists. We get into trouble when we assume that they speak for business interests broadly. They only speak for the least useful of the business interests—in fact, business interests that are often harmful. These are not the people who will bring us the next Big Thing, unless that Big Thing is another financial crisis.

On Monday, Bill O’Reilly went after some of the people who complained that his comments on the changing demographics of the country were racist. I don’t actually think that Bill O’Reilly is a racist. He’s just a dick—to everyone. He is an angry and hateful man who seems to be very sure that, against all evidence, he has a good bead on reality. But none of that really matters. What does matter is that he is wrong about his comments Monday.

He starts off his “Talking Points Memo” by supposedly defending Mitt Romney against those who are attacking him. I don’t particularly care. On the one hand, I don’t think Romney did a worse job running for president than anyone else; on the other, why should anyone care if some plutocrat gets his feelings hurt? But I do care that O’Reilly doesn’t have enough honesty in him to come out and say what’s really on his mind: he’s angry that people are calling him a racist. Before he gets to that, he trots out the standard conservative line about the election: Obama ran a great campaign. Yeah, that was it; it couldn’t have anything to do with ideology or policy.

Eventually, O’Reilly gets to the core of his argument: he isn’t racist, the world is. It isn’t that he claimed the poor were voting for Obama because the president was giving them gifts, it is that the president was giving the poor gifts and that’s why they voted for him. He then goes on to note that many of those making less than $30,000 per year, “Receive entitlements—food stamps, housing subsidies, that kind of thing.” And this is why they voted for Obama.

O’Reilly’s point is not that there’s anything wrong with this; he pointedly doesn’t say any such thing. But it is clear enough what he’s saying: the votes were bought explicitly. Sure, saying this kind of thing is offensive. But is it really any more offensive than the guy usually is? I don’t think so.

What really bugs me is that it is nonsense. People don’t vote this way. Despite what I’ve heard from conservatives privately over the years, everyone I know (and this includes a lot of low-information voters) takes the process of voting very seriously. I don’t know any “single issue” voters. And I certainly don’t know of any people who vote because of the hope of “gifts.” People vote for the candidate they think is best.

The poor do indeed vote for people who speak to their concerns. But these are also the concerns of everyone they know. Poor people don’t spend Christmas with the Romneys, unless they are working for them. And the poor understand what policies would be best for all of the people they know.

I can’t speak as well for the rich, since I don’t know them. I do, however, know quite a bit about their voting patterns. I know a lot about how politicians promise and deliver huge gifts to them. They most likely think that tax cuts for the rich are good for society, but then they most likely think that whatever is good for them is good for America.

The policies that help the poor are cheap. The policies that help the rich are expensive. Why is it that people like Bill O’Reilly focus on the policies that help the poor while rarely even admitting to the existence of policies that help the rich? I think I know the answer: conservatives hate the poor. And this is the problem they have going forward, because their policies of the last three decades have made a lot more of them.

We certainly should be trying to help underwater homeowners as a simple matter of fairness. We bailed out Wall Street billionaires, it seems a pretty minimal proposition to offer assistance to homeowners who bought into a bubble that all the top economists insisted did not exist.

—Dean Baker
Underwater Homeowners Cannot Explain the Weak Recovery

I was recently at the local CVS, and I saw the following sign on the bathroom door. It seemed very strange to me. Unless you read the fine print, this is very confusing. It certainly looks like CVS is offering to text you when the bathroom is available. What’s next? Those little buzzer devices they have at The Olive Garden? (By the way: don’t do business with them.)

For the record, CVS is actually offering to text you when a sale item is in the store. They still only provide old-fashioned bathroom queuing.

I am very fond of turkeys. They are nice animals. So I’m glad that President Obama pardoned not one but two turkeys yesterday. But this reminds a bit too much of Charlie Costello in Seven Psychopaths—the guy who will kill another human without a thought, but who dearly loves his Shih Tzu.

As I reported two weeks ago, President Obama has pardoned fewer people than any modern president. Out 1,041 cases that have come to his desk, he has found only 22 compelling enough for a pardon. When you consider just how much injustice is done in our so called justice system, the president’s lack of action is an outrage.

Let me list a few of the people via Propublica who President Obama didn’t feel as deserving of his attention as the turkeys Cobbler and Gobbler:

• A former brothel manager who helped the FBI bust a national prostitution ring.
• A retired sheriff who inadvertently helped a money launderer buy land.
• A young woman who mailed ecstasy tablets for a drug-dealing boyfriend, then worked with investigators to bring him down.

We’ve had three consecutive presidents who committed felony drug possession. All of them seem to think that the reasons they didn’t do any time in a federal prison is their moral rectitude, rather than dumb luck. These men should have have been grateful to society for the grace that they were shown. Instead, they show the arrogance of the entitled. Instead of “There but for the grace of God” it is “Of course God protected me.”

It is nice that yesterday, President Obama pardoned more than the requisite single turkey. But it doesn’t do a thing for the unfortunate humans rotting in jail because the president wants to look tough or something.

With Thanksgiving comes not one, but two Charlie Brown specials. As I was cooking in preparation for tomorrow’s thang, I watched them—mostly. The first one was the traditional A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. This is an interesting film because Lucy is not in it. As a result, it seems that Charlie Brown is meant to act the part of the asshole. He treats Snoopy and Woodstock as though they are slaves. And then, when everyone heads off to Grandma’s condo for dinner, the animals are left behind to fend for themselves. I was outraged. Really.

Snoopy has a turkey dinner all ready to go in his dog house, of course. But then, after all the animal slavery, something happened that bothered me even more. Snoopy serves Woodstock part of the bird and Woodstock eats it! I know this is technically not cannibalism, but it is close enough. This is supposed to be a children’s show. What is wrong with these people?!

The second Charlie Brown special was so much worse. I didn’t even make it to the first commercial. It is the first episode of This is America Charlie Brown: Mayflower Voyagers. It pissed me off right away. Here were Charlie Brown and Linus in their iconic modern dress. But the girls were all in period costume. Why? How the hell should I know?! One thing I do know: it was offensive for vaguely sexist reasons.

But the reason I turned away was that the show told the same lie that most people continue to believe: the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower to find religious freedom. I’m so inspired. Wait! I feel a song coming on:

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

And the crowd goes wild. Of course, this is total bullshit. The Pilgrims left England because the English were a bunch of intolerant assholes. They moved to Holland and got all kinds of tolerance. Too much tolerance! Their children were starting to behave is bizarre ways: being open minded and shit. They were hanging out in the hash bars. Okay. There were no hash bars, but if the Pilgrims were there today, that is exactly the kind of place their kids would be hanging out. So the Pilgrim elders thought, “What we really need is to find a place that is tolerant of us but of nobody else.” And if they could find such a place, there would be no one to get in the way of their occasional witch hunts.

The solution: America! Which is perfectly fine. I don’t particularly have a problem with people going off alone and doing their creepy shit. (Well, actually, I do; but I don’t think I can do much to stop it.) What does really bother me is when their bigoted offspring claim that they were all about freedom. Fuck that! The Pilgrims came to America to escape freedom. In large parts of America, we managed to move beyond their small minded beliefs.

Here’s the thing: I think it is good to hide unpleasant things from kids. If I were a parent, for example, I would wait until my kids were at least six before showing them Night of the Living Dead. (The remake, of course, because it is totally awesome!) But I don’t believe in lying to children. So fine, don’t teach second graders that the Pilgrims were a bunch of narrow minded assholes. But don’t teach them that they were some kind of noble freedom seekers. And if you do, expect that forty years later, you’re going to have listen to some disappointed old man rant on about why he couldn’t get through that Charlie Brown special.