Daily Archives: 11 Dec 2012

How to Shit on the Little People

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Sarah KliffSarah Kliff at WonkBlog reported yesterday, White House to States: on Medicaid Expansion, It’s All or Nothing. This hasn’t been well reported, even though it is kind of interesting. But I suspect this is because it is yet more data showing that Republicans are all basically dicks.

As you probably have heard, many governors have decided that they are not going to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Currently, all the states support everyone under a certain level of income. To get the states to do this the federal government pays about 65% of the cost. Now, the federal government is offering to pay 100% of the cost of covering everyone making up to 133% of the poverty line—for at least 3 years. There are two ways to look at why these governors are passing up this incredible deal. Maybe they really do worry about long term liabilities. But this seems unlikely. The governors could always pull out latter if the program becomes too onerous. I’m inclined to think that they are just being spiteful.

But that doesn’t mean that these governors aren’t salivating at the money Obama is dangling in front of them. So quietly they were asking if the government might be willing to meet them halfway: pay 100% of their Medicaid coverage while they only cover the people they’re already covering. It is surprising that anyone thought that the Obama administration would go for that deal. For one thing, going forward, this would put much less pressure on the states to join the Obamacare program in full. But much more important: this would simply be giving the states money for not doing what the federal government wants. It would also be a horrible signal to the states that are embracing the program. Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services came back with an answer: hell no!

The political posturing of the Republicans on this issue is evil. They are making their constituents suffer for the sake of making a political statement. What’s more: no one cares. Everyone knows that in five or ten or twenty years, every state will be fully vested in Obamacare. So all these Republican governors are doing is showing that they are small minded. I wonder if they plan to look back on their careers and think, “I really sent a message to that bastard Obama, and all I had to do was shit all over the little people!”

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Boehner’s Gerrymandered “Mandate”

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John NicholsJohn Nichols over at The Nation explains, John Boehner Has No Mandate. This comes from the fact that Boehner is on his whining tour, complaining to Fox News that the White House, “must have forgotten Republicans continue to hold a majority in the House.” I’m very sympathetic to that line of argument. Boehner shouldn’t roll over just because Obama won re-election by a large margin. Instead, he should roll over because he has no leverage.

But Nichols point is that Boehner is only Speaker of the House because of the ridiculous level of gerrymandering done when the the Republicans were allowed to take over legislatures in so many states. The numbers are striking. When the Democrats took back the House in 2006 with a smaller seat advantage than the Republicans now have (233-202), they won the popular vote by 6.4 million. This was a win of 7.9 percentage points. This year, the Republicans kept a 234-201 seat advantage in the House. But they lost the popular vote by 1.2 million. This is 1.0 percentage points.

Thus, Boehner doesn’t have a mandate. Instead, the United States has a broken system of government.

Afterword

Want to know all about gerrymandering in a most enjoyable way? The great CGP Grey:

I like that weasel!

With Gun Rights Go Responsibilities

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No NRAI used to live in Portland, and I remember the Clackamas Town Center being the most festive shopping mall I had ever visited. It had a ice rink where I saw Tonya Harding practice—a big attraction in the early 1990s. So I was shocked to read that there was a shooting rampage at the mall this afternoon. Shocked because it hit uncomfortably close to home, not because I was shocked about yet another mass shooting in our vast bastion of gun owners’ rights. There is, after all, a mass shooting here every five days.

I know: crazy people do crazy things; evil people do evil things; stupid people do stupid things. But it is interesting that this shooting happened on the very day that, “The Seventh Circuit overturned Illinois’ law forbidding concealed-carry of handguns—the last remaining law in the whole country against concealed carry.” Now I know what many of you are thinking, “But these permits are only given out to responsible adults!” My tendency is to say that you ought to tell that to Trayvon Martin, and leave it at that. But for me, it is a little more personal.

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are what I would call gun fanatics. They broadly fall into two categories (although there is overlap): hunters and paranoids. I don’t too much dig on hunting, but whatever; some people need more to be content than a fine English translation of Don Quixote; I understand. But the paranoids? They’re dangerous. They really think that their guns are going to keep them safe and they are eager to find (or force) a situation in which they can prove it. Add to this the very common spice of libertarianism, and you end up bitter enders who think they are the last line of freedom from the coming Brown Shirts. I actually share some of their concerns, but given that they think the socialist hellscape has already arrived, I don’t have much faith in their judgement. And that is the primary issue.

If you weed out those people who truly need a gun for their jobs (I’m being liberal here), what you are left with is mostly a bunch of my paranoid friends with concealed carry permits. You know: people like George Zimmerman. Mostly, these people are a bigger threat to themselves than they are to anyone else. But that isn’t the critical issue. I’m all for allowing people to make their own mistakes that harm themselves. But I’m not for allowing their paranoia and negligence to harm 7-year-old boys—for one almost random example.

So I’m willing to grant everything: people shouldn’t be stupid; or evil; or crazy. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.[1] I grant you everything. But clearly there is a problem. If we should keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this. If we should keep guns out of the hands of evil people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this. If we should keep guns out of the hands of stupid people, there are things we could do. But the NRA opposes this.

As long as gun owners continue to support the wackjob National Rifle Association, then nothing will be done. As long as the media refuse to honestly engage this issue, things will get worse. As long as gun owners refuse to admit there is a problem, people will continue to die unnecessarily. I grant you everything but this: you are culpable.

Afterword

I do understand the philosophy of the NRA. I even agree with it. But it is an extremist philosophy. It is only a small group that should constantly be pushing the envelope of acceptable law. When a group as big as the NRA is this extreme, we get bad policy. And hey, we have bad policy. The NRA members can change this because they are much more reasonable than the group itself. If you are a member, ask yourself: do I know what the NRA is doing with the money I send it. It may well shock you.

[1] Frankly, guns don’t kill people; bullets kill people; I don’t really have a problem with guns; it’s the bullets that are a menace.

The Case for Cliff Diving

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Fiscal CliffNoam Scheiber over at The New Republic makes the case, To Save His Second Term, Obama Must Go Over the Fiscal Cliff. He counters the standard thinking that while it may be tactically smart to go over the Fiscal Cliff, it is bad strategy. He quotes a number of people who argue that if Obama wins this fight, he will so anger the Republicans that he won’t be able to get anything done for the next two years. Scheiber calls this for the nonsense that it is.

Anyone who reads me with any regularity know that I don’t buy any of this talk about honor among politicians. In fact, I’ve been defending the Republicans for their intransigence. Politics is about getting power to enact the policies that you favor. That’s why there are two political parties: because they disagree. That’s why we work to win elections. Bipartisanship doesn’t make any sense as an end in itself. It only works when each side thinks the trade offs are worth while. We could have a deal where the top tax rate goes up to 99% and we end Medicare and Social Security. That would be bipartisan: both parties would hate it. But both sides would be giving up something that’s important to them! So it must be good, right?

Scheiber says there are currently two kinds of Republicans in Congress: “moderately delusional and the utterly, irreconcilably delusional.” The moderately delusional are those who understand that the tax fight cannot be won. The irreconcilably delusional are the ones who think that with a stiff upper lib and a song in your heart, all things are possible. They aren’t. But as Scheiber notes, even the moderately delusional crowd is wrong: why would Obama take a 37% top tax bracket when he automatically gets a 39.6% top tax bracket by doing nothing at all?

This isn’t the argument that Scheiber is making, however. He just brings this up to show who Obama is dealing with. He notes that as during the debt limit negotiations, the Republicans really believe that America is on there side in this fight. (The polls? Why would Republicans listen to polls are this point?) They need an object lesson. On 1 January they will get that lesson. During the first day or two of the new year, Republicans all over the nation will have an epiphany, “Now that the top tax rate is 39.6%, I see why I couldn’t stop it!” Some people are slow. Right now, they are the little party that couldn’t. Next year, they’ll be the little party that finally sees that it couldn’t.

Scheiber puts it more prosaically, but doubtlessly more clearly:

But the real key here is the political upshot of going over the cliff: Republicans will see in defeat that it’s not Obama who has somehow pulled one over on their leadership or simply played his hand better. Instead, they will see that they have been completely repudiated by the public in a way that even the election didn’t impress on them. It will, in other words, be as close as you get in politics to a total victory for one side. It will highlight the perils of following one’s base too slavishly, a lesson that will come in handy not just on future fiscal policy fights (there will in all likelihood still be a debt ceiling to raise next year), but, one can imagine, also on an issue like immigration. Which is to say, it’s only by forcing the GOP off the cliff that Obama will find the space he needs to govern.

As I’ve written before, this is what comes from the Republican winner-take-all approach to governance. In 2011, they chose not to take Obama’s generous (sell-out) deal to the Republicans, and bet on his defeat in 2012. They lost that bet. And when the top margin tax rate is back up to 39.6%, this will all come suddenly into focus.

Another Modest Proposal from Jonathan Chait

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A Modest ProposalThose Very Serious white guy business reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen over at Politico report on the breaking news that CEOs are whining about the lack of certainty in the market. I discovered the article through Jonathan Chait where he attacked the insularity that allows reporters to think that what is good for GM (“the CEO class”) is good for America. But I found I was even more annoyed with Chait than I was with VandeHei and Allen.

Chait seems to have a problem with the way these reporters and CEOs talk about policy, not the policy itself. For example, his whole article sounds very much like this:

Moynihan claims that more free trade is good, and I am in total agreement. But we should remember that these things might be disruptive to workers. And he claims that we need to reform entitlements. No argument here: gut those mother fuckers! But let’s not forget that many people don’t see the wisdom of doing this. And all these great men agree that the best way to help the poor is to allow them to sell their babies as food for the rich—human baby is a nice sweet meat! And I think this a fairly sensible as policy.

Luckily, Matt Yglesias saves us in a short article, Dear CEOs: Please Stop Whining About Uncertainty. He says what should be obvious to everyone, especially CEOs: life is uncertainty. If business wasn’t uncertain, it would be easy to make money. And if it were easy to make money, why the hell are corporations paying these fucktards so much?

Look. Uncertainty is an intrinsic feature of reality. Business executives do not currently know what fiscal or regulatory policy will look like in 2017 and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to alter this fact. Executives in 1952 did not know what 1957 would look like and executives in 1992 did not know what 1997 would look like… [I]n the real world it’s hard to get rich because certainty doesn’t exist. There’s no certainty about domestic public policy, there’s no certainty about foreign crises, there’s no certainty about technologic trends, there’s no certainty about consumer tastes, there’s no certainty about anything. Life is hard.

I would disagree on only one thing: selling babies for food. That’s a fucking slam dunk!

Update (11 December 2012 4:12 pm)

Charles Pierce at Esquire has a very good—and funny—take down of the original article. He particularly has a problem with the people who are quoted by VandeHei and Allen, “Brian Moynihan? The modern poster child for Deposition Alzheimer’s? Put a Bible under his hand and Moynihan won’t remember his own name, but put a couple of credulous fools in front of him and he’s suddenly got all the answers.” But he ends the article very seriously:

Clearly, a deal on the economy is being cut with the minimal amount of input from the people on whom the weight of the deal will fall most heavily. Sacrifice is being parceled out by people who will feel none of it. And elite journalism is presenting this iniquitous arrangement from the point of view of the grifters and thieves who will profit most from it. This piece is not about the current economic stalemate. It’s about two Beltway foofs showing the red on their asses by demonstrating that they can get important people on the phone. This isn’t economics. This isn’t even really journalism. This is a brief in support of oligarchy. It is public financial star-fking.

And that is the big problem. That is always the big problem. The poor are never consulted. The middle class is rarely consulted. But you can bet your ass that Obama is hanging on every word that fucktards like Brian Moyniham and Jamie Dimon spout.

Movie Torture

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Zero Dark ThirtyThere is a bit of buzz about the upcoming blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty. It is already getting rave reviews, which goes to the heart of my problem with film “critics”: they aren’t critics, they are ombudsmen. But it is a big mistake to listen to them. They tend to be too pretentious for most moviegoers and too stupid for real movie fans. This movie is the newest from the team that brought you The Hurt Locker. And it looks to be the same kind of film: brilliantly constructed and morally abhorrent. I have no intention of seeing it, but I don’t doubt that it is great filmmaking.

Although the film is not yet released, it is getting attention because of its depiction of torture as being instrumental in the hunt for bin Laden. Glenn Greenwald takes the writer and director to task on this point. He notes that the director,Kathryn Bigelow, has been going around the country saying that they took “almost a journalistic approach to film.” But when presented with the fact that numerous sources have claimed that torture played no role in finding bin Laden, she hides under claims of artistic license, “It’s a movie, not a documentary.”

It is all a mush and this is one of many reasons to hate movies “based on a true story.” You are either telling the truth or you are making up a story. If you’re going to introduce torture that wasn’t part of the true story, then you are creating fiction. Worse actually, because the truth that is in your film implies that the fictions are just as true. But Bigelow continues to play both sides by claiming she is depicting, not advocating. But as Greenwald notes, saying that torture was critical to doing the only thing that most Americans feel really good about, is the same as endorsing torture. In fact, he compares Bigelow to Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl:

But, says Bigelow, that is not her responsibility: she is merely depicting, not advocating. Without comparing the crimes involved, that was always the controversy surrounding German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, widely hailed as one of the most brilliant and innovative filmmakers of the 20th Century, yet also widely despised for producing films that glorified Nazism and excluded all of its crimes. One of her principal defenses—I was simply showing what was taking place, not judging—has been rather vehemently rejected by most commentators, because it (at best) naively ignores the obvious effects of what she produced, and because she had a responsibility to judge those crimes.

One of the things that has bothered me for the last 11 years is our cultural acceptance of torture. I know that we have always tortured. But we were publicly against it. In films, torturing was almost what defined a villain. James Bond was tortured; he was never the torturer. And then came 9/11 and Dick Cheney’s “dark side” and 24. And now Zero Dark Thirty: torture got bin Laden! Torture is great!