I almost didn’t notice that it was new year’s eve today. Part of it is that I just don’t like the day. I never do anything for it. Under most circumstances, I won’t even stay up for it. But now I normally do because that’s when I do my birthday posts. Really: the new year has absolutely no relevance to anything. It is an entirely arbitrary dividing line between years. But whatever. I do have a bit of good news on this new year’s eve.

Maryland had the death penalty all the back to when it was a colony — in 1638, they hanged two men for piracy. Since that time, they’ve killed 312 people. Now that may sound like a lot, but actually, in that almost four centuries, the state has managed to kill off many fewer than Texas has killed since people started dancing in the street in 1976 because the Supreme Court allowed them to start legally killing people again. (Texas has killed 508 people in the last four decades.)

But last year, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed a law abolishing the the death penalty. As Huffington Post reported, O’Malley argued that “it wasn’t a deterrent for criminals, could end up being applied to innocent people, and was far more costly to the state than other punishments.” You know: the holy trinity — the reasons that all people would be against the death penalty if they approached the subject with their higher brains. But instead, most people approach it with their lowest brain: they just want to “get” the bad guys.

Let’s go over that list. First, people don’t kill as rational acts. They don’t think, “Now that I only have to spend the rest of my life in prison, I’m going to kill my wife!” People murder for two reasons: they either think they won’t get caught or they aren’t thinking at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that the death penalty reduces the homicide rate.

Second, innocent people get put to death all the time. If the death penalty really was effective at stopping murders from happening, maybe one could argue that innocent people being put to death was an acceptable price to pay. But since we can’t, we are killing these innocent people for no reason whatsoever. But hey, I guess as long as it isn’t happening to you or one of your loved ones, it doesn’t matter. And after all, you do get something from the death penalty: the great feeling that you are “getting” the bad guys.

Third, it is a hell of a lot more expensive to kill a murderer than to just let him rot in jail the rest of his life. It is this argument that gets the most bizarre response from death penalty advocates. Their response is always the same, “But it shouldn’t cost more!” According to them, after a “guilty” verdict, the judge should just pull out a gun and shoot the defendant in the the head. The fact that dozens of people have been proven innocent decades after conviction is just ignored. Nothing can get in the way of the wonderful feeling people get from legally murdering the bad guys.

In getting rid of the death penalty, Maryland had a bit of a problem. They had four people still sitting on death row. The state could still kill them because they were grandfathered in, so to speak — or so some claimed. So as his final act of governor, O’Malley commute their sentences to life without the possibility of parole. That is about the best news that you are going to get from me this year. And it is pretty good news too. I wonder when my home “liberal” state of California will ever outlaw this barbaric practice.

Paul Waldman wrote in interesting if maddening article article yesterday over at The Washington Post, The Substance and Politics of Obamacare, in One Citizen. It tells the story of Kentucky resident Amanda Mayhew who is thrilled with all the needed medical care she is receiving because of Obamacare. But she would give it all away if it would put an end to all the old people who are being killed by the death panels. It’s kind of sweet actually. Ms Mayhew is clearly a very caring person. In fact, she’s the kind of person that Americans flatter themselves as being: willing to put the needs of the less fortunate above their own.

The bad aspect of this is that her very decency is being used against her. She’s been lied to. There are no death panels. No one is deciding if old people deserve cancer treatment. This is just a scare story designed to malign the new healthcare law. Teens are told the story of The Hook to scare them away from making out in their cars and the Death Panel is told to the working poor to make them turn against a healthcare bill that is designed to help them.

Waldman blames politicians and hate radio hosts and Fox News for the problem of all the misinformation about Obamacare. But I don’t. They are just doing their jobs. They are the foot soldiers for their fascist leaders. My problem is with the mainstream media. All the right wing propaganda about a government takeover of healthcare and death panels never would have gotten a foothold in the mainstream consciousness if it hadn’t been for the local news and the big newspapers and the network news reporting it as, “The administration says that the government is not taking over the healthcare system and that there are no such things as death panels; the Republicans claim this is the end of quality healthcare in America and all people over the age of 65 will be forced to kill themselves; as objective reporters we have no way of saying what the truth is.”

Let’s not forget where the whole idea of the death panel came from. Sarah Palin, of course, came up with the name. But the concept came from Betsy McCaughey — the disingenuous health policy “analyst” who pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Clinton healthcare reform plan. And like James O’Keefe, it doesn’t matter how many times she lies and is shown to be totally wrong, the press just can’t manage to apply even the smallest amount of skepticism towards her. Because, you know: that wouldn’t be “objective!”

The best example of this came when McCaughey went on The Daily Show when she brings out a big binder containing the Obamacare law. And Stewart gets her moving from section to section until it is clear that what she’s claiming is nonsense. Nothing in the law says anything about death panels. It’s clearly just about end of life planning — living wills — and Stewart is absolutely right when he calls what McCaughey is doing hyperbolic and dangerous. Also check out the second part of the interview.

But as usual, the mainstream media didn’t do anything near as good as what the comedy show The Daily Show did. So as usual, the problem is our media that has no real interest in informing readers and viewers. Instead, it is a kind of talking point aggregator. And that’s why we can’t have decent governance. Our government is only as good as the media that covers it. And we don’t even have a media that covers the government. We have a media that repeats the government.

So we have poor Amanda Mayhew who would vote to eliminate Obamacare because of the all the old people she thinks the law will kill. “Liberal” Californians vote against GMO food labeling because they think it is going to harm the one remaining small family farm in the state. And Americans consistently vote for politicians who take money from them and give it to the rich because of some weird sense of fairness. And it is all due to a media system that will only take a stand on an issue when it helps the power elite.

Robert Samuelson is a truly vile person. He uses his prominent perch at The Washington Post to argue week after week that all of our problems come from the fact that we treat our elderly too well. He thinks Social Security pays too much, even though it pays out what it takes in and it is not nearly as generous as similar programs in other advanced economies. And then he complains about all the money we spend on Medicare, but isn’t at all concerned that the cost is so high because we pay twice as much for our healthcare as people in other advanced economies where the medical care is better. He just wants to harm the poorer people in our society and assure more and more money for the already rich. Like I said: he’s a vile guy.

On Christmas eve, he sunk to new lows, Repairing the Middle Class in 2015. The title itself is funny. As if Samuelson is in the least bit interested in helping the middle class. But the article itself is just one distortion after another. He claims that the American system is not rigged against the middle class but rather for the middle class. “That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.” No serious person could look out on the vast American political system and conclude that the votes really matter. A tiny investment of $8 million by Monsanto caused a hugely popular GMO food labeling bill in California to go down to a resounding defeat.

But when it comes to all that money that the middle class is getting from the government, Samuelson points to — Surprise! — Social Security and Medicare. Keven Drum calls him on this issue, The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow:

But Samuelson doesn’t leave it there. He goes on to complain that most of the taxes fall on the rich. Well I wonder why that might be! Median incomes have been stagnant for almost four decades. But he is further disingenuous by looking only at the federal government where taxes are most fair. As I showed last week when discussing the supposed Texas Miracle, state taxes are usually ridiculously regressive. But Samuelson doesn’t want to talk about that, because he isn’t interested in what the truth is about life for the poorer classes in the United States. He’s interested in pushing the interests of the oligarchs.

But if that weren’t bad enough, he then goes on to blame the financial crisis of bursting the house bubble on those evil poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford. He noted, “There is much evidence for [the cause of the financial crisis], but it ignores the deeper cause: an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” To begin with, those lax lending policies were not created to help the middle-class. They were created to help bankers make a lot of money. But his narrative is just outrageous. Oh, those poor bankers being pushed around by the intellectual, political, and social climate! Funny how when people are screaming for jobs, the business community is sitting on piles of cash, despite the intellectual, political, and social climate.

Samuelson ends his article by noting that the challenges for the middle class are only partly economic. It is also psychological. It seems we can’t really control the economic environment, but we can control ourselves. So let’s not do anything about the economy and let’s complain that the middle class just kind of sucks. Dean Baker called this for the nonsense that it is, Robert Samuelson Thinks That Because He Is Confused About the Economy, Everyone Else Is Also:

It’s also interesting that the government has done nothing to keep the minimum wage up with the rate of inflation — to say nothing of the rate of productivity growth. The government has done everything it could get away with to screw the poorer classes and lavish the rich with every possible benefit. But that’s what Robert Samuelson thinks it ought to do. I just wish he were more honest about it.

Michael Hiltzik offered up some potentially good news at the end of this year, Is Texas, the Biggest Domino, About to Topple on Medicaid Expansion? It seems that not all right wing freaks are created equal. With Rick Perry and his Super Glasses leaving office to pursue truth, justice and the American way, governor-elect Greg Abbot has indicated that he might be open to taking the Medicaid expansion in the form that Arkansas and Utah have pioneered. In it, instead of the working poor getting added to Medicaid, they are given money to buy insurance on the exchanges. It ain’t perfect, but it is a distinct improvement on the way things are.

It’s kind of the perfect way for Republicans to dip their toes into Obamacare. After all, they are already part of it. The citizens of Texas are already required to have health insurance. And they are already paying higher taxes for the new law. So they are getting everything bad from the law and relatively little good from it. They might as well get some of that money back that they are sending away. The way the law was designed, blue states (because they are generally richer) were subsidizing red states. But because Republicans have been so spiteful about Obamacare, it’s worked out that red states have been subsidizing blue states. This is not a state of affairs that can go on for long.

This kind of “block grant” approach to the Medicaid expansion is something that Republicans have long claimed to like. And this kind of deal is a great face saving maneuver that allows the Republicans to claim both that they made the evil president bend to their will and that they don’t just hate the working poor. (Even though they clearly do.) Now we will have to see if Texas goes along with this. It is still likely that the Texas legislature will be unable to get past their mean girl spite and do what is best. But this is good news regardless.

Hiltzik runs the numbers in his article and they are overwhelming. Texas has the highest level of uninsured residents with over 22%, when the average is around 13%. And with bad economic times coming to Texas, it will only get worse. A 2013 report found that by not taking the Medicaid expansion, the state was set to lose almost $8 billion and have extra costs of almost $400 million. That was for a two year period. What’s more, hospitals are getting hit hard. Each year, they do $17 billion in uncompensated work. The Medicaid expansion would take a big chunk out of that.

I spend a lot of time complaining that the Democratic Party is too much the party of big business. But what’s remarkable is that the business community is so wedded to the Republican Party when the party doesn’t look out for its interests at all. Its general incompetence hurts business growth but on the individual level, it doesn’t do anything for business except for its trademark crony capitalism.

But we have a perfect storm here in Texas. It is losing a huge amount of money. The hospitals are keen to see the extra money coming in. The state is looking at bad times ahead. And it has a perfect face saving excuse for signing up for the program now. Given the absolute joke that the Republican Party is — especially in Texas — we can’t say what will happen. But this is hopeful news. And if Texas accepts the Medicaid expansion, many other states are sure to follow.

Charlie Pierce made an interesting comparison over at his place at Esquire, Life And Cheerios Imitate The Newsroom. He started by noting the ridiculousness of Chuck Todd claiming that he has to allow Republicans (“politicians”) to lie on Meet the Press, because if he didn’t, they wouldn’t come on the show. It was a remarkable moment of honesty, although Todd does seem to think it is about “balance.”

I think it is typical of what I call “fake power” — the kind of power you only have as long as you don’t use it. The best recent example of this has been Speaker of the House John Boehner who has enormous power, but if he ever used that power to do what was right rather than just to do what his caucus wanted, he would find that he was out of a job. Similarly, Chuck Todd has the power to ask the “hard questions” only so long as he absolutely never asks the hard questions.

It reminds me of something else. You could watch the nightly news on ABC, NBC, and CBS. And you would never see anything different. It is a remarkable example of self-censorship. Either that or it just so happens that the major news outlets manage to get right to the heart of what is going on in the world. Of course, we know that isn’t the case. You can go back over the decades and see what the news sources were reporting in their amazing unanimity and see what was really going on. It’s just follow the leader.

Meanwhile, all the time I was growing up, I was told that the Soviet Union didn’t have a free press. Well, true enough. But that didn’t speak poorly of them so much as it speaks poorly of us for thinking that we do have a free press. It’s like what Noam Chomsky said in The Common Good, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

So good old Chuck Todd is there to play the part of a free journalist. And indeed, he isn’t being told what to say and not to say by the government. Oh no! He’s being told what to say and not to say by the “free” market! And that is better because… I’m not sure. No one has ever answered it because no one seems to even be aware that it is a question to be answered.

Pierce focused primarily on Reince Priebus’ recent hissyfit about not allowing any Republicans to come on MSNBC, after someone at the network had tweeted out, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.” MSNBC folded like a cheap ironing board, of course. And Pierce notes that if a Democrat had made a similar demand, he would have laughed out of polite company. But there is a difference I’m afraid: Democrats aren’t bigots. If half the electorate that votes Republican weren’t compelled to do so by their bigotry, Priebus wouldn’t have felt the need to demand an apology.

I don’t think there is an other side to this situation. Democrats — despite their many failings — actually believe in what they claim to believe in. It isn’t the case that half of the Democratic vote comes from closet communists. And even that would be more acceptable than the racist base of the Republican Party. So of course if the Democrats started acting like the Republicans, people would scoff. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a comment that would cut the party so deeply while also being true.

What’s wrong with our media system is that people like Chuck Todd don’t start interviews with Reince Priebus with questions like, “What is the Republican Party going to do when all its racist voters die off? Does the party have a plan to create new racist voters?” But that won’t happen. If it did, the Republicans wouldn’t come on Meet the Press, and people like Chuck Todd would have to do actual journalism. And I don’t think there are many people in the mainstream press that still know how that’s done.