Jonathan Chait wrote an excellent article this morning, Springtime for Obamacare. In it, he goes through a number of arguments that conservatives have made about Obamacare and discusses how recent events have refuted them. I recommend reading the whole article, especially because I’m only going to talk about one small aspect of it.

He used a quote by Tennessee Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield to make a general point. Campfield recently argued that Obamacare is like the Holocaust, because it was the government deciding who lives and who dies. It’s actually a hoot if you brush aside the fact that it was said by a man with a lot of political power. I mean, you need extremely twisted logic to come to that conclusion. You have to assume, for example, that providing more healthcare will actually kill people because it will make the care so much worse. But I suspect that Campfield also thinks that huge numbers of the “right” kind of people don’t have health insurance because they’ve been priced out of the market by the government’s paying for the “wrong” kind of people.

Chait’s point is that wackos like Campfield are actually in an easier position because they make no factual claims to be refuted. After all, they aren’t saying that Obamacare will lead to death. They are simply claiming that the very idea of Obamacare is deciding who lives and dies. No proof needed. But here’s the thing: those who present actual claims and those who do not are against Obamacare for the same reason. They just don’t want the old system changed.

This fact is clear enough in one of the standard arguments against Obamacare: “Health insurance doesn’t make you healthy.” This was a big deal last year when a small study out of Oregon didn’t find health improvements in a couple of categories for people who had health insurance. Of course, since then, a much larger study out of Massachusetts has found that increased health insurance coverage actually saves lives. So that argument ought to be gone, but of course it will continue on because facts don’t seem to matter in these cases.

What’s interesting about this argument is the subtext. It argues that health insurance is not useful. And if its not useful, it isn’t worth helping people get it. That’s what I’ve always said about the conservative position on healthcare reform: they don’t want to do anything. Obamacare is based upon a private market system developed by the Heritage Foundation. But it was never meant to be law; it was mean simply as protection against something like a single-payer system. This is actually a concept that Chait himself pioneered, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle (HUP): as soon as a Republican healthcare idea becomes politically viable, it disappears. He noted this early example of it:

The principle that lies beneath the HUP is that the Republicans absolutely are for the healthcare status quo. Yes, they are for certain changes to the healthcare system, but they are for them for other reasons. The best example of this is tort “reform,” which is just a way of giving more power to powerful at the expense of the powerless.

But in this way, regardless of the argument—”Premiums will go sky high!” or “Welcome to the Holocaust!”—the conservatives are disingenuous. What they want is to do nothing at all that will upset the power elites. But they can’t say that. So they come up with ridiculous rationalizations. But at least the Nazi comparisons have the advantage of being transparently bogus.

Remember last night when I wrote, Repealing Smart Gun Law Won’t Change Attitudes? It was about this New Jersey law that says if any Smart Gun is sold in the United States, all gun sales in that state must be Smart Guns within three years. So Democrats in New Jersey are offering to repeal the law. I said that it wouldn’t matter, because the same people will just come up with other reasons for being against them. Plus I said they would claim that New Jersey could just enact another such law.

Well, All In had Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America on his show tonight. Hayes asked Pratt if his organization would back down if the law was repealed. Pratt spent most of his time talking around the issue but in the end, his answer was no. And he ended the segment by saying that the legislators were saying, “Do what I say or else.” Along with that, he made a gun with his hand and pretended to shoot the camera. It was both creepy and infantile. Pratt is an excellent example of why we can’t have a sane or honest discussion about guns in his country.

The main part of what Larry Pratt talked about was how Smart Guns only work 80% of the time. For some reason, he thinks that this justifies stopping anyone from selling them. Or at least that’s what he implied. It’s outrageous to think that a gun rights group is really protecting consumers, like a gun-only Consumer Reports. But what about that 80% claim. The All In Twitter feed sent out a link to the study that Pratt is pushing. It is eleven years old (pdf) and it is not about the Smart Gun technology at all; it’s about fingerprint technology. The Smart Guns are not based on fingerprint technology.

Of course, this all makes Larry Pratt a perfect conservative! Once you get a talking point, regardless of how old it is and regardless of the fact that it doesn’t relate to the issue at hand: repeat it! Over and over. I went back and watched the segment. Pratt was on for almost exactly two and a half minutes. He mentioned the “20% failure” point three times, using the vast majority of his time to talk about it.

This isn’t surprising though. Larry Pratt is not only involved with Gun Owners of America. He’s also founded English First and is at least involved with US Border Control and Committee to Protect the Family. So basically, he just hates everyone. Take a spoiled and bullying kindergartener and you pretty much have Larry Pratt. He is emblematic of a certain kind of conservative who think that the government has no right to interfere with gun ownership but thinks that the government should have cameras in every bedroom in America to make sure that people only have the right kind of sex.

Oh, and did I mention that Pratt at least pals around with racists? Here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center had to say about him 13 years ago:

What a sweetheart! And he is one of the people driving our conversation about guns in this country.

Jon Perr wrote a great article at his website Perrspectives, The Laffer Curve Brings Red Ink to Red States. It seems that over the past few years, Art Laffer has been going around the red states and selling the usual supply side economic nonsense. If you were around in the 1980s, you are very familiar with it, “You will get more tax revenue if you cut taxes!” The idea is that cutting taxes will cause the economy to grow and so more taxes will come in. It sounds too good to be true because it is.

Let’s talk a bit about the Laffer curve. It isn’t actually a concept of Laffer’s, it’s just that he’s the guy who made it popular among Republicans in the 1970s. The idea is that if taxes are too high, people will not work as much or will find ways to avoid paying taxes. For example, a 100% tax rate would produce no tax revenue because there would be no incentive to work. More or less. But a photo in Perr’s article that looks like it is from the 1970s really struct me. You can go over and look at it, but here is my standard Laffer Curve graph and it shows the same thing:

There is no reason to think the Laffer Curve would be symmetrical. Indeed, when real economists (and I have a hard time putting Laffer in that category) deal with it, they don’t make it symmetrical. In fact, an article in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics shows that estimates of the rate are around 70%. So why did Laffer present his curve as being symmetrical?

I think it’s the timing. In the 1970s, when he was first using the Laffer Curve to argue for lowering taxes, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. And this default Laffer Curve says that the optimal rate should be 50%. And what was the first top marginal tax rate that Reagan got? Fifty percent! The Laffer Curve was and always will be a propaganda device. As Laffer admits, the idea was not new to him. But the reason his name was put on it was because he proposed the idea that you could lower tax rates (the top one especially) and increase tax revenues. But that just wasn’t true at the tax rates we had then (which are much higher than they are now).

The result: tax revenues went down. But somehow this fact is not known by conservatives. That, or they just don’t care:

What Perr noted was that after Laffer did his tour, many red states followed his lead and enacted the same failed policies the Republicans have been pushing for four decades. And the results have been predictable. He discussed New Jersey and especially Kansas. But the truth is that this has been going on in a lot of red states, although generally with less catastrophic consequences. But this is why, for example, Scott Walker and his Republican legislature cut school funding while giving businesses tax breaks.[1] That sounds loony to liberals but it makes perfect sense in the world of Laffer propaganda.

Perr ended the article with a 2012 survey of economists that didn’t find anyone who thought that a cut in the federal tax rates would increase economic growth over a five year period. There’s a reason for that. In a depressed economy, forcing the federal government to borrow less will not make more money available to the private sector to borrow and invest. As I point out all the time, companies are sitting on piles of money not knowing what to do with it. But Laffer wasn’t going around telling red states to cut their top taxes because it would be good for the economy. I’m not even sure how that would happen at the state level. Laffer was doing it because he’s looking out for the interests of the rich. Check out this graph from Kansas on their tax cut:

This is modern conservatism. I don’t think Art Laffer especially wants to make the lives of the poor worse—he’s just looking out for the rich. But the Kansas legislature was certainly trying to send a message with this distribution.

[1] Politifact, in their typical fashion rated this claim false. But if you read the text, you will see that it is actually true. On the issue of school funding cuts, they say the original claim was twice what Jennifer Shilling said. So the schools were not cut by $1.6 billion but by $800 million. In other words: Scott Walker cut school funding by a whole bunch. Politifact gave that a “mostly false” rating. On the issue of tax breaks, Politifact gets into a semantic debate about whether tax breaks actually cost tax payers any money. They give that claim a rating of “half true.” This is why everyone thinks Politifact is a joke.

I may have to subscribe to New Republic just because of Jonathan Cohn. His coverage of Obamacare has been great from the very beginning. If you are going to get your news about the law from one place, he’s the source to go with. He’s insightful of course, but more important, he’s accurate. And that’s something we don’t get much when it comes to coverage of Obamacare.

Yesterday, he wrote, Gallup: Uninsured Rate Is Lowest We’ve Ever Recorded. Of course, Gallup has only been polling about this since early 2008. But that was when the economy was doing pretty well. That was when the unemployment rate was right around 5.0 percent. So that’s when we were somewhere close to full employment. Yet at that time, our supposedly great employer-based health insurance system still left almost 15% of our citizens without coverage.

This number climbed over the following five and half years. I assume this is largely because even as new jobs were created in place of old jobs, they were mostly worse jobs without health benefits. Cohn cautioned us that the numbers are noisy. But the trend is unmistakable. The uninsured rate rose steadily until Obamacare was fully in effect and then the numbers plummeted to a full percentage point below the lowest point they’ve ever been:

It is a mark of Cohn’s seriousness that he noted that being insured is not the purpose of the new healthcare law. The purpose is to allow people to more easily get healthcare and to avoid medical bankruptcy. So the uninsured rate coming down is a good sign but it doesn’t mean anything on its own. But here’s the thing: Republicans have long been fans of coverage alone. That’s why they’ve always pushed high deductible “catastrophic” plans. And that’s not even to mention some of their other favorite policies, like purchasing insurance across state lines that would set up a system where most people got insurance in name only. So they ought to thrilled that the uninsured rate is going down. Right? Right?

Today, Cohn wrote, See How Right-Wing Media “Covered” Obamacare’s Big News Day. Not only is the uninsured rate down, but a study based upon the Massachusetts’ plan that Obamacare is based on shows that the increased access to healthcare is, in fact, saving lives. Great news! The reaction:

This is the very core of why conservatives are generally so ill-informed about what’s going on in the world. Major stories are simply ignored. And no, this is not the same as it is on the left:

And that’s why Cohn, and liberal writers in a general sense, are worth reading. They aren’t going to hide information from you. It’s good news for Obamacare and thus good news for the nation. But because the Republicans are not in power, they see good news for America as bad news. And they don’t report bad news to the true believers who read them.

Afterword

I wonder about this behavior on the part of conservatives. With Obamacare, they can kind of get away with it because Obamacare will triumph slowly. But the same thing happened during the 2012 presidential election where much of the conservative movement was truly shocked that Obama won re-election. The news sources must have known that a fall was coming. And after the conservative base was so badly informed, it amazes me that they didn’t turn on those news sources. But I guess if Dean Chambers is still “unskewing” reality, there must be something deeply delusional about conservatives.

In a very real sense, the ONION is “America’s Finest News Source.” There is more truth to be found in it than in most newspapers. I felt that especially strongly yesterday when I read, Woman a Leading Authority On What Shouldn’t Be in Poor People’s Grocery Carts. The article is about Carol Gaither, a woman who is very critical of how the poor are living their lives. If they would just live as she does, their lives would be as great as her’s. (Yes, I know she isn’t an actual person!)

Broadly speaking, Gaither is all of us. We tend to think we have the answers to the correct way for everyone to live. Of course, that would mean the whole world would be like us and that would be (1) very boring and (2) a total catastrophe, regardless of how wonderful anyone may be. Personally, I try to understand that the focus of my life is not the focus of others’ lives. This is perhaps a bit easier for me than most people because I’m pretty idiocycratic so society has a habit of rapping me on the head about how out of it I actually am.

It reminds me of a segment on The Colbert Report last week, “Watters’ World.” It made fun of the videos that Jesse Watters does for The Factor, where he goes around and interviews people and finds that they are ignorant of this or that political matter. It’s very much like Jay Leno’s thing, but it isn’t done for humor; it’s done for outrage. It is also highly deceptive. Obviously, the vast majority of the people, who are reasonably knowledgeable, don’t get put on the segment.

But I think it’s wrong to feel above the people who are ignorant about politics. I’m ignorant of things that they think everyone should know. The girls in the segment were Miley Cyrus fans. I know the name, but I wouldn’t recognize a picture of her. (When I went to check the spelling of her name, I saw a picture and I was surprised she was a blond.) Now, I think the things I know about are more important—who doesn’t? But that doesn’t mean that in an absolute sense it is more important to know who John Kerry is than who Katy Perry is. As it is, I suspect my impact on what Kerry does is less than the girls’ impact on what Perry does.

It seems that there are two ways that people develop as they get older. They become more certain about their world views or less certain. Carol Gaither in the Onion article is one who has become more certain. But I think such constant prattling about how people ought to live does not come from a conviction that one knows how the world ought to be run. I suspect it is all about trying to grab onto a little power in a society in which very few people have power even over basic aspects of their lives.

None of this is going to stop me from ranting about all the wrongs I see in the world. Along with my constantly lowered belief that I know what’s really going on in the world comes a greater acceptance of who I am. Regardless, this is about communication. My opinions can and do change over time. If only everyone were more like me, the world would be fine!

Three words: it won’t matter.

Chris Hayes did a great sequence on All In about Smart Guns. These are the guns that only allow authorized people to use them. This is done with a little wristwatch that is worn on the same arm as you shoot with. This is necessary because the “watch” much be within ten inches of the gun. This is a big deal because hundreds of kids are accidentally shot and killed each year. It would also make stolen guns much less useful. So it’s a win-win.

But of course, there are those who don’t like it. Some claim that the system is not perfect and it might not shoot when you need it. This is a totally ridiculous complaint. The same can be said for any gun. Things go wrong with guns. They jam, for example. So this complaint is just from people who are against any advancement.

But as Hayes points out, there is actually a substantive reason that the gun rights crowd is against these guns. New Jersey has a law that says that if Smart Guns go on sale anywhere in the United States, the gun dealers in New Jersey must convert their inventories to Smart Guns within three years. Outside of gun rights, that strikes me as an onerous regulation. In three years, it is unlikely that many manufactures will be making Smart Guns—so it would greatly limit consumer choice. Also: the Smart Guns are very expensive and I doubt that will be much changed in three years.

Hayes says that he would be in favor of repealing the law to get Smart Guns on the market. And he had a New Jersey legislator on his show who said the same thing. But there’s a problem and that’s where we get to my three words: it won’t matter.

Even after the law is repealed, the gun rights crowd will do at least two things. First, they will grab onto the “we can’t be sure these guns will always work” argument. Second, they will claim that even though New Jersey repealed its law, it could always pass another. And any number of other states could do the same. So the Smart Guns will be seen as a Trojan horse. And they doubtless will come up with other reasons why the Smart Guns are the Son of Satan.

The truth is that gun owners are not especially crazy. But they see themselves as an oppressed minority. So it takes very little for them to get worked up. One or two opinion leaders decide that Smart Guns are the biggest threat to gun rights since serial numbers and suddenly they all believe it. (Can you imagine the reaction if the government proposed serial numbers as a new thing today?) But this is how bad it’s gotten. Now we don’t even argue over gun laws. Now new gun technologies have to be pre-approved by the gun rights brigade. It’s shameful. They’ve pathetic. And I weep for the steep downward trend of this country.

Afterword

I know I said I stopped watching MSNBC. And mostly I have. But I do check back in occasionally, especially if I hear they are going to do something interesting. And I was really interested in this.

Chris Hedges wrote an update about his case Hedges v Obama, which challenged the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). The law allows the government to detain anyone (including US citizens) for indefinite periods of time as long as the government believes that they are terrorists. Of course, “terrorist” is meant in the Patriot Act sense where the government knows a terrorist when it sees one because a terrorist is someone the government wants to detain indefinitely.

If this sounds like circular reasoning, it shouldn’t be surprising. After a lower court found this part of the law unconstitutional, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned it. Of course, they didn’t do it on its merits. That would be too much like an actual legal system. It said that Hedges had no standing because he did not know that the government was targeting him. Of course, he can’t know because that information is classified. And so we get into the usual catch-22 where the government can’t be forced to reveal its unconstitutional surveillance because the people can’t prove the the government is in engaged in unconstitutional surveillance.

Last September, Hedges asked the Supreme Court to force the lower court to reevaluate the case, given that the Snowden revelations showed that Hedges did in fact have standing. And a week ago the Supreme Court came back and said no. And interestingly, all it said was no. According to SCOTUSblog, “The Court made no comment as it denied review of Hedges v Obama.” I find it interesting that people like Scalia and Alito who were so concerned about government overreach in the matter of Obamacare leading to forced broccoli consumption don’t seem to be the least bit concerned about the government effectively making US citizens disappear.

For his part, Hedges sounds more desperate than I’ve ever heard him—and that’s saying a lot. He seems to think that nothing short of a popular uprising will save the country and the constitution that supposedly supports it. He explains what the ruling (such as it is) means:

He’s threading a needle here. His point is that the problem is not the government. That’s an important distinction because people like Hedges are not like the supposed “constitutional conservatives” who seem only to want to overthrow the government so they can stop paying taxes and set up a theocracy. The problem is that we really don’t live in a democracy anymore. The government does the bidding of the oligarchs and not much more.

But when I look out on this country of ours, I don’t see people ready to demand their power back. In fact, I don’t even see many people who will bother to vote to keep things from getting much worse.[1] And at this point, voting is of limited power even if we could get politicians who would support the people. The judicial system has been thoroughly corrupted. Just today, Cecily McMillan was found guilty of assaulting a police officer while she was being arrested during an Occupy protest. She faces up to seven years in jail for allegedly elbowing the officer. (I find it amusing how cops claim to be so tough and whine about how hard their jobs are, but when a young woman elbows one, they run to the authorities.) And the judge wouldn’t even let her free for the two weeks until her sentencing.

The power elites own everything and everyone who matters. The rest of us are too busy scraping by to do anything about it. I don’t see much hope.

[1] Let me be clear. The candidates we get are bad. But if all the people showed up at the polls, all the time, we would get much better candidates. But instead, we get a government that is far more conservative on economic issues than the people. And one of the long-term results of this is that we have a ridiculously conservative judicial system where what was once considered conservative is now labeled “liberal.”

As a general rule, I don’t watch the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The truth is that I think it’s dangerous. What the event says is that the media and the political world are just one happy family that puts on a hell of a show for the American people. Well I think that’s bunk. The politicians are supposed to be doing the work of the people. And the media are supposed to be reporting on and probing that work. You want to know why Benghazi is so big in the right wing world? Because it’s entertainment. It is no different than Finding Bigfoot or similar shows based upon nothing but the delusions of kooks.

But I heard all weekend just what a terrible job Joel McHale did at the dinner so I had to check it out. I’ll admit, I went into it as an iconoclast: I wanted to disagree. I wanted to say everyone just didn’t get him. And I think that is largely true. The material was quite strong. But there is no doubt that his performance was weak. He blew a number of otherwise good jokes. But above all, he spent 70% of his time looking down at his cards. I went back and watched Stephen Colbert’s 2006 performance, just to make sure this was not how it was done. And it was not. I’m not sure what was wrong with him.

The best joke of the night was not about politics at all. McHale noted that Robert De Niro was in the audience. He said that he couldn’t do a De Niro impression, but that he did De Niro’s agent. So he reached out and grabbed a pretend telephone and put it to his ear. Then he said very excitedly, “He’ll do it!” That goes along with what seems to have happened to his career. At one time he took great roles. Now he’s just making money.

But the show was filled with some sharp attacks. For example, he said, “Julia Pierson, the new director of the Secret Service, is here tonight. Under her leadership Secret Service agents can no longer consort with prostitutes thanks to their new ‘too drunk to make it to the brothel’ program.” And then there was this, “CNN is desperately searching for something they’ve been missing for months: their dignity.” This elicited boos, to which McHale responded, “Totally!” He continued, “At this point, CNN is like the Radio Shack in a small strip mall: you don’t know how it stayed in business this long, you don’t know anyone that shops there, and they just fired Piers Morgan.”

He made a number of what I thought were cruel jokes about Chris Christie, and that’s saying something because I despise the man. But he did pay it off with what was the high point of his performance, satirizing Christie’s 9 January press conference:

The best part of the evening was not McHale, however. Nor was it Obama, who I thought was rather stilted. It was this fun Veep sort of parody with Joe Biden and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve actually never seen the show, but I loved to see Joe Biden playing a cleaned up version of his super-cool character in The Onion:

But for the record, this is the real Joe Biden:

So it’s all kind of silly and bad for the country. But it has its moments.

Afterword

Here is the whole thing, if you dare: