I’ve been pretty clear about my thinking regarding the filibuster over the years. And most recently, I even discussed the whole question of hypocrisy, arguing that one could reasonably have been in favor of keeping the filibuster in 2005 but be against keeping it now. It absolutely doesn’t work the other way around. Filibuster abuse is far worse now than then. If it was a good idea to get rid of it in 2005, it’s an even better idea now. End of story.

This leads up to that great icon of conservatism Charles Krauthammer. Jonathan Chait was nice enough to do a little Googling for us, Today in Hackery. On 13 May 2005, Krauthammer wrote, Nuclear? No, Restoration.

But it is eight years later. The Republicans now filibuster virtually everything. They commonly filibuster appointees who go on to be unanimously approved. The situation is far, far, far worse than it was in 2005. If what the Democrats were doing then was “radical,” what the Republicans are doing now is “super doubleplus radical.” So he’s all for what Harry Reid did, right? Well, I’ll give you a clue; his Thanksgiving column was titled, An Outbreak of Lawlessness. Ready or not, Dr. Charles Krauthammer:

Yeah, whatever. In his defense, he’s not being completely hypocritical. Now he’s saying that the problem isn’t getting rid of the filibuster. It is how the filibuster was gotten rid of. The problem is that how the filibuster was removed now is exactly the way it was going to be removed in 2005: the Constitutional option. This is a typical rhetorical device that provides him with wiggle room if anyone confronts him on Fox News.

I know Charles Krauthammer really well. He’s the kind of conservative pundit that my father likes, so I try to stay up on what he’s talking about. I know what appeals to my father. He’s soft spoken. He uses “the other side says” as a rhetorical device that makes him sound like he’s looking at both sides of the argument. But he is just a conservative hack. The right wing is full of them. This is the same game played by George Will, David Brooks, and Avik Roy. It was perfected by William Buckley. But it is all the same. The only time one of these guys goes off script is when one of them finds out one of his kids is gay.

Charles Krauthammer: king of the hacks.

Afterword

Just in case anyone is worried, Charles Krauthammer’s physical problems (he was paralyzed in a swimming accident when he was 20) do not seem to have affected his ability to procreate. He has a son from his marriage four years after the accident. I’m very impressed with how Krauthammer has managed to live his life with his disabilities. It’s just too bad they haven’t made him any less of a right wing hack.

Paul Krugman’s column today is on the minimum wage, Better Pay Now. Basically, he says that given how popular raising the minimum wage is even among Republicans, it just might be possible to do. It is true that 57% of Republicans claim to be in favor of raising it. But give Fox News just one week of coverage and see that number plunge down to the low 20s. So I don’t know about just how politically feasible it is.

But I was struck by the very first comment to the article by one bck453 from Wall, NJ. He made a counter argument that I hear from conservatives all time. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. But it actually shows the typical complete misunderstanding of how business and economies work.

For the umpteeth time, repeat after me:

Every conservative would-be economist thinks that a company just passes on higher expenses to their customers. If they are selling a hamburger for one dollar and their costs go up by 15¢, then the price of the hamburger will go up to $1.15. If that’s the case, why was the restaurant not selling the hamburger for $1.15 all along? After all, they could have made an extra 15¢ profit on every burger they sold!

Markets don’t work this way. Most conservatives think that businesses sell their products at the lowest prices possible. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. They sell their products at the highest prices possible. The only reason that markets work is that there are multiple businesses who compete with each other. Our hypothetical restaurant owner above is selling his burger for one dollar because that’s the price that allows him to make the most money. If he had charged $1.15, much of his business would have gone elsewhere.

So if the minimum wage goes up, will prices increase? Yes, they probably will go up a bit, but nothing comparable to the increase in wages. Will companies demand more output from their employees? Yes, just like always! And will companies fire their higher wage employees? Not at all. Commenter bck453 is just an idiot.

In the end, bck453 claims to be for an incremental approach to slowly raise the minimum wage to $15 over the next ten years so as to not shock the economy. There is some sense to this. But raising wages either will cause low wage workers to lose their jobs or it won’t. It turns out, it won’t. But bck453 is as confused about how the economy works as he is about whether or not he is for raising the minimum wage. Unfortunately, his thinking on the subject is the most common that I run across.

In Why We’re Liberals, Eric Alterman attacks the conservative claim that liberals are “elitists.” He writes, “While unelite America is wonderful in every way, it’s just not a place where a Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh or Bernard Goldberg or Ann Coulter or John Podhoretz or Newt Gingrich or Peggy Noonan and Andrew Sullivan or Michael Ledeen or David Brooks would ever choose to live.” It’s a great observation because conservatives have no shame about this kind of stuff. The book was written before the rise of Sarah Palin, but in what world would someone consider her just an ordinary American? In what world does an idiot nobody end up on the best seller’s list for any stupid book she “writes”?

But let’s go through and find out what these people have to say about liberal elitism. First: Laura Ingraham. On The View, she said, “People in this audience make this country great—not celebrity elites, not UN elites, not European elites and not business elites.” Ah yes, because we just want to pick some recent college ideologue to go create the Iraq stock exchange. Wait! We already did that! Incompetent governance rocks!

Where do we start with Rush Limbaugh? Maybe when he blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on liberal elite thought. Yep, that’s right! Those hoity-toity colleges in and around Boston do nothing but try to close down young minds and get them to accept fundamentalism. It’s a good thing we have Rush to keep free thinking alive with his army of ditto heads. Closed minded authoritarianism rocks!

Bernard Goldberg is a classic. One of his extremely sloppy books is, Bias, where he takes on the “liberal media.” In the book he writes such gems as, “Everybody to the right of Lenin is a ‘right-winger’ as far as media elites are concerned.” Basically, his complaint with the “liberal media” is that they didn’t treat him very well. He got in a tiff with Jon Stewart, after Stewart caught him saying, “This idea that that whole middle of the country is made up of sort of jerks—that’s a Democrat, that’s a liberal thing.” Afterward, he walked it back to say that he didn’t mean “liberals”; he meant “liberal elites.” The problem with this is that although liberals do take occasional swipes at the middle of the country, it is nothing like the constant conservative attacks on the coasts. Ignorance and stupidity rocks!

Ah, Ann Coulter, or as we like to think of her, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Most recently she slammed that rich elite Jim Carrey for his Funny Or Die song “Cold Dead Hand.” This is from a woman who said that Clinton “masturbates in the sinks.” And that the backbone of the Democratic party is a “typical fat, implacable welfare recipient.” And “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.'” And when anyone gets upset, her response is the same, “Liberals have no sense of humor.” But apparently she only has a sense of humor about what she says. Hypocrisy rocks!

As for John Podhoretz, let me just outsource it to Eric Alterman:

Privilege rocks!

Do I have to even talk about Newt Gingrich? Here is a politician with a feel for the common man that rivals William F Buckley Jr. Here’s a man with a PhD from Tulane University. A man with a net worth of close to $10 million. He is an elitist on pretty much any scale you can define. Yet he’s always out fighting the liberal elitism. Two years ago he was defending oil company tax breaks from those liberal elites who want everyone to move to the city and ride the bus. Protecting the wealth of the rich in the name of freedom for the poor rocks!

Peggy Noonan went to Fairleigh Dickinson University, which US News and World Report ranks as the 69th best college in America. In other words, it’s an elite institution. She was Ronald Reagan’s speech writer. She’s a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know what her net worth is, but I’m sure it’s in the millions. So you can see how closely aligned she is with the American middle class. When Obama was first running for president, this is what Noonan had to say about him and his wife:

I don’t know, but I’ll leave it to such a salt of the earth as her to decide. Disingenuousness rocks!

Andrew Sullivan is a hard one because now he is more or less a liberal. Of course, he’s still a bigot. I really don’t understand his popularity. But back in 2001, this Harvard PhD had the gall to write the following:

This is from a guest in our country. I think he should have been thrown out of the country. Rudeness rocks!

Michael Ledeen is another regular American with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Eric Alterman quotes him as bragging about a road trip “to Indianapolis for a Toby Keith concert, where [they] partied with something like 25,000 happy rednecks.” That was when he was 65 years old. A big partier he! He was so in tune with middle America that he thought that Toby Keith was a Republican. (Of course, Keith is an idiot and is probably a Republican today.) And there’s nothing that middle class Americans like so much as old PhDs calling them rednecks. Cluelessness rocks!

New York City native and University of Chicago graduate David Brooks knows what the folks stand for. And he’s very even handed. He knows that the conservatives dismiss all intellectuals as liberal intellectuals. But the liberals started it! Mostly, he’s just an apologist for all the stupid and creepy conservative policies. Here he is explaining how Bush Jr helped America know how to live, “People who are part of that culture tend to adopt the values of George W. Bush, regardless of the values they had in their old towns. These include order and neatness over disorder and dysfunction; achievement, sports, and competition; and a sense of responsibility and success.” A bunch of tired platitudes rocks!

Those who run our various social institutions are, by definition, elites. But it’s only the conservative movement that wraps itself in the mantle of every man. Both sides have their elites. But at least liberal elites have earned their statuses. Conservative elites have mostly been born into it.

The way that the Republicans have behaved for the last five years in Congress has greatly limited their options in terms of voicing their disapproval of anything—according to them, they disapprove of everything. While the Senate Democrats were in the process of eliminating the filibuster, many on the right claimed that they would retaliate. They could, it was said, stop the Senate from getting normal work done. There was even concern that Ted Cruz would again act as Speaker of the House and get the Republicans there to misbehave. There was just one problem: Congressional Republicans were already doing everything they could to stop the the Democrats from doing anything.

As it was, the only action in Congress was appointments. The House acted as though they were the only branch of Congress and passed law after law that had no chance of passing the Senate. And Speaker Boehner refused to allow votes on popular bipartisan laws coming from the Senate—even ones that had been jointly negotiated. In the Senate itself, the Republicans filibustered any and every nominee as though Obama were offering them nothing but major figures in the Nation of Islam. So what exactly did the Republicans have up their sleeves to make Congress work even less? Other than some post offices not getting named, I don’t see anything.

That left the reaction to the Democrats’ filibuster change to a lot of finger pointing from the mainstream press. It has portrayed those on both sides of the political divide as hypocritical. The story goes something like this: in 2005, the Democrats wanted to keep the filibuster because they were in the minority, whereas the Republicans wanted to get rid of it then because they were in the majority; but now thing have flipped. Hypocrisy! I don’t see it that way at all. Yes, the Republicans are a bunch of hypocrites—at least publicly, because secretly, I think they are thrilled. The filibuster was not that bad back in 2005 when they thought they had to get rid of it. Now that it is far, far worse, they think it is important to keep.

The Democratic situation is not hypocritical at all. They wanted to keep it in 2005. They even made a deal to keep it that effectively meant that there was no filibuster except in name. Then, in 2009, when ending the filibuster would have been the most politically expedient things to do, the Democrats did nothing. As far as I’m concerned, that was a major mistake and I knew it at the time. But maybe I’m just cynical. I knew that the Republicans would do everything to stop the Democrats from enacting their policies. But the Democrats hoped for the best. Remember the administration thinking they would get 20 Republican Senators to vote for the Affordable Care Act? They ended up getting zero.

During the years of the Bush Jr administration, the Democrats had actually brought the number filibusters down, all the way until 2007 when the Republicans became the minority party. Even though the Republicans still controlled the White House, Senate (Republican) filibusters doubled from the 2005 Senate (when Democrats were in the minority) to 2007 (when Republicans were in the minority). So there is no hypocrisy on the part of the Democrats.

Consider an analogy. It’s sunny outside, so you don’t use an umbrella. The weather gets worse and it starts to drizzle. Still you use no umbrella. The weather gets worse and it starts to pour. So you get out your umbrella and use it. That just makes sense. But the way the Republicans have acted, they use their umbrella when it is clear and drizzling. But when it is pouring, they put the umbrella away. These two approaches to rain protection cause many in the media to claim that both Democrats and Republicans are hypocrites because they changed their minds about umbrella usage. It’s just a silly way to look at things.

As Republicans have made the filibuster a worse and worse policy, the Democrats have come to think it is a bad thing. It is only the Republicans who seem to think the filibuster is a bad thing only when they are in the majority. I have no problem calling the Republicans hypocrites. But the Democrats are not—at least not on this one issue.

Josh Marshall presents a very optimistic take on the future of healthcare reform, A Realist’s Take on Obamacare. He offers four reasons for this. First, the law is going nowhere until at least 2017 when a Republican might be in the White House. This is the response to the conservative belief that if the Republicans just held their breath long enough and destroyed enough of America, Obamacare would just go away. Well, maybe Obamacare will go away. But even if our next president is Chris Christie, I don’t see him dumping the plan. It is exactly the kind of conservatism that he believes in. So we’ll see, but only in another three and a half years.

Second, the insurance and medical industries are completely vested in its success. To me, this is the ultimate argument against repeal of Obamacare. The liberal complaint against the healthcare reform from the beginning was that it was a great big wet kiss to the whole healthcare industry. The hospitals didn’t want to get stuck with unpaid bills from the poor and the insurance companies wanted more customers. And let’s face it: Obamacare effectively turns insurance companies into a kind of private utility where they are paid just because they exist. In our new system, they are nothing but middlemen scraping off a cent or two from every healthcare dollar spent. I wish I could get in on that. And they are going to be none too willing to give up on that gravy train.

Third, there are huge numbers of people who are going to very happy with Obamacare: people on expanded Medicaid, people who couldn’t get insurance at all before, and people who are getting cheaper or better insurance. So what we have now is about 85% of the population currently on plans (through employers or the government) who will not see things change at all. Then we have about 13% of the population who have no insurance at all who will be getting it. Then we have perhaps 2% of the population who will have to trade in their placebo policies for something that works. So let’s lay that out:

85% No change!

13% Completely Good Change!

 2% Mixed Change…

Marshall’s fourth reason is kind of vague. Basically, he thinks that Obamacare is a well designed law and that as time goes on, it will work even better. In other words, the truth will out. The design is such as to provide near universal coverage and keep costs down. It’s funny to watch people like Avik Roy pull out Switzerland and claim that’s the system we should have. It is always the same thing: what we ought to have is something—Anything!—that isn’t what we have. But as free market systems go, Obamacare is about as good as it gets. So Marshall is right: the law will work.

The biggest problem with Obamacare going forward is the fact that half of the states are not expanding their Medicaid programs. This is nothing more than conservative spite—an attempt to harm President Obama politically with the added benefit of harming the working poor. But I don’t think this will be an issue for very long. These conservative lawmakers are simply wrong about the harm they are doing. First, they aren’t really hurting Obama. As the system works in Blue State America, it will be trumpeted as a success by the media, because most of the media are in the big blue states. Second, and most important, not expanding Medicaid is bad for the states. They are foregoing free money that would stimulate their local economies. Their hospitals are still going to have to treat poor people who will not be able to pay the bills. And as a result of that, healthcare premiums in these states will be higher than they would normally be. So it isn’t just the poor who are harmed in Texas. It’s Rick Perry too.

So I’m with Josh Marshall: the future of Obamacare is bright. And the stragglers will catch up once they see that their spiteful political “messages” mean nothing other than that their states are harder to manage and their economies are more depressed. In the end, the conservative ideologues will look like idiots. (But they’re used to that.) And Obamacare will be that thing no one knows how we ever did without.

Keep your stinking government hands off my Obamacare!

Shawn Fremstad has been writing over at CEPR Blog and putting out some great stuff. I recommend checking him out. But right now, I want to focus on an article he wrote last week, Paul Ryan Getting Advice on Poverty Policy From K Street Organization that Receives Most of Its Funding From Government. As you can tell from that headline, Fremstad is following in the sarcastic and snarky footsteps of Dean Baker.

The article gets at the hypocrisy of conservatives when it comes to government funding. In a larger sense (not discussed in the article itself), it comes back to this myth that conservatives want smaller government. For the umpteenth time: conservatives want big government that keeps the poor in check and sends the rich big checks. In fact, if you went line by line through the budget of what conservatives want to pay for and what liberals want to pay for, the conservatives would end up costing a lot more. It is cheap to help the poor; helping the rich is very costly.

But I was very struck by the following bit of information about the libertarian CATO Institute:

Even by their own definition, libertarians aren’t libertarians when it comes to actual policy. Libertarians are for people being able to enter into voluntary contracts, but they are somehow against labor unions. They are against coercion, but only when it comes from the government. And as we see here, they ignore welfare that helps the well off, and focus like a laser on welfare that helps the poor. I would put the word “libertarian” in scare quotes, but I would have to do that basically every time I used it because I don’t know of a prominent libertarian who fits the definition.

This all takes me back to why I originally left the libertarian movement. (It was later that I stopped being a libertarian.) What, in the end, do libertarians stand for but making the rich richer and the poor poorer? Take education, for example. They believe there should be no public education. Well, if they really wanted a society where everyone was judged by their works, they would want a level playing field. But rich parents can give their children advantages that are insurmountable for the children of the poor. And to libertarians, this is just fine because—What?—the government isn’t the one causing this immoral inequality.

What Fremstad shows in that quote is that libertarians are just a particular kind of conservative apologist. They are for most of the conservative policy, they just have a different approach to justifying it. But if you scratch the surface of their arguments, they fall apart. They come down to: the rich are better than the poor so we should do everything we can for them. Or to put it more bluntly: fuck the poor. And that’s their right. But it doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep calling them out about it, because they really are self-deluded. Their moral thinking is repugnant.

Danny Westneat wrote a most amazing article over at The Seattle Times, Debunking Obamacare Sob Story. It is about Jessica Sanford, a single mother who has gone 15 years without health insurance. She was able to get it for just $169 per month and the administration used her as an example of an Obamacare success story. And then things went wrong.

The state made a mistake calculating her income and the insurance was going to cost more. But really, not that much more. It was going to cost her $237 for a “bronze” plan for herself and $30 for full coverage for her son. That’s a total of $267, or $98 more per month. That’s a shame, but for a woman making almost $50,000 per year, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. Regardless, Sanford now says she can’t afford insurance.

Of course, this caused the right wing press to go absolutely crazy. Rush Limbaugh published, Another Lie: The Story of Jessica Sanford. And you can well imagine the rest. But here’s the thing: the numbers don’t back up the story that Sanford is being harmed.

Sanford’s son suffers from ADHD and she spends $250 per month on medication for him. That medication should be covered by his $30 policy. So Jessica Sanford should have to pay only:

It could be that the new plan will not pay all of the cost of the medication, but even if it pays 50%, her insurance will be only $142. Or it could be that she is exaggerating about what she now pays for medication. Or it could be that the only way she thinks she can afford insurance is if the government pays her $81 per month ($169 – $250).

But I think the most likely case is that she just hasn’t thought about the savings that the insurance will provide. The whole thing is very frustrating because we hear about these terrible injustices in Obamacare. They are widely reported. And when everything is factored in, people end up with at least reasonable deals. But that isn’t reported. And for an old scientist like me, I don’t appreciate the whole anecdote game anyway. But if we are going to talk anecdotes, we should at least be sure they are true.

On Friday, Brian Beutler wrote a much discussed article with a great headline, Whoops! Obamacare Turns Out to be Great Deal Personally for Boehner. For obvious political reasons, John Boehner decided to buy insurance on the ACA exchanges. And he blogged about the experience. As you might expect, he had difficulties. According to him, he spent four hours fighting with the system. But less than an hour after he complained online about the process, he succeeded.

Certainly, that kind of frustration is not acceptable. But what’s more important is that Boehner would only have mentioned bad things that happened. If the whole process took 15 minutes, he simply would have said nothing. So the question is, “What did John Boehner not say?” I’m sure that’s the question that Beutler asked himself before writing his article. Because one thing immediately comes to mind: he didn’t mention that his his premiums went up. I wonder why.

Beutler went onto the exchange and entered John Boehner’s information. And he found, “The cheapest policy for a 64-year-old is a high-deductible, bronze-plated BlueCross BlueShield plan with a $372.14 premium.” That’s actually an amazing deal from what I know about health insurance for people about to retire. Beutler writes, “Just under 2 percent of Boehner’s income. Not bad for a man on the cusp of his golden years!” The most Boehner might pay is 5.5% of his income for a gold plated plan. But he could get a zero deductible plan for just $699.86 a month—3.7% of his income.

I can well imagine that when Boehner came up with his plan to sign up with Obamacare, he had visions of ranting about sticker shock. That wasn’t a reasonable expectation. The only people likely to see their premiums go up are young healthy affluent people. Boehner is certainly affluent—he didn’t get any subsidies. But he isn’t young and he is smoker with some kind of preexisting condition that turns the skin orange. But I suspect he really did think he would face sticker shock. In the right wing echo chamber, Obamacare is making everyone pay more for health insurance—at least those who can actually get the system to work.

It’s interesting to see how Boehner’s stunt has played in the media. When he first announced that he couldn’t sign up, the conservative media were all over it. Twitchy, for example, published Rep. John Boehner Unsuccessfully Attempts to Enroll in Obamacare. Although even by the time it published the article, it was no longer accurate. But since then, the conservative media have lost interest. Again: the echo chamber. Their readers hear that Boehner can’t sign up and they hear nothing more—not even that it took Boehner a long time to sign up.

The reason I was even looking at the coverage of this is that I thought that John Boehner might release a statement. If Beutler was even partly wrong, he would have said something like, “I’m not going to talk about my personal finances, but I did not get a great deal through Obamacare.” But we didn’t even get this kind of non-denial denial. So I feel very comfortable thinking that Boehner actually did get sticker shock, “I am shocked that my premiums are so low through Obamacare!” But you won’t hear him talk about it. When there is good news about Obamacare, no conservative will dare talk about it.

Update (24 November 2013 7:37 pm)

According to Politico, John Boehner’s Premiums Spike Under Obamacare. I smell a rat. According to the article, “So, he’ll pay more next year for himself than he paid this year for both himself and his wife.” First, that sounds like it comes direct from Boehner’s office and not an actual journalist. Second, given that the Boehners get their insurance through their employers, wasn’t the actual cost they were paying higher than their own contributions? That is: what about the employer’s contribution? Third, by opting out of employer insurance, are they throwing themselves into a high risk pool—namely the “old and smoking” pool? I wonder about it and I will watch closely to see what is reported tomorrow by people who understand all this stuff a lot better than I do.

As one of the more hysterical of the filibuster reform proponents, I’ve been itching to talk about yesterday’s historic change to the Senate rules. For those of you who have been in a coma, the filibuster was changed so that it now only applies to Supreme Court nominations and legislation. But even that is only temporary. The next time there is a filibuster of consequence on these matters, it too will die. But we aren’t likely to see anything for a while because there won’t be a Supreme Court vacancy for a while, nor will there be any important legislation as long as we have divided government. So the filibuster change is about as big as it could possibly be.

What may surprise you is that I think this change is sad. Harry Reid was correct to do it, but what led up to this is just terrible. The filibuster was a good idea and as long as it was used sparingly, it was fine. The standard narrative about it is that the filibuster went on tilt as soon as the two parties became strictly ideological. It used to be the the most liberal Republican was notably more liberal than the most conservative Democrat. That’s no longer true. But it also isn’t true that this is the reason that the filibuster had to be destroyed.

As I wrote about all the way back in January, Republicans Caused All Filibuster Abuse. For good and for bad, the Democrats did and do abide by norms. Over the years, they’ve kept filibuster use at whatever level the Republicans had left it at. It was the Republicans and the Republicans alone who constantly increased the use of the filibuster. The Republicans long ago became a revolutionary party, and as such they have no interest in norms because they don’t think the system itself is legitimate.

So I’m very sad that things have gotten to this place. And let’s be clear: this is a good thing for the Republicans. The Senate is already a highly undemocratic institution. It favors low-density areas and that means that it favors bigotry and intolerance, and that means it favors the Republicans. As it is, they stand a decent chance of controlling the Senate as of 2015. But here’s the thing. Despite their cries and whimpers, the Republicans are thrilled with the end of the filibuster. Their most recent behavior regarding the DC Appeals Court nominations really left the Democrats with no choice. I suspect that they are licking their chops, imagining how they can destroy democracy for decades if only they can get another George W Bush elected.

My biggest concern is that Obama will not use this opportunity. Now is the time to focus on filling judicial vacancies. There are a lot of them and this administration has not been very good at nominating. In the past, that may have been because they figured that the Republicans would just block them anyway. But I think it is more that Obama is just focused elsewhere. And now we can add to that the usual Obama as schoolboy with his bizarre notions of fairness. Well, as it is, the courts are skewed to the right and there are major limits to reproductive rights in Texas because of it. This is a very big issue and Obama needs to pay attention.

I know how the Republicans operate. If they do get the presidency in 2016 (and that is quite possible), they will likely see it as their last opportunity in a while. They will funnel conservative judges onto the federal courts to block any and every liberal legislative endeavor for the next generation. Changing the filibuster gives the Democrats more power now but it also gives the Republicans more power later. And the best way to limit that later power is for the Democrats to maximize the power now.

Regardless of all this strategy, killing the filibuster was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do in February 2009. Regardless of everything else, the Republicans were going to kill the filibuster the moment it was to their advantage. I still don’t understand what Carl Levin thinks he gets from keeping the filibuster. Can he possibly be naive enough to think that the Republicans would not use the nuclear option when they effectively did so already in 2005? I think the best assumption is that our elected officials just aren’t that good at thinking.

Going forward, I’m cautiously optimistic. But regardless of what bad comes of this, we all have to remember that it was coming no matter what. We need to use this opportunity the best we can to put as much sense in the courts and executive institutions as we can. Now.

Update (22 November 2013 4:17 pm)

I saw the following headline over at Political Animal, With the Filibuster Gone, Time for a Confirmation-palooza! I thought, “Wow! Ed Kilgore is talking as radical as I am!” But it wasn’t so. It seems that Kilgore’s father is in the hospital (on the mend, it looks like) and so he has been getting some help. The article was written by Ryan Cooper. He’s hardly a radical himself, but it isn’t quite the same. Regardless, I agree with him completely! Check out the article.

This just in via The Real News, McDonald’s Website Tells Underpaid Workers to Sell Holiday Gifts on Craigslist and Quit Complaining. And yes, it really does say that. The video below is fun with the kind of cheery music that they like in places like McDonald’s and North Korea. To be fair, the website itself has a different feel to it. For example, it isn’t telling employees to stop complaining because management isn’t interested. It is just being helpful. It seems that people who complain are less healthy. Of course, that might have something to do with people complaining about not having access to healthcare.

As I’ve discussed in the past, McDonald’s really could afford to pay their employees more without raising prices much. Most of the big businesses could afford to do this. It would cut into their profits, of course. But clearly, corporate America is making too much: more than ever before. They are sitting on piles of cash and doing nothing with it. Of course, we have one and two-third political parties who think their primary mission is to protect the rich and powerful. (See how the Washington Post took a bold stand for the rich on Sunday!)

Regardless of all this, the following video is great. And McDonald’s is even worse than we thought:

Over at The Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell reports on some really interesting political science (pdf) research, About as Many People Say They’ve Been Abducted by Space Aliens as Say They’ve Committed Voter Fraud. But that headline may give you the wrong idea; the research is very clever and shows that voter impersonation pretty much never happens.

Unlike other research that looks at allegations and prosecutions of voter fraud, this research just asked people. But given that it is a crime, they couldn’t just ask, “Have you ever committed this federal felony?” So what they did was create two groups and gave them a list of innocuous things that people do. But the test group had “voter fraud” added to it. All the people were asked if they had done any of the things listed. By comparing the two groups, they could tweeze out how many had committed voter fraud. The number came out to 2.5%.

That’s pretty high. So the researchers did the experiment again, but this time instead of testing for “voter fraud,” they tested for “abducted by extraterrestrials in the previous year.” And the percentage of people who claim they have been abducted by aliens is—Wait for it!—2.5%. It would seem that roughly 2.5% of the people who take these tests do not pay close attention. Or maybe we have a bigger problem:

But there is a more basic issue here. I understand that political scientists need to test the claims of the voter ID proponents. But these activists are being totally disingenuous. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to make people show ID to vote. But if that were your actual concern, then you would go about it differently. If you must have ID to vote then the government must facilitate you getting an ID free of charge. Otherwise, it is like a poll tax. No one pushing for voter ID laws is at all concerned about voter fraud. Simply put: voter ID laws begin and end with voter suppression.

The authors of the paper note that as real as actual voter fraud may be, it is dwarfed by other problems in our voting system:

But we aren’t seeing any laws passed to deal with these kinds of problems. And that’s because voter ID laws are created to suppress the vote of Democratic leaning citizens. In future decades this will be as big a shame as the voter suppression leading up to the Voting Rights Act.

Afterword

And please don’t tell me that those southern bigots were all Democrats. We all know that the big political shift over the 60s and 70s was those southern Democrats becoming Republicans. Southern bigotry has been the core of Republican victories from Nixon through Bush Jr. If the Republicans are going to use racial resentment to get elected, they should at least own it and not make out like they are still the party of Lincoln.