Yesterday, I was pushing back against all this nonsense about the poor people not able to keep their existing insurance plans. As I pointed out, these are just Placebo Policies. They make people feel that they have insurance, as long as they don’t use it. And that’s worse than useless. It’s very much like the Loony Tunes short “Fool Coverage.” In that video (which is sadly not available online), Daffy Duck convinces Porky Pig to buy accident insurance that will pay one million dollars for a black eye “as a result of a stampede of wild elephants running through his house between 3:55 and 4 PM on the Fourth of July, during a hailstorm.” When this actually happens, Daffy amends the clause, “A stampede of wild elephants and one baby zebra!” And, of course, a baby Zebra shows up because it’s Loony Tunes and not the actual life of one of the people with one of these placebo policies.

Jonathan Cohn has laid out just what is going on with the Republican plan to help these tragic victims who are being forced to get real insurance. The plan by Republican Representative Fred Upton is all of 235 words. And in that small bill there is the undoing of Obamacare. The problem is that the bill not only says that these useless plans can be sold to the people who already have them, it says they can be sold to anyone. This will cause of the young and healthy people to bail out of the exchanges and get these cheap faux policies. All the older and sicker people will stay in the exchanges because (1) they need actual insurance and (2) the companies would deny them for these plans anyway. Thus the price for everyone else would go up. Goodbye Obamacare.

The obvious question is whether the Democrats are really stupid enough to go along with this. Jonathan Chait wrote a very good overview of the Democratic Party freak out that is going on right now. He noted, “Undermining Obamacare in order to placate angry individual-insurance holders makes no sense even on narrow political terms.” But the Democrats can’t seem to hide their terror. Next year’s elections are a long time off, and none of this is going to mean anything if the exchange website starts working and the television narrative changes from “the website isn’t working” to “everyone is getting great prices on insurance!”

The whole thing makes me want to freak out! After all, I am only grudgingly a Democrat. But I do so identify because it is the liberal(ish) party in a two party system. One can’t expect to get everything; this is politics. But when the actual politicians of the party don’t understand the basics of politics, it is disconcerting. It doesn’t mean anything to “win the week.” It isn’t like the way long term interest rates predict later short term rates. This crisis will likely blow over and mean nothing in the long term. The Republicans seem to understand this. Why can’t the Democrats?

What we most definitely don’t want to do is make the signature legislative accomplishment of the sitting president collapse because of panic over looking bad on the Sunday political talk shows. What’s more, as both Cohn and Chait discuss, these measures aren’t likely to work even at what they intend to do. So they are not helping the 2% they want to help, and they will be hurting ten times as many people the law will be helping as it is. It just makes no sense. I think it is time for Samuel L Jackson to make a video for our Democratic representatives. Calm the fuck down!

I’m sorry about this, but I have to comment. Sarah Palin was back in her natural habitat (Facebook) to walk back her comments to Jake Tapper that Pope Francis surprised her with comments that “sound kind of liberal.” Now she says that she was deceived by the media. After talking to “Catholic friends” (Third on the list after “Black friends” and “Jewish friends.”) she has learned that, “Pope Francis is as sincere and faithful a shepherd of his church as his two [very conservative -FM] predecessors whom I admired.” Oh my.

Let’s just leave aside all the religious stuff. Palin apparently knows as much about religion as the average American Christian: nothing. What bothers me is her apparent definition of the word “liberal.” Based upon her comments, “liberal” is a synonym of “evil” or at very least “stupid.” It doesn’t define a way of thinking that she disagrees with. It is, as best I can tell, simply a pejorative or an expletive. “Get away from that liberal PlayStation and come do your homework!”

I shouldn’t be surprised. Conservatives worked very hard for decades to vilify the word “liberal.” And at this point, I’m well aware that the word has lost almost all of its power to scare anyone other than the hardcore conservatives themselves. But I had thought that at least it meant the standard things: a bleeding heart who wants to do the right thing but is totally screwed up. You know: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But I have seen this the last couple of decades. That is what conservatives meant BC (Before Clinton). But since then, they seem to have moved on to thinking that liberals are actively evil people.

This goes along with the modern revolutionary Republican Party. The Democrats don’t just disagree with them on policy; they are actively trying to destroy America. And given that they think that, it is no wonder that every new policy results in calls of Armageddon. There is certainly some of that on the left, but it isn’t the entire Democratic base. As for me, the Republican Party is very simple: a party for the super rich that uses racial and sexual (that is, abortion rights) anxiety to be able to win elections. I don’t think the base of the Republican Party is evil, just terribly manipulated.

What’s more, I have nothing against the idea of conservatism. I too believe in culture and continuity and respect and responsibility. But I don’t see too much of that on display in American conservatism. As I said, it has become a radicalized movement. Most of its proponents don’t want to save the past; they want to invent the past. Only a month ago, I came upon the blog I Am a Black Mother—a website of a white southern woman who has adopted a black child. There, I found one of the most vile discussions (which very much included the “black mother”) about how slave owners treated their slaves well and most slaves were happy. Now, I don’t know of any conservatives who want to go back to that fantasy past, but there are lots and lots who want to go back to the fantasy past when blacks “knew their place” and women were just thrilled to be in a world where “a girl could still cook and still would.”

Palin, of course, if part of a whole new wave of conservative leaders: people who came from the base itself. And the dangerous thing about her is that unlike the traditional Republican elites, she actually believes the propaganda. So clearly: Democrats aren’t just the other major party that Republicans do battle with over policy disputes. The Democrats are evil by nature. In other words, they are liberal. And to call the Pope liberal is the same as calling him the Antichrist.

As happens from time to time, someone I’ve never heard of starts to follow me on Twitter. Now I fully admit: I’m terrible on Twitter. I’ve been trying to follow Andrea’s lead and be something more than a tired series of “Look what I’ve written on Frankly Curious!” But when Jennifer Izaakson followed me, I noticed. She’s written a couple of articles on the Huffington Post. And regardless what they pay, I want a chunk of that. So I clicked over to see what she had written.

Her most recent article is, A Ban on the Veil Is an Attack on Our Freedoms. Well, having read that title, I was immediately impressed—imagining her as a modern day Isabelle Eberhardt. As a first approximation: of course! There’s a reason why “liberal” and “libertarian” share two whole syllables. All else equal, people should be able to do what they want. And if people want to wear the veil, who are I am to disagree? After all, for most women, it is probably more cultural than anything else.

But it isn’t quite that simple. Let’s suppose the issue were not the veil, but genital mutilation. In this case would we really believe that women were demanding genital mutilation out of some cultural affinity with their mothers? I think we would rightly believe that these women had just been brain washed. So the issue is not as black and white as I’m afraid that Izaakson would make it. Although I’m the first to admit that wearing the veil is well on the liberty side of the question.

What this all brings up is the elephant in the room. (Not Chris Christie; he’s just really big.) How do different cultures fuse together to create a new culture? I’m sorry for this, but I have to go all Thomas Friedman on you. I was riding in this taxi with a Sheikh driver. Because I’m very interested in religion, I asked him about his religion, which I knew a bit about—far more than most Americans. Unfortunately, the conversation quickly turned to the question of how American women dress and how they are a bunch of whores. Clearly, he saw things differently from the way I did. I think men are mature enough to see a totally hot young woman in short-shorts without losing all control. In other words, as a man, I put the onus of control on my own gender and he put it on the other gender. Men are helpless when tempted by the nubile figure!

Obviously, I think my cultural perspective is correct. And I’m not just saying that. His attitude was repugnant to me. I feel as sure of my attitude being better than his as I am of mammalian child rearing is to that of alligators. (FYI: alligators eat their own children.) So I have a very real problem with the veil in the sense that it is a symbol of the reptilian belief that men just can’t control themselves when they see a bit of skin. Sadly, that is what is on the other gender side of the veil debate.

You may well ask, “Does he believe in banning the veil?” Not at all! I believe not only in culture but in the clash of cultures. I believe different peoples who combine become better, in the same way that genetic diversity improves the species. And I have no doubt that over time the veil will become a cultural signifier rather than a scarlet letter. But let us not fool ourselves into believe that the veil does not have a pernicious symbolism for many (Especially men!) in many non-western cultures throughout the world.

Updated to non-drunk standards.

Robert Reich is angry at fellow Democrats for—What else?!—wimping out on healthcare standards. I’m right with him. In fact, I’ve spent most of the day being angry about the whole Obamacare situation. Everywhere I look, pundits are second guessing whether the website will really be up and running properly by the end of the month. Can there possible be any more useless speculation? We should just be letting the people do their work. But of course, we’re not, and it is a lot worse than just pundits.

Today, Darrell Issa has Henry Chao, the chief project officer for Healthcare.gov, testifying. And what is Issa concerned about? That a completely marginal feature of the website has been delayed for political reasons. This feature, called “anonymous shopper,” allows people to shop for coverage without setting up an account. It would be a nice feature, but regardless, it isn’t a linchpin of the system. According to Chao (who ought to know), there was nothing political about the decision; it was just that the system failed tests. Regardless, is the middle of a war the right time for yet another Darrell Issa political witch hunt?

None of this matters to me. I’m going to wait another two weeks to really worry about it. Now is about the time that we should start seeing notable improvements in the website if things are on track. “No change” up to this point really means anything. I understand why conservatives would be talking incessantly about these problems. What I don’t understand is all the hysteria from liberals.

The other, more worrying aspect of the Obamacare situation is the obsessive concern over Obama’s claim that people would be able to keep their health insurance if they liked it. Well, for a small percentage of people, this is not going to be true. And guess what? That’s the good thing! Most of these people have terrible insurance that is either (1) a policy that covers next to nothing or (2) a policy that would have been canceled as soon it started to be used. The only reason these people were happy with the policies was that they never needed to use them. Let’s just call these things what they are: placebo policies.

This brings us to Robert Reich who is focused on what Democratic Party politicians are doing, Having the Backbone to Set Minimum Standards for Health Insurance. As usual, with the smallest raindrops in the political world, large parts of the Democratic Party turn tail and run. Now there are two camps that are trying to push some kind of legislation that would allow people to keep their old placebo policies. This is the wrong way to deal with the problem.

But how big is this problem, anyway? I’m not clear on it because every time there is some news report about “sticker shock,” it turns out that the person didn’t know what they were talking about and that they’ll get a really good deal through the exchanges. To me, this is just modified Shirley Sherrod. The media are going to town on these stories and the Republicans are demagoguing them, so the Democrats just give up. Reich explains it perfectly:

That’s right. Obamacare is designed to fix a number of problems. One of them is the hidden costs associated with the uninsured, which we pay for now even though we don’t get a direct bill. People with placebo policies are effectively uninsured. And this problem is one that was bound to come up when we decided to go with the Republican “free market” leave-no-insurance-company-behind approach to healthcare reform. But there are solutions to this issue that will help those who “like” their placebo policies—for example, special temporary subsidies for those few affected to get real policies. But gutting health insurance standards is an awful idea for the individuals with these useless plans and for the nation as a whole.

Democrats and liberals of the nation: it is time to join the Vertebrate subphylum!

Yesterday, I had a little fun with Richard Cohen’s reference to the offensive Merle Haggard song “Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver).” It was part of Cohen’s own offensive column, Chris Christie’s Tea Party Problem. The thing about the column is that it is effectively an apologia of the most vile of modern racist thought.

Cohen first claims, “Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party…” But then he goes on to say, “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.” That is a jaw dropping statement. In other words: gagging at the thought of interracial marriage is not racist. Ta-Nehisi Coates lays it out exactly right:

This made me think of the murder of Willie Edwards, who I discussed this morning (he would be 81 today). He was killed in 1957 in Alabama because some white bigots thought he was having an affair with a white woman. There has never been a greater emotional resonance for white racists than the idea that blacks (and other minorities, most notably Chinese) would have their way with “our white women.” Look at the film Stagecoach where the southern gentleman Hatfield almost kills Mrs Mallory rather than allow her to live as an Indian bride. This is powerful stuff.

What is deeply concerning is that Cohen and his many apologists don’t recognize this. It’s a bizarre world we live in where using racial epithets (rightly) makes one a racist, but breaking out in a panicked sweat over the idea of whites and blacks marrying is not. Richard Cohen needs to take a serious look at his thinking about race in America. But then, we all do.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

The Senate Republicans have just filibustered the third nominee, Cornelia T L Pillard, for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This raises the obvious question that I’ve been asking for years: how long are we going to allow this to go on? No amount of handshake agreements and temporary armistices are going to solve this problem. The Republican Party is long past the point of respecting institutional norms.

As I showed back in January, Republicans Caused All Filibuster Abuse. Since 1960, each time the Republicans were in the minority, they increased the use of the filibuster. When the Democrats were in the minority, they abided by the new norm that the Republicans set. In some cases, they actually reduced it to a new norm, only to have the Republicans push the number of filibusters to unprecedented levels.

Folks, this is very simple: when the Republicans are in the majority they will at least stop the filibuster for nominations. Democrats who think otherwise are living in some fantasy land where everyone is fairies and elves, the the Republican Party doesn’t even exist. Does my own dear Senator Dianne Feinstein really think her support for the filibuster is going to save it as a Senate tradition after the Republicans take over again? In the 20 years she has served, she’s watched as the Republicans, and the Republicans alone, have caused the number of filibusters to go up almost 400%. She’s a cynical old slumlord; she can’t possibly be blind to what is really going on.

Chuck Grassley is egging us on. He said, “Go ahead. There are a lot more Scalias and Thomases that we’d love to put on the bench.” The problem with this logic is that neither Scalia nor Thomas were filibustered. But you can be sure that if Obama nominated someone even half as liberal as Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, the Republicans wouldn’t just filibuster her, they’d charge that the president had nominated something that was vomited right out of the rotting corpse of Stalin.

Implicit in Grassley’s comment, of course, is the idea that only the Democrats would get rid of the filibuster. I’m tired of talking about this, but the Republicans were the first ones to get rid of the filibuster. As I wrote in July, “And the only reason [the Republicans didn’t end the filibuster] was the Gang of 14 made a deal that turned out to mean, ‘As long as the Democrats never filibuster judicial nominees, the filibuster stays.’ And doncha know, as soon as the Republicans were in the minority, the filibuster was being used more than ever but the Gang of 14 quietly disbanded. Funny that!”

So let’s do it! Let’s end the filibuster at least on nominations and get a little more balance on the federal court. The way it is now, it is tipped way too far to the right. This one is simple for me and it should be simple for all liberals. I’m willing to let the conservatives do as they want when they are in power as long as liberals get to do the same. The reason is that our ideas are better. In a fair fight, we win hands down. The current situation just allows the conservatives to make everything worse without ever getting blamed for it.

End the filibuster now!

The Des Moines Register reported yesterday, Palin Compares Federal Debt to Slavery at Iowa Dinner. And you may well ask why I care. After all, Sarah Palin is always saying something stupid and she is always somewhere. This weekend, it was Iowa.

But I think it is important. I don’t care about the slavery bit and all her racist talk. What does bother me is this, “Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China.” There are two things wrong with this sentence. First: China. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about this, so I think it is worth bringing up again. As I discussed in China Owns America! In Republican Ads, only 32% of our debt is owed to anyone outside the country; only 8% is owed to China. The vast majority of American debt is owed to ourselves.

I see this kind of fear that we are going to bury ourselves in debt—especially from conservatives. But it is based on an extremely poor understanding of finance. Consider this example. When I was 5-years-old, my parents bought a house for $17,000. It is now 44 years later. Imagine that they had kept that house all this time and had only paid the interest on it. Let’s also assume that their mortgage rate was 8%, which is actually kind of high. That would mean that today, they would be paying $113 per month in interest. Clearly, they would be better off having paid off the principle—$113 per month better off. But it’s not the case that they would be buried in principle. What’s more, they would now have a house that is worth about a quarter million dollars.

That brings us to the second problem with Palin’s sentence. We aren’t taking money away from our children by borrowing money today. That is especially true if we are using the money we borrow to invest in infrastructure, health, and education. College graduates are having a hard time finding jobs right now. And that will hurt them into the future. Having a low paying job or no job at all will be a big problem compared to that modest $113 mortgage we are supposedly saving our kids from.

The real concern about our “debt problem” is that in the future, the government will have to raise taxes on the rich. That’s why conservatives care about the issue. But I’m not sure that’s the reason that Palin cares about the issue. She seems more like the base of the conservative movement—someone like Amy Kremer. These kinds of people seem to have just decided to join the conservative movement and so they repeat the talking points without even understanding them. Of course, that makes them really dangerous if they ever get power. You can depend upon someone like Karl Rove to not do anything really crazy. He knows that most of the Republican talking points are nonsense. But if Palin were president, she really would allow the government to default. There would be no convincing here. She believes in conservative principles the same way she believes in Jesus.

Sadly, this is the legacy of the modern Republican Party. And as I’ve written about a lot here, it is wrong to think that a crazy Republican can’t become president. All it takes is a bad economy.

I got this picture from Wikipedia. The caption reads, “Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I veteran, attends the dedication day parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son, who was killed in the Korean War.” This is not just how I think about Veterans Day; it is how I think our country should think about it. Let us honor veterans but let us also regret that we have them.

In most countries, today is Armistice Day: it marks the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. It is also referred to as the more appropriate Remembrance Day. It is a day to remember those who have died in our wars. It is a solemn occasion. And it should be. Even the “good” war, World War II, should not be looked back on as a great adventure. It was a tragedy for the world. Over 60 million people were killed in that war. And for what? A bad economy that allowed a megalomaniac to gain power in Germany?

It’s my opinion, based upon nothing but a fair insight into human nature, that most people just want to live their ordinary lives with their families and friends and the occasional barbecue and backyard party. And that’s as true of people in the army as anywhere else. I put the number at 95%. It’s that 5% of the population that fucks everything up. And I’m not just talking about Hitler here. Why did we started the Iraq War? It certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction—that was just a cover. And I don’t think it had to do with oil either, but that doubtless played some role. I think it was just another example of a small group of men who thought it would be super keen to take out big bad Saddam Hussein.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate Veterans Day. The idea of it is not bad. We need to honor our veterans, although I think better than a single day would be an everyday approach to providing them their earned benefits. But it seems that Veterans Day to most people is just another day to celebrate what a kick ass country the United States is. Except because it references veterans, there is more explicit jingoism. To most people, it is a time to celebrate the fact that the United States spends 46% of what all the 171 countries of the world spend on military. It ought to be our great national shame, especially when even the Democrats want to cut food stamps for the poor.

But back to that picture. That’s how we should think of Veterans Day: an old veteran from one of our many useless wars with a symbol of his son who died in another of our useless wars. To call the wars useless is not to disrespect the veterans. It is no disrespect to Achilles and Hector to note that the Trojan War was useless and tragic. To see wars clearly is a reminder of what a precious thing life is and how we should value it just as much before the war as after it.

Have a safe and thoughtful Veterans Day.

For decades, I’ve wondered just why we have credit ratings agencies. They clearly aren’t good at their jobs. There is no real reason that we should listen to them. There is a real chicken and egg aspect of it. We seem to invest confidence in them because we invest confidence in them. Of course, over the last decade it has been so much worse. First, they all gave AAA ratings to garbage mortgage backed securities. After the financial crisis showed them for the useless institutions they are, they all sat in front of Congress saying that it wasn’t their fault; they were just expressing an opinion. Fair enough. But then everyone went back to pretending that they actually knew something and weren’t just exercising their First Amendment right to talk out their asses.

The second big event was in August 2011, when S&P downgraded the US federal government’s credit rating. It was a funny thing, because at first it was based on some bad math by S&P. When the government pointed out the error, S&P decided to downgrade the credit rating anyway. It showed that the downgrade wasn’t about reality so much as S&P sending some kind of a message to the world. But here’s the funny thing about that downgrade: it didn’t seem to change the cost of borrowing for the US — at all. It is as though bond buyers — who have actual money on the line — knew that S&P was full of shit.

Well, as you may have heard, last week, S&P downgraded France. Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article about this on Friday. He argues quite convincingly that the issue here is not economics at all, but rather politics. Looking at France’s economy, all he sees is that it is doing rather well — better than countries that have a AAA credit rating with S&P. In fact, France has also brought down its deficit. The problem, for the standpoint of S&P and others, is that France didn’t do it the right way:

He even quotes the S&P justification and, although it is written in finance jargon, it says the same thing. Not that it matters. Again bondholders don’t seem to care. The French government can borrow at pretty much the same rate as they could before.

But I have a broader question. All the credit ratings agencies seems to be useless. S&P in particular seems to have some kind of conservative ax to grind in addition to being useless. Actual buyers of bonds indicate that they know the credit ratings agencies are useless. So why do we still grant them any respect? Why do we allow banks to use them to justify their actions? And most of all, and to the point, why is a ratings change from S&P given any more credence than an RNC announcement?