Timothy Egan wrote a really good article over at the New York Times last night, The South’s New Lost Cause. It is very clever. He starts by contrasting Obama’s healthcare “lie” with how Lincoln lied to South when he said during his inauguration, “If you like the slaves you’ve got now, you can keep them.” Well, he didn’t use those words. He actually said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.” But you get the idea.

Of course, it isn’t clear that Lincoln meant to lie. Had the southern states just stayed cool, they might have been able to to keep the slaves they liked. But Egan’s point is that slavery was a lost cause for the southern slave owners. He doesn’t get into it, but slavery was bad for the southern economies. It might have been great for some of that minority of southerners who had slaves, but it stopped the region generally from industrializing and moving into the modern world. With or without Lincoln, slavery was ending.

This is a similar situation with modern conservative economics. Business owners in general prefer the Republican Party. But the modern Democratic Party pushes economic policies that are better for the country and for the business community. Yet they continue to support the Republicans because they only look at their short-term interests. They don’t ask, “How can I increase the number of people buying my products over the next decade?” They instead ask, “How can I minimize the amount of taxes I pay next quarter?” (Ayn Rand always talked about how businesses had to look out for their “enlightened self-interest.” That shows what a fantasy she believed in. People don’t act like that. Communism is more believable than that!)

Now the south is at it again, hurting themselves in the name of another lost cause. Right now, southern (and other conservative) states are passing up the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Why? Egan is more blunt than I’m used to reading in the Times, “And they are doing it out of spite.” But it is more than just harming the poor. That’s no big deal for conservatives. They believe the poor are unworthy after all. They aren’t just spiting Obamacare and the working poor of their states. They are spiting their own economies.

Egan provides some numbers:

To provide some context here, there are about two million people employed in Kentucky. An increase of 17,000 jobs represents almost 1% of the total workforce and 10% of the unemployed. Accepting the Medicaid expansion will not only provide healthcare to tens of thousands who don’t currently have it, it will reduce the unemployment rate by an entire percentage point. Imagine that you were the governor of a state and the federal government offered you a free program that would lower your unemployment rate by a percentage point. You’d have to be really messed up to pass that up, and yet 25 states have said, “Hell no! We like our high unemployment and uninsured rates!”

Meanwhile, conservatives throughout the nation are very keen on the Keystone XL pipeline because of all the jobs it would create. Estimates indicate that it would create just a couple thousand for two years and then basically none after that. Even the company itself no longer holds to the 20,000 jobs number. But even if that were the case, nationally, that means nothing. It is roughly equal to what the ACA will do in Kentucky alone. There’s a whole lot of hypocrisy going on with the conservatives regarding Obamacare and the Keystone XL pipeline.

The south is as likely to rise again and re-enslave our African-American citizens as they are to avoid the Medicaid expansion as they years go by. I can’t help but think it all goes back to the same thing. Them Yankees ain’t gonna tell us true Americans in Texas and Alabama and Idaho what to do! Apparently, they would rather live in dirt hovels than allow the black Democratic president to “win.” It’s just awful because a lot of innocent people are harmed. For example, 70,000 people in Montana will go without healthcare and many others will go without jobs, all in the name of spite and meaningless political posturing.

Hey folks. I’m out of town all day today (again actually) and so no more posts until this evening. I look forward to seeing you then. But until then:

On this day in 1898, the great surrealist painter Rene Magritte was born. Over the years I’ve really become fascinated by him. Paintings like The Human Condition that put together the nature of reality with the nature of art never seem to lose their interest. Sadly, most people just remember him as the guy who paints hats and green apples. He did not become popular until later in his life. Most of his life he spent working other jobs. These included art forgery and currency counterfeiting. A man’s gotta eat! Anyway, in the 1960s he did finally break through in a big way, but nothing like what happened after his death in 1967.

Other birthdays: baseball player Stan Musial (1920); actor Marlo Thomas (76); comedy writer Harold Ramis (69); actor Goldie Hawn (68); businessman George Zimmer (65); and actor Nicollette Sheridan (50).

The day, however, belongs to the great enlightenment philosopher Voltaire who was born on this day in 1694. The great thing about him is that his thinking evolved over time—becoming more liberal. Unfortunately, it also means that people can generally use him to justify pretty much anything they want to believe. What I find most interesting about him is that he has become a big deal to a lot of modern conservatives. The funny thing about conservatives is that they love to grab onto liberals of the past. The idea seems to be that of course they would have been liberal back then but now things have just gone too far. More than anything else, it’s just silly. The very definition of a conservative is someone who thinks the liberals of previous generations were right. A conservative is always behind the curve of history. All they can see is the past. The only future they can see is a straight one where nothing changes. If today’s conservatives were around during Voltaire’s time, they would have been apoplectic about the thought of religious freedom or democracy. Hell, many conservatives today are against those things. Leave Voltaire to the liberals who are the only ones who deserve him!

Happy birthday Voltaire!

I really like this: actual stories of Obamacare successes. Because here’s the thing: that’s the rule, not the exception. If the mainstream media want to present stories of people losing crummy healthcare policies and being forced to pay more for good policies, fine. But don’t present them as typical of what’s going on. In the two biggest states in the union, people are getting better insurance at lower prices. That’s the story. Leave the “Obamacare is destroying America” stories to Fox News and right wing hate radio. Because that isn’t news; that’s just propaganda.

In addition, Lawrence O’Donnell mentions that the administration now claims that 80% of users will be able to get insurance on the website. Despite what he says, 80% is the vast majority of users. It can be better and it will be better. But as Jonathan Cohn notes, there will always be people who won’t use the website. As I know from my own experiences with the well working Covered California website, some people have complicated situations that cause problems.

Anyway, watch at least the beginning of this. It is worth it.

I want to be perfectly clear. Martin Bashir was wrong. He never should have apologized for his commentary about Sarah Palin last Friday. For one thing, what he said made perfect sense. I am so tired of this pretend outrage. Sarah Palin used slavery as an analogy for current deficit spending. What she said was not stupid by her standards because there are plenty of supposed smart people who agree. Think: Niall Ferguson. But what is truly vile is the conservative tendency to bring up slavery as though it were just a system of control—as though it had nothing to do with racism and the basest of reptilian brain desires to subjugate anyone you can.

So Bashir was right on in his analysis of Palin’s terrible analogy. This stuff isn’t academic. Sarah Palin makes us a worse nation. She not only brings the level of discussion about current events to primordial levels, she carelessly abuses the history of this country and those who have suffered during it. I am fully aware that what Martin Bashir said was harsh. But I’m not at all sure that anything said could compete with the pernicious effect that Palin herself has had on our culture. And to say that maybe someone should defecate in her mouth strikes me as mild to what a traitor like her deserves.

Here is the original video:

Now I’m going to show you Bashir’s apology. As I said, I think he was wrong. No apology should have been offered for what was a very concise bit of political commentary. But if you are going to apologize, this is how you do it. Martin Bashir is a class act. I am grateful that he is part of the liberal movement. There’s no “I’m sorry if you were offended.” If things were reversed, I’m sure right now that Sarah Palin would be claiming that Shakespeare wrote potty humor. But I’m sure she would allow that it might be sad if Martin Bashir’s family were offended. But let me just be blunt: liberals are better.

Martin Bashir is a better man than I am. But Sarah Palin shows that words can be treasonous.

On this day in 1900, the cartoonist Chester Gould was born. He is best known as the creator of Dick Tracy. It is not one of my favorite strips. But one can’t deny that it is iconic: Roman nose and literally squared jaw. What’s more, Gould was a great illustrator. That’s especially true when you compare his work to the other strips of that period. I’ll go out on a limb here (Andrea’s sure to disagree!) but he was the Bill Watterson of his day.

The writer Alistair Cooke was born in 1908. I know him from two things. First, of course, as the host of Masterpiece Theatre where, on a weekly basis, he made millions of Americans think they were beneath the English. Second, he used to do audio essays on NPR that I enjoyed. I didn’t necessarily agree with him but he was always thoughtful, interesting, and amusing.

Robert F. Kennedy was born in 1925. That’s kind of amazing to think about. There’s a fair chance he would be alive today if he hadn’t been assassinated. I’m not so convinced that he would have actually beat Nixon in 1968, however. In general, elections are won and lost on the fundamentals. But it is quite something to think about: a second Kennedy administration and no Nixon? Who knows where we would have gone from there. Maybe no Reagan. We might have a much better nation today.

One of the greatest guitarist ever, Duane Allman was born in 1946. Here he is at the Fillmore East just a year before his death doing “Whipping Post.” Allman is the blond guitarist; Dickey Betts is the brunet, who is pretty damned great himself.

Other birthdays: physicist Otto von Guericke (1602); painter Christian Wilberg (1839); actor Richard Dawson (1932); comedian Dick Smothers (74); two beauties: Bo Derek (57) and Sean Young (54); and screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (52).

The day, however, belongs to the great astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born on this day in 1889. He is known for his observational research showing that the further away a galaxy is from us, the greater its redshift, or speed moving away from us. This indicates that the universe is expanding and is the first experimental finding in support of the Big Bang theory. Although there is no doubt about Hubble’s importance (he did a lot of other work too), the theoretical work associated with this particular finding was actually published two years earlier by Georges Lemaitre. I don’t think there is question but that Lemaitre was a great theoretical astrophysicist and Hubble was a great experimentalist. But we really ought to name some important stuff after Lemaitre. (I actually have a lot more to say about Lemaitre than Hubble. Oh well.)

Happy birthday Edwin Hubble!

Afterword

Happy 71st Joe Biden! Drink a cool one for me!

With a new filibuster fight before us, I knew that it was time to contact my problem Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is one of the old Democrats who always stands in the way of filibuster reform. If Harry Reid is having a hard time finding the votes to counter the Republicans, you can count on Feinstein being missing from his caucus.

For the umpteenth time, writing to your Senator or Representative is really easy. Just go to Who Is My Representative. You enter your zip code (depending upon where you live, you may need your extended 9-digit code), and it will tell you who represents you in Congress. But more than that, it will give you links that take you right to where you can contact your representative. If you care enough to vote, you should definitely care enough to write your representative, because doing so gives you extra influence because most people don’t write.

What’s more, you don’t have to say much. I try to dash off a couple of breezy paragraphs. But a sentence or two is all you really need to do. This is what I wrote to Feinstein today:

But like I said, you don’t even need to do that much. Just say, “You need to support Harry Reid in his fight against the Republican misuse of the filibuster!” It’s not going to mean any less than what I write. And remember that you have two Senators in this case. I will go and send a nice note to Barbara Boxer now. (My letters to her are always nice because she mostly does what I want.)

Now the idea that “dependency” is what makes people poor might make some sense if we were all born with the same opportunities to get ahead. Tragically, however, that American dream is dead, or, at the very least, it lies broken and bleeding on the side of the road. In today’s economy, the single greatest predictor of how much an American child will earn in the future is how much his or her parents take home. Working Americans have essentially bought into a unique social contract: they forgo much of the economic security that citizens of other wealthy countries take for granted in exchange for a more “dynamic,” meritorious economy that supposedly offers them plenty of opportunities to succeed. Of course, this is never explicitly stated, and most of us don’t know about the deal, but it’s reinforced all the time in our economic discourse…

Conservatives have spent the last three decades unraveling those kinds of protections—all have been subjected to death “by a thousand small cuts” since Reaganomics hit the United States. As a result, it has once again become true that the accident of one’s birth dictates one’s life chances to a very large degree, and that is a wholly predictable result of the rise of the conservative backlash.

—Joshua Holland
The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy

The Washington Post is at it again with an all new attack on Social Security and the long con that retirees are perpetuating against the young, Social Security Proposals Are Wrongheaded. It starts by bemoaning the fact that the Holy Grail of the Very Serious “Centrists” have not and probably will not come to pass. This, of course, is the lauded Grand Bargain: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in exchange for mythical tax increases that would be a bad idea even if they were real.

But the editorial waits until the second paragraph to get to its point. You see, there has been some pushback recently on entitlements by liberals. Finally, people are looking around at other advanced economies and seeing that they treat their seniors a hell of a lot better than we do. As much as the Very Serious Choir would have us believe that we are drowning our older citizens in benefits, it turns out that we are actually stingy. You fought in World War II? Who cares?! What have you done for us lately?!

Senator Tom Harkin (Happy 74th birthday!) and Representative Linda Sanchez have proposed increasing Social Security benefits. But the Washington Post calls this “a case study in how not to redefine liberalism for the 21st century.” That’s rich! Over the last 20 years (and to a large extent 37 years), the Democratic Party has moved further and further to the right. But the Post thinks that liberalism needs to be further “redefined”?! How is that possible unless the Post’s idea of liberalism is unusually defined like this:

After explaining the proposal, the Post gets down to the real problem (even though they claim it isn’t), “It’s a massive transfer of income from upper-income Americans to the retired.” Don’t be fooled, this is always the reason that the Very Serious People want to cut entitlements. It isn’t about the kids or the survival of the program. The concern about debt is that it may reach a point where taxes have to go up on the rich. And that is totally unacceptable to these people.

Both Dean Baker and Paul Krugman lashed out at the editorial. I think that Baker is pretty tired of this. It is like a daily battle between him and Fox on 15th as he describes the paper. You can see his weariness in the title, The Washington Post Wants to Kick Seniors Yet Again. Nonetheless, he does put the editorial in the broader context, “However, the greatest absurdity of the Post’s crusade is that its obsession with austerity and budget deficits is denying income to both the young and old…”

This goes back to my main point about the whole deficit scold industry: these people don’t care about high levels of unemployment and millions of wasted lives. They don’t care about improving the economy. They don’t even care about debt as is clear by the fact that they don’t believe in raising taxes. All they care about is protecting the rich from any social demands at all. And this is all coming from a respected mainstream newspaper. People like Harkin and Sanchez are right to pushback against the austerity crowd, because clearly the “centrists” in the mainstream press have been co-opted by the right.

On or about this day in 1786, Carl Maria von Weber was born. He was one of the founders of the Romantic period of classical music. As you all know, not one of my favorite periods of music. But the early Romantic period stuff isn’t so bad. Von Weber is known primarily for his operas, but here is the first movement of his Clarinet Concerto No 1, which will give you a brief and clear idea of his music:

Other birthdays: French painter Eustache Le Sueur (1617); bandleader Tommy Dorsey (1905); business theorist Peter Drucker (1909); Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1917); two talk show hosts: one mediocre, Larry King (80); and one great, Dick Cavett (77); businessman Ted Turner (75); actor Meg Ryan (52); and actor Jodie Foster (51).

The day, however, belongs to the great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman who is 55 today. I don’t really know anything about his life and I don’t especially want to know anything. He has written some of the best films in the last decade and a half: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York, which he also directed. I don’t want to overstate it, because a lot of writers are only ever allowed to write crap. But there is no doubt that most screenwriters seem to think that crap is all that is worth writing. And Kaufman has a unique style that would stand out even if Hollywood hadn’t become the animation arm of Marvel Comics.

Here is the best scene from Adaptation. The whole film is great way to deal with those awful internal dialogues that we all have. All of us are both Charlie and Donald:

Happy birthday Charlie Kaufman!