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.