For years, wingnuts argued that gays asking for marriage equality wanted “special rights” not given to anyone else. This makes no sense to me, but it’s still their argument. Just google “gays want special rights” and you get one tirade after another like this one, which basically says that same-sex marriage is wrong because the author says it is; therefore, if we let gays marry we are granting them special rights.

I agree with Nathaniel Frank that the homophobic view is pure narcissism. It makes sense only if you accept as a “given” that homosexuality is abnormal or depraved. So, in the homophobe’s minds, same-sex marriage amounts to a state approval of depravity that no one else gets.

Otherwise, their argument just plain makes no sense.

But NOW the shoe is moving to the other foot, so to speak, because wingnuts are asking for special privileges for themselves to be able to discriminate against others, or to allow employers to impose conditions on employees purely because of the employer’s religious beliefs. I say this amounts to the religious right asking for special rights and privileges other people don’t get.

I’m reacting to a couple of articles by Daniel Linker that basically says, if righties play the religion card they get to do whatever they want, because religion. (See “Is opposing gay marriage the same as being a racist?” and Are secular liberals getting cocky?) And I argue that Linker is asking for a special dispensation to ignore the establishment clause.

See also Ed Kilgore.

This made me laugh:

Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.

The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”

Part of the reason this made me laugh is that in The Book (current working title: Rethinking Religion: Being Religious in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World) there’s a chapter titled “God and Existence” that contains variations on the theme of the nature of existence, drawing on science and philosophy, to argue that “existence” is mostly indefinable, and depending on how it is defined anything could be said to either exist or not exist. The point in context of The Book is that it’s really stupid to argue about whether God exists, even assuming we had any idea what God is. But the Republican health care plan is a good example, too.

Chait’s theme is that Republican health care plans going back to the beginning of the Clinton Administration are ephemeral things that “exist” as thought-objects only as long as there’s no plan to implement them. For example,

In 1993, Republican minority leader Bob Dole supported a version of it to demonstrate that Republicans did not endorse the status quo, until Democrats, facing the demise of their own plan, tried to bring up Dole’s plan, at which point Dole renounced his own plan.

Mitt Romney, clearly too thick to understand how the game is played, screwed the pooch by putting an actual conservative health care plan into effect in Massachusetts. The Republican response has been to hang what was mostly a Heritage/Romney plan around the neck of President Obama and call it socialized medicine. The wonder is that, years ago anyway, Heritage came up with a plan that was do-able in the real world, even if clumsy. I doubt Heritage will make that mistake again. Or could if they tried.

Brian Beutler points out that current Republican “plans” on the “table” suffer from the same weaknesses they perceive in Obamacare.

The cornerstone of nearly every conservative health care reform plan is to eliminate or dramatically reduce the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance and use the revenues to help people pay for their own coverage. But the disruptions that would entail would dwarf the ones Obamacare is creating, and conservative wonks realized that by opportunistically attacking Obamacare, political operatives had just crafted the very attacks that could ultimately doom their own policymaking pursuits. …

…Two weeks ago a trio of Republican senators introduced a plan to replace Obamacare. Conservatives everywhere, including Ponnuru and his National Review colleagues, applauded it. But its authors will seemingly have to choose between actually financing it or inviting the same severe market disruptions the GOP is now on record opposing. The plan itself called, somewhat confusingly, for “cap[ping] the tax exclusion for employee’s health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan’s costs.” Yuval Levin surmised reasonably that they meant capping it at the 65th percentile of employer plans. But either way its authors became caught in the trap their own party set for them in the fall. When questions started rolling in about market disruptions, they made a dramatic change to their white paper. The cap would now be set, vaguely, at “65 percent of the average market price for an expensive high-option plan,” presumably at the expense of revenues required to finance the plan’s coverage goals.

The plan is just a prop, anyway. It’s a means to allow the Wall Street Journal editorial page to run headlines that Republicans have a better way to fix health care. It’s like the stacks of paper they were carting around when the ACA was being voted on in Congress; they’d hold their stacks of paper up at press conferences and say, see? We have a health care plan, too. But the paper was just a prop. Even after the ACA was passed and the GOP started talking about “repeal and replace,” they still didn’t have a “replace.”

I’m making good progress on The Book. Of the eight chapters planned I have five finished and the sixth is about half finished. Seven and Eight are still mostly outlines. I started out thinking I would write about 20,000 words, and now I’m at 30,000. I think some of it’s not bad.

My Zen teacher, Jion Susan Postal, died last night of cancer. This was not unexpected. But i”m not that much in the mood to write about politics just now. So go ahead and comment on whatever.

Paul Krugman gives us a succinct account of the “Jobless Care Act” flap, which of course we already knew was bullshit. But the Right fell too much in love with their new talking point to let go of it without a struggle. Mollie Hemingway writes at The Federalist:

When the Congressional Budget Office this week nearly tripled its previous assessment of how many people would stop working because of Obamacare, some in the media tried to change the story to one focused on how Republicans were too uncharitable about what this meant for the country and her economy. Obama and his water carriers in the media tried to spin it as spectacular news, really, that simply shows how Obamacare liberates some people to subsidize the lives of others. Yesterday, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf affirmed, though, that the troubled law creates a “disincentive for people to work.”

Because, you know, we can’t have people not chained to jobs, even if they can support themselves without them, and even if they’d rather stay home with children or take care of elderly parents, or purse their life’s passion of painting portraits of fish.

Never mind that all this workforce-fleeing is happening in the middle of a major “income inequality” class warfare push by Team Obama. Just set that all aside.

Him

And if Alice voluntarily leaves her job, and Beulah gets hired in her place, this makes income inequality worse how, exactly?

Hemingway seems to assume all these people leaving jobs voluntarily will automatically be put on Medicaid or receive subsidies, which is not at all a given. In fact, my understanding is that if you are eligible for COBRA benefits, which most such people would be, you can’t get insurance through the exchanges or receive a subsidy until COBRA runs out in 18 months.

But what’s really got Hemingway’s panties in a knot is that Ron Fournier (who actually wrote a pretty good column about this) tweeted “The GOP argument on Obamacare has more than a whiff of Reagan-era racial “welfare queen” politics.” Well, yeah, a whiff. Republicans usually are pretty whiffy. Hemingway responds,

Le sigh. It’s not that some people think creating disincentives to work is unhealthy or unethical. It’s that they’re racist.

Poor baby. But I’m going to go even further than Fournier. I say that what Republicans really long for is a return of the so-called “black codes” that former Confederate states passed into law after the Civil War until the 14th Amendment said they couldn’t do it. The black codes took away the freed people’s freedom to make their own life choices and compelled them to work in a labor economy, for whatever wages their employers (usually former masters) were willing to pay them. If a black man chose to live on his own, raising vegetables and hunting for meat as some whites still did, he would have been afoul of the law. And, of course, allowing him the freedom to pursue some other line of work or open his own business would have been unthinkable to the old confederates.

The only difference is that, I assume, today’s black codes would apply to all races equally. So if Hemingway wants to argue that proves she’s not a racist, she’s free to do so. Anyway, Hemingway spends the rest of the article whining that it’s not really racist to think that people on welfare should work instead, and what that has to do with the CBO report is beyond me.

The New York Times explains,

The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.

The report estimated that — thanks to an increase in insurance coverage under the act and the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums — many workers who felt obliged to stay in a job that provided health benefits would now be able to leave those jobs or choose to work fewer hours than they otherwise would have. In other words, the report is about the choices workers can make when they are no longer tethered to an employer because of health benefits. The cumulative effect on the labor supply is the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time workers by 2024.

Which also seems to suggest that there will be 2.5 million job openings that other people might fill. Sounds like a win/win to me.

As soon as the CBO report was released, wingnut media were running headlines about Congressional Budget Office sends death blow to ObamaCare and The Jobless Care Act: Congress’s budget office says ObamaCare will increase unemployment, claiming that 2.5 million people would be fired because of Obamacare. And this is a lie.

This lie is so egregious that even Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post‘s false equivalency finder fact checker, says it’s a lie. Being Glen Kessler he manages to find some bullshit reason to give the lie only three pinnochios instead of five, but for Kessler to pin three pinnochios on Republicans is pretty amazing.

In fact, even Paul Ryan has admitted that the report says people would choose to work less, not that people would be fired from jobs. Imagine. I’m sure he’ll come up with some other way to demagogue the numbers, but this may mean that either the “jobless act” lie will die rather quickly on the vine, or Ryan’s unearned reputation as a “policy wonk” will soon be called into question by the Right.

Orrin Hatch, touted the CBO report with the lie, saying it would lead to two million fewer jobs, then turned around and trashed the report for saying that a part of Obamacare Republicans have been calling an insurance company bailout will save the government mpney.

The Hill reports:

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday threw a potential wrench into House Republican plans to tie an elimination of ObamaCare risk corridors to the next debt-ceiling increase.

The CBO now says that the program, which critics deride as an insurance “bailout,” will earn the government $8 billion over the 2015 to 2017 period. Last May, the CBO said that the program had not net budgetary effect.

The government will pay insurers $8 billion over the period but will collect $16 billion in return from companies, yielding a net benefit.

Another day, another faux scandal.

Jerks:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has set up a number of websites that look like they could be a Democratic candidate’s campaign page, unless you read the fine print. They may even violate a Federal Election Commission regulation, Campaign Legal Center expert Paul S. Ryan explained to ThinkProgress. . . .

. . . Ray Bellamy of Florida says he was tricked by the page and accidentally made a donation to the NRCC. “It looked legitimate and had a smiling face of Sink and all the trappings of a legitimate site,” Bellamy told the Tampa Bay Times. The look-alike page uses the same colors as Florida candidate Alex Sink’s campaign, with the URL sinkrocongress2014.com. Once entering information, the person is redirected to an NRCC thank-you page.

They can’t get enough campaign money on their own, so they have to steal it from Democrats? Of course, this might just be one of those “because we can” things.

But Ed Kilgore says the House Republicans appear to be in retreat, generally.

So you have to wonder about last week’s House Republican retreat, which produced more confusion and division than was contained in its baggage from Washington to Cambridge, Maryland. Its much-heralded and heavily telegraped “principles on immigration,” written in codes and near-hieroglyphs, has created the largest and loudest row among Republicans on the subject since Marco Rubio helped Democrats build a super-majority for comprehensive reform in the Senate. The steely focus of Republicans on Obamacare is now being blurred by wrangling over alternatives. And the House GOP conference’s strategic decision on how to deal with an imminent debt limit measure has bogged down into arguments over what empty gesture to offer before surrender.

Immediately after the retreat ended, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor went on Face the Nation, and pressed mildly by Major Garrett on these obvious subjects, collapsed into incoherence.

Brian Beutler explains why he does’t think Chris Christie’s political career will survive Bridgegate. Beutler tends to be more optimistic about things than I am, and I will be hugely surprised if Christie doesn’t serve the rest of his term as governor. I think he can kiss off the White House, though. He doesn’t have broad enough support in the Republican base to ride this out.

Speaking of the Republican base, CNN reports that a conservative group is calling for the GOP leadership in the House and Senate to step aside.

“Time and again, year after year, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate has come to grassroots conservatives, and Tea Party supporters pleading for our money, our volunteers, our time, our energy and our votes,” said ForAmerica Chairman Brent Bozell in a statement to CNN. “In return they have repeatedly promised not just to stop the liberal assault on our freedoms and our national treasury, but to advance our conservative agenda. It’s been years. There is not a single conservative accomplishment this so-called ‘leadership’ can point to.”

Now that the federal insurance exchange website is, I hear, considerably less buggy, the GOP is zeroing in on some state exchanges that are not doing so well —

With the federal online insurance exchange running more smoothly than ever, the biggest laggards in fixing enrollment problems are now state-run exchanges in several states where the governors and legislative leaders have been among the strongest supporters of President Obama’s health care law.

Republicans have seized on the failures of homegrown exchanges in states like Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon — all plagued by technological problems that have kept customers unhappy and enrollment goals unmet — and promise to use the issue against Democratic candidates for governor and legislative seats this fall.

“People see incompetence when they look at this,” said Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “Everyone that’s associated with it is going to have to deal with the consequences of this terrible law, including the state legislators who created these exchanges and the governors in charge of running them.”

Hmmm. People are frustrated with the sites not working well because they’re trying to buy the bleeping insurance. And Republicans, who oppose the legislation to make buying the insurance possible, think this is an issue that will work for them, because …?

But they’re still trying to make the law look bad. David Weigel tells us about a couple of the women appearing in anti-Obamacare commercials.

Lamb didn’t have private insurance per se. She was on a Tennessee-sponsored health care program that covered 16,000 people, canceled last year because it “had a $25,000 annual limit on benefits” and “the federal health law does not allow yearly expenditure caps.” The state applied for a waiver, and didn’t get it, but nor did it consider accepting the expansion of Medicaid. (Since 2011, the state’s been run completely by Republicans.)

Here’s the other one, a woman whose insurance policy was canceled but refused to use the exhange to get new insurance:

The reason she didn’t visit the Washington state health exchange was basically #OBUMMER. “I wouldn’t go on that Obama website at all,” she said. This didn’t start with her cancellation. This started years ago. Republicans told Bette, and others inclined to distrust Obamacare, that they’d face death panels and rationing boards. That their options would be unaffordable, and irredeemable. That the exchange sites would make their personal information vulnerable to hackers and that creepy Uncle Sam would sexually violate them. They said all this in the hope that people like Bette wouldn’t give the law a fair shake, then turned around and feigned outrage on their behalf when the plan worked.

Finally — I just heard that the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died, possibly of a drug overdose. He was only in his 40s. Very sad.