Monthly Archives: May 2014
Fun With Hashtags
This may be one of the best things Jon Stewart ever did. Be sure to watch to the end:
That hashtag, in case you missed it, is #F*@KYOURUSH .
I had noticed the Right was absolutely enraged by the photo of the FLOTUS holding a sign with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Mark Steyn wrote a post called #BringBackOurBalls that was just plain twisted. As in over-the-top projective vomit. I refuse to link to the thing; you can google for it if you want to read it. Steyne is disgusted by the photo, but he can’t say what else the FLOTUS is supposed to do about the kidnapped Nigerian girl, other than send in special forces, or SOMETHING. Like a FLOTUS has the power to order special forces around.
Ultimately, Steyn’s problem seems to be that Michelle Obama exists.
Ann Coulter piled on, but it backfired a tad. Heh.
Poor Baby Bobby
Bobby Jindal wants you to know the evil Obama Administration hates America.
Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war.
It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance.
It is a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence.
It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism.
It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle.
It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity.
It is a war against the conscience that drives social change.
It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together.
It is a war against America’s best self, at America’s best moments.
It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty.
…
This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.
Wow, that’s really awful. What is the awful terrible government doing to oppress religion?
First, the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. The Obama Administration has taken the position that private, for-profit companies cannot claim a religious exemption from including birth control as part of their employee benefit packages.
Second, the HGTV Cable network — HG stands for “home and garden” — dropped plans to produce a program hosted by twin brothers David and Jason Benham. The brothers were to have helped poor people turn a “fixer upper” into a nice home. Then it came out that the brothers and their father, Fiip Benham, had a history of right-wing extremist activism that includes lots of loud hate speech aimed at homosexuals and those who support abortion rights. HGTV dropped plans for the program, no doubt to protects its politics-free brand. This episode proves, Jindal said, that “The modern Left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.”
It would probably surprise HGTV that they are representatives of the “modern Left.” But no one is stopping the Benhams from saying what ever they like.
And finally, Jindal is still angry about the “Duck Dynasty” guy, who suffered no ill effects from saying stupid things that pissed off a lot of people. I think Bobby feels left out he missed being fed to lions in an arena.
Are There Hats?
Update on The Book
I have uploaded a trial file to Kindle and am checking the format, and things seem to be going smoothly. Sometime this week The Book will be available for sale on Kindle. I have a lot of formatting work to do to get it ready to be printed, but it’s safe to say the paperback version will be available in June, if not by the end of May.
The final title is Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World and the ISBN is 978-0-692-21946-1.
Little Boys With Big Toys
Today the war between self-appointed “militia” and the BLM continues with a protest of the closing (in 2007) of Recapture Canyon, Utah, to motorized vehicles. Today a bunch of spoiled brats with big senses of entitlement plan to ride around Recapture Canyon on ATVs in the name of “freedom.” The issue with the area is that it is full of archeological sites, including some nearly intact Pueblo dwellings, and the ATVs were smashing things, which is why the BLM made it off limits to ATVs. Here’s a video made in 2010 that shows what the area is like:
(Update: Saturday’s Illegal Cliven Bundy-Endorsed ATV Rally Runs Through Sacred American Indian Sites)
As soon as the BLM said people had to stop riding ATVs in Recapture Canyon, the Spoiled Brat Militia, also called the Little Boys With Big Toys, made riding ATVs in Recapture Canyon a Big Deal Cause. Never mind that Utah is this huge sparsely populated state with who knows how many trails to ride on; if they can’t ride through Recapture canyon and smash up artifacts at will they are being Oppressed.
A fellow who loves the canyon named Don Peacock wrote,
One immediate consequence of the illegal ATV event is the cancellation of a well-planned trip for veterans co-sponsored by the BLM and the Sierra Club. I was to be a partner in this invaluable veterans’ program and had intended to address the vets at Sand Island, 20 miles south of Blanding, on the day following the ATV trip. Many of the veterans are, like myself, disabled from combat, with service-related trauma both physical and psychic. Native American medicine men were to prepare sweat lodges, along with traditional healing ceremonies. Navaho war veterans, whose ancestors were forced off these lands and fought in great numbers in our country’s foreign battles, had planned to assist the veterans healing program. I was especially enthusiastic to participate in the vets program because of the Navajo and the quality of the leadership of both BLM and Sierra Club outreach personnel. One of them wrote this on April 24:
“Due to the potential risk of an illegal ATV ride on BLM lands conflicting with our Cedar Mesa trek, we are postponing the event until October of this year. While the spiritual side of the event could be affected by the ATV ride, there is also the potential safety risk to BLM staff and trip participants due to the recent hostile atmosphere in the West surrounding these events.”
This great healing event for veterans has been pushed aside by a few ATV advocates insistent on illegally riding their silly toys. What a missed opportunity.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
Fed up with federal control over lands their families have used for generations, about 30 people on ATVs on Saturday drove into Recapture Canyon, a nearby trove of prehistoric sites the Bureau of Land Management closed to motorized use seven years ago.
San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, acting as a private citizen, organized the event, which started with a rally in Blanding’s Centennial Park, to protest what he and supporters call federal “overreach” into local jurisdiction. Prompting the protest is their anger with what they say is the BLM’s failure to process San Juan County’s applications for ATV rights-of-way in Recapture, which is filled with Native America prehistoric sites.
It’s federal land; there is no “local jurisdiction” and never has been. These guys are destroying things that belong to all of us.
… there was little sympathy from environmental, hunting and preservation groups, as well as tribal members, who claim an ancestral affiliation with the Native Americans who inhabited the canyon 1,000 years ago. Critics say ATV enthusiasts have themselves to blame for the closure by building an unauthorized trail over archaeological sites that harbors middens, kivas, farming plots and cooking areas.
Vehicle traffic accelerates erosion of intact deposits under the routes, which can help reveal how prehistoric people thrived in this arid landscape, but only if studied in proper scientific context, according to Jerry Spangler of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance.
“Damage to archaeological sites is permanent and the information about our collective past is then lost forever,” Spangler said. “It is sad that irreplaceable treasures of importance to all Americans would be sacrificed on the altar of anti-government fervor. It is worse that protesters would be so blinded to their own insensitivity as to what others consider to be sacred treasures of their past.”
They don’t care about anybody but themselves and their “right” to ride around in noisy, smelly vehicles and ruin things for everyone else. Little boys with big toys.
Desperately Seeking Desperation
The New York Times editorial board gets shrill:
The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to “serve†on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand.
They won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration. On Thursday, they voted to create a committee to spend “such sums as may be necessary†to conduct an investigation of the 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The day before, they voted to hold in contempt Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service official whom they would love to blame for the administration’s crackdown on conservative groups, if only they could prove there was a crackdown, which they can’t, because there wasn’t.
It may be starting to dawn on some of them that Obamacare isn’t going to be the magic bullet to a midterm sweep that they had assumed, which has a lot to do with why Benghazi!!! is so important to them now. Because it’s all they’ve got.
You know they’re getting desperate when they start asking each other why the Democrats are so afraid of [fill in the blank]. This is something they do whenever the Democrats call bullshit on their grandstanding. (See? They aren’t cooperating. They must be afraid!)
Know When to Hold, Know When to Fold
Republicans’ biggest Achilles heel is that they believe their own bullshit. Last week the House GOP cranked out a phony survey that claimed only 67 percent of Obamacare enrollees had paid for their policies. Today the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on Obamacare, and the Republican members were utterly dumbfounded that the insurance executives who testified did not repeat the GOP talking points.
Republicans struggled to land punches against ObamaCare in a hearing Wednesday, as responses from insurance companies deflated several lines of questioning.
Democratic lawmakers were emboldened to defend the Affordable Care Act with renewed vigor and levity, creating a dynamic rarely seen in the debate over ObamaCare. …
… Republicans were visibly exasperated, as insurers failed to confirm certain claims about ObamaCare, such as the committee’s allegation that one-third of federal exchange enrollees have not paid their first premium.
Four out of five companies represented said more than 80 percent of their new customers had paid. The fifth, Cigna, did not offer an estimate.
Republicans also stumbled in asking insurers to detail next year’s premium rates. Companies are still in the process of calculating prices, and they have a strong financial incentive not to air early projections in public.
They honestly believed the hearing would confirm their bogus report? Actual facts caught them off guard? Apparently a lot of the Republican members walked out early, once they realized they weren’t going to get any useful anti-Obamacare ammunition. Some in rightie media were left with the the old foot in the mouth …
Across the board, the health insurance executives testified that the payment rate for premiums was somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, while stressing that these data are preliminary and that outstanding payments are still coming in.
This was a stinging rebuke of the Republicans on the very committee to which the executives were testifying, who had issued a report last week claiming that the premium payment rate was actually 67 percent. That report, which was based on incomplete data and rigged to produce a low number, was met with derision by journalists and observers who saw it as a transparent ploy to create a damaging anti-Obamacare talking point.
Conservative media, however, ate it up. “White House tries spin move on gloomy Obamacare numbers,†said Fox News. “The enrollment totals were bogus and worse than expected,†clucked Townhall’s Guy Benson, who later sneered at the White House’s pushback on the report.
Naturally, the headline at Reason is “Insurers Testify that 10-20 Percent of Obamacare Sign-Ups Haven’t Paid, Some Are Duplicates.” But y’know, the 10 percent easily could be people who got insured through new jobs, or through some other way, and decided they didn’t need the exchange policy. And if some are duplicates (from people making repeated attempts to sign up), that suggests the percentage of actual unpaid policies might be lower.
It’s also notable that the House Republicans apparently expected the insurance guys to be their buddies and give them the sound bytes they wanted. It doesn’t dawn on them that the insurance execs are mostly interested in keep their companies profitable, which means they want the exchanges to work. Because they make money selling insurance policies, and the exchanges are helping them tap into a market they weren’t tapping into before. The GOP is too lost in the weeds to realize that, it seems.
Clarence Thomas and Stockholm Syndrome.
Charles Pierce calls Justice Clarence Thomas “the last Confederate.” I hadn’t realized the Justice has a “thing” about the 14th Amendment and thinks it has been incorrectly applied to deny states the power to trample on the rights of U.S. citizens.
Yes, that 14th Amendment. The one that ensured people of color were citizens and stopped the “Black Codes.” The one that has been the primary foundation of much civil rights case law. I started to call this blog post “Is Clarence Thomas trying to prove Cliven was right?” but decided it was a bit too incendiary. But were the Black Codes okay with you, Justice Thomas?
Now that the Court has said it is perfectly fine to expect citizens to sit through prayers to Jesus at a town council meeting — the Court’s three Jewish members and just one of the Catholics disagreed — it turns out Justice Thomas thinks the establishment clause shouldn’t be binding on the states at all. So let Louisiana make Christianity the state religion and tell the Buddhist public school student to suck it up.
I was not aware, however, that several years ago Justice Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion that said states have the right to determine qualifications of senators and representatives elected to the federal Congress.
Emphasizing that “the Federal Government’s powers are limited and enumerated,” Justice Thomas said that “the ultimate source of the Constitution’s authority is the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the nation as a whole.” Consequently, he said, the states retained the right to define the qualifications for membership in Congress beyond the age and residency requirements specified in the Constitution. Noting that the Constitution was “simply silent” on the question of the states’ power to set eligibility requirements for membership in Congress, Justice Thomas said the power fell to the states by default. The Federal Government and the states “face different default rules,” Justice Thomas said. “Where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power — that is, where the Constitution does not speak either expressly or by necessary implication — the Federal Government lacks that power and the states enjoy it.”
That has been the basic argument since the Constitutional Convention began, and every time that it has been litigated — in the debates over ratificaton of the Constitution, in the battle over the tariff with South Carolina, when Webster stood up to Hayne, when John C. Calhoun fashioned his doctrine of nullification out of it, when the nation tore out its own guts between 1860 and 1865, and, most recently, when “massive resistance” became the strategy through which white supremacy sought to break the civil rights movement — it has failed. It was the basis for the Reconstruction amendments, especially the 14th, which Thomas curiously elides in both his term-limits dissent and his government-prayer concurrence.
So sad.
Health Care Makes People Healthier! Who Knew?
A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine yesterday said that after the 2006 “Romneycare” law went into effect in Massachusetts, mortality rates in Massachusetts dropped by about 3 percent.
The study tallied deaths in Massachusetts from 2001 to 2010 and found that the mortality rate — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — fell by about 3 percent in the four years after the law went into effect. The decline was steepest in counties with the highest proportions of poor and previously uninsured people. In contrast, the mortality rate in a control group of counties similar to Massachusetts in other states was largely unchanged.
A national 3 percent decline in mortality among adults under 65 would mean about 17,000 fewer deaths a year.
There have been a number of estimates of how many people die in the U.S. every year because they lack insurance. I think that’s a hard thing to quantify, and some people (Megan McCardle, actually) denied that access to health care made any difference to mortality rates at all, based on some standard McCardle-style reasoning that makes sense only if you don’t think about it.
The estimates have ranged from a low of 18,000 deaths per year to a high of 45,000 (analysis here), and the new study comes closer to supporting the lower figure. However, I postulate that the effects might be larger in poorer states, especially over a longer period of time (the study only covered 2006-2010). I believe Massachusetts already had lower mortality rates than much of the rest of the country, mostly because it is more affluent overall. Also, it’s going to take a few years before the effects of long years of neglect fade away. But they’re not going to fade so much in “Medicaid gap” states.
See also interesting comments from The Incidental Economist.
Meanwhile Gallup reports that the percentage of uninsured Americans has dropped to the lowest point since they began measuring the percentage of uninsured Americans.
Also meanwhile, some whackjob Republican is comparing Obamacare to the Holocaust. And a majority of Americans still think Obamacare is a failure.