Monthly Archives: May 2009

Bush: The Reformer With Results

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Just published at the Washington Post —

The number of babies being born out of wedlock has increased sharply in the United States, driven primarily by significant jumps in women in their 20s and 30s having children without getting married, according to a federal report released today.

More than 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women in 2007, a 26 percent rise from 2002 and more than double the number in 1980, according to the report from the National Center for Health Statistics. The increase reflected a 21 percent jump in the rates of unmarried women giving birth, which rose from 43.7 per 1,000 women in 2002 to 52.9 per 1,000 women.

That means that unmarried women accounted for 39.7 percent of all U.S. births in 2007 — nearly four out of every 10 newborns — up from 34 percent in 2002 and more than double the percentage in 1980.

Well, so much for the Healthy Marriage Initiative, not to mention the Abstinence Only Until Marriage programs. On the plus side, if we need to find junk to cut out of the federal budget, I have a couple of suggestions.

However, it appears the Obama Administration has adopted the Healthy Marriage Initiative rather than kill it. Please, just de-fund the blasted thing.

Sticks and Stones

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The head in The Politico says “GOP, RNC to rebrand Democrats as ‘Socialists,'” which made me wonder if I’d enter some Star Trek time warp-loop anomaly. Wasn’t the “S” word the big gun that was supposed to save the McCain campaign last summer?

But the story is that the RNC is going to vote on a resolution that will rebrand the Dems as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” and force party chairman Michael Steele to use that term whenever referring to the Dems. Steele is on record as believing the “Democrat Socialist” idea is just dumb.

As Ron Beasley says, “You know what a sorry state the Republican Party is in when Michael Steele is the voice of reason.”

I’m wondering what happened to the old standard insult, “liberal.” Twenty years ago, it was the only code word the GOP needed to defeat Michael Dukakis. But now it seems the word “liberal” has not only been drained of meaning; it’s been drained of connotation, color, inference, and association as well. It’s now as bland as cottage cheese. Who’s afraid of the “L” word any more?

I can’t imagine “socialist” is exactly the firebomb it once was, either. It’s been a long time since red-baiting was the sure-fire way to win an election. It was replaced by race-baiting at least 40 years ago. But then race-baiting was replaced by feminist-baiting, atheist-baiting, gay-baiting, and most recently immigrant-baiting, and the voters aren’t biting the way they used to.

But maybe the GOP is on a nostalgia kick. Wake me up when Eric Cantor says Nancy Pelosi is “pink right down to her underwear” (said by Richard Nixon of Helen Gahagan Douglas, California Senate race, 1950).

System Failures

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Robert Pear writes in the New York Times that the recession is draining Social Security and Medicare of funds faster than expected. If current trends continue, Medicare will be out of money by 2017 and Social Security by 2037.

The situation with Medicare is especially bad news, coming at a time when we’re finally on the edge of maybe enacting real health care reform. Medicare’s situation will be more ammunition the Right will use to protect the private health insurance industry.

My fear is that we’re looking at cascading system failures. Everything is breaking down at once, and we can’t fix this until we’ve fixed that, but because that is failing we lack the resources to address several other things, etc. Government may not have been drowned in the bathtub, but it lacks the strength to stand up and dry itself off.

It may be that it’s too late to pull the nation out of the pit it’s in, and that hardships are going to continue to pile up for the next few years. That’s a possibility I think we have to face.

I haven’t seen much discussion on the blogosphere about this yet. For the past couple of years discussion of the looming shortfalls of Social Security in particular were actively shouted down as a right-wing talking point and not a real problem. However, it always has been a real problem; just not a problem that a health economy and some tweaking of the income cap couldn’t fix in time to avoid disaster. Now, not so easy.

Well, if you find any commentary that sheds light on this situation, please let me know.

What Is the Purpose of a Health Care System?, Part II

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Last week I proposed there were two answers to the question “What is the purpose of a health care system?”

A. Provide health care
B. Support a profitable health care industry

I’m not opposed to a health care system that does both, but not if Purpose A is compromised.

Apparently Sen. Chuck Schumer is attempting to craft a “middle ground” that compromises Purpose A in order to support Purpose B. A New York Times editorial explains Schumer’s plan:

Any competition between a new public plan and private plans would be waged on a regulated field of battle within a new health insurance exchange. Most reform proposals envisage the exchange as a place where individuals unable to obtain coverage at work and ineligible for existing public programs like Medicaid could buy policies that would be available to everyone without regard to pre-existing medical problems. Low-income people would get subsidies to help buy a private or public plan.

Opponents of a new public plan have raised the specter that it might have unfair advantages that would enable it to draw customers from private insurers and ultimately drive them out of business, leaving virtually all Americans enrolled in a full-fledged single-payer system, like Medicare. That prospect could be mitigated by appropriate ground rules.

Now, get this part:

Senator Schumer, a Democratic member of the crucial Senate Finance Committee who was assigned to study the issue, has come up with some reasonable principles to ensure that any competition between a public plan and private plans would be a fair fight. In general, he suggests that a public plan should have to comply with the same rules and standards as private plans.

Because, you know, we cannot be unfair to the private insurance industry, even if it means compromising the health of citizens.

The public plan could not be supported by tax revenues or government appropriations but by premiums and co-payments. It would have to maintain reserves, like private insurers, and provide the same minimum benefits as all other insurers in the exchange. It could not compel doctors who want to participate in Medicare to also participate in the new public plan. And it would be run by different officials from those who run the insurance exchange to lessen the likelihood that federal officials would give unfair advantages to their program.

Because, you know, we cannot give unfair advantage to a public system, which means the public system will be priced out of reach for many people. Yes, it says “low income” people may qualify for subsidies, but we sort of have that now. It’s called “Medicaid.” The income ceiling for qualifying for Medicaid is so low that vast numbers of people who can’t afford health insurance don’t qualify for Medicaid, either. I am not hopeful that low-income subsidies for public health insurance would be any different. Let’s forget about putting people through the indignity of qualifying for subsidies and make the bleeping insurance less expensive, period.

I just sent Sen. Schumer — one of my senators — a message explaining to him why he can go to hell, btw.

And the New York Times editorialist is no less clueless:

Mr. Schumer is on the right track. It should be possible to design a system in which public and private plans could compete without destroying the private coverage that most Americans have and for the most part want to keep.

I don’t think most Americans give a hoo-haw about private versus public coverage, as long as they can see a doctor when they need to. People who have insurance now and can see a doctor when they need to don’t feel a need for change, but if their insurance was publicly funded and they could still see the same doctors they are seeing now, I very much doubt there would be riots in the streets because the government isn’t being fair to the private insurance industry.

Tortured

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Greg Sargent:

The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. The paper cites “allies” of the White House as a source.

Dem Congressional staffers tell me this report is the “holy grail,” because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives.

Of course, anything the Obama Administration does triggers howls of protest from conservatives. Nor do I think release of such a document would cause Dick Cheney to go away, because I think Dick slipped his tether to reality some time back.

Memo to the Titanic

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Nate Silver has picked up on my generational political “imprinting” hypothesis, which says that at the point a new generation becomes old enough to be aware of politics, it is “imprinted” with whatever narrative is playing out in politics at the time. That imprinting carries with it political memes and values that will stick with most people of that generation the rest of their lives, no matter what.

My hypothesis was based on pure observation, but Nate, bless him, has real data. And he says that much voter behavior hinges on the question “Who was president when you turned 18?”

Nate has a chart that shows people who turned 18 during the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations are more likely to identify themselves as “Republican” than people who turned 18 during any other recent administration. And if this trend continues, the GOP had better be worried. The crop of young folks who turned 18 during the G.W. Bush administration is the least Republican generation ever.

Nate says this political partisan imprinting can be “quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse.” In other words, once imprinted, the imprinting tends to stick, even if political reality changes. The imprinting going on now will impact politics for the next half century.

Heh.

Along the same lines, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais write for the Los Angeles Times that “The Republican Party ignores young ‘millennials’ at its peril.”

The “millennials” — the generation of Americans born between 1982 and 2003 — now identify as Democrats by a ratio of 2 to 1. They are the first in four generations to contain more self-perceived liberals than conservatives. …

…Only 9% of millennials polled expressed a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Only 7% were positive about the GOP’s congressional leaders. By contrast, 65% of millennials had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, and a majority also approved of congressional Democrats.

The authors attribute this shift to how the millennials were raised, but I think the real difference is George W. Bush and the current Republican Party. These young folks came of age during a national train wreck.

For the first time in living memory, young people do not assume their lives will be as financially blessed as their parents were. Even those who go to college and who get “better” jobs spend much of their early adulthood paying off college loans instead of saving for the first house. “Job security” has become an oxymoron. Once they’re too old to be carried on their parents’ health insurance, vast numbers of young people are cut off from receiving medical care.

And the GOP is utterly oblivious to this. Republicans are not addressing these issues at all except to call for continuing the failed policies that created the current reality. This is not to say Democrats will do a better job of addressing these issues, but at least Democrats seem to have a clue.

Millennials tend to be more knowledgeable about environmental issues and more accepting that global climate change is real than previous generations. They also are less homophobic. The current GOP is laissez faire on economics and business, but authoritarian on social issues. But millennials tend to be laissez faire on social issues and want to see government play a more pro-active role in steering the economy. They feel locked out and want the nation’s wealth to be “redistributed,” dammit!

Two other op eds at the Los Angeles Times deserve mention. Mickey Edwards, who appears to be a conservative, argues that “The Nation Needs a Better GOP.”

If Democrats control the legislative and executive branches without meaningful opposition, the country will be the weaker for it. Some of President Obama’s initiatives would dramatically shift the boundaries between public and private, reshape the relationship between citizens and government and alter the lens through which America views its international commitments. These are serious matters and deserve serious, and constructive, engagement.

In the long run it is far better for the country if a broad range of views — or, at least, as broad a range of views as one finds in American politics, which generally isn’t that broad — is represented in government. It’s good when the majority view is challenged intelligently by a thoughtful minority. If nothing else, it keeps the majority on its toes and goads them into thinking through their proposals more clearly. However,

Today, the Republican belief system has degenerated into an embarrassing hodgepodge that worships political victory more than ideas; supports massive deficits; plunges the nation into “just-in-case” wars without adequate troops, supplies or armor; dismisses constitutional strictures; and campaigns on a platform of turning national problem-solving over to “Joe the Plumber.” It’s hard to see how all that points the way to a reawakening of voters to trust in the GOP. …

… Merely attacking administration proposals and labeling Obama a “socialist” will only ensure that instead of rebounding, as the GOP did in 1968, the party will slip even further into irrelevance. And that will not be good for America.

Finally, one other op ed says “What Republicans need is a mutiny.” To take the party away from the troglodytes, yes? Alas, this op ed was written by Richard A. Viguerie, a troglodyte’s troglodyte.

Democrats have nothing to fear from today’s Republican Party leaders. That’s why Democrats have taken to targeting Rush Limbaugh and others who aren’t in formal leadership positions in the GOP but who forcefully articulate a conservative vision.

To paraphrase the Gipper, anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh is forcefully articulating “a conservative vision” is the problem, not the solution.

Update: Fred Barnes actually wrote this for next week’s Weekly Standard:

Improving the party’s image is a worthy cause, but it isn’t what Republicans ought to be emphasizing right now. They have a more important mission: to be the party of no. And not just a party that bucks Obama and Democrats on easy issues like releasing Gitmo terrorists in this country, but one committed to aggressive, attention-grabbing opposition to the entire Obama agenda.

I hope all Republicans read this and pay close attention to what Fred says.

If Republicans scan their history, they’ll discover unbridled opposition to bad Democratic policies pays off. Those two factors, unattractive policies plus strong opposition, were responsible for the Republican landslides in 1938, 1946, 1966, 1980, and 1994. A similar blowout may be beyond the reach of Republicans in 2010, but stranger things have happened in electoral politics. They’ll lose nothing by trying.

GOP: Barnes is a wise man, and you should do what he says. Please.

Ayn Rand and Infantile Omnipotence

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If you’re in the mood for something a little weightier than the ever-popular “righties stink,” check out this essay on Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes by Mary Midgley at The Guardian.

The basic theme is that both Hobbes and Rand wrote about the individual in relation to society, but came to opposite conclusions. Hobbes stressed the individual’s need for security, and he promoted the ideal of a strong commonwealth with a powerful sovereign at its head. Rand went in the other direction, warning of the evils of “collectivism” and promoting absolute individuality to the point of denouncing altruism as evil.

Hobbes’s ideas belonged to the age of the Sun-King, Midgley says, and Hobbes has little to say to us today about dealing with intolerable government. Rand, on the other hand, is still influencing politics. “Noam Chomsky has called her deeply evil,” Midgley writes. “This may seem like taking her too seriously, but we surely do need to take seriously the ideas that she stands for.”

This paragraph seems to me to be especially insightful:

What chiefly emerges here is surely how important it is, when we are confronted with these extreme and simple doctrines, to understand the guiding visions behind them and in particular, just what danger they aim to protect us against. Rand’s guiding vision is clearly what used to be called infantile omnipotence – the childish hope of total control – and her doctrines have great influence because that hope is still always strong in the depths of our hearts. The fear that haunts her is the fear of having to obey someone else. This fear, intelligently disciplined, does indeed lie at the root of our emphasis on liberty, but there is nothing to be said for erecting it on its own into a “heroic” stance of self-admiration.

I’ve long felt there was something both infantile and desperately fearful at the base of Randism. And for all their supposed admiration for rational thought, there is nothing rational about an ideology that denies the basic nature of humans and human civilization. We are social creatures who depend on each other and live for each other, whether we like it or not. Civilization may have come up with ways to make the interdependence impersonal, but we are still interdependent. Individual humans, isolated from other humans and from civilization, do not survive well.

So when a Randbot says, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” that’s both a scream of denial and a tantrum.

More Infantilism

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For the past several days the Right Blogosphere has been excusing Bush Administration torture by taking what, to them, is the moral high ground — The Dems were in on it too. Specifically, they’ve been pointing fingers at Nancy Pelosi, who allegedly was briefed on torture early on, and said nothing. Emptywheel has been fact-checking.

I’ve been mostly ignoring this, because what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it is far from the biggest issue facing us today. But the righties aren’t letting go of it. Everything is about political gotcha with them.

If Pelosi or any other Democrat appears to be guilty of something, by all means, investigate, and indict where appropriate. This “Pelosi did it too” nonsense is just plain infantile.

Olbermann did a segment on this that’s worth watching:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Disconnections

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During my recent adventures in physical therapy, I overheard an elderly woman, also in physical therapy, talking about a relative who had received bad medical care while traveling in Italy. Then she shook her head and made a disparaging remark about “socialized medicine.” I wanted to ask her if Medicare paid for her physical therapy, although I didn’t. I suspect that if I had told her Medicare was “socialized medicine,” she wouldn’t have believed it.

I thought of this woman as I read Joe Conason’s article in Salon called “Stop ‘Hillary-care’ now!” He calls the Right’s attempts to scuttle health care reform pathetic, and on many levels they are. But that doesn’t mean they won’t work.

Conason writes that the Right’s strategy is to stoke fear of government bureaucrats.

But as his memo indicates, that task is becoming more difficult as the actual conditions that Americans confront grow worse. No longer is it sufficient to deny the reality of crisis in the healthcare system — and if Republicans continue to do so, the overwhelming majority of the American public that is demanding reform will dismiss them. What Luntz urges his party to do instead is to redefine the crisis not as an existing problem of millions of uninsured families and unaffordable care, but as a looming threat of government medicine run amok.

Maximizing fear is the true message of the Luntz memo: fear of government-run healthcare, fear that bureaucrats will intercede between doctors and patients, fear that those same faceless bureaucrats in Washington will deny lifesaving procedures to helpless people. He urges the Republicans to promote “horror stories” about care delayed and denied in countries with national health insurance. If they heed his advice, we can expect to see ads warning that “your child could die” because government bureaucrats held up a critical operation until it was just too late.

Of course, bureaucrats at private insurance companies have been doing these terrible things for years, but we’re not supposed to notice.

Conason reports something said by Republican Senator Jon Kyl: “Imagine needing a new hip that will make it easier to get around, but just because you’re over 75, the government denies you that surgery. We can’t allow that to happen in America.” But Medicare pays for hip replacements all the time. So won’t Americans notice how absurd the GOP’s arguments are? I say some will. But some won’t.

The Right has done an amazing job of turning Americans into people with bifurcated brains. There’s a clear cognitive disconnection between “big expensive government programs” and “programs I like (that are run by the government).”

Remember this Bushism from the 2000 presidential campaign?

We trust individual workers, and so our plan says we’re going to keep the promise to our seniors. But we’ll allow younger workers at their choice to invest some of their own money in the private markets to get a better rate of return so that the Social Security promise will be kept.

And this frightens some in Washington. Because they want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. We understand differently though. You see, it’s your money not the government’s money.

Of course, Al Gore pounced on that remark, and in a sane world candidate Bush would have been hooted out of the campaign. But Bush was not hooted out of the campaign, and I think that’s partly because many of the people who heard the “like its come kind of federal program” remark didn’t catch the problem with it.

And I know in my bones that you could find people who have been denied care by insurance companies, or who have no insurance at all, who are opposed to “socialized medicine” because they don’t want “government bureaucrats” making decisions about health care.

Conason writes,

In a typical Luntz language memo such as this one, he commands Republicans to repeat certain words and phrases over and over again, on the humiliating assumption that both they and their constituents will behave like mindless stooges. His underlying aim is to strip words of their meaning to evoke automatic responses — and to shut down rational thought.

Yes. And y’know what? They are really good at stripping words of their meaning to evoke an automatic response. Think of what the Right has done to “liberty” and “freedom” for example. They play “freedom” like a trump card. It doesn’t matter what they’re defending, including torture and warrantless wiretapping; once “freedom” is thrown on the table, the trump card is supposed to win the hand. But within the context of the ideas they are defending the word “freedom” has no meaning.

On the other hand, I can think of times in which a majority of the American people saw through the sham. I’m thinking of the privatized social security scheme Bush tried to sell, and the Terri Schiavo debacle. I’ve thought for years that eventually the percentage of Americans with really bad experiences with the health care system would grow into a critical mass. And when that happened, I thought, maybe we could get reform.

But then there are lobbyists. Someone should work out a citizen-to-lobbyist influence ratio, as in how many irate citizens does it take to cancel out the influence of one lobbyist? It would be a really big number.

Then again, citizen opinion must count for something, or the Right wouldn’t even bother to scam us, nor would the insurance industry have paid for those “Harry and Louise” ads of yore. Perhaps all is not lost.