conservatives are weird

Supposedly the conservative media circuit is going absolutely gaga over this video as the big "game changer" they've been looking for. I don't get it. I tried to guess from the Youtube comments, but I can't make out any point underneath the cesspool of generalized obscenity. Something about Obama being a racist because he magnifies his African American accent when talking to African Americans and gave a shout-out to Reverend Wright in 2007.

People can be really, really stupid.

Today is the first day of "Obamacare" for the hospital system

Ezra's on the case:

There are two big parts of the health reform law going into effect today. One penalizes hospitals if patients are re-admitted to the hospital within one month of a visit for a condition that should have been dealt with on the first trip. The other seeks to redistribute higher Medicare payments to the hospitals that are delivering better care.

 He goes a little deeper into the weeds in his post. For my part, I've always been skeptical of models that target low performing organizations and cut their funding, whether in terms of hospitals or schools. If the organization is suffering from some problem that inhibits the quality of their output, whether bad management or perverse incentives or incompetent personnel, isn't cutting their funding only going to make things worse?

Nevertheless, speaking of perverse incentives, putting hospitals on the hook for delivering bad care is a great idea. I would have preferred a system that spends a little more money and audits the hospital in an effort to pinpoint the problem, but the ACA is about broad directions more than perfect solutions.

The perfect is the enemy of the less bad

Conor Friedersdorf and some Facebook political identity test have set off a conversation in the last week or two about whether liberals should vote for Obama. Drone warfare is traumatizing the citizens of Afghanistan something awful, and as we have discussed here before, Obama has been surprisingly bad on civil liberties, chasing down whistleblowers to a degree unmatched even by the Bush Administration.

Still, I have a few thoughts about this sentiment:

1. First of all, just to get it out there, Conor Friedersdorf is not a liberal; he's a right-leaning centrist with libertarian sentiments. Thus, there is an element of concern trolling going on here. Friedersdorf doesn't approve of much anything the president has done, including all the stuff liberals are (or should be) gaga over, so of course he doesn't plan to vote for Obama!

2. Conor Friedersdorf is not only not a liberal, but if I recall correctly he's also too young to have been suckered into this line of thinking in 2000. I wasn't too young, and I and many other idealistic rubes cast votes for Ralph Nader, which as we all now know turned out really to have been a vote for George W. Bush.

Sure, if you had told me at the time this would be the result, I might not have cared. After all, what does it matter which Republicrat gets into the White House, right? Except, as Kevin Drum points out today and which I've argued with others about since that fateful year, even if you make the worst possible assumptions about an Al Gore Administration, there would be one indisputable difference between it and what really happened: we would never have gone to war in Iraq. The Iraq War was a project of Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, one which there was no reason for Gore to have any investment in. That's hundreds of billions of dollars, 4000-ish American troops, and Lord knows how many civilian lives that would have been saved had a few hundred Nader voters in Florida and/or New Hampshire voted more realistically.

I want to emphasize here, again, that we didn't know George W. Bush was going to be the disaster he turned out to be. He ran as a borderline isolationist, saying in one debate that he didn't believe the US should be in the business of "nation-building." He was an unremarkable governor, not good but not particularly bad, either, aside from his zeal in signing death warrants. He talked up a big game about "compassionate conservatism," about reaching out to Democrats. By all appearances in November 2000, a Bush Administration really wouldn't be all that different from an Al Gore Administration. 

Fast forward to 2008. I knew some LGBT and ally voters who considered not voting for Obama because he seemed squishier than they'd like on gay rights. I'm not sure any of us would have guessed that he would end Don't Ask, Don't Tell by the end of his 2nd year in office, and would become the first president to support marriage equality by the end of his 3rd. Meanwhile, we know from John McCain's reaction that he would never have signed DADT away.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that the major party candidates are generally more different, and your vote means more, than the cynics would have you believe, and often in ways that surprise us. While it really is impossible for Jill Stein to win the White House herself, it is certainly possible for her to hand it to Mitt Romney, just as Nader unwittingly did for George W. Bush. It turns out that the primary consequence of a vote for Nader was a vote for the Iraq War, while a nose-holding vote for Barack Obama was a vote to end DADT. 

back to the future: who is middle class?

Here we are again: Barack Obama is running for president and we get mired in a debate about what constitutes "middle class."

I'm definitely less comfortable than I was four years ago drawing lines between the classes. I'm more cognizant now of the fact that people's income levels shift dramatically over the course of their lives, one key fact among many that Romney clearly is clueless about in his ignorant, elitist tirade against "the 47%."

Last time we talked a lot of median incomes and buying power and whatnot, but I think our whole conversation missed a crucial point: class is about much more than income levels. Either that, or in our society people frequently move from working class (college) to middle class (first job) to upper middle class (highest position) to working class (retirement) over the course of a lifetime. If that's the case, then "class" is nothing but a shorthand for how much you make at a particular moment, with no identifiable indicators of culture or power or anything else.

The point of "class" as a political concept is its connotations of privilege or the lack thereof, or as a sociological concept, in its connotations of a distinct sub-culture. The fact that we can't adequately define our classes, can't point to many things that are obviously exclusive to this or that class, is a good thing. The fact that the few things we can point to generally have a racial subtext is, obviously, less good. Conversations about privilege are mucked up by the prominent role of racism and modern-day segregation in shaping American attitudes toward each other, and the homogenizing forces like television have flattened cultural distinctions between classes.

I still think this it's ridiculous to put those making $200k/year in the same class as those making $40k/year. These two groups live worlds apart. Beyond that, it's harder to say.

the United States will not be pulling out of the Middle East, sorry

Steve Cook's great article on why the United States will remain the dominant diplomatic force in the Middle East is a helpful corrective to the talk about us losing influence that's become chic as of late. As a voting public, we're pretty ignorant on foreign policy; thus the old joke that war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. I don't think many people understand why we continue to have bases in the Middle East, and from what I can tell there are very few talking heads interested in explaining it. That is, of course, aside from those who think we should just shut the whole thing down and those who think we're waiting for Jesus to convert Israel to Christianity. I suppose the main reason for that is it's complicated, and there are both good reasons and bad reasons. Yes, we are there for oil. Yes, we are there to protect Israel. Yes, we are there to keep peace. Yes, we are there to plant and nurture the seeds of democracy. We're also there, however, because virtually no other countries want to be there, and the one other one that really does (Russia) is, in fact, a force for authoritarianism and brutality in that region. Our allies, meanwhile, benefit from our presence there. In fact, in terms of foreign policy the Obama Administration has greatly clarified this last point for me, the role of our allies' dependence on us in our foreign policy. As we discovered during the Libya conflict, the reliance on NATO and the Soviet Union for all foreign conflict for 50 years means that the US military is the only entity in the world capable of projecting significant military force and coordinating the forces of multiple nations. It is similar in Middle East foreign policy, where our diplomats and bases are also the proxy diplomats and bases of Europe and NATO.

fact checking

I was talking with a friend recently about "non-biased, objective fact-checkers." My point I was trying to make to her was that in most journalistic circles, it appears that "non-biased" just means "centrist," but those are not the same thing. The facts are not always directly in between the Democratic and Republican parties.

"Objective," meanwhile, doesn't mean anything at all: nobody is objective and nobody can be objective, but everybody believes they are objective.

What I told her I prefer are wonky policy types who are more concerned with dealing with the evidence conscientiously than with being accused of being liberal or conservative. Perhaps that's just a fancy way of saying "non-biased, objective fact-checkers," but I feel like what Ezra Klein does is different than what Politifact or NBC News' in-house fact-checker does.


Here's a really interesting example of that from Ezra. Ezra attempts to make a circumspect post on the truths, lies, and misleading points in Paul Ryan's speech, but fails to find enough compelling true points to finish the post. In my opinion, most people who call themselves "fact-checkers" would have either added some questionable points to the "true" section to maintain "balance," or alternatively would have deleted the whole thing and just not said anything. Ezra posts anyway and shows his work, since his inability to complete such a post is a very important insight into Ryan's speech.

Romney's running mate

Did the Romney campaign really telegraph their choice before he made the official pick? That seems exceedingly silly to me. Are people supposed to get super jazzed over Paul Ryan? If he really does pick Ryan, my suspicion is a bunch of Beltway morons told him everyone would be ecstatic over this, when the truth is that probably fewer than 10% of voters know who the hell this guy is.

And let's be honest, the ones who do know him, know him as either nasal-voiced snoozefest or a faux-serious economic charlatan.

My record of predicting running mates is admittedly atrocious, but I would have put money on Marco Rubio.

I'll give Romney this, for what it's worth: Paul Ryan isn't Sarah Palin, and will never be Sarah Palin. This might make for one seriously boring ticket, but he's unquestionably a better choice than the one John McCain made.

Interestingly, a debate between Paul Ryan and Barack Obama on budgets, in a non-campaign setting, could actually be intensely interesting. Both of them are gifted at civil, polite, detail-oriented debates, and are of similar temperament if dramatically divergent political perspectives. We'll get no such thing in this campaign, though.

calling foul

Interesting development here in the preseason. An important detail: the usual refs are locked out due to contract negotiations between the officials' union and the NFL. These "replacement officials" are, in fact, scabs being double-teamed by the union whose picket lines they're crossing and the players, who are themselves unionized. Without having watched the games, it's hard to say whether it's true that these refs were "clueless" or were just being judged ungenerously by a hostile audience.

Frankly, I'm not sure it matters, either. Union workers may or may not be better or more qualified or more diligent than non-union workers, but that isn't the point of supporting unions or the reason to despise scabs. Unions should be supported because the alternative is to hand all power over wages and workplace conditions to the bosses. We've had that situation before, and it wasn't pretty.

Sadly, these are also the circumstances under which the NFL is hiring its first female referee. It's sad that Shannon Easton has to cross a picket line to break through this glass ceiling.

the best Tex Mex cooking site IN THE WORLD

Did you know there's a Tex Mex-specific analog to Smitten Kitchen? I didn't. I've now tried 3 recipes from Homesick Texan:

This biscuit recipe is what I used to make my first successful attempt at fluffy biscuits without resorting to shortening. I even used white-whole wheat flour!

The Mexican rice turned out better than any restaurant version I've ever had.

The sauce in this stacked enchiladas recipe, however, brought me to a new state of consciousness. Also, I just washed the dishes afterwards, and my fingertips are burning.

The Worst Congress Ever, in 14 relatively nonpartisan ways

Told like it is. Fewest laws passed of any Congress, lowest popularity of any Congress, most polarized of any Congress, but most importantly, an explication of all the very important ways they have failed us at critical moments this year, and have done more harm than good.

credit card surcharges and you

Underneath all the election year garbage, some news of actual import to everyone who uses credit cards or runs a business that accepts them. Via Kevin Drum, it appears that, thanks to a major anti-trust settlement against Visa and Mastercard, merchants are no longer barred by contract from passing along card companies' 2.5% swipe fee on to consumers.

Drum is mainly looking at the possible effects of this settlement from a wonky point of view, but what does it mean for the consumer? 2.5%, if added as a surcharge to every credit card purchase, swamps any savings gained by most rewards programs, as they all give in the neighborhood of 1% back. Will it still be worth it not to carry cash? Will this apply to debit cards as well? Will we find, as Drum suspects, that the swipe fees were too high in the first place, and now businesses will get a respite from the grift of a greedy oligopoly? Will this mean the end of rewards programs?

ACA not a very good issue to demogogue

Yglesias on why we keep getting articles and interviews where someone viciously denounces Obamacare and then proposes in its place something identical or almost identical:

Still, as a matter of forward-looking policy, I think that what's going on here is that in order to stay "onside" in the political debate, a number of moderate conservative commentators are drastically exaggerating the extent of their disagreements with the law. Saying you think Obamacare's increase in taxation of investment income should be rolled back and replaced with more aggressive implementation of the excise tax is a far cry from positing a deep-seated philosophical disagreement with the overall approach. At some point, everyone had to look at the overall legislative package and decide if they were "for" or "against" it, and ever since that moment the debate about the specific elements of the progam has gotten extremely fuzzy and overly polarized.

It's true, I definitely think he's right that this happened, but I think he's being too charitable here. Yes, there is definitely an element here of David Brooks playing a side, and so trying to find excuses to denounce Obamacare. This point about how people have generally approached debate on the ACA by taking a side on the whole thing first and then letting that color how they feel about, and argue, each individual piece is I think unquestionably true. There is something of a smart calculus there, though: while nice discussions can be had on the merits of each piece, if you analyze the pieces and then try to argue a position on the whole thing based on those, the "ban on denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions" pieces is going to crowd out everything else, and the anti-Obamacare position is pretty much indefensible on TV if you allow that.

That being said, I'm pretty sure there's also a strong element here of David Brooks not actually knowing what the law does. Coverage and debate of the ACA has really exposed just how little the journalists in our television and newspapers present or even understand the major bills they purport to be discussing. Brooks' misunderstanding here is quite minor compared to the general idiocy we've been subjected to.

Outsourced Justice: not blind, but only sees green

I've joked a bit with friends that now, having lived in the deep south for almost a year, I get why southerners are so distrustful of government: they're so terrible at it. There are so many terrible ideas in this piece that I don't know where to start. It's about municipalities down here outsourcing traffic fines and probations. There are a lot of individual sentences in this piece that will leave your jaw agape. Here was one that did it for me:

J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit, said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like many across the country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue, and that some legislators even believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.

What kind of an uber-Randian weirdo do you have to be to believe that the courts should generate their own revenue?

Fast and Furious: what it is and what really happened

Are you curious? Have you been avoiding all the articles about it because it looks like more pointless Republican b.s.?

I had been. It turns out that there's actually a very interesting story in it, just not the one House GOPers are trying to write. Fortune Magazine, of all places, has released the findings of its detailed investigation. It's an amazing story, tragic on many levels. The story answers an important question about the connection between the evisceration of state and federal firearm regulation and the frightening bloodbath in Mexico, a question about the macro-level consequences of massive gun deregulation.

It all starts, however, from a much smaller question: how does ATF stop an alleged Sinaloa cartel gun-runner in Arizona, where it's legal to buy guns in infinite amounts, legal to turn around and sell them to whomever you want, illegal to construct a database to track gun sales and buyers, and the penalty even for getting caught selling guns to criminal organizations carries only a minor penalty?

Read to the end: the story has a killer punchline.

"The Newsroom" and ideological centrism

I can't speak to the problem with "The Newsroom" because I haven't seen it. That being said, David Carr's critique in The New York Times comments on the show as clearly inspired by CNN and Sorkin's vision for what cable news should be, and well, it's problematic. One should preface such a discussion by stating that discussing the "perfect" news show is a perilous path. There be dragons! Still, this sentence irked me:

CNN has stuck with, well, a version of the news, and gotten clobbered in the process. ... In Mr. Sorkin’s series, and out there in the big, bad world of television, there is a battle for the souls and eyeballs of the American viewing public, and CNN finds itself in a competitive business where simply delivering the news is no longer sufficient.

Except the CNN doesn't simply deliver the news, does it? Here I think is where CNN has been unable to fix itself: its board or producers or whatever haven't grappled with the fact it's every bit as ideological as any other channel, but lacks their convictions. It's the media version of the political centrist, and it's losing cache among the public for the exact same reasons.

FOX is a news channel full of conservatives and run by a conservative. They may be trying to make as conservative a news channel as possible, but more likely it's a group of conservatives covering the stories they believe is important in the manner they believe is most accurate and most fair. Thus, discussions and editorial choices on that channel display all manner of conservative assumptions, biases and philosophical points of view. That being said, those assumptions and biases and philosophy are probably unconscious at the time of newscrafting; rather, the reporters and producers are reporting and producing what they believe is The Truth.

I loathe FOX News as much as any self-respecting liberal. I believe it's deeply unbalanced and unfair, that it places low value on journalistic integrity and is as much as an arm of the Republican Party as a news organization, but I think the anchors and talking heads and producers on there generally believe what they're saying.

It's largely the same with MSNBC. When it's liberal, it's liberal because Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow are liberals conducting a news show in the way they believe is most accurate and fair and meaningful, not because the producers are thinking: "Hmm, what would be the most liberal stories to cover, and how can we make them as liberal as possible?"

This is the problem with centrism, whether practiced as a news organization or a politician. Centrists begin not with their own first principles, but with everybody else's. The answer to every question lies directly between what the conservative said and what the liberal said. It matters not if the conservative and the liberal are both more conservative than they were 20 years ago, or whether the conservative was arguing what is now the liberal line only 3 years ago, or whether one's facts are demonstrably false according to every nonpartisan source in the country.

This hermeneutic of looking at two arguments and crafting a middle one is hardly "simply delivering the news." In fact, in my opinion, it's ideological in a much more calculated way than either of the ideological networks.

Longer life, thanks to the government

Ezra Klein notes findings in The Lancet that the average life expectancy of the citizens of the New York City have gone from being the shortest lived in the country to the longest over the course of about 20 years. And what do New Yorkers have to thank this remarkable turnaround?

New York City, meanwhile, was accustomed to trailing the rest of the country in life expectancy by a full three years through the 1980s. That changed in the 1990s for two main reasons, according to The Lancet, a British medical journal: The city’s murder rate dropping 75 percent and new antiretroviral therapies that could combat the cities AIDS epidemic. The next decade saw the advent of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s public health crusade, replete with public smoking bans and restrictions on trans fats.

What Ezra isn't mentioning here is that the city's murder rate dropped precipitously in the '90's for one very specific reason: Mayor Rudy Giuliani's focus on aggressive law enforcement.* New York City's two liberal Republican mayors engaged in prolonged programs of government intervention in the life of the city, one relentlessly arresting and prosecuting offenders for even minor crimes and flooding the streets with police officers, and the other enacting a stringent program of government regulation of the marketplace in the form of health code tightening and enforcement. People complained about the "Disney-ification" of gritty old NYC, having to stand outside in the cold to have a smoke with your beer, and Nanny Bloomberg making people's decisions for them. 20 years later, however, the effects of those programs are not just undeniable, but transformative.

Who knows? Maybe New Yorkers would still argue that the benefits aren't worth the changes in the character of NYC, that they'd prefer old New York with its crime, drug dealers, trans fats, smoke-filled bars, and shorter life spans. I doubt it, though.

The lesson? Government policy can be a force for good. It can change things for the better. We saw it nationally in the '60's when President Johnson's Great Society cut the poverty rate in half in 10 years, and now we've seen it more recently in New York. Reagan's nonsense about how government can never fix anything just isn't true.

* Yes, crime rates dropped nationwide during the 1990's, and yes, the drop in NYC's crime rate began during Dinkins' last term as mayor, but the drop in NYC's crime rate dwarfs the drops everywhere else. It's pretty clear nationwide factors don't sufficiently explain it.

personal experience as a crutch for empathy

I've wondered for a while exactly how a guy like Marco Rubio balances his beliefs on immigration with otherwise being a hardcore social conservative. Yglesias helpfully elucidates. Note this reporting here about the man's position:

Many people who came here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn't feed our families," he writes in An American Son, which was released Tuesday. "If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn't give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn't a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here." Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants and has been among the more vocal members of the Republican Party about the need to soften rhetoric on immigration. He planned to introduce a bill that would help young undocumented immigrants gain legal status -- although he said Monday that the legislation is unlikely to come up -- but also opposes comprehensive reform that would grant legal status to many.

That quote is exactly, precisely the liberal critique of anti-immigration legislation. There are various reasons to favor more open immigration policies from an intellectual standpoint, but this is the emotional reason, the one that animates people to actively oppose rather than merely grumble. The people who are willing to brave the guns of soldiers and vigilantes, the high fences, the scorching Arizona sun, the tumultuous Atlantic waters, and the double-crossing coyotes for the chance to secure a better life for themselves and their loved ones are the very people we should want here the most. Their actions bespeak bravery, inner strength, an unwillingness to settle for less than they and their loved ones deserve.

How does he square the circle of opposing "path to citizenship" legislation for those who came here illegally? Well, as Matthew helpfully notes, it's always legal in American law for Cubans to come here; it's only illegal on the Cuban side. Thus, it's only Mexicans and Guatemalans and Hondurans who come here "illegally," not Cubans.

Here we are again: a so-called "thoughtful conservative" who wants liberal policy for himself and his own but conservative policy for everyone else.

"morning after" pills don't actually prevent implantation

So says The New York Times. This question of conception/implantation always seemed like theological hair-splitting to me, to be honest. Does anyone out there really hang their opinion on women's medical care on such inane minutiae? Is anybody out there really trying to figure out when "life" or "humanity" or "ensoulment" begins, as opposed to just throwing a few bombs into that melee for your side?

Now that the supposed "medical" reason for hating on Plan B has been refuted, will this change even one single solitary person's mind? The fact that I haven't heard a word about this article since it came out probably answers my question.

I have a friend from high school whom I respect, but who has since gone "the full Ratzinger" on birth control. I found her argument rather illuminating: she said that birth control is sinful because it's an effort to thwart God's will. This isn't to say that one can thwart God's will; you'll never actually manage to prevent a conception that God wanted you to have, of course. It's the attempt itself that is the sin.

What's illustrative about this argument is that the line between thwarting/not thwarting is so easily erased and redrawn. Lots of Catholics have no problem putting abortion and Plan B and the pill on one side of that line and, say, the rhythm method or coitus interruptus on the other, with the only real distinction I can see being that the former group actually works.

Of course, that's probably the point.

One thing that makes absolutely no difference whatsoever in this calculus: the exact moment of conception or implantation or whatever. If the medical community gets everyone to agree that Plan B is morally equivalent to the pill, the result will not be Plan B becoming acceptable to these people, but rather the pill being further vilified.

breaking the insurance system

This is why it would be an extremely bad thing if either the Supreme Court or a Romney Administration and Republican Congress overturn the health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act but leave the stuff everybody likes. As Ezra notes here, we know exactly what would happen in that scenario because -- believe it or not -- we've already seen it happen at the state level.

Washington State passed an insurance mandate-cum-guaranteed-coverage-and-no-price-hikes bill, which is essentially what the ACA is, in 1993. The mandate was repealed in '94 but the rest left intact. The result: premiums spiked, consumers dropped their coverage since they could just buy the same coverage once they got sick, and 6 years later it was impossible to buy individual insurance plans at all in the state of Washington, because it was no longer profitable.

These are our choices if we're going to persevere in this asinine decision to have private middlemen greasing and fleecing our health care system. Either everyone has to pay in, and I mean everyone, or the middlemen have to be allowed to weasel their way out of paying for your health care and just let you die like they could in the days before the ACA. There aren't really any other options, that is, short of doing the obviously correct and sensible thing and putting everyone on Medicare, and even then everyone will have to pay in.

As it is, overturning the mandate is going to mean causing premiums to spike as healthy people game the system, dropping coverage until they get sick. Overturning the whole thing means a return to the days when insurance companies were gaming the system, the days of "pre-existing conditions" and insurance companies giving people the run-around in order to keep from fulfilling their obligations.

the financially unfriendly skies

This is interesting. We all know that airlines have had a lot of trouble being profitable over the last 10 years. It turns out, however, that according to the GAO airlines have never been profitable. Notice that the graph goes all the way back to 1968. Makes one wonder whether we'll eventually be faced with either the disappearance of broadly available passenger air travel, or government taking it upon itself.