Via Roy Edroso, I see that at least one wingnut has risen to the bait of defending the Tea Partiers who bellowed their approval at the idea of letting an uninsured man died. John Hawkins of Right Wing News rose to the bait, by pointing out that Blitzer was asking about someone with a good job who can afford insurance but simply doesn't pay it. Of course, John ignores that "The Left" was doing more than simply disagreeing with people who say that someone in that situation should be left to die---though I am surprised at how few people have pointed out that they often are left to die---but that we were appalled at the bloodthirsty love of needless death on display at the debate. It wasn't just that someone made a somber argument for the necessity of letting some people fall through the cracks (which again, is the status quo---emergency rooms are required to care for you regardless of ability to pay, but in the situation Blitzer describes, the man would actually be taken off life support), it was the foot-stomping glee that the Tea Partiers had at the idea of death. You get the impression that if Ron Paul suggested that they send a squad of people to his house to rape his wife and beat his kids, you know, to "send a message" about not buying your own insurance, the audience would have gone nuts with approval. That, I think, more than the argument, is the concern here.
But I'm honestly surprised more wingnuts haven't risen to the bait like Hawkins, because the way Blitzer asked about this question was a complete and utter red herring. Red herrings are a favorite argument technique of conservatives---which is why I suppose Blitzer is fond of them, rat bastard that he is---but they have no place in a presidential debate. A common red herring, for instance, is for anti-choicers to invoke the specter of someone who is 9 months pregnant, wakes up and says, "You know, childbirth doesn't seem like a good idea after all," and waltzes into a Planned Parenthood to have an abortion. This never happens. But the reason wingnuts bring it up is because they can't win the argument on real world grounds, so they make up fairy tales to debate instead. That's why having a so-called journalist do this during a debate instead of asking a real question is utter bullshit. You're just eating up time that could be spent on discussing real-world concerns.
Let's revisit Blitzer's question:
A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it.
Your average American can see immediately at least one major problem with this question. There is no such thing as "good job" that doesn't have insurance benefits. He might as well have said, "So you have this 30-year-old who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs, and he figures that he doesn't need a police force. Should he be able to opt out of the percentage of his taxes that go to pay them?" Blitzer should be ashamed of himself for concocting a myth and throwing it out there like it matters. And sure enough, Hawkins---dishonest fuck that he is---laps that shit right up, claiming that millions of Americans who are going without insurance could totally have it if they wanted. Sure, if they quit paying their rent, but let's be real here. The notion that there are 30-year-olds who are like, "La di dah, I could totally pay for insurance with my vast fortune, but I choose not to because ha ha, the federal government's got my back!" is asinine. It just doesn't happen, as most working uninsured work part time (aka, in not-good jobs). And if you can find that one example somewhere in the mists of time---you heard from a friend of a friend about this person---so what? We really shouldn't be making broad policy decisions that affect the entire nation because of one guy someone heard about somewhere.
Now, there is the exception, I suppose, of entrepeneurs. There are a lot of freelancers and entrepeneurs who take their chances with going uninsured, because money is tight and also because insurance is more expensive than Blitzer is letting on. But that's just one more reason that universal health care is such a good idea! Right now, many creative and interesting people are stuck in jobs (jobs that someone else would probably like to have, especially in this economy!) that don't use their taients, and one of the major reasons is health care. I know a lot of people who are 30-year-old entrepeneurs of various sorts, and their attitude towards health care is not the cavalier one Blitzer describes. It's actually better-described as "desperate". Good health care that actually provides is simply too expensive for most people, and so the holy grail of this world is getting a contract with someone who values your contribution enough to offer health care on top of what they're paying you. Universal health care reform will pay out many long-term economic dividends in this way, by encouraging more people to go with the small business ideas of their dreams, many of which will be successful and create more jobs....with health care.
In fact, I would argue that this is a major reason so many corporate interests oppose health care reform. For all the blather out there about "free markets", much of modern day conservatism is about squelching actual free markets, where people with fresh ideas can actually compete with big businesses. The last thing big business interests want is to encourage entrepeneurs. Big business doesn't want to innovate or work hard; they just want to sit around collecting obscene profits off over-priced goods, safe in the knowledge that many of the people who could compete with them if set free are instead tied to desk jobs, in no small part because they want health insurance. Republicans are the protectors of entrenched corporate interests, and that's why, regardless of their poses, they oppose anything that would encourage genuine entrepeneurship.
New Bloggingheads! This time it's me and Joshua Treviño, patriarchy-lover extraordinaire and former Bush speechwriter, discussing the Perry campaign's chances and the role Texas plays in national politics. You may be surprised to find that I'm largely unwilling to get into the weeds with him about the reality of the "Texas miracle". It's not that I'm unaware that the "Texas miracle" is a myth. I point out in the video that Texas's unemployment rate is still at a record high and is only one point below the national average, and here I'd like to add that Texas has higher unemployment than Massachusetts or New York. Plus, dwelling on unemployment numbers is a way to distract from the fact that decades of neglect and Republican rule have created a culture of poverty in Texas that is stunning to even see, which Treviño no doubt has, since he travels a lot. It's got the 6th highest poverty rate in the nation. And pretty much everything that's shielded Texas from plunging even further into the abyss has nothing to do with Rick Perry's leadership: as someone who lived there 32 years, I can state with assurance that the mass migration of people to Texas owes more to the weather than any other factor. Unlike someplace like New York that has hot summers and freezing winters, most of Texas doesn't have a winter to speak of, and a culture of air conditioning prevents the summers from being that bad. New York is actually harder to take than Austin in the summer because it's so humid and there's so little intense air conditioning---some days you're just going to be sticky no matter what you do. Not so in Austin. When people ask Marc and myself what we miss most about Texas, we tend to say "the weather". The Tex-Mex, our friends, the Alamo Drafthouse---all fine things, but 70 degree days in January is hard to beat. Central Texas is the new Southern California, a place where you go when you could go anywhere, because it's got nice weather, and unlike Southern California, it's still not as crowded, though that's changing.
Anyway, getting off-topic. Here's why I'm wary of arguing about the non-existent "Texas miracle": the old maxim that if you're explaining, you're losing. This is the same trap liberals always fall into. Conservatives trot out some quick, farcical, but evocative phrase like "Texas miracle", toss that out there, and enjoy watching liberals start arguing it, complete with heavy details and nuance that cause everyone who isn't already a detail-oriented liberal to tune out. They try to drag you down the rabbit hole, too---if you successfully argue something simple as a rebuttal, they have a bunch of other lies to throw out to get you back to the bad habit of 'splaining shit. Treviño tried to bait me repeatedly like this, trying to toss out half-truths and falsehoods in order to get me to argue them down. Anyone undecided watching this finds themselves emotionally attracted to the easy lies and not to the complex truths. As long as we're fighting on their turf, we're losing.
Treviño asked me a hard question about this, and I struggled with an answer. Clearly, the answer for an Obama win in 2012 is for them to start getting those jobs created and fast. Steve Benen was closing in on the answer with this piece where he told the administration to start approving Republican requests for projects in their districts that would create jobs. He's right that they need to get that approving pen out and start fast-tracking some jobs. But he's wrong that they should do it in places like Bachmann's district. There's no return on that investment for them. Even if Obama turns the economy around in some shitty little Whitopia Republican hellhole, they are still not going to vote for him. The hardcore Republican districts vote their religion and skin color, full stop. Giving them money in some political kabuki isn't what's going to get the job done.
No, the answer is to target spending in swing districts. Ohio, Florida, places like that? They're not going to be entranced by bullshit memes about the "Texas miracle" when they're experiencing an actual Ohio miracle or Florida miracle. Show them that Obama has the will to use his power to get them working again, and they'll respond positively. Most people trust Democrats more on these issues than Republicans, and only vote for Republicans out of a desperate sense that since the Democrat isn't working, then they'll take their chances with the new guy, even if they're less trusting of the new guy's message.
Of course, that's the sort of bold, ass-saving move we're not used to getting from Obama, so I'm not going to bet the house on that one. But I do think it's important to remember that if you're explaining, you're losing. If someone starts to go off on the "Texas miracle", I recommend joking it off instead of explaining it off---it is a miracle, because after all, Rick Perry had shit all to do with it, so you might as well thank your supernatural deity. All your efforts would be better spent focusing on what Obama has accomplished, and suggesting that a solid Democratic win in 2012 could help him accomplish more.
Aggravated today by a New York Times story in which striking Verizon workers were forced to argue that their wages weren’t, in fact, “too high”–seeing them make the very valid point that living in the New York area and raising a family on $40,000-$70,000 a year doesn’t actually make them rich–I tweeted angrily:
“How the hell did we get into a world where workers making $60,000 are overpaid but CEOs making millions are overtaxed?”
I don’t tend to have that many Republican or libertarian Twitter followers, but when Kirsten Powers, a Fox News contributor, retweeted me, I was deluged with replies, some of which I’m reposting here (without user names, since I don’t know if these folks would care to share):
“becuase they are paying all those 60k wages. Without them, the people making 60k are unemployed.”
“Who assumes the most risk?”
“Pay is dependent upon what you accomplish for the company. If you make 60K and are not being productive..”
“If you have to threaten people with violence to earn $60K, you are overpaid.”
“because you can’t punish success. It’s anti-capitalist.”
“The workers making $60K accepted it while CEO’s demanded more, but how does the CEO’s wage negatively affect the $60K guy?”
I personally wasn't aware that the CEO of Verizon did all the work of building towers, working with customers, running accounts, and making sales. But according to these guys, Verizon is simply a charity organization and "jobs" are actually welfare checks that hard-working CEOs write to people who don't work, presumably out of the kindness of their hearts. How that's "capitalism", I don't know, but I will say this: Then why are they so upset at the strike?
I mean, if the CEO is the only "productive" person at Verizon, then all of the "non-productive" people can go on strike and business should carry on without a blip, right? You can't really have it both ways, believing that working people are leeches who contribute nothing, and then throwing yourself on the ground kicking and screaming when the non-productive leeches of the world stop contributing. That literally makes no sense at all. That's like being mad that a complete stranger who has never spoken to you tries to file for divorce against you. You might be a little perturbed, but you're not like, "How dare they want to divorce me?!" They can't divorce you. You weren't married.
Seriously, wingnuts, choose. Either the workers contribute nothing to the company and therefore don't deserve compensation, or strikes are bad. You can't have it both ways.
Since their argument contradicts itself, I think it's time to consider the possibility that all this blather about "production" is just a cover story. We need to start judging them by their actions instead of their illogical rhetoric. And their actions suggest one very solid theme: a belief that this country shouldn't have a middle class. That's what drove so much anger at Sarah, was her assumption that people who work for a living should get middle class wages. The notion that someone, somewhere might work a full-time job for more money than what it keeps to barely keep them alive so they can work more sends these people around the bend.
Which is why I propose dusting off an old term and bringing it back in fashion to describe their ideology. The current ones are insufficient. "Libertarian" makes no sense, because they oppose the rights of workers to collectively demand better wages, a fairly basic liberty. Instead, they expect these people to work hard and slobber gratefully that their masters tolerate paying them at all. Nor are they really "conservative" in any meaningful sense. I don't like conservatives, but conservatives are people who object to social progress. But the existence of an American middle class has been around for a century now, and conservatives in the past were far less likely to object to its existence on the ideological grounds that no one but the rich deserve to have squat.
There's really only one term for people who believe, as a matter of ideology, that a handful of people deserve to own everything and the rest of us should living lives of endless work and squalor, with perhaps a slender class of people who get paid pretty handsomely to protect the interests of those who own everything: feudalists. That's the system that they're clearly advocating for, albeit in modern terms, where the billionaires and company owners are our kings, top executives are the knight class, and everyone else is a peasant who works to death, gets four hours off for church on Sunday, and needs to be grateful that his masters allow him that.
I bet if you groused on Twitter that the Koch brothers are supporting a return to droit du seigneur for CEOs with regards to their male employees' spouses, Kirsten Powers would retweet it so as to bring a calvacade of outrage on your head. It's in our future, people. I can't wait until a sea of Fox News advocates starts tweeting at Sarah, "Right, like some Verizon employee can really give good wedding night to his bride like CEO Lowell McAdam. The workers produce nothing, so why should they be the ones to get the wedding night benefits?"
Camila Batmanghelidjh has a powerful piece in The Independent about the social underpinnings of the riots in London and elsewhere in England, and how the collapse of the social contract made this violence inevitable. Quoted at length for brilliance:
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour's door to grab an "over-stayer" and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there's not enough food on the table.
It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.
Emphasis mine. Whenever something like this happens, there's a widespread tendency to shy away from trying to understand why, for fear that doing so will somehow come across as excusing those who commit violence, especially against their own communities. But refusing to understand the situation leaves us in an even uglier space. After all, the violence in concentrated in some communities and not others; the link between who riots and poverty is undeniable. (Not that some people don't try, as one woman on Twitter complained to me that she's totally seen expensive sneakers on the feet of a rioter, which apparently renders the entire problem of poverty in Britain moot. This, despite the fact that a pair of sneakers is not a job, it is not an education, and what it costs probably couldn't even pay for a week's worth of meals.) If we pull faces and say that the only moral position is to write off the rioters as thugs and monsters, we're left with the question of why some communities break out into fire and some do not, why some people's children are rioting in the streets and some are not. If we eliminate, out of the principle of not wanting to make excuses, these are the options left for why rioting tends to be so strongly associated with poverty: The poor are inherently, perhaps genetically inferior people with violence born into them. I personally reject this thesis, as it's never been proven with scientific evidence, and not for lack of trying from those who stand to gain from the discovery that inherent inferiority creates poverty, and not social injustice.
It's also a more hopeless theory. If we refuse to look at the whys of these situations, we basically are refusing to look at solutions. Wriitng off the rioters as thugs and monsters and not asking why some people turn thuggish and some don't means never even making the first step towards preventing future riots. By looking at social causes, we can at least start down a path that prevents future riots.
I'm not excusing the rioters. At the end of the day, each individual has moral responsibility not to stab, throw things, or set fire to the possessions of innocent people. But the rioters aren't the only people who have flouted their moral obligations here. The decision-makers of society have the choice not to treat people living in poverty like shit. Choosing against that is also immoral. While responding to abuse with abuse isn't morally correct, it's also inevitable if the abuse is large-scale, as it sounds from this essay like it is. If we're going to cast moral judgments, we need to make sure that everyone who has erred is held accountable, and not just the ones who erred the most recently while being the most vulnerable to the criminal justice system.
Sorry for late-ish posting today. But I've been kind of monitoring the news a lot this morning, I think because I'm still a little anxious about the debt ceiling situation. Still, I was reassured enough last night that it's not going to fall through that I filed a piece that assumed it's a deal, which you can read here at RH Reality Check. My argument is that abortion caused the debt ceiling. Okay, that's actually just the hook, but the real argument is that our right wing populist movement was built on sex panic (and race panic), and they have been able to use sex panic to grow their power and numbers until they were nearly able to derail the entire world economy. The implication is that either we start taking the Fetus People seriously now, or next time they may have even more seats in Congress and no amount of Wall Street pleading will stop them from doing something world-destroying stupid.
Anyway, the news that the country's not going to come crashing down around our ears but instead is going to continue its slow decline into becoming a banana republic will overwhelm today's actual, for-real good news: the HHS announced that birth control is going to start being free to women with insurance. When it starts being free to you depends on when your insurance plan begins---it could be as late as 2013 for many women---but still. Free birth control. And by birth control, I don't just mean the pill or the ring. You will also be able to get your tubes tied, an IUD installed, or an implant put in....all for free. No co-pay for any contraception. Free pills is a good thing and should reduce unintended pregnancies, but the free long-term birth control methods may be a bigger deal. A lot of women would prefer to have these kinds of birth control, but the up front costs are just too daunting. Preliminary research shows that women who have access to free long-acting birth control both are far more likely to use these methods and, unsurprisingly, have fewer abortions.
So, hard as it is to believe, today is actually going to be somewhere between "not as bad as we feared" and even a good day.
There's so much to comment on from this clip, but what really struck me about this report on Boehner's visible loss of control over the Tea Party idiots in his party is that the teabaggers, as an act of aggression against him, started praying. Being from Texas, I'm really familiar with praying as a form of passive aggressive emotional warfare, but even I was mildly surprised to see a bunch of grown men doing it to other grown men who they claim to be on the same team as. As a psychological weapon, it's really grown past the pinched mouth "i'll pray for you" disapprovals I grew up witnessing.
I think this whole situation should put to rest all the hand-wringing about what the "Tea Party" is. Whatever diverse shit people are saying on the ground, people who are taking leadership roles are religious fanatics with very small minds who would rather burn this country down to the ground rather than share power with the kind of folks who would vote for Barack Obama. Or, to put it another way, the teabagger relationship to the country is like a wife-beater to his wife: what they call "love" is actually a desire to exert control and complete ownership. And now the wife-country has run off with a handsome and charming black man.
Of course they're going to pull the trigger.
The religious fanaticism angle is fascinating to me, and I think goes a long way towards explaining why the Tea Party types are going to tank any deal. Basically, once you start saying that god is telling you what to do, what you mean is you're making 100% of your decisions based on knee-jerk emotions. And not just any emotions, but fundamentalist Christian ones---i.e. paranoia, grandiosity, etc. A lot of these folks probably believe Obama is the Antichrist. But even if they don't, they definitely believe that anyone who isn't their version of right wing conservative is in thrall to Satan. What this makes them is impervious to reason. That's why I think they really, seriously do believe that Obama, Boehner, the pundits, etc. are lying when they say the shit hits the fan if we don't raise the debt celing. That is, in the fundie eye, a lie fueled by Satan to keep this country away from the path of the Lord. Everything the demonized mainstream media and the Democrats say is, in their view.
This is what religious fanaticism does to the body politic. I think a lot of people have, for a long time, imagined that the fundie right wasn't that big a deal, because hey, they just want to ban abortion and gay rights, right? As long as people considered these second tier issues, the fundies could grow their power unchecked. The mainstream Republican party thought they could use the Bible thumpers to get a caucus together, throw them some abortion bones, and then use their warm bodies to get votes for the stuff Wall Street really cares about. But what they've found is they've created a monster.
Increasing numbers of Republicans are making it clear that they think that concerns about the U.S. going into default on August 2nd are just a hoax being played on the public in order to convince Congress to borrow more money to pay for abortion parties and caviar for welfare recipients. I was deeply alarmed by how widespread this narrative is getting, according to Rachel Maddow's coverage.
It's hard to single out the most moronic Republican moron in all this, but I think MVP in the Stupid Olympics should go to Louie Gohmert, one of the many representatives in Congress whose sole purpose in life is to make those of us from Texas wonder when the state turned into Oklahoma. Gohmert's reaction to all this is, well, special.
"[W]e find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over," Gohmert told Newsmax TV yesterday. "And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration." That's right: This whole "idiot Republicans are taking the world economy to the brink of financial ruin" ferrago is just a way for Obama to raise money... from celebrities. "Isn't that amazing?" Gohmert wonders. "The timing of this?"
Let's think about what Gohmert is saying about the President by saying this. First of all, he's claiming the President is stupid and doesn't understand the economics of this. Second, he's claiming the President is deceitful, a casual liar who will bring the nation to a crisis situation with his casual inability to ever speak the truth. (Sounds like projection to me.) But most of all, Gohmert is portraying the President as an irresponsible, self-indulgent layabout who tricked the public into electing him so he could have big parties on the government dime. That move right there is out of the ex-Confederate-responding-to-the-Reconstruction playbook. Remember, Republican expressions of blatant idiocy, misogyny, and racism are like cockroaches: for every one you see out in public, there are hundreds, even thousands behind closed doors.
In all the coverage over this, I think one thing that's really being neglected is how much of what's motivating Republicans is culture war. There's a tendency to think this is only about slashing taxes for the rich and pushing the have-nots deeper into economic deprivation, but there's more than that going on. (As if that wasn't enough, I know.) The voices of sense continue to point out that if we default on our loans, this will cause economic collapse, and we wonder if Republicans really are being serious when they act cavalier about raining destruction on the country they claim to love. And the answer is yes. It's clear their "love" of their country is similar to the love a man has for the wife he murders for leaving him. As I noted before, the belief appears to be that if they---they being white Christian conservatives---can't have complete control of the U.S., then the U.S. as we know it doesn't deserve to exist.
Via Crooks and Liars, there's been some illuminating research from Cornell on public perceptions of what constitutes a "government social program". Turns out that whether or not you identify as someone who has used a government social program doesn't really depend on things like having used a government social program.
Levels are shockingly high across the board, but the data suggests that it's middle class people who don't identify as someone who has used a government program, even when they get a check in the mail from the U.S. Treasury. I highlight that, because the obvious dodge away from seeing what's going on here is to claim that people don't perceive tax credits or deductions as government programs, because they think of government programs as things where you go directly for services or money. But Social Security and VA benefits look like a government program just as much as food stamps. Also, the aesthetic difference between Head Start and student loans isn't enough to justify the gap in perception, and interestingly, Medicare and Medicaid are very similar, and yet there's more than a 10 point gap in perception of yourself as being on a "government program" if you use it.
These numbers only make sense if you assume that whether or not one identifies as someone who uses a government social program depends on irrelevant things like class status. This table demonstrates the effectiveness of decades of Republican propaganda equating "social program" with deragatory stereotypes of poor people and non-white people. When you call someone up and say, "Are you in a government social program?", you're going to get a lot of white, middle or upper class conservatives thinking, "I'm not some low rent welfare queen," and they're going to answer no without really connecting the dots.
The obvious result of this is that Republican voters are supporting ideas they clearly don't understand, because their prejudices are preventing them from thinking clearly. So you see a lot of conservatives raving online about how we don't need to raise the debt ceiling, and they're thinking, "We've borrowed enough money to pay for the liquor and cigarettes for an undifferientiated hoarde of dark-skinned layabouts. Screw 'em. They should get a job and spend their own money." This is wrong on many levels, and liberals tend to focus on the most obvious wrongness of it---the classism and the racism and the total lack of empathy and the broad stereotyping that has no basis in people's realities---but there's another level of wrongness here that is driving this entire debt ceiling fiasco. And that's the assumption that the main role of government is to tax well-off people and hand it out to people who have less. The government actually does very little of this. If anything, they tax well-off people and then give it right back to them in credits, deductions, subsidized loans, etc. in order to to make their lives easier and more secure. And that's after all the money that's spent just running the country and of course the untouchable defense program. The amount of taxation that goes to redistribution of wealth is measely. It's certainly not enough to get the people who depend on it on a road out of poverty, unlike middle class subsidies that really do help middle class people start accumulating social capital and wealth at an early age that pays off their entire lives.
"If I can't have you, no one can!" seems to be the mantra of Republicans with regards to this country. I think everything about this debt ceiling debacle can be understood in those terms---if Real Americans® have to share power with the pointy-heads, black people, gays and lesbians, Mexican immigrants and their families, feminists, Muslims, and hippies who run organic food stores, well, they're not going to do it. Teabaggers are always talking about a revolution; did we honestly think that it wouldn't matter that they believe that it would be better to burn the country to the ground than to share it? What's nice about this debt ceiling debate---whether they force the U.S. to default on its loans or whether they just get a deal that's so terrible it functionally destroys the economy for at least a generation---is that they get their revolution without having to marshal an army of elderly Glenn Beck fans waving guns and screaming about how Thomas Paine was a creationist. I want to offer a novel interpretation of teabagger nonsense. When they insinuate they'd rather be the complete rulers of a shitpile than share power over the greatest nation on the planet, believe them. That appears to be exactly what they mean.
It's worth remembering how much of an existential crisis white, Christian conservative America is feeling. The writing is on the wall; they are losing numbers. I realize it's beating a dead horse to some people to remind everyone that this country has gotten so far past their way of viewing the world that we elected a black President, but the election of Obama is the primal scene from which everything else follows. You can sense that the nation is changing in the little ways: More women in leadership positions, gay couples having big weddings and inviting their entire families, there being black professors at Harvard for the cops to harass, decent Mexican food joints opening up in the Midwest. But electing a black President basically proves everything you were worried about, if you're a teabagger, is happening on a large scale. And right now, the only thing they can see that will turn the boat around is burning the place to the ground. They sense that their opportunity to tear this country to pieces is limited and that their hold on power might permanently slip out of their hands in response to demographic changes, and so there's a sense of immediacy that just feeds their panic.
You can see this attitude in more than the debt ceiling fight. God knows it's what's compelling the "kill Planned Parenthood" frenzy. It's also feeding a surge in passing legislation that openly defies the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both in letter and in spirit. The idea is to disempower the groups that threaten them the most and ideally, to keep enough of them from voting or organizing as to artificially depress the effects of these demographic changes. Poor women on Medicaid marshalling around an extra child or two they don't want aren't really in a position to fight the power, or at least, not as much as they could be if they weren't so burdened.
But destroying the economy is just pure rage and hate, I suspect. And, at the end of the day, Republicans don't see it as something that's going to hurt them that badly. The housing bubble bursting was something the rich recovered from and then got a bonus---the gap between them and everyone else grew dramatically. The sickest part of all this is that they don't even have to personally pay any price for their revolution. Most revolutionaries have to sleep in tents, suffer illness and injury, face arrest, and see their comrades get killed. They just get to see the gap between the rich and everyone else grow larger.
Matt picks up a drum I've been beating for a long time, which is "everything is culture war". There's a tendency in the mainstream media, which is encouraged by numerically small but well-funded and frankly deceitul "libertarians" to think there's some giant gap between "fiscal" and "social" conservatism. In theory, maybe (and mostly in the elite classes), but for the right wing base, that's largely absent. Matt cites a van he saw driving around that had slogans about the evils of abortion and slogans about the evils of government spending. He responds:
Abortion is, obviously, a very emotional and very ideological issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s a problem for the country when strong emotional and ideological views about abortion get intimately linked in people’s ideas with views about much more technical questions about the merits of raising the debt ceiling or whether we have too much inflation or too little.
Naturally, I do think there's something wrong with abortion---which is, as I've said a million times before, a stand in for a host of beliefs about sex and women's role in life---being so emotional. I think we'd be a far greater country if people could step off and butt out of other people's consensual sexual behavior and their often incredibly personal choices about love, marriage, and child-bearing. But all that aside, I think this is a good place to point out that while most of us think of "economic" and "social" issues as divergent, they really aren't.
I'm going to point out that the truck in question here specifically singles out black women who have abortions as bad people.
The reason I'm going to do so is to point out that in the right wing mind, these are all intertwined things. The right wing story is basically that this country is going to hell because people have abandoned traditional values, and now they're fucking in the streets and that the hard-working white man has to pay for all this bad behavior with his tax dollars. Women's sexual choices are blamed for a lot---I'd guess that your average right wing nut thinks that spending on welfare is about half the federal budget. This is blamed predominantly on women's inability to control their sexual urges. Black women are especially held out as living lacivious lifestyles that the taxpayer is on the hook for. I think Dana Loesch's rant at CPAC really boils down the argument:
But you’re not empowered when you’re expecting Uncle Sam to act like your sugar daddy, and take care of your abortions and take care of your birth control, and pay your bills and everything else?
Preventing a pregnancy, having an abortion, and bearing children out of wedlock are all blurred together in the right wing mind as evidence of women's bad behavior that they're subsidizing with their tax dollars, and the debt ceiling gets all caught up in that. So these aren't separate issues in their minds at all. The assumption is, from what I can tell, that the government needs to "crack down" and stop borrowing money, and throw all those sluts on the street. And then what will happen is said sluts will stop fucking, get married, and have a husband to support them and this country will return to the 1950s....and the prosperity of it.
I know that doesn't make a lot of sense if you see social policy and economic policy as different things---and god knows that a sensible approach does call for such a distinction---but for a lot of average voters, the most obvious change from the prosperous 50s to now isn't hard-to-understand economic policies. Most people have no idea what the tax rate was in 1953, for instance. But they definitely know how much sexual and gender mores changed, and the most obvious change becomes the scapegoat for all other problems.
How appropriate. At the Guardian's CIF, I put up a piece about what it means to lose John Edwards as a figurehead of populist liberalism in the wake of his scandals. I don't write much at all about Edwards, because invariably it means people project a lot of their more personal feelings about him and his campaign onto me because of the whole situation where I got a job with his campaign and then resigned because of attacks from the pedophila-excusing Bill Donohue. (Who I just saw quoted in another piece in the New York Times recently! He could rape a bunny on live TV and then eat it while its heart slowly stopped beating and people would still call him up to comment on various Catholicism-related stories.) Please check it out; it's mostly about how Edwards had an opportunity to be the pro-labor conscience of the Obama era, and he screwed the pooch and there's not been another person who can really step into his shoes.
In more ways than one, it turns out. Because one reason I was eager to back Edwards was there was no conflict in his campaign between the three tiers of modern liberalism, which often do fight each other. I see the three as:
1) Economic justice. This is labor movements, anti-poverty initiatives, fair taxation, health care reform, social services, government that is functional, etc. Anything that helps secure the middle class, bolsters the economy, and lifts people out of poverty.
2) Social justice. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-colonialism, things like that---anything that divides people against each other on the basis of identity hierarchies.
3) Environmentalism and rationalism. Preserving the planet, promoting science, basically using the now to work towards a better tomorrow.
Obviously, a smart person sees how these are interrelated and that you really fail at anti-racism if you don't think about poverty and that you're not a good environmentalist if economic justice isn't part of your worldview, and you're not an effective feminist if you treat science like it's a lark. I can think of a million other examples, but sadly all of them tend to happen over and over again. Edwards was smart about weaving social justice issues in with economic justice issues. So I liked that. And I fear that there's just not enough prominent leadership out there doing that anymore, even though I can think of many people who aren't that prominent who do so effortlessly.
Instead, we get Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a "slut". Now, Laura Ingraham is a racist piece of shit, sure. She's the wart that fell off a toad. Listening to her talk is like trying to bring santorum-stained sheets in to your dry cleaner and look him in the eye, except worse somehow. She makes the world a worse place every time she talks. But she is not a "slut", because a "slut" is a woman who is immoral because she enjoys sex too much or has many partners. And "sluts" do not exist, because there is nothing wrong with women liking sex or liking sex with lots of people.
You can, then, why the high hopes have been dashed. Is it so hard to have leaders who can speak out on economic justice while not making rookie mistakes like that?
We're reached income inequality levels to rival the Great Depression, which is why I laugh sardonically every time a news anchor uses the term the "Great Recession" as if it's something that happened in the past. I'm sure Wall Street is doing fine, but most of the country is living in a great depression, and that's all there is to it.
The percentage of young adults ages 19 to 29 who are living with their parents rose from 25% in 1980 to 34% in the late 2000s, Qian's research shows.
As someone who lived with her mom for a short period in my early 20s, I've often been one to say that we shouldn't judge this situation as some kind of hellish nightmare. Families often choose it because both the child and the parent prefer it to alternatives such as roommates. It's often not pure mooching, but a situation were the adult children contribute financially and help around the house. But it's definitely an economic indicator, because I think many people who choose it would have separate homes if they could live alone. I wish it didn't take economic catastrophe for the social stigma of this arrangement to lessen.
Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) Paul Waldman explains the problem and some potential solutions here. One issue that keeps coming up is the public's ignorance of what this is actually all about:
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found only 16 percent of respondents saying the ceiling should be raised; a McClatchey/Marist poll pegged the number at 24 percent (see more here). It isn't surprising; after all, asking whether the ceiling should be raised sounds a lot like asking whether we should be borrowing more money, and borrowing more money doesn't sound like a good idea when we keep being told that we're being crushed by debt and that government should "live within its means." At the moment anyway, most Americans have no idea what the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be.
He advocates that Obama take a no-negotiation stance in dealing with this. I want to agree, but I don't think that's enough. If the problem is that the phrase "debt ceiling" is confusing, then Democrats can do something about that. Why don't we just start saying that the vote is on whether or not to default on our loans? Or to cease government spending entirely? There's got to be ways to avoid this whole problem of erroneous comparisons to family finances, though it's worth pointing out that Americans are not above borrowing money to pay for medical bills or to keep from sleeping on the street, which is what the federal government is facing right now.
Anyway, one of my promises if we made $2,000 or more for the Bowl-A-Thon was to record webcam videos answering a question asked of me on Formspring. I got two in rapid succession that totally worked, so I did both. Here they are. I'd be happy to get some feedback on whether or not these were fun for you, and if I should do more like them in the future. There is one tech problem I would like help with, if anyone has tips. The top of each video is all weird-looking and then gets better rapidly. I recorded them through Quicktime and uploaded them through the "Share" function. Is there another way to do this that will prevent that problem? The videos look just fine on Quicktime itself.
So this year I was molested more than ever before. Hooray for success!
I’ve got two sources of income. By day, I’m the finance manager for a defense contractor. Like most of you I do the whole withholding thing where they, oh so very subtly, yank a small portion of my paycheck. (more on that later) By night, I’m a professional novelist, which means that I’m an independent contractor who has to calculate and send quarterly withholding payments myself. The last one I sent for the year literally made me tear up. I had to send the government a check for more money than my total income for any year of my life up until the age of twenty-three. (for one quarter) Oh, but my calculations were a teensy bit off, so this week, I had the opportunity to send them enough money to purchase a decent used car.
Well, let’s think about a few things here.
Larry, who works for a defense contractor, is angry about how much money the government spends on things like defense contractors. He is also publishing four (yes, four) novels this year, which one hopes are edited for the sake of the English language. He is deeply and truly angry about the fact that the financial success gained from his science fiction novels causes him to pay the government money. Probably because the money goes to pay finance managers for defense contractors who spend their time writing science fiction novels.
The man is a Moebius strip of loathing.
The government almost shut down last week over cutting 38 billion dollars… That may sound like a lot, but comparatively speaking, that’s like a 600 pound man who’s heart is about to explode congratulating himself that he got a hamburger instead of a cheeseburger… for his fifty-seventh meal of the day. Republicans backed off because they didn’t think they could win the PR battle. Let’s see… the Democrats were willing to not pay soldiers, currently fighting three wars, in order to ensure funding for abortion clinics… And you didn’t think you could win that PR fight? Seriously? Have you ever thought about maybe hiring a marketing major? I know a guy….
Please tell me that this man hires a ghost writer. Please.
After another thirteen or so paragraphs talking about how the government essentially needs to be treated like a hostage in a Quentin Tarantino movie, he starts proposing what should be cut in government (hint: none of his suggestions rhyme with “re-fence protractor”). This is just awesome:
You know what happens when a regular company runs out of money? We have to lay people off. Why is it when our economy sucks and everybody is hurting that our government grows? Obama raised government salaries to the highest level in our history, and then to show that he understood our pain, he froze salaries… Let me see if I’ve got this right? You raised your salary super high, and FROZE it THERE and now you’re telling me that’s somehow a good thing. Screw you.
Corporate welfare? Gone. We shouldn’t have to pay $10,000 in subsidies for the ridiculous Chevy Volt so that rich urban liberals can assuage their guilt. There is no Too Big To Fail, because somebody smarter than you will come along and buy your assets. Does that hurt your union pension? Cry me a friggin’ river.
I’m pretty sure Larry doesn’t know what happens when a regular company runs out of money, because he works for a motherfucking defense contractor. Keep the government off of his Medicare and off of his paycheck, folks. But also, end corporate welfare and such, and let viable private market enterprises like defense contractors stand unfettered from government intervention or regulation. BECAUSE OF FREEDOM.
Based on Monday’s column, a projection of “moderate” conservative Brook’s column a few years hence.
It was a season of constitutional perestroika. Last fall, the Simpson-Bowles governmental commission released a bold report on how to avoid the continued suffrage of non-land-owning Americans. For a few weeks, the think tanks and government offices were alive with proposals to reestablish a series of fiefdoms, our labor policies on serfdom, and just about every other government program.
The mood did not last. The polls suggested that voters were still unwilling to accept being assigned to a manors and forced to work in poverty while paying tributes to lords and vassals. Smart Washington insiders like Mitch McConnell and President Obama decided that any party that actually tried to implement these ideas would be committing political suicide. The president walked away from the Simpson-Bowles package. Far from addressing the fiscal problems, the president’s budget would double the nation’s debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But the forces of reform have not been entirely silenced. Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that military use would be a more effective road than simply expecting people to vote their democracy away. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, announced that he’s formed an army, financed by the Koch brothers, in order to sack the countryside and divide it into fiefdoms. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan plan will not be formally enacted this year, but the raping and pillaging of suburban and rural Virginia is already informally under way.
His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to the Southern dukedom controlled by the GOP will have to be able to talk about ransacking with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. jockeying for position.
The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about dismantling the underlying architecture of our government in 2012 and beyond.
The Ryan civil war will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.
The initial coverage will talk about Ryan’s logistical priorities — especially focusing on sacking the dense Eastern seaboard instead of knocking out easy victories in the South and Midwest. But the important thing is the way Ryan would reform government. He would reform government structures along the Simpson-Bowles lines, but without the same responsibilities put on vassals. (It’s amazing that a budget chairman could include military manuevers in his proposal, since it’s normally under the purview of the Ways and Means Committee.)
The Ryan budget doesn’t touch the freed man status for anyone making over $250,000 a year, but for poorer people it lays out a defined contribution plan. Instead of assuming open-ended future costs, the serfs will give the vassals a sum of money (starting at an amount equal to 40% of your annual income) and a regulated menu of protection options (mainly, which knight’s fief you’d like to live) from which to choose.
The Ryan budget will please leaders of both parties by turning most of the country into block grants — giving leaders flexibility in terms of how to divide and distribute it amongst their cronies. It tackles agriculture subsidies and other corporate welfare, by shifting those obligations to the serfs. It consolidates the job-training programs into a single program to be determined by local lords according to their needs. It reforms housing assistance and food stamps. It dodges Social Security mainly be eliminating it. The Republicans still have no alternative to the Democratic health care reform—-it’s unclear where the medical class and hospitals fit into a feudal landscape—-but this budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts.
Ryan was a protégé of Jack Kemp, and Kemp’s uplifting spirit pervades the document. It’s not sour, taking an austere meat ax approach. It emphasizes relationships between upper and lower classes, social mobility for the upper middle class, and personal choice. I don’t agree with all of it that I’ve seen, but it is a serious effort to create a sustainable welfare state — to return to a more traditional form where the welfare of those offering leadership and protection is treated with due reverence.
It also creates the pivotal moment of truth for President Obama. Will he come up with his own counterproposal, or will he simply demagogue the issue by railing against “savage” Republican firebombing and rape campaigns? Does he have a sustainable vision for government, or will he just try to rise above the fray while Nancy Pelosi and others attack Ryan?
And what about the Senate Republicans? Where do they stand? Or the voters? Are they willing to face reality or will they continue to demand more unsustainable democracy?
Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.
Sorry, Virginia. I don’t have anything against you, but I just imagine that’s how it would go.
Via Roy Edroso, I see that at least one wingnut has risen to the bait of defending the Tea Partiers who bellowed their approval at the idea of letting an uninsured man died. John Hawkins of Right Wing News rose to the bait, by pointing out that Blitzer was asking about someone with a good job who can afford insurance but simply doesn't pay it. Of course, John ignores that "The Left" was doing more than simply disagreeing with people who say that someone in that situation should be left to die---though I am surprised at how few people have pointed out that they often are left to die---but that we were appalled at the bloodthirsty love of needless death on display at the debate. It wasn't just that someone made a somber argument for the necessity of letting some people fall through the cracks (which again, is the status quo---emergency rooms are required to care for you regardless of ability to pay, but in the situation Blitzer describes, the man would actually be taken off life support), it was the foot-stomping glee that the Tea Partiers had at the idea of death. You get the impression that if Ron Paul suggested that they send a squad of people to his house to rape his wife and beat his kids, you know, to "send a message" about not buying your own insurance, the audience would have gone nuts with approval. That, I think, more than the argument, is the concern here. 
Sorry for late-ish posting today. But I've been kind of monitoring the news a lot this morning, I think because I'm still a little anxious about the debt ceiling situation. Still, I was reassured enough last night that it's not going to fall through that I filed a piece that assumed it's a deal, 
"If I can't have you, no one can!" seems to be the mantra of Republicans with regards to this country. I think everything about 
How appropriate. 
Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) 