The basic philosophy at the center of the tea party movement, explained:
The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.
Yes, I had to look up what a Jacobin is.
Congressman David Obey, the current Chairman of the House Appropriations committee, is retiring after 42 years of service. He doesn’t pull any punches in his statement:
In the last months, two colleagues, Charlie Wilson and Jack Murtha, have died. Both were 76. For me, that is only four years away. At the end of this term I will have served in the House longer than all but 18 of the 10,637 men and women who have ever served there. The wear and tear is beginning to take its toll. Given that fact, I have to ask myself how I want to spend the time I have left. Frankly, I do not know what I will do next. All I do know is that there has to be more to life than explaining the ridiculous, accountability destroying rules of the Senate to confused, angry, and frustrated constituents.
I absolutely believe that, after the economy returns to a decent level of growth, we must attack our long-term budget deficit. But, perhaps I expect too much because, in addition to an attack on the federal budget deficit, I also want to see an equal determination to attack the family security deficit, the family income deficit, and the opportunity deficit which also plague the American people.
I am, frankly, weary of having to beg on a daily basis that both parties recognize that we do no favor for the country if we neglect to make the long-term investments in education, science, health, and energy that are necessary to modernize our economy and decline to raise the revenue needed to pay for those crucial investments. I do not want to be in a position as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee of producing and defending lowest common denominator legislation that is inadequate to that task and, given the mood of the country, that is what I would have to do if I stayed.
Seems like he’s feeling liberated.
I’m not too happy with the state of Arizona, but I can’t express myself any better than New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse did today, in her op-ed piece Breathing While Undocumented. Arizona has passed a law that any idiot can see is inhumane and unenforceable.
Political activists tend to ignore basic issues of enforcement when they propose laws. During the late stages of the health care debate, Senate Republican introduced an amendment that bans the government paying for erectile dysfunction drugs for registered sex offenders. Not to go too far afield, but the idea was that the Democrats would have to embarrass themselves by voting against the amendment for procedural reasons, thus handing Republicans a minor victory.
But what interested me was that while this amendment might have seemed like a good idea, it had huge enforcement issues. Suddenly it turns doctors or health insurance companies into law enforcement agencies — whose responsibility does it become to ask patients whether they’re a sex offender? Do people have to indicate that they’re a sex offender when they enroll in a health insurance plan?
Now that this bill in Arizona has gone into effect, every policeman has immigration enforcement added to their existing list of duties. Not only does it increase their workloads, but it also makes it less likely that immigrants will work with the police for any reason, undocumented or otherwise. If anything, this bill will make life better for criminals in immigrant communities because those communities will be further alienated from the police.
So on top of the reasons of principle that make this bill an awful idea, but it’s likely to be an utter failure for practical reasons as well.
Dan Froomkin on the line that ends with Justice Stevens:
Stevens’s unblinking devotion to human rights, civil rights, and the rights of the little guy have led him to be widely seen as the Last Great Liberal Justice, the end of a lineage that included William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas.
But Stevens is something else entirely.
He is actually the last of the Moderate Republican Justices.
I have never agreed with anything so wholeheartedly as I do with this Matt Welch piece calling the media out for its obsession with “narratives”.
The big question I’ve had this week with regard to health care reform is, “Why is it taking so long to vote?” The path forward is that the House will pass the Senate bill, and then the House and Senate will pass a small bill that amends the Senate bill by way of reconciliation, so that it can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate. My impression was that the holdup was due to the Democrats having insufficient votes to pass both bills, but that’s actually not the case.
Jonathan Cohn explains:
But, as Lori Montomery explains today in the Washington Post, the devil really is in the details. And the devil, in this case, has a name: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In order to satisfy the requirements for the budget reconciliation process, through which Congress will consider the amendments, CBO must certify that the changes will reduce the deficit both in the decade following enactment and the decade following that.
By “reduce the deficit,” I mean reduce the deficit relative to whatever the Senate health care reform bill would do on its own. And that is no small thing. The Senate bill, as written, was projected to save quite a bit of money. As such, the amendments must result in reform, as a whole, saving even more money than the CBO projected originally.
So basically legislators are tinkering with the reconciliation bill and then letting the CBO score it until they get a bill that accomplishes what’s necessary and is eligible for reconciliation. Once we have a bill that’s been scored acceptably by the CBO, we’ll see if the Democrats have enough votes to send it to Obama for his signature.
Fred Clark argues that on health care reform, Democrats are playing Jeopardy while Republicans are playing Family Feud:
At the recent health care reform “summit,” Republican leaders made it clear that they’re not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers — cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he’s pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed.
So the GOP has decided to play a different game — to switch from Jeopardy to Family Feud. That way it’s not about the facts, or about what works, or about the actual effect of actual policies on actual people. In the subjective guessing-game of Family Feud, none of that matters. Family Feud is all about perceptions — about what those hundred people surveyed think or guess or dimly remember having heard something about.
This is perhaps my favorite blog post I’ve read this year and a gold medal winner in the Metaphor Olympics.
James Surowiecki ably describes the gulf between Democrats and Republicans on expanding access to health care. Democrats see the fact that 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance as a problem that the federal government should solve in the near term, and Republicans don’t. Democrats also see the fact that for certain groups of people, it’s impossible to get affordable health insurance at all as an individual as a problem, and the Republicans don’t. Or at least they don’t see either of those problems as being worth doing what it takes to solve them.
But there’s another side of the issue that he completely ignores — the fact that health care costs are rising rapidly and that both Medicare and employer-funded health insurance are headed for disaster. Most retiree health plans are already in deep trouble, and the second order effects are severe. One of the reasons General Motors has been uncompetitive is that a substantial portion of the revenue they earn from each car they make goes to pay for health insurance for retired autoworkers. Republicans do not seem to want to engage on this issue, even if America’s system were perfect today, the rising costs insure that it’s going to have big problems down the road.
And this, to me, is the bigger problem. Republicans and Democrats can debate until the end of the world whether the government should make sure everyone has health insurance. I am strongly in favor of universal health care, personally. But regardless of where people stand on that issue, our government is going to have to engage with the issue of rising health care costs and growing Medicare enrollment sometime soon. The fact that Republicans are unwilling to treat the problem as the impending crisis that it is disqualifies them from being taken seriously as far as I’m concerned.
Turns out the same skills that make a person a keen observer of movies or theater are also useful for observing the real world. Here’s Roger Ebert in The gathering storm:
Sometimes in the noise of the news there will be a single item that pops out with clarity. That happened when I heard about Tracy, California, which is charging $300 every time the fire department answers an emergency call that doesn’t involve a fire.
The essay also explains why it’s so expensive to park in Chicago. I wondered about that last time I was there.
To go back to the beginning, some of my favorite writers were at one time theater or movie critics. New York Times columnist Frank Rich was a theater critic, as was technology journalist and entrepreneur Scott Rosenberg.
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Sentences that provoke regret
From a New York Times article on a federal appeals court decision denying detainees access to US courts:
The court has ruled that as long as the government detains prisoners in Afghanistan rather than the US, they are not entitled to the same process as they would be if they were detained somewhere else, regardless of where they were captured. That’s quite a loophole.
In the meantime, Britain’s new government is confronting its complicity in torture and looking to roll back surveillance powers and other impingements on civil liberties. I’m envious and more disappointed than ever in the Obama administration.