jaiapprovedthis

ignorance is Ignored

2009-12-07T04:26:14Z

One of the reasons we were set up as a Republic, instead of a direct democracy, is that it doesn't really make sense for hundreds of millions of people to delve into complex nuances of policy which they'll only have extremely marginal opportunities to effect. It costs a lot of time to sort through public policy, and most people, rationally, don't waste a ton of time on it. I suspect you'd find similar results across the policy spectrum, from foreign to monetary policy. Instead of obsessing over policy details, people elect a handful of people whose sole job it is to be be hyper-aware and immersed in policy details, and voters make a birds-eye-view judgment of their performance every few years in the elections. The idea is that you get the benefits of democracy without requiring everyone in the country to read 200 pages of policy briefings every week.

One of the results of this is that public office holders have some capacity to swing public opinion - lots of people who don't want to waste their time on boring policy details will defer their opinion to a group of trusted representatives. The Republican party, as a whole, figured this out some time ago. If you yell "socialization of medicine" and "death panels", that effects public opinion.

The Democratic Party has, largely, forgotten this lesson, evidenced by the decades-long pursuit of "triangulation" above all else. This is not as bad as it was for much of the 90's and 00's, but the Democratic representatives, on the whole, seem convinced that they are at the mercy of public opinion, rather than active participants in it. If polls show that people are "concerned" that the public option will cost too much money, then they have to be concerned about it too - even when such concerns lack absolutely any merit at all. In the end, many Democrats are so busy chasing polls that they never stop to notice thtat the polls are following them too.

Equality in DC

2009-12-01T18:39:38Z

D.C. is about to pass marriage equality. This makes me extremely happy.

yay for Congress

2009-11-15T08:40:12Z

From The NYTimes:

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.
E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

CNN Becomes Mildly Less Putrid

2009-11-12T04:00:32Z

Lou Dobbs leaving CNN to spend more time protecting his family from brown people.

While we're on the subject

2009-11-09T19:18:56Z

This:

Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment did not make abortion illegal. And it did not block the federal government from subsidizing abortion. All it did was block it from subsidizing abortion for poorer women.

Stupak's amendment stated that the public option cannot provide abortion coverage, and that no insurer participating on the exchange can provide abortion coverage to anyone receiving subsidies. But as Rep. Jim Cooper points out in the interview below, the biggest federal subsidy for private insurance coverage is untouched by Stupak's amendment. It's the $250 billion the government spends each year making employer-sponsored health-care insurance tax-free.

That money, however, subsidizes the insurance of 157 million Americans, many of them quite affluent. Imagine if Stupak had attempted to expand his amendment to their coverage. It would, after all, have been the same principle: Federal policy should not subsidize insurance that offers abortion coverage. But it would have failed in an instant. That group is too large, and too affluent, and too politically powerful for Congress to dare to touch their access to reproductive services. But the poorer women who will be using subsidies on the exchange proved a much easier target. In substance, this amendment was as much about class as it was about choice.

Congress Needs a Ladies' Night

2009-11-09T19:03:08Z

Like most of the world, we're a majority-female country. But you wouldn't know it to look at our representatives.

69 countries have better representation for the X-chromosomier sex than we do. We fail. Badly.

Hilarious

2009-11-08T03:51:41Z

Watching C-SPAN as the final House bill goes to the floor. The Republicans are using all of their speaking time to (1) warn about the dangers of government intervention in health insurance and (2) make sure that as much money gets spent on Medicare as possible.

The bill should pass within the next hour or so, with a newly-minted amendment which effectively bars insurers on the individual market from covering abortion. Ironically, this is the most blatant intrusion of the federal government into private medical procedure, and I believe the only medical procedure which individual insurers will now be banned from covering. So, conservatives' big accomplishment today: Using the government to effectively restrict what medical procedures insurers are allowed to cover. I'm doubtful this amendment will survive to Obama's desk - Reid is unlikely to include similar language in the bill he brings to the floor of the Senate, and everybody in the room at conference is going to prefer the government-doesn't-restrict-coverage Senate version of the bill. Still, troubling.

House is currently voting to lock down the bill, end amendments and debate, and move to a final vote. Within the hour, the House of Representatives will succeed where 80 years of reform effort have failed and finally pass comprehensive health reform. Then it's all eyes on Harry Reid in the Senate.

Playlist for Maine

2009-11-05T08:47:48Z

Keep Going

2009-11-04T15:02:47Z

"It's sort of like gay 'Survivor.' We're going to outlive, outlast and outsmart bigots." - Dan Savage

81-19 - Final balance in favor of equality on the University of Maine-Orono campus.

Damnit.

2009-11-04T05:09:42Z

Spoke too soon. It looks like love is going to lose in Maine.

Going to bed. Pissed off at humanity.

New Jersey

2009-11-04T03:09:52Z

Christie, the Republican, looks on track to be the next Governor of New Jersey. There are still a few big outstanding Democratic districts, but the odds favor him at this point.

Maine Equality Update

2009-11-04T03:00:48Z

People who support love and equality are beating people against same-sex families. 51-49 with 22% of the precincts in. Gonna be close.

In Other News

2009-11-04T02:41:27Z

The Chamber of Commerce has acknowledged that the Earth revolves around the sun and climate change is real. They're switching posture from "climate change isn't real nyah-nyah-nyah I can't hear you" to "okay it's real but we should decide how to deal with it". That's pretty huge - the Chamber of Commerce has been one of the huge institutional impediments to acting on climate change. Their shift may foreshadow climate-change-deniers shifting out of their caves and beginning to have a real debate about how to deal with it.

Election Night

2009-11-04T02:12:53Z

Republican wins VA Gov race; expected, but disappointing. Expanding mass transit in the DC metropolitan area will be that much harder now. Combination of very energized Republican base and a Democrat who decided the best way to win was to look as much like a Republican as possible. His two Democratic predecessors ran as Democrats and won pretty handily. So, maybe a lesson here.

New Jersey too close to call. This is one of those races where I really have no love for the Democrat because he's not a really good governor, and no love for the Republican because he's a Republican.

On the most important race of the night, though, things are looking good. It looks like Maine is going to ratify marriage equality. Washington will be voting on a civil unions referendum, the results of which will be coming down in a few hours. Fingers crossed.

Meritocracy and Government

2009-10-29T15:30:46Z

By most account, the United States is the most economically libertarian of the industrialized nations. In our national mythology, this idea is tightly bound to our self-image as a "land of opportunity", where anyone can become rich by virtue of hard work, regardless of background. By the same mythology, more statist economies (i.e., the rest of the industrialized world) have fewer opportunities for economic mobility. The problem with this mythology is that it doesn't hold up very well when you actually look at socioeconomic mobility:<blockquote>America, land of opportunity. That's what we like to think, but a new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Belle Sawhill of the Brookings Institution proves otherwise. They took a close look at intergenerational mobility and found that 42% of American men with fathers in the bottom income quintile remain there as compared to: Denmark, 25%; Sweden, 26%; Finland, 28%; Norway, 28%; and the United Kingdom, 30%. They present a wealth of new and old research evidence to support the conclusion that if you're born poor in America, you're likely to remain poor.</blockquote> That statistical summary isn't nearly enough to form a firm conclusion from, but I'm interested in reading this book to see what the bipartisan researchers have found.

To Reiterate

2009-10-28T18:19:06Z

Lieberman's "I oppose the public option because it will cost taxpayers money" argument is unequivocally and completely untrue. This isn't a matter-of-opinion or I-suppose-if-you-look-at-it-this-way sort of thing. The closest thing I've heard to a coherent argument in this vein is "if the public option goes into debt Congress and the President will start subsidizing it". Part of me doesn't want to dignify this anti-logic by engaging with it, but I'd rather state in absolute terms and step-by-step why it's nonsense.

It's an argument against legislation which absolutely no one is proposing. It's an argument against actual legislation based on a fantasy about legislation someone might propose someday. It's sort of like saying "I oppose the Bush tax cuts because later someone could propose funding them by selling poor people into slavery". You can take this approach to any piece of legislation. "I oppose X because someday someone might say 'we should do X while killing puppies', and I for one love puppies".
There's every reason to believe that said fantasy-legislation would never get passed. It would require 60 Senators in favor of subsidizing government insurance, and a President in favor of subsidizing government insurance, and the House of Representatives. Right now, in a government as liberal as we're likely to see in a while, there are at most 60 Senators willing to allow a vote on a health care bill which includes a non-subsidized public option which the government is legally barred from funding, and even the lefter-than-the-Senate President isn't willing to go further than that. The even leftier House of Representatives can't even get enough votes together to link public option payments to Medicare rates - which would save even more money by increasing leverage. This after repeated analysis shows that the free public option will probably reduce the deficit by billions.
"But the Government never lets entitlements die!". This might be relevant if the public option was an entitlement, instead of a purchasable health insurance plan open to only about 10% of the population. Even, the government has previously been happy to let entitlements die when they're for poor people. The point of the public option is to save money - not even someone at lefty as me wants to subsidize it under the current health care environment.
If people want to argue against government spending on health care, the public option is exactly the wrong section of this bill to be attacking. The public option reduces government spending on health care, a point which would be beyond debate in anything resembling a sane discourse. But there is government spending on health care in the bill - and conservatives almost never talk about it. There are hundreds of billions in the bill to subsidize insurance for those who can't afford it. If you oppose government spending, this is exactly the part of the bill you should be railing against. But there's near silence on the issue. Olympia Snowe actually wanted to increase these beyond what was set in the Finance version of the bill. Why? Why is there all this noise and fury over a provision which saves everyone money, and deafening silence over the parts of the bill which actually do represent massive new spending?

There is a common thread which explains righteous opposition to a public option and polite whistling to generalized subsidies. And that would be the position of the health insurance lobby. Health insurers really, really like the idea of subsidizing health insurance for poor people - because those subsidies end up flowing into their pockets when those poor people actually buy health insurance. Likewise, the health insurance lobby really doesn't like any form of the public option, since it saves money by increasing competition. The best versions of the public option - the ones that save the most money - are the ones which introduce the most competition into the health insurance market. And more competition means lower profit margins.

I generally don't like to question underlying motives - I prefer to attack the actual arguments being made. But dealing with the same nonsense arguments over and over again, there comes a point where it's worthwhile to talk about the source of the nonsense. The same conservative Senators and Congressmen who stridently oppose a money-saving public option "for fiscal reasons" while being perfectly content with actual spending on subsidies are the same people who receive the most money and attention from the health insurance lobby. Any sort of principled conservative would be far more upset at hundreds of billions in government spending than in an unsubsidized government program to increase competition. But that's not what we see.

The ultimate source of these reality-challenged arguments is, by and large, not principled conservatism. It's the insurance lobby.

Lieberman

2009-10-27T18:19:12Z

Lieberman is threatening to join a filibuster. Why?

"I think a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not. It's going to cost the taxpayers and people who have health insurance now, and if

it doesn't it's going to add terribly to the national debt...there's so much in this health reform legislation that is so good, that I think they're just putting an unnecessary burden on top of it by creating another Washington-based entitlement program."

Some of us came to the crazy opinion that the public option was free when the legislation said that the federal government wouldn't spend any money on it and would have to be financed entirely through premiums, making it in fact not-an-entitlement-program-at-all. Our wild theories were fueled by CBO analysis showing the public option actually reducing the national debt by lowering other health care costs via competition.

There are entitlements of a sort in the bill, but they're completely unrelated to the public option. These entitlements are subsidies to help low-income Americans purchase health insurance. If he wants to object to those - well, I disagree, but it would at least be factually accurate. As it is, he's threatening to filibuster over a provision which does the exact opposite of the thing he says he's opposed to.

That Senator Lieberman's position is logically insane isn't debatable; He's completely wrong on the basic facts of the matter beyond reasonable argument. I'm worried that I live in a world where people can say something like this and still be considered an important public figure.

::facepalm::

OPT-OUT GOES TO SENATE FLOOR

2009-10-26T19:45:36Z

Huge win. Reid isn't even sending Snowe's trigger to the CBO, which means that triggers are 99% dead. There are 56-58 votes for the bill, which puts a ton of pressure on the last few holdouts - are they so opposed to a broadly popular public option that they'll scuttle all of reform over it? I'm betting no, but it's too soon to know for sure.

This is the endgame. Here's what happens now:

-Over the next few weeks, Reid and Pelosi will finalize their final versions of the bill and move them to the floor. The House version will be more progressive than the Senate version.

-The House will vote first, and is almost certain to pass it's version of the bill.

-The Senate will vote next, and there will be massive drama over cloture votes. Republicans will try to filibuster anything, which means any significant floor amendments are highly unlikely.

-Then comes final reconciliation. This is the stage where the White House has long hinted they're going to delve into the process and tweak the bill to their liking, but how much this happens is probably dependent on how close the initial votes are and how annoyed Congressional Democrats are at Obama.

-Final House and Senate votes. Unless there are dramatic changes in reconciliation, these should be easier votes.

-Obama signs the bill.

Opt-Out

2009-10-26T15:38:52Z

Today's morning dose of rumor says that Reid is very likely to move forward with an opt-out public option in the Senate, and will summon the CBO to score a few versions of the bill as early as today.

Good policy aside, it's worth noting that opt-out should be utterly terrifying, politically, to Republicans in any way involved with state politics - especially Governors. Giving constituents access to the public option is, if polling and common sense hold out, going to be extremely popular - with everyone but the Republican base. Remember the slight mockery of Republican officials who loudly denounced the stimulus and then sheepishly accepted the state funding anyway? Bump that up a couple of orders of magnitude. Incidentally, this may be why this compromise seems to be more popular with conservative Democrats - helping the state party is very good for them politically.

So, the dimensions in which the current bills most differ, the outer edges of the possible, and what I think a final bill is likely to look like at this moment

Bad: No employer mandate, "free rider" provision, triggered public option, expanded but still relatively subsidies for the poor, funded by cutting unproductive medicine and taxing income over $500,000 at slightly higher rates.

Good: Employer mandate, no "free rider" provision, Medicare +5% public option, moderately expanded subsidies for the poor, funded by low-end means plus tax on extreme-high-end-plans.

Likely: Weak employer mandate with no "free rider", non-triggered state-opt-out negotiated rate public option, moderately expanded subsidies for the poor, funding mechanism about halfway in-between.

All In

2009-10-24T10:49:06Z

It looks like Reid is doubling-down on a states-opt-out public option. That means a virtual guarantee that Olympia Snowe will join the other 39 Republicans in mounting a filibuster - which means Reid has to keep all 58 Democrats, Bernie Sanders, and the Connecticut-for-Liebermanian Senator in line on a strictly-partisan vote. Any one of them can kill the bill - and the conservatives in the caucus are going to be terrified of backing a bill with exactly no bipartisan cover. If one of them tries to kill the bill, it could be disastrous.

And if the gamble works, health insurance gets better and billions are saved.

The rumor is that the White House is terrified about this approach - they prefer to push a mediocre bill at lower risk. But Reid presumably knows his caucus better than the White House does - and the Senate is the bottleneck at this point.

It's worth remembering that at this stage, rumors are going to be rampant and pushed by a dozen conflicting interests. Nothing should be presumed until it's public and official. But for now - it looks good.

Manly Politics

2009-10-22T13:16:17Z

guys, the truth is that I am in to politics for the manly rush of it rawrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Obama Deescalates the War

2009-10-19T03:23:49Z

...on drugs.

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.

Talking Heads Kill People

2009-10-18T18:59:39Z

Anti-vaccine stupidity is not new. Hysterical accusations of vaccines causing autism have been running for decades, despite the complete lack of any casual link. HPV vaccine is completely safe, but the stupid/pro-cancer lobby from saying its somehow more deadly than cancer.

It is not too surprising that this streak of anti-science reached the new H1N1 vaccines. It is surprising how mainstream this insanity has become with the assistance of cable news hosts.

(You can't tell from the Fox News coverage, but the "Doctor" in the above clip is a complete quack. He refers to the "high level of adjuvants" as dangerous. There are exactly zero adjuvants in H1N1 vaccine, but even that's beside the point as adjuvants are considered safe.)

(I really, really hate Ron Paul. Main difference between the current swine flue outbreak and the the 1976 non-pandemic he's referring to: We're already in mid-pandemic, with almost 5,000 confirmed deaths and millions of confirmed cases.)

There are many, many more videos. Turn on the TV if you feel like being depressed, or search Youtube if you want to destroy any faith in humanity you may have left.

So, how mainstream has this insanity become?

(I think the partisan divide stuff here is stupid - the numbers of stupid are relatively close across party lines, especially considering the higher margin of error among sub-samples).

But, yeah. Fully half of the country has been scared enough by loud idiots on television that they'd rather risk suffering from an infectious disease, and spreading it to more people, than take a perfectly safe vaccination.

There's nothing partisan or political about this. It's just scaring people for ad revenue, even if it means creating a public health hazard.

Fuck.

Different Kinds of Opposition: Insurance Companies v Republicans

2009-10-14T08:35:02Z

One thing that people don't really talk about: Health insurers are mostly in favor of reform. For one thing, they're not stupid - they recognize that the current system is untenable, and the collapse of the entire US health care system is bad for them too. For another, they stand to make a lot of money from millions of new customers purchasing insurance. There are parts of reform they don't like - robust health exchanges and a public option would increase competitive pressure and consequently drive down profits, which is why you keep seeing Senators close to insurance interests doing whatever they can to cripple these aspects of reform. But on the whole, insurance companies want a bill to pass - just enough to maintain the viability of privatized insurance, but with as little competition as possible.

Many of my fellow reform advocates like to bash on insurance companies, because they're an easy target. But while insurance companies are far from moral paragons, they're not really the main obstacle to reform at this point.

This puts Republicans in the odd position of being more opposed to reform than insurance companies. Virtually the entire Republican caucus has dedicated themselves to not just opposing, but filibustering any health care reform legislation that comes to the floor. It's not because they're in the pocket of the health insurance industry - they're not (the focus of health insurance lobbying efforts has mostly been conservative Democrats). The motive seems to be a core conviction that the eventual resurgence of the Republican party is synonymous with Democratic failure. In short, the belief that if Republicans manage to block a major Democratic initiative, voters will punish the Democrats for failing to get anything done by electing the party which kept them from getting anything done.

Phrased that way, it's extremely counterintuitive. But it makes sense if people differentiate between Congressional Republicans (whose approval ratings now compare unfavorably to that of Swine Flu) and Republican candidates. Then the strategy may be stated more simply: Make the public hate Congress in general. That puts all incumbents at risk, but most incumbents are Democrats. Conversely, it gives all challenging candidates a "I will break the gridlock in Washington" campaign theme - and after Democrats took virtually every competitive house race in 2006 and 2008, almost all viable congressional challengers in 2010 are Republicans.

With a few borderline exceptions, most of the opposition to health care reform isn't really about the policy itself - it's about the metapolitics of public perception, incumbency, and math. Given that, it's not really surprising when Republican talking points have little or nothing to do with the policy actually being proposed (i.e. "death panels", "you lie [about illegal immigrant coverage]"). It's not really about trying to change or affect policy. It's about perception. And it's supposed to look ugly. It's supposed to be distasteful. It's supposed to make people hate the process and Congress and politics in general. Politically, Republicans don't really have anything to lose. Hence,he Andross strategy.

lazyblogging

2009-10-10T03:30:12Z

I'm tired, so I'm going to quote Ezra Klein at length:

I had a good time making fun of Barack Obama's Nobel prize this morning. It is undeserved. It is a bit ridiculous. But it's a laugh in the way that finding a $900 antique chair in the attic is a laugh, or getting paid $120,000 to be a celebrity dog walker is a laugh. It's an absurdity worth celebrating. It's an absurdity that can help you.

During the campaign, one of the arguments for Obama's candidacy was that his election would give us a costless shot of international goodwill. That the symbolism of his election would aid America's international standing without forcing any substantive policy concessions. At the time, that was a very big deal: Leaders were winning elections in other countries in no small part by tying incumbents to George W. Bush. That made it a lot harder for our allies to loudly support our initiatives. <Snip>

The Nobel Committee said, in essence, thank you for proving us wrong. The prize was about what Obama meant to other countries, or at least to the Nobel Committee. Not what he currently means to America.