True Blue

Because Dems Want a President Cheney?

2006-03-27T09:57:00.000-05:00

So, Republicans are claiming that if Dems take over the House, Dems will impeach the President?

Becuase, what, House Democrats would prefer a President Dick "Go F* Yourself" Cheney? The guy who's gotten everything wrong in Iraq? Five Deferment" Cheney who hides behind the troops when people say he's a doing a lousy job? Cheney who said everybody was gonna die if we didn't invade Iraq, or if we elected John Kerry? Who outs covert CIA agents for political gain, and who has failed on homeland security, incompetent and cowering before lobbyists and special interests.

Yeah, Dick Cheney sounds like just the kind of guy Democrats want in charge. Outta the frying pan...

Not my Fault, Part 212...

2006-03-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

"Listen, every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy."
-- President George W. Bush (AP)

Really? George Bush, Yale history major, tells us that every war plan looks good on paper. Has he not heard of:

Swedish King Charles XII’s invasion of Russia (hmm, take a seat at the table of Europe’s power brokers, or blow it all in a half baked invasion of Poland & Russia because you’re mad at their royal families. Hard call.)
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (Supply lines? Who needs supply lines? It’s not like the Russians are famous for a “burn and retreat” defensive strategy…)
Hitler’s invasion of Russia (Who needs winter clothing on a march to Moscow? Does Russia get cold or something?)
The Maginot Line (I mean, the Germans couldn’t possibly DRIVE AROUND IT, right?)
Verdun, Gallipoli…pretty much all of WWI
The Charge of the Light Brigade (hint: when, as your cavalry charges directly into the enemy’s artillery, the enemy starts mowing you down while saying things like, “are those guys drunk? What the hell are they thinking,” you should entertain the notion that this plan probably didn't look so good on paper, either.)
Custer’s Last Stand (Really, who cares how many Indians there are? Just attack!)
Ancient Rome’s invasion of Germany under Augustus (Sure, when the German guy starts talking about this great shortcut he knows through a dark, muddy forest that no Roman has seen before and where your military advantage will be totally neutralized, you should definitely follow him. That doesn’t sound like a trap.)
The Crusades (most notably the Children’s Crusade. Unless you think it looks good on paper.)

But none of those sound like our war plan for Iraq, right? It's not like we sent too few guys, in without body and humvee armor, and then just expected that once Saddam had fallen that Iraq would pretty much spontaneously spring into a pluralistic peaceful democracy overnight?

Sure, George. Future military strategists are going to look at Iraq and say, "Yeah, but just look at this plan! It's not like anyone would have anticipated a plan this good would go horribly awry." Because, you know, there's no such thing as a war plan that looks bad on paper and a leader who's too stupid to see it.

Lies My Op-Ed Columnist Told Me...

2006-03-17T13:00:00.000-05:00

Today, Michael Kinsley attempts a takedown of Paul Krugman and Robin Wells' brilliant piece in last week’s New York Review of Books—specifically, a takedown against single-payer.

The results are a rather sad mix of ignorance, lies, and idiocy as he suggests that the choices for healthcare reform are status quo with tweaks vs. rationing under single payer. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Beginning with the idiocy, it appears that Kinsley subscribes to a view of health insurance as a bet: individuals bet on the odds that they will get sick and need $X amount of healthcare, and insurers bet the same amount of money that they will not. When people end up being sicker than the insurer expected, the insurer loses and the people win.

This totally bizarre way of looking at health insurance leads Kinsley to worry about a “problem” that no one with any sense cares about—that under single payer, some people will pay into the system and never get sick, while other people will pay into the system and be really sick. That is, single payer sets up an irrational system where if people stay healthy, they “lose” the bet, and if they get sick, they “win” the bet.

Getting cancer and needing chemotherapy is winning a bet? Perhaps I’m in the minority, but if I’d paid a tolerable amount of my salary into a health care system, never had to worry about paying medical bills for myself or my family, and then got hit and killed by a bus when I was 90, I really doubt my dying thought would be “darn it, I really got screwed because I paid into health care my whole life but never needed a triple heart bypass.”

This kind of thinking is why Kinsley agrees with Krugman that Bush’s health care savings accounts are bad but Kinsley only understands half of the argument. Kingsley correctly agrees that HSAs mistakenly focus on the pennywise spending and the issue in the healthcare system is that we’re pound foolish. But he fails to point out that they’re also a bad idea for several othe reasons, paramount among them the fact that they make health insurance really cheap for healthy people, and really expensive for people who actually need healthcare. Sadly, as we will see later, he considers this aspect a feature, not a bug.

It’s the next paragraph where he starts spinning. I don't know what's more insulting: that he's spinning, or that he's doing it so badly. Kinsley argues that Krugman and Wells are being misleading when they lay out the “complexity and administrative costs of the current fragmented [healthcare] system.” He suggests that the computer industry would look equally lousy if presented this way.

But it’s Kinsley who’s being misleading when he says “even the most competitive industry can seem wasteful and inefficient when described on paper.” He never mentions that, unlike the very competitive American computer industry, the American health care system is not at all competitive globally. America spends way more to take care of fewer people, and there's no evidence we get any more for our money. If Kinsley claimed the American auto industry looked inefficient on paper but might still be really competitive, he’d be laughed at. He deserves to be laughed at here.

Kinsley further argues that although Krugman and Wells point out that healthcare spending is skewed (the 80/20 rule), other forms of insurance are like that, and that’s not what makes health insurance unique. Kinsley claims they don’t explain why health insurance should be different from any other form of insurance—why we should allow people to use it as a “subsidy” rather than as a stop-loss based on their health risk. And to give the devil his due, at a certain level he’s right. Krugman and Wells don’t explain why health insurance isn’t like car insurance. Because it’s perfectly obvious why they’re different.

Health care isn’t like car repair, so it’s not surprising that a system that works well for cars has been working very poorly for people. The economic approach that Kinsley wants us to take—winning or losing the insurance bet—is completely wrong. For most people, health insurance simply isn’t about insuring against losses. Health insurance doesn’t guarantee you will have $30,000 to fix your old car or buy a shiny new car if you accidentally smash up your old one.

That’s because health insurance is about guaranteeing access to care. Its primary value is that it’s a subsidy, not a stop-loss or a replacement for a lost investment like a house or car. Most of us aren’t billionaires and know full well that if our kid got cancer, we couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills. The reason we buy health insurance is to make sure that if our kid gets cancer, she can get chemo. Period, full stop.

Finally and perhaps most disgustingly, Kinsley brings up the bogeyman of rationing and says that Krugman and Wells “duck the issue.” But they don’t. In fact, they say what Kinsley won’t admit, that our current rationing system—rationing by health status and ability to pay—is not only immoral, but also leads to colossal inefficiencies. They say that if we had the system every other country has, we might be able to avoid rationing altogether, although they are honest enough to admit that we may still need to ration. They do put a silver lining on it by saying that we could at least ration more rationally, but they have the honesty that Kinsley lacks and admit we may not be able to get rid of rationing.

It’s Kinsley who ducks the issue of rationing by pretending it doesn’t exist today, and by implicitly advocating for a solution that would lead to more rationing by health care status. Kinsley almost casually waves away the problem of charging people higher premiums if they're more likely to get sick by saying, “[a]dverse selection is only a problem to the extent that insurance is not really insurance but rather a subsidy.”

This, of course, ignores the fact that health insurance is only necessary to the extent that it’s a subsidy. He pretends that people are choose not to buy insurance because they do not value it enough, when the real reason that most people don’t buy insurance is that the exact opposite—because they’re sick, it’s too valuable and so they can’t afford it.

And so it’s in his closing paragraphs that Kinsley becomes the most odious. He says, “If you're not as hopeful as Krugman and Wells about being able to avoid rationing, you face this question: Should people be allowed to opt out of rationing if they can afford it?...Better-off or better-insured people could be told, individually or as a group: Give up your health care subsidy and you may opt out of any rationing-type restrictions that the system imposes.”

Guess what? That’s the system we have now. No one has to buy insurance. No one has to decide to accept the subsidy. And our system is still full of rationing. Most people without health insurance aren't rich folks choosing to forego a subsidy, they're the working poor—too “rich” for Medicaid, but unable to afford insurance. There are millions of sick people who can't afford insurance, and who don’t get medical care as a result. Sure, there's a handful of irresponsible twenty-somethings in there, too. So what?

Michael Kinsley is a deceitful, desperate defender of the status quo. His “free market rulz!” ideology has blinded him to the fact that American healthcare is failing on all fronts—fairness, quality, and cost. He thinks our healthcare system mostly works great, and the way to fix what ails it is to make insurance cheaper for people when they don’t need it, and more expensive for them when they do.

Krugman and Wells say we’ve got to admit that an “every man for himself” approach has failed in healthcare, and it’s bankrupting us financially and morally. They suggest that the solution lies in abandoning ideology and instead learning from the proven success of other healthcare systems. And the first thing we need to realize is that all successful healthcare systems guarantee treatment to sick people when they need it.

What Should the Dems do about Iraq?

2006-03-16T13:24:00.000-05:00

Right now, big voices in the netroots are saying that Iraq is hopelessly screwed up, and that all that can be done is to get a new president in 2009. Democrats have to stop trying to come up with a "save Iraq" plan, because this gang will screw it up; and impeachment isn't an option because, no one wants to see President Cheney (or President Hastert or whatever).

Without disagreeing with the above, I'd like to point out that there is a third option. Today, we have a President who is an idiot, surrounded by toadies who make insanely bad decisions and are utterly incompetent. Democrats need to force the President to throw out his senior leadership and replace it with sane people. We need to make him clean house and fill it with people like Brent Scowcroft--people who, while we don't agree with them on everything, aren't going to lie to gin up support for a half-baked war in a critically strategic region and then lose it.

This is what used to be done in monarchies when the king went nuts. Instead of deposing him and running the risk of totally destabilizing society, nobles surrounded him with powerful and competent leaders who would act in his name, while talking him out of or otherwise undermining his completely insane ideas.

This is the best way for the Democrats to salvage what can be salvaged over the next three years, and also to position themselves to win the next election. Dems need to let it be publicly known that they are pushing for new leadership--and actually throw out the names of a new Secretary of Defense, or a new National Security Advisor who they are hearing "buzz" about and of whom they approve. Throw out the most gravitas-laden-name that gets the most bipartisan respect (like Scowcroft), even if there's no way this is going to happen. Then, when a neocon nut is replaced, the Democrats are in a position to say, "it's an improvement, we made this improvement happen, if you want more like this, start voting for Democrats, because unified Republican leadership brought you the fiascos of Iraq, Dubai, North Korea, nuclear proliferation, and no Osama."

This is Why you Never Play the Race Card...

2006-02-24T14:47:00.000-05:00

When I was a little pup, I once heard a young operative suggest we solve a political problem by making race a factor where it wasn’t. I expected him to be shot down, but I was impressed—what a win-at-all costs, tough, cynical bastard. We were lucky to have him on our side.

And then a big dog with a long history in City politics looked down at him and said, "Never play the race card, sweetheart. Because it’ll come back and bite you in the ass."

Unlike any modern President, George Bush unhesitatingly throws down the cards that every sane politician avoids. Not just the race card, but the religion card, or the treason card, the terror card. Hell, he runs on them! But with this ports deal, I think for the first time, he and Karl Rove are seeing why sane politicians don't play these cards.

People think the danger in playing these cards is that they'll incite the masses uncontrollably. Which is true, eventually, but it's not why politicians don't play them. They think it's because people will see through the manipulation, and the blowback will be fierce. And sometimes that happens. But with the right approach, you can play this card pretty successfully. Perversely, the higher you get, the easier it is to play the card without blowback—people don’t want to believe that someone as powerful as, say, the President, could be this reckless, so they demand a very high level of proof before they will turn on him. So, playing the card isn’t the problem. The problem is that the card stays on the table.

And if you’re still in power, you will eventually have a situation where you need to do something that the card won’t let you do. If you’re governing at all responsibly, this point will come sooner rather than later. In this case, it’s come much later, when George Bush needs to, for whatever reason, turn over control of East Coast ports to UAE.

George is now potentially in the same position than his opponents were in before. He put the race and terror cards on the table when he justified the invasion of Iraq with laughably flimsy evidence of its collusion with terrorists. Cheney reinforced the racism with his talk about how Iraq was “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years.” Furthermore, the Administration’s arguments over the legal legitimacy of Guantanamo have rested on a very aggressive playing of the terror card, resting almost entirely on the assertion that anyone with possible connections to terror doesn’t have the same rights that other people do, and that it is dangerous to give them any procedural rights whatsoever.

The race and terror card is sitting on the table for Dems to pick up. Once they do, the substantive merit of the port deal is out the window. So, all George can do is try and stop his opponents from picking up that card. He'll try to frighten them—“you can’t play this card, because I’ll play the race card, too, and you’ll lose your base.” He'll falsely appeal to their sense of the greater good—“we really need this port deal for America.” He'll try to terrify them—“if you play this card, you will forever legitimize the double standards you claim to so thoroughly oppose, or you'll set off a race war!”

To date, arguments like those have stopped the Democrats from picking up any of the cards on the table. But with the port deal, all those arguments fell apart. America doesn't need the port deal, if Abu Ghraib didn’t set off a race war this certainly won’t, and after Katrina, not one member of the Democratic base is going to believe that George Bush, who don’t like black people, is going to stand up for racial justice.

But hopefully, this incident will make Congressional Dems figure out what old city pols have known for a long time. You can’t appease people who play these cards, because they will just keep playing them, for higher and higher stakes. There is only one way to beat these cards, and it’s to play them yourself. Let the other guy know that, politically, it’s mutually assured destruction.

In addition, I hope that Dems will also realize that playing these cards isn’t like losing your virginity—you can get it back. Look at Bobby Kennedy, commie-hunter turned fighter for Civil Rights.

And furthermore, you can only neutralize these cards once you have the credibility from playing them. The same way that only Nixon could go to China, only people who are on the right side of the terror card can neutralize it. You can’t take it off the table until you own it. And right now, the Dems are the party that are on the wrong side of this card. They are the ones who would rather see us all dead than offend some Muslims. Dems have to prove to the public that they’re willing to offend Muslims in order to protect America. Only then will they have any ability to make rational policy without falling victim to Republican demagoguery and race-baiting.

Usually, playing a card like this demands you do something very horrible and unjust, and that innocent people suffer as a result of it. All we have to do is not sell a port to some very rich people. Let’s do it.

How to win on Illegal Domestic Spying...

2006-01-26T11:57:00.000-05:00

I am really tired of Democrats who keep arguing that, "it's the lawbreaking, stupid." You know how that conversation plays in Peoria?

--"President Bush lied to spy on Americans."
--"Yeah, but he did it to protect us. Wouldn't you break the law to save your son's life?"
--"But that's not the point. Um, it's that he didn't go to congress and let them change the law."
--"Okay, he should have gone to Congress. But I'd rather have a president who'd break the law to protect me than one who was so afraid of going to jail he'd let me die rather than break the law..."

See how this DOESN'T work for us?

Here's how to make it work for us.
--"I love that Bush is talking about how it's OK he broke the law because he takes Osama bin Laden seriously. I seem to remember 6 months after September 11, he said he wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden, but he was REALLY concerned about Iraq."
--"Yeah, but Osama bin Laden is a threat."
--"He totally is. Why the hell did Bush say he wasn't concerned about him? Man, Bush is a total screwup. I don't see why we put up with him breaking the law. He needs someone to hold him accountable."

Insanity is doing the Same Thing Again and Expecting a Different Result.

2006-01-20T10:51:00.000-05:00

Can someone please explain to me how this "keep Osama bin Laden on the run" strategy will keep us safe today when it didn't keep us safe before 9/11?

June 26, 2001
U.S. Has Bin Laden 'On the Run,' Sen. Shelby Says

Council on Foreign Relations Q&A:

How did bin Laden end up back in Afghanistan?

After he left Saudi Arabia in 1991, bin Laden settled in Sudan, where he established his own businesses and set up training camps for al-Qaeda. U.S. and Saudi pressure forced him to abandon Sudan in 1996; back then, the United States sought to keep bin Laden on the run, not to capture him [emp mine]. Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan, where the Taliban offered him a base in exchange for money to fund their fighters.

Before September 11, how did America pursue bin Laden?

In several ways, including military strikes, diplomacy, legal action, and intelligence work. The United States used diplomatic pressure and the threat of U.N. sanctions to get Sudan to expel bin Laden in 1996. For several years, the CIA paid agents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan to monitor bin Laden’s movements; after the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the United States used cruise missiles to hit his Afghan bases. Also in 1998, a federal grand jury indicted bin Laden and 21 other al-Qaeda members for conspiring to kill Americans abroad; four men were convicted in May of 2001.

And, for chrissake, how long are we going to maintain this delusion? That this guy isn't a threat to us because he's "on the run?"

1/22/02
Bush: "My attitude was, once we get him running, it's just a matter of time before we bring him to justice."

3/17/02
Bush: "I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run."

2/28/2004
A top U.S. anti-terrorism official says al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is on the run, amid what officials say is an intensifying hunt for fugitive members of the terror network. The U.S. official says he believes Osama bin Laden will be captured soon.

Ambassador J. Cofer Black, coordinator for the State Department counter-terrorism office, say the United States and its allies will find Osama bin Laden.

"I feel confident that it will be sooner rather than later, although I'm not going to speculate on the exact date," he said.

9/10/2004
"I don't know where he is," Powell said. "I don't know his state of health. I believe he is still alive, but I can't prove that. He clearly is in hiding and he is on the run."

5/30/05:
KING: Have we ever been close to getting bin Laden?
CHENEY: Uh...
KING: You can tell us.
CHENEY: Well, we've had him on the run, I believe.

1/20/06:
"Clearly the al Qaeda leaders and other terrorists are on the run. They're under a lot of pressure," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Commitment, Terrrorism, and Audiotapes...

2006-01-20T10:15:00.000-05:00

George Bush, one week after 9/11:

"I want justice. There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive'....I just remember, all I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid I remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. It said: 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.' All I want and America wants [bin Laden] brought to justice. That's what we want."

George Bush, six months after 9/11:

"I am deeply concerned about Iraq. And so should the American people be concerned about Iraq. And so should people who love freedom be concerned about Iraq..."

-snip-

"I don't know where [bin Laden] is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him....Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Headlines 1/19/06:
Bin Laden tape warns that new attacks on US being prepared
Bin Laden’s tape sends oil prices rocketing
Dollar climbs despite mixed data and Bin Laden tape
Security Stepped Up After Bin Laden Threat
City Fury as Osama Threatens Attacks

From the Administration that Brought you the Medicare Drug Benefit...

2006-01-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

Bush is pushing his Medical Savings Accounts again.

I've pointed out before that these are very bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that they punish the sick, they destabilize hospitals, and they help out well-off healthy people way more than anyone else.

But what you might not have realized is that George Bush is lying when he says they'll control health costs.

Everyone in the field knows that in healthcare, sick people are expensive and healthy people are cheap. Something like 80% of the money in health care is spent on just 20% of people--it's spent on things like 24-hour ventilator care and kidney transplants and cancer treatments and surgery for kids with spinal bifida and holes in their heart. This phenomenon is familiar to every insurance executive, hospital administrator, and healthcare policy person in the country. It's even got a nickname, "the 80/20 rule."

George Bush claims that the reason we're spending so much on healthcare is because people aren't personally responsible. He promises that Medical Savings accounts will make healthcare cheaper because they'll make people spend their own money instead of the insurance company's money. But that's a lie and he knows it, becuase he knows about the 80/20 rule. He knows that MSAs wan't control healthcare costs by making people spend their own money because most of the time, that money is going to be spent by insurance companies and not by individuals.

Y'all just lost the Wimmins, y'know.

2005-09-06T21:53:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, I had an interesting converstaion with two red staters. At the end of it I was convinced that Katrina would send all the married women who'd voted for Bush running back into the arms of the Democrats.

The man I spoke with was all bluster and outrage, saying that this situation was a tragedy, but people had brought it on themselves by not evacuating.

What was interesting was the woman's response. She had the look of someone who'd realized something very frightening. She was quieter, and after the bluster was done, she looked at her 8 year-old daughter and said that she lived near a nuclear power plant, just outside a big city. She said she'd been thinking about it, and she didn't know how the hell she could get her family out of there if the evacuation air-sirens went off.

This strategy of blaming the poor who didn't evacuate will lose the Republicans the married woman's vote. Especially now, since Oprah has shown them the footage of the people who stayed--the old, the poor, and all the children.

Fundamentally, women aren't like men when it comes to evacuation--we don't think strategy, we think logistics. Beucase that's our job. We're the ones who know that no matter how much time you leave, it still takes another 20 minutes beyond the time you set aside to get 3 kids packed up for the beach. We know that it's impossible to remember to bring every single thing you meant to bring, that even when you thought about it the night before and laid everything out in the living room floor, one of the kids always moves the sunblock or his towel or you forget the sandwiches in the refrigerator. We know exactly how risky it is to stake your kids' life on your remembering to bring every single thing.

Every middle-class mother hears "immediate evacuation" and "5 days in the Superdome" and thinks, "Jesus Christ, I have no idea how much water I would bring for 5 days. Is it 5 gallons? Ohmigod, where are our passports? Do I have to bring the kids' birth certificates? What about the deed to the house? Would I have time to get my mother's jewelery out of the safe deposit, or is that selfishness that's going to kill my children?"

Tell her that she's got to evacuate without a car, and she'll start shaking her head. Tell her she's gotta do it in 18 hours, Grayhound and Amtrak are shut down, it's 250 miles to get out of the hurricane's path, and she's got $200 bucks in her pocket, and every soccer mom will know with certainty what every soccer dad doesn't get--that it's impossible. Flat out impossible.

Maybe the Bush administration will succeed in keeping these facts from mothers. But I think they hear "no car" and "one day to evacuate" and they'll know the score. And they will have very little time for any politican who claims that no one could have expected people would stay. Becuase she'll know he's lying.

UPDATE: Welcome, all of youse visiting from Crooked Timber. Please check out the rest of the site (here, here, here and here are some of my favorite posts).

And do forgive the failure to update since 9/05. I was in a delayed-onset coma, brought on by eating too much paste in childhood. But I've awakened, cleared the coma-crud out of my eyes, and will soon be setting the blogosphere on fire with posts! Do enjoy.

Katrina

2005-09-06T21:24:00.000-04:00

I've always said that if I didn't live in NY, I'd live in New Orleans. These past 5 years have not been kind to either city, but I think it's pretty clear that N'awlins just won the screwed-over sweepstakes.

And, of course, the politics here are appalling. Everyone from Bush "no one expected the levees to break" to "on Tuesday, all the headlines said we'd dodged a bullet" Chertoff is lying and passing the buck. I knew that civilization could be so fragile, but I never thought in America that we would allow it to fall away so quickly and so utterly.

At the end of the day, no one was prepared for this catastrophe. Everyone should take a share of blame commesurate with their ability to affect the outcome. The poor and car-less of New Orleans who were told to evacuate at 11AM on Sunday after the buses and trains had stopped running, have little reason to apologize for failing to load up their life's possessions on their backs and literally running through the path of an oncoming hurricane in a mad dash for the Texas border.

The mayor of New Orleans can be faulted for failing to do see Katrina's path more clearly and for failing to forcibly evacuate a city of 500,000 with his small band of 1,500 police.

The Governor can be cursed for failing to keep the peace with her half-staffed National Guard, and for her ludicrous crying jags and calls for prayer.

But the full measure of outrage should be reserved for those who had the most power to affect this storm's ultimate outcome--the incompetent federal government, and the Republicans who control all its branches.

From a stripped and weakened FEMA; to incompetent political appointees more focused on PR and spin than on rescue work; to budget cuts that stopped levee work for the first time in 37 years; to a president on vacation who ate cake and played guitar as New Orleans flooded; to a secretary of state who went shoe shopping; to a Secretary of Defense who went to a baseball game...there is much to answer for here.

For those of you believing in God, pray for the people of New Orleans, but pray also for the souls of those who failed them. Because this callous failure cannot go unpunished.

UPDATE: Welcome to all of youse visiting from Crooked Timber. Please look around (4 of my faves are here, here, here, and here).

And um, the site hasn't been updated since 9/05 because I was...in a coma. Yep, a delayed-onset coma brought on by eating too much paste in gradeschool. But fear not, I've cleared the coma-crud out of my eyes and will be updating regularly!

The Mysteries of Sleep

2005-06-30T14:14:00.000-04:00

So, this piece on the insomnia of baby dolphins leads me to point out something I've thought about a lot. Sleep is weird.

We spend roughly a third of our lives asleep, we go crazy if we can't sleep, but we haven't got a clue why we need to sleep at all! When you look at the biological basics, we understand the functional purpose of a lot of the biggies--we know why we get hungry and eat, why we need to breathe, why we have sex...but sleep? Nobody knows .

I find this a very exciting thing. The fact that we don't understand sleep at all suggests that there is a huge breakthrough in scientific knowledge or theory to be made--something as earthshattering as quantum mechanics, or the discovery of the microscopic world. We have plenty of data points on sleep, but we simply have no understanding of the functional purpose of the phenomenon. I suspect that once we are able to understand sleep, we will also be able to understand a lot of other things--many forms of mental illness, the biology underlying emotional states and affecting social interaction, etc.

Anyway, it's nice every once in a while to look out the window and marvel at all the undiscovered country. Rock on, baby dolphins!

The CIA also believes in the Javits theory...

2005-06-22T19:42:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, I made the argument that Iraq's porous borders mean that Iraq isn't flypaper, where all the world's terrorists go in, get stuck and die--it's a convention center, where they go in, get training, and then leave to wreak havoc elsewhere.

It appears the CIA agrees that this observation is correct.

Food Police Found!

2005-06-13T22:26:00.000-04:00

This has got to be the funniest thing I've read in months. It includes the priceless quote, "Be very cautious and skeptical of door-to-door sales of meat or seafood."

Update: The AG got his conviction! Go food police, go!

And, um, who exactly ARE the food police?

2005-06-12T19:40:00.000-04:00

I'll admit it--I had to stop reading today's NY Times, because the cognitive dissonance in so many articles damn near made my head explode. Josh Marshall links to a gadflyer analysis of the flagship disgrace, an article speculating on the impact that increasing longevity may have on Social Security's solvency, an article that fails to mention even once that this is not a recent observation and Social Security has already (and always has) factored in increased longevity in its solvency projections.

But the article that made me throw down my Times in disgust was Melanie Warner's love letter to lobbyist Rick Berman. Entitled "Striking Back at the Food Police," the article details the struggle of Berman, a lone David struggling against the mighty Goliath of the Organized and Impressively Funded food nazi bridages.

Here are some interesting things I learned from this article. If one negotiated on behalf of Bethlehem Steel and campaigned against a minimum wage increase, one can be described as having "buil[t] a career working on labor issues." If a company markets unhealthy food the same way that Phillip Morris marketed tobacco, lying to the consumer about its health effects and attempting to create confusion about the evidence, the real bad guys are: "trial lawyers [who] are circling and are starting to turn food into the new tobacco." If one says something on a scientific issue that is either factually inaccurate or tangential and blatantly tendentious, one's argument will be met with the gentle retort that "these are useful points" and "many scientists question whether [this particular point] really matters," and the debate will be framed thusly: "Amid the claims and counterclaims, Mr. Berman and his opponents duke it out, taking sides on major questions about obesity..."

The gentleness of her response to Berman is striking in light of the fact that some people in the scientific community are arguing that obesity will lead to a decrease in life expectancy in the coming years.

This is like reading articles on climate change, in which the arguments of Exxon-Mobil's lobbyist are credulously parroted and the scientific community is all still up in the air about whether humans are having an impact on the climate.

Seriously, I am thinking of starting up a Flat Earth lobbying shop/think tank, becuase I think the coverage would be hilarious: "theorajones points out that Magellan's circumnavigation means little, as much of 17th century science has been discredited. 'My opponents want to go back to the era of wooden ships and candles, but we believe in progress.' Many scientists agree that the 17th Century had wooden ships and candles..."

What was the point of this article? And could someone please tell me who the hell these food police are? All I see is an industry hack and a bunch of non-profit do-gooders, scientists, and impartial government employees. You'd think a reporter would ask "hey, those food police you keep railing against, they with the 25th or what?"

Beat Your Wife to Death? $50 and Time Served!

2005-06-10T19:18:00.000-04:00

Via Bobo's world, a guy in Oklahoma who apparently beat his wife to death has been charged with "a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment of up to one year or a fine of $3,000 or both."

In Texas we get a story about a guy who beat the crap out of his pregnant girlfriend until she miscarried, and the focus of the article (as Amanda points out) is abortion, specifically the politics and legality of abortion. It even asks why Erica would choose to have her boyfriend beat the crap out of her instead of getting a legal abortion, and suggests the answer is that she was in denial about her pregnancy and that this is common in teen girls. Becuase apparently, the salient issue isn't the fact that we have a teenager in a violent, abusive relationship that did her such physical harm that she miscarried--no, the real issue here is abortion rights and the wacky things that crazy teenage pregnant girls do!

See, where the Oklahoma woman went wrong was in getting old and not being pregnant when she let her husband beat her to death. Becuase, you know, if he'd hurt the fetus inside her, then we'd have a crime! But without a fetus in her...she's just a worthless empty cunt, I guess.

FBI Catches Major Suspects! (don't read the fine print)

2005-06-10T07:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's Headline:
Father and Son Held in California are Tied to Al Quaeda Camp

Today's Headline:
Affidavit Changed in Terrorism Accusation

Ah. Our strategy in the War on Terror apcontinues to be a roundup of little fish and non-fish, with lots of triumphant press releases (and torture!) but not much in the way of actual productive investigation.

I feel safe.

So, who trained 'em to disassemble? My god, the FBI!

2005-06-01T10:10:00.000-04:00

"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd...We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic] -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is." --George Bush (emphasis mine)

Plausible, yes? The enemies of America train their followers to lie and therefore we should not believe it when prisoners claim they were tortured. Ah, but then there's this:

The first public claims of U.S. torture at Guantanamo Bay were made by three Britons from Tipton, England. Shafiq Rasul, 27, and Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, both 22, were released without charge in March under pressure from the British government. In August, they and their lawyers presented a 115-page report on their treatment, likening it to the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Britons said they were beaten, shackled in painful positions, left in extreme temperatures and forcibly injected with unknown drugs while held for more than two years. At that time, the U.S. military denied the Tipton men's allegations.

Which sort of makes me confused. I mean, if these guys were important enough to our enemies to get counter-interrogation training, then why the hell did we release them?

And perhaps more importantly, there were FBI reports of abuses that FBI agents personally witnessed at Guantanamo, as well as clear indications that there was more going on that they didn't see firsthand. Should I believe that our FBI has been infiltrated by the enemies of America who are training our agents to disassemble? And if this is true, shouldn't the president be launching an investigation? Maybe he can find someone who will give him a list of known disassemblers...

Noted Healthcare Policy Expert...Robin Cook?

2005-05-23T19:45:00.000-04:00

So Robin Cook, a novelist best known for medical thrillers in the beach-reading genre, wrote an op-ed in the Sunday NY Times on the implications of genetic testing. Coincidentally, his new book, a medical thriller about genetic testing, will be released soon.

And suddenly, non-healthcare people are asking me if I got a chance to read this "great" op-ed, and saying that it's the most persuasive argument they've heard in favor of universal health care. Others are quoting this piece and talking about the "inevitability" of universal health care. It's completely strange; "adverse selection is bad and universal pooling is the only way around it" is healthcare economics 101. Cook's piece displays no new insights and people in the field have written about the impact of genetic testing on the insurance industry a thousand times over the past 10 or 15 years.

Somehow, Robin Cook set out to promote his book but succeeded in making the pernicious effects of adverse selection obivious to the non-expert, and has even made universal healthcare more acceptable to the general public. Even more bizarrely, people seem to find it acceptable because he's argued that it's a solution to discrimination on the basis of genetic profiling--a problem that does not yet and may never exist!

So, universal healthcare to cure our current insurance crisis is bad. But to cure a problem that may or may not exist in 20 or 30 years? Good.

Next week, I'll be talking about how investing in electronic medical records will be especially useful during an alien invasion...

The Javits Theory of Terrorist Threats

2005-05-17T10:06:00.000-04:00

I was reading Brad Plumer and thinking that if foreign fighters can get in and get out of Iraq, we have a problem. Jihadi summer camp turns pissed off extremists into pissed off extremists who know how to build bombs, manage far-flung communications networks, and organize and stage attacks against civilians and the American military.

Iraq. It's not flypaper. It's a goddam convention center. I can't see how this is a good thing, and it's yet another dangerous consequence of this administration's attachment to fairy tales of an easy victory blinding them to the critical need for postwar planning.

Well, at least we can take comfort in the fact that nobody thought we had any other choice. I mean, the Bush Administration really thought those WMDs were dangerous--more dangerous than any other country like Iran, North Koreal, Libya...oh, WAIT.

AEI disses the market!

2005-05-11T11:47:00.000-04:00

AEI slams the FDA for going direct to the consumer with drug warnings (via Kaiser Daily Health Report).

Sorry, aren't AEI the guys who think it's cool for drug companies to go direct to the consumer with drug advertising? Don't they want more "personal responsibility" in the healthcare system? By this logic, telling consumers about dangerous medications is bad because...?

Sadly, it would appear that AEI is not really committed to consumer empowerment as deeply as they're committed to preserving a healthcare system that systematically discriminates against the sick and the poor.

Weep together, people. It appears another great bastion of conservative intellectualism has been exposed as nothing more than a collection of schills, ideological pimps whoring out ideas for the powers that be.

Priorities: Kids or Frozen Embryos?

2005-05-11T09:47:00.000-04:00

In Missouri, about 100,000 parents, disabled, and elderly are being kicked off Medicaid. In Tennessee, they're looking to eliminate 300,000 people from the program and to reduce benefits for 400,000 more. Texas, where one of every five kids is uninsured, has already cut thousands from its rolls and is looking to do more. New Hampshire is looking to charge hundreds of dollars in Medicaid premiums to people who have no income at all. And Mississippi, goddam--a little bit of brinksmanship as the governor hinted he'd let the program go bust, followed by...cuts. Nationwide, the cost of insurance continues to skyrocket and more folks are uninsured.

In Washington? $10 Billion in Medicaid cuts. And $1 million in new spending for this little project:

Public Awareness Campaign on Embryo Adoption

The increasing success of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has resulted in a situation in which an infertile couple typically creates several embryos through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). During IVF treatments, couples may produce many embryos in an attempt to conceive with several being cryopreserved (frozen) for future use. If a couple conceives without using all of the stored embryos, they may choose to have the remaining unused embryos donated for adoption allowing other infertile couples the experience of pregnancy and birth. Embryo adoption is a relatively new process in which individuals who have extra frozen embryos agree to release the embryos for transfer to the uterus of another woman, either known or anonymous to the donor(s) for the purpose of the recipient(s) attempting to bear a child and be that child's parent.

Covering a kid on Medicaid costs about $1300 a year. A million dollars could have covered more than 750 poor kids. But apparently, the federal government thinks it's more important to spend taxpayer money on finding a good home for rich people's frozen embryos than on healthcare for kids. Sure hope those embryos never grow up into kids who need a vaccination or asthma medicine...

Just Asking...After Three and a Half Years,

2005-05-05T11:13:00.000-04:00

So, has anyone else noticed that Pakistan is very good at capturing al-Quaeda who try to assasinate the Pakistani president, but not so good at capturing al-Quaeda who blow up lower Manhattan and kill 5,000?

Gosh, it's enough to make one think that they're not trying that hard. On the other hand, it's only been three and a half years and we should really cut Bush some slack...I mean, he's been so very busy eliminating that other guy who ~~attacked the US~~ ~~had weapons of mass destruction~~ ~~was further along than his equally hostile neighbors in building a nuke~~ ~~posed a threat to the United states~~ once tried to blow up his daddy in Kuwait.

Looks like we and our allies have definitely got our priorities straight.

Teron Buried

2005-05-02T18:54:00.000-04:00

Teron Francis was disconnected from his ventilator Thursday and buried on Saturday.

The child had a toothache. And it killed him.

What are we going to do about it?

Maybe those Hillary-haters Have a Point

2005-05-02T18:09:00.000-04:00

"It is unconscionable to balance the budget on the backs of our most vulnerable Americans, and that is exactly what the White House and congressional Republicans have decided to do,"

-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Girlfriend got it wrong. Here's the math:

Our current spending + $100 billion in tax cuts -
$40 billion in food stamps and Medicaid cuts =
$300 million in the red

We've got a leaky ship of state awash in a sea of red ink. What's the Bush Administration do? Throw two poor skinny bastards overboard, hoping we won't notice that it didn't do the job and we're still sinking!!

The Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans ASPIRE to a budget that is balanced on the backs of our most vulnerable Americans. Pathetically, they can't even get that right. Seriously, while I can see where ruthless incompetence is dashing, we've moved one giant step closer to a system with the worst of both worlds: fiscal ruin and moral indefensibility.

Can't wait to see what happens if he gets his hands on Social Security. Yeah, that'll end well.

Best Healthcare System in the World?

2005-04-25T12:32:00.000-04:00

This week in the Bronx, a 13 year old kid died of a toothache. Seriously.

This case seems to encapsulate everything that's wrong with out healthcare system. The kid, Teron Francis, has a family that clearly has lots of challenges and not a lot of resources, and Teron showed up for a root canal last week without the proper accompaniment or parental authorization. So, of course, the healthcare system did what it typically does when it encounters a bureaucratic hurdle--it threw up its hands and said, "sorry, we can't give you the treatment you need."

In the "greatest medical system in the world," a 13 year old died of a toothache because he didn't have the right paperwork. That's bat shit insane.

And, of course, there's a Schaivo-esque twist to all this: according to news reports, Teron is brain-dead, but his family is insisting he be kept on a respirator. There's some dispute between the hospital and the family--the family claims the hospital planned to take Teron off the respirator (which makes sense if he's brain dead), so the family filed an injunction to prevent it. The hospital, which apparently received Teron as a transfer patient when it was already too late to do anything for him, disputes the family's charge. And the icing on the cake is watching the Bronx's notoriously sleazy judiciary descend to a new low: this weekend, in a brilliant stunt, the wife of the judge who issued an injunction against removing the ~~feeding tube~~ ventilator prayed over the poor child's braindead body.

I can't imagine a better parable for our medical system: when it comes to preventive care, we're going to make it as difficult as possible for you to get the care you need in order to stay healthy. The roadblocks will be formidable, and if you fail to pass any of the system's tests--financial, bureaucratic, language or any other--it's going to be up to you, the sick person, to figure out the right way around them. But once you're dead, baby, you've hit the jackpot! The bureaucracies will magically align and they will move heaven and earth to preserve your quality of life.

Best medical system in the world? Tell it to Teron.

DOD: Health Benefits Corporation with War as a Sideline...

2005-04-14T12:24:00.000-04:00

I've said for awhile (and Lee Iacocca said something similar first) that at some point, healthcare costs were going to escalate to the point of an identity crisis for big business: they'd begin to realize they could be as easily characterized as a health benefits provider that sold cars to cover their employee health costs as they could be characterized a car-sellingcompany that employed people to make the cars.

It appears that the Pentagon is the most recent victim of this mission creep (via healthsignals).

With healthcare costs blowing up the bottom line, people are wondering why we have a wage and employment crisis?

Doom. Gloom. And Nuclear Power.

2005-04-10T09:58:00.000-04:00

So, Kevin Drum is going off again on peak oil, and Kristof is telling environmentalists that nuclear power is their friend.

Now, True Blue is going to play futurist: as we are forced to find affordable replacements for oil, the dominant power source of the next century will be nuclear power. Fundamentally, there is no replacement for oil today--it's an easily transportable, dense energy source that's easily converted to a usable form. Even when using other fossil fuels, nothing's nearly as good as oil. But we're not going to run out of oil overnight; it's going to become gradually more expensive as it becomes more difficult to obtain. So, it's a marginal benefit issue: as oil becomes gradually more expensive, what's going to replace it where it's replaceable?

Every alternative energy source except nuclear has some sort of glaring technical problem that makes it unworkable: solar and wind are far too unreliable, geothermal/tidal/hydropower are too local (hydro, especially, has significant political repercussions in water use battles), and we can't get fusion to pay off on planet Earth. If we could figure out a way to efficiently store and transport electrial power, we'd be more willing to work on the technical issues for these alternative energy sources and make the continuing investments that made them more and more efficient, but it turns out that storing electricity ain't easy.

Today, the path of least resistance is to substitute nuclear-generated electricity for oil wherever possible. To be reductive, when it comes to keeping the lights on, burning uranium is the most like burning coal or oil. This path of least resistance won't change without a major investment by government--it's pretty clear that finding the technical solution to storing energy will be a phenomenally expensive high-risk venture, and making energy cheaper looks far too much like a public good for any business to reasonably anticipate a meaningful ROI.

Today, we've got an administration that refuses to make this investment in a meaningful way. Even if we manage to get a progressive in office by 2008, the window of opportunity for investment is closing--the next officeholder is going to have to spend all their political capital digging the nation our from under Bush's fiscal mismanagement and preparing us to take the fiscal hit (Medicare/Medicaid health costs and Social Security) of the retiring boomers in 2011. There will be no spare change to invest in the kind of basic energy research that's needed to make most alternative energy sources a viable option.

Barring a lucky discovery by a genius scientist, there's little chance we're going to move off our current energy path--we're just not making the investments in the science that would make it possible. Oil will become more and more expensive, and our solution will be substitutions of less desirable energy sources (mostly nuclear) at the margins of consumption. Ironically, we'd be better off if we were going to run out of oil on a set date--we need a major technological breakthrough to maintain and improve our current standard of living, and without an impending crisis, it appears we are unwilling to make the investment necessary to create this breakthrough.

It took FDR's leadership and the terror of Nazi triumph to make the nuclear breakthrough. What's it going to take for us to make the next one?

Sympathy for the Devil

2005-04-05T07:03:00.000-04:00

Terrorism: "the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."

Sen. Cornyn: "It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions. [Sometimes] the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people....I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence." [Senate Floor, 4/4/05]

There you have it--what causes this United States Senator "great distress" isn't the grisly spectre of judges' corpses in a pool of blood--nope, what's distressing is the entirely legal spectre of judges ruling laws unconstitutional, and applying the law correctly to specific cases Schaivo . We've got a Senator suggesting on the floor of the Senate that when judges exercise the appropriate powers of their office in a lawful manner, their lives and the lives of their families may be forefit.

Tell me, what do you call a guy who supports his political agenda by making excuses for criminally murderous thugs and suggesting death at their hands is the consequence of opposing his policies?

100,000 Indian Doctors to Social Security's Rescue!

2005-04-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

The Social Security debate has crystallized into Republican claims that it's a big crisis and the way to solve it is to get rid of Social Security; while Democrats are saying, aided immeasurably by the facts, that it's a small problem, and the way to fix it is to increase the payroll tax (preferably on higher earners), to cut benefits (preferably on wealthier folks) or some combination of both.

What I find bizarre is that neither side is saying that the solution to the Social Security funding problem is to expand the taxpayer base by bringing in more adult workers through increased legal immigration. So, instinctively I've assumed it's because someone's run the numbers and figured out that immigration wouldn't fix the problem.

But then I see noted smart guy Brad DeLong (either him or his buddy Bob Gordon, I can't tell which) point out that, "[r]aising immigration by 0.3% of the workforce every year wipes out nearly half of the 75-year Social Security deficit," and I really don't get it. I mean, the problem with social security is that we need more adults to work and pay taxes. Yet outside our borders there are literally millions of adults desperate to get into America so they can work and pay taxes! And because we write immigration policy, we can even cherry-pick the world's best and brightest, maximizing America's return on other counties' investments. It's an endless spigot and we've got our hand on it. Why aren't we bringing that into the debate?

Is it because everyone is afraid of anti-immigrant sentiment? Is it because nobody wants to come to America anymore? Because there's some quirk in the numbers and immigration really does create more problems than it solves? Am I not understanding what it means to raise the immigration rate by 0.3% of the workforce annually and missing some weird compunding effect (you know, like those penny-a-day and double it things)? Seriously, why aren't Democrats saying "don't worry, we let in 15,000 more Jamaicans and we're back on easy street...what, you don't like Jamaicans? I got Trinidadians, if you want them instead...how's about some nice Poles? Chinese?"

UPDATE: Or, alternatively, we can just cut back on border patrols, let in a few more illegal immigrants and screw them over until the Social Security shortfall is met...

Keeping a New Year's Resolution.

2005-03-31T14:48:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago, I encouraged all left-leaning folks to talk more about national defense. And then promptly...didn't. Because I'm totally ignorant on national defense and, in a rare show of humility, don't think it's a good idea to bloviate on a subject about which I know so little.

Good news! The fine people at Democracy Arsenal are doing the work for me! Look. Read.

And I now amend my initial promise and will instead link at least once a week to these guys or other similarly informed people.

Still Waiting for the Magic Johnson Hit Piece

2005-03-28T18:23:00.000-05:00

So, I was thinking about Magic Johnson. I took a look at some of his (ahem) Johnson Development projects, and it seems like every damn piece on him makes Magic out to be a modern-day Robin Hood, revitalizing entire inner city communities with sustainable development through win-win projects that improve the community and turn a tidy profit (sadly, no pics of Magic in tights and quiver.).

So, where's the piece that unceremoniously cuts him down, and (justly or unjustly) calls all his achievements into question, putting him under a cloud of self-serving mendacity?

If such a piece does not present itself in a major publication within the next year, I think it represents a sea change in US journalism. I mean, you could never rely on those guys for the truth, but you could at least rely on them to never accept any millionaire who says he's going to start and business and dedicate himself to the betterment of the underprivileged. Whether it's a good thing, with fewer decent rich people pilloried for trying to do good things; or it's a bad thing, with credulous acceptance of exploitation of the poor when it's framed in a business model that only wants what's "best" for them; I don't know. But it's definitely a change.

(Sure, they let that Mother Theresa get away with public heroism on behalf of the poor, but she was, like, totally poor and celibate. This is a different thing entirely.)

America--NOT a Swedish Theocracy!

2005-03-27T00:30:00.000-05:00

I was reading the comments in a recent Pandagon post on the villification of single mothers. (Read the post, too--Amanda is a most fabulous addition and I heartily endorse this post). Anyway, a commenter made a very stupid point that Swedes "don't believe in a God who can tell people what to do," and in the US we do, therefore it's OK for the US to have policies make it harder for women to get divorced, becuase that reflects what religious interests want.

Which brought me to a thought. Sweden is not considered a theocracy, but it's not really clear to me why. I mean, there's a Church of Sweden. Heck, there's lots of "secular" states with official religions--Denmark's got their official religion written into the Constitution and hey, Norway's official state church just ordained a gay priest. Which leads me to argue two things: first, God's policy positions are far less clear than those promoting a "Christian Nation" would have us believe, and second, that liberals' defense of the separation of Church and State is not necessarily a defense of liberal values but is unquestionably a defense of American values.

Plenty of people have pointed out the pluralistic society's "Well, which God" problem with arguing for governance via God's will, and plenty of others have pointed out the, um, sacrelige of claiming to know God's will. But even if we assume we can know God's will as revealed through Christianity and we should use that to govern, we've still got a big problem when it comes to creating a "more Christian" nation. Jesus, Christianity's central figure, preached mainly in parable so, unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity doesn't have a lot of explicit rules that its adherents can refer back to and formally debate. So, to be inexcusably reductionistic, while a fundamentalist Islamic or Jewish theocracy could easily outlaw cannabilism because it's not Kosher or Halal, theocratic Christians wouldn't be able to point at a hard and fast rule and would have to argue in a different way that eating other people is terribly, terribly unchristian. The current demands from the Right Wing for a greater "recognition" of Christianity in our laws and government seem to miss the fact that Christianity is very flexible religion, equally useful to tyrants and saints, and that their cries for a "more Christian" nation would justify everything from an America that looks like Norway to one that looks like El Salvador.

The second point stems from the first--while a Christian nation is neither inherently conservative nor liberal, inherently just or unjust, a Christian nation is inherently unamerican. People have made entire careers opining upon the First Amendment's implications, as well as the implications of other constitutional quirks such as the prohibition against a religious test as a condition to hold office. But frankly, the document's pretty clear--the government should stay out of the religion-promoting business, and it shouldn't use Godly authority to justify its exercise of power. Or, as the legally non-binding Declaration of Independence put it: while the legitimacy of our rights are divine, the legitimacy of our government is mundane--it derives from the consent of the governed.

As someone whose name I've forgotten and who I'm shamelessly plagarizing pointed out: Religion in government does not make politicians more divine, it makes priests more profane. Today, when liberals confront conservatives who demand laws that better reflect our "Christian values," they're defending American values.

On the other hand, maybe conservatives argued the same thing when Civil Rights activists were organizing in churches and in 40 years when liberal Christian churches are in vogue, we'll find liberals' commitment to the separation of Church and State is as cynically convenient as Republicans' commitment to states' rights and limited government. Hopefully not.

Oh, yeah, use this as a "Happy Easter" post.

And we're torturing them because...?

2005-03-22T18:53:00.000-05:00

So, this is interesting. Put simply, torture doesn't work. But we're doing it anyway. Why?

Because if, like George Bush, you're not willing to take on the chemical industry and put in proper safeguards, if you're not willing to roll back tax breaks to pay for port inspections, you can't have people just talking about that. Every B-school flunkie knows that if you don't have the policy chops or the political courage to actually be effective, you need to look busy.

And nothing makes you look more busy than torture.

Torture is hard work. It keeps your intelligence guys busy--not just with the business of torturing (ropes! electrical prods!), but also busy analyzing all the "data" you're gathering. And even better, you don't have to capture more people in order to stay busy with analysis! See, a tortured man will keep changing his story, becuase he'll say anything to make the pain stop. So if, for example, you can't catch Bin Laden, you can still keep yourself busy analyzing the contradictory stories that his childhood gardener tells when you put the screws to him.

Also, torture gets you the right headlines. You get to make the terms of the debate about "who's soft" vs. "who's tough" instead of "who's effective" vs. "who's ineffective." This is good, because when people start talking about "effective," you're going to be in trouble because...you're not really doing anything (see above re: no policy, no courage).

Of course, there's a downside. You endorse the enemy's torture of your own people. You turn your soldiers into sadistic monsters who will one day come home. And there's the thorny problem of what to do with the innocent guys you pick up and torture--if they weren't plotting against you before, they are now.

Oh and also, it's evil. And if you think you can contain this sort of evil, that it's going to stay in a little box in Cuba...well, you'd best hope that it's never in anyone's political interest to leave your pretty little ass dangling from a hook in the ceiling.

When we allow political expediency to surpass inalienable rights, we've repudiated everything that we as a people hold dear. There's consequences to that sort of thing.

Making Excuses for Torturers

2005-03-09T19:56:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm no interrogration expert, but this explanation of extraordinary rendition is just...total bullshit.

Sorry, we have to send terrorists to their home countries so they can be confronted by their families? Because...we can't bring their families here? Does the CIA not understand how planes work? Not only can you bring people from the US to Syria, but you can also bring them from Syria to the US! Shocking, really, the wonders of modern technology.

More seriously, arguments like these need to be challenged because they provide cover for a bad policy. America has already sent an innocent man to Syria where he was tortured. Do you think this makes Osama bin Laden more or less credible to recruits when he claims that the Middle East is run by evil puppet regimes that hurt Arabs in order to make America happy? Naive and credulous defenses of bad policies like these are a big part of the reason "America is losing a public relations war in the Muslim world to people sawing off the heads of other Muslims."

And what's even more appalling is that all the arguments in this article are tremendously weak, so weak that they're laughable. They remind me of the arguments used to justify slavery in the 1800's--they would only be persuasive to an audience that wanted to be persuaded, that desperately wanted an excuse to continue to pursue an evil and destructive policy.

Gak, it's one thing to make excuses for torturers. It's quite another to accept transparently false ones.

Seriously y'all, WHAT is up with Kansas?

2005-03-03T20:49:00.000-05:00

Last week, we heard that the Kansas AG was subpoenaing the medical records of teenaged girls and adult women at clinics, ostensibly so he and his deputies can comb through them and look for evidence of child rape. Why someone would need look through the medical records of a 30-year-old adult woman to see if she's been the victim of statutory rape is, quite frankly, beyond me...

This week we hear that, apparently, Kansas prosecutors secretly took a DNA sample from a woman's pap smear in order to prove her father was a serial killer.

I can imagine the signs in Kansas will soon read: "Um, hi! Welcome to Kansas! Ladies, you may want to think twice before seeing a doctor, as it's becoming standard operating procedure for us to paw through your medical records (and your tissue samples, ewww) for evidence of crimes you had no connection to. Because, you know, there's absolutely no other way for us to catch serial killers or child rapists than invading the privacy of completely innocent women who had nothing to do with the crime! Yep, it's our only option, and we just feel sick to death that we keep using it all the damn time."

Hey, why don't we make this whole process more efficient and have every GYN in the state start sending copies of medical records and bits of tissue directly to the DA's office at the end of every workday? That way, the police can review it and follow up as they deem appropriate. I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that. Unless they had something to hide...

And about that Chocolate Situation...

2005-02-14T14:42:00.000-05:00

This is just distressing. Chocolate and child slavery? I just ate an enormous chocolate heart and now I'm nauseous. Well, it was organic, so maybe I'm in the clear...

Send them some valentines. Nestle, Hershey, and Mars really don't want to be branded with a slogan like, "Tell you her you love her...by offering her the blood of innocent children." Let them know you're not going to be placated with a tiny pilot project in Ghana--let them know that there will be no more chocolately goodness until they get on board with the Harkin/Engel plan.

Make it a Valentine's Day to remember, y'all!

Republicans are Dinosaurs--Take Back National Security!

2005-02-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

Today marks a new feature here at True Blue, a weekly reminder to do something to address our total lack of national security cred.

Let's face it. When it comes to national security, Democrats are viewed as only slightly less wimpy than cornflakes. This has been a problem since Carter, and it's going to continue to be a problem until we deal with it. When Republicans can run a draft-dodging alcholic against a decorated war hero and win on a platform of "we're tough guys who will do what needs to be done to protect you, so don't ask any questions," I think it's time for us to admit that there's a huge national security advantage one has in being called a "Republican" that transcends the substance of one's policies or personal history. Either we address it, or our candidates will continue to start the race 2 laps back.

At True Blue, we follow the invaluable wisdom of G.I. Joe: "Knowing is half the battle." We still don't really know we have a problem with national security. We don't talk about it, we pretend it's not there. But as long as we are weak here, all our victories--on Social Security, healthcare, education, economic opportunity, racial justice, the environment, sustainable energy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of choice--will be much harder-fought and won't give us usable currency. So let's start talking: agitate for a think tank, demand smarter military investment, come up with a way to recruit for the DNC at West Point, whatever.

It's time to start talking tough. This week: oh, look, the DNC agrees with me!

Elections!

2005-01-31T16:11:00.000-05:00

A lot of folks are trying to figure out what these elections really mean. Some are pointing out scary parallels with the Vietnam elections of '67, some are trumpeting the same sorts of oratories we heard when Saddam was captured, and some are saying that it don't mean much.

I like important events to have morals, and my take on this is simple: going forward, no matter how this thing ends, we can't blame it on the Iraqis.

Overwhelmingly, this election demonstrated that there is widespread support for the institution of representative democracy. Iraqis didn't boycott elections becuase they preferred an alternative form of government (say, restoration of the monarchy); they didn't stay home out of fear; hell, they didn't even demand a perfect election process as a condition of participation. They voted. This is good news to anyone who wants to create representative democracy in Iraq--the people are willing to not just go along with it, but to risk their lives for it.

But at the end of the day, this condition is necessary but not sufficient for a successful democracy. It's not enough that the people of Iraq are brave and eager. There's an army with its own agenda, which may or may not coincide with those of the Iraqi people. There's an organized insurgency with many different factions pushing its own interests. So, it's good news that the Iraqi people, en masse, want a peaceful, representative governing process. Unfortunately, what they want doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Still, when this all ends, I don't want to hear neocons talking about how "those people" can't rule themselves peaceably. From every indication, they've got what it takes. From here on out, it's all on us.

Club for Growth: My Opening Bid on the Social Security Trust Fund is $10,000!!

2005-01-27T16:12:00.000-05:00

Dear Club for Growth:

Recently, you indicated that the Social Security Trust Fund has no assets, but is composed entirely of "paper IOUs that represent the Trust Fund’s obligations, not assets."

As a patriotic American, I would like to solve this problem for the government. I would like to take those "paper IOUs" off your hands. I've got $10,000 in savings, and I'll give it all to you in exchange for all the "paper IOUs" that are in the trust fund. TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!

I figure this solves a horrible problem for you all. Now, those "paper IOUs" aren't the Trust Fund's horrible burden, they're MY horrible burden. And you can just finance the Social Security program out of general funds, the same way we finance the Defense Department. Also, hey, you're $10,000 ahead!

Because, you know, if the Trust Fund's really "not an asset," you'd be a fool not to trade it for cold hard cash. Right? Right??

I'll be waiting by my email.

Love,
Theorajones

No On Gonzales

2005-01-25T19:47:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you just have to say no. This is one of those times.

You Gotta Have a Little Extra to Buy Smoothies for the Death Squadders!

2005-01-25T07:17:00.000-05:00

Apparently the new US embassy in Iraq is going to cost $1.5 billion. Kinda shatters the old record of $250 million. And what's funnest about the Bush Administration is that I'm not sure if this padding is going to go to Halliburton contractors or to our dear Ambassador Negroponte, as a little death squad slush fund for training and, I dunno, special treats for the best killing machines. Of course, we're not in the business of training and supporting death squads anymore, are we?

Safire Gives Bush a "B-"

2005-01-21T15:34:00.000-05:00

Lessee...Safire puts Bush's Second Inaugural in the top 5 of 20 second inaugural speeches...we do the math...and figure out that puts it at the 80% mark, as far as second inaugurals go.

80% is a B-. It's a C if you're a less than generous grader.

Talk about damning with faint praise...

UPDATE: Safire printed a correction--there's only been 16 second inaugurals. It was a cheap shot anyway, so I ain't gonna redo the math (I'm a girl, and, Summers knows, I find numbers confusing and scary).

I guess for me, the real lesson is going to be that right-wingers don't fact check. Ever. No matter how ludicrously fact-checkable their assertions are and how utterly idiotic they'd look if they got them wrong. Therefore, before performing math on a winger's "numbers," you must first check the numbers, lest you be dragged down with them into the pit of stupid.

The Appropriately Named Fred Dicker...

2005-01-12T22:30:00.000-05:00

Was involved in a confrontation with NY State Democratic Party Chair Herman "Denny" Farrell about Dicker's story on Farrell's girlfriend--it seems she and Farrell have a little bundle of joy coming, she's 30 years younger than Farrell, and they're not married! Heavens to Betsy!

Anyway, the exchange didn't make either of them look too good. But what I found really shocking was Dicker's self-defense of his reporting: that the story was newsworthy because Farrell was a public figure and, more specifically, "an elected official in a (black) community that's been troubled with out-of-wedlock births."

Why the hell is Dicker playing the race card? Does he really think it's credible to suggest he wouldn't have run the story if it were a white State Democratic Party Chair having a baby out of wedlock? And in what universe is it acceptable for Albany's pre-eminent political writer to argue that a double standard for black politicians should be standard operating procedure in journalism? I don't know what's more offensive, the lying or the casual use of a completely racist argument. (Happy Martin Luther King Day, everyone! See how far we've come!)

Dicker is not the first political journalist to confuse the kind of reporter he thinks he is with the kind of reporter he really is. Dicker clearly wants to believe he's a serious journalist, who only reports on issues of profound social and/or political significance. However, this story shows that he's a reporter who at least occasionally descends into tabloid coverage of politicians. Reporting on love children isn't hard reporting--it's salacious gossip-mongering. It's entertainment news.

Dicker is Albany's top reporter, and he should start acting like it. This was his scoop, but it was a gossip scoop, not a news scoop. If he wants credit for the scoop, he has to take heat for the gossip. Tortured spin justifying the "newsworthiness" of gossip doesn't make journalists look better--it devalues true news, it makes the public suspicious of reporters' integrity, and it leads to insanities like Albany's top political reporter telling everyone it's OK to use different rules for white and black politicians. If political reporters are embarrassed they print gossip, they should stop doing it and kick it over to Page Six.

And for the record, I love Page Six. Do you think Angelina broke up Brad & Jen? Discuss in comments.

To Hell with your Yellow Ribbon Bumper Sticker!

2005-01-08T09:35:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of yellow ribbons on cars belonging to people who don't have kids, friends, or neighbors in the military. There are also a lot of people who have confused support for the Iraq war--meaning its tactics, the pentagon's civilian leadership, and this administration's foreign policies--with support for the individuals who are fighting this thing out on the ground. That's simply not acceptable.

Let me make my own positions clear. I thought Afghanistan was right. I think Iraq is a fool's errand. And I support any troop in our army who's fighting in either conflict. I especially support the troops who think the Iraq war is the worst idea ever, who are appalled by the senseless carnage, who think this will undermine America's strategic preeminence for the next 50 years and who are still following their orders to fight in Iraq.

I firmly believe America is stronger becuase of its professional and apolitical soldiers. It's a really bad thing when armies start taking positions on issues. Because, you know, they are uniquely positioned to persuade people to take their side of the argument--personally, I'd expect a Sherman Tank rumbling down my block to make me reconsider my position on pretty much anything.

This is why I support every soldier who is doing his job. It's his job to shoot and fight and kill and die. It's an absolutely appalling, horrible job. And it's a vital and necessary one. Whether or not I think the political leaders have sent troops off to fight the wrong war has no bearing whatsoever on the sacrifices soldiers are making. It is a soldier's job to fight every single war he is directed to fight, especially the wars he thinks are a really stupid and bad idea.

This is why those yellow "I support George Bush" ribbons piss me off so much. It's not the job of civilians to make a soldier's sacrifice worth something by patronizing him with a line about how he's really lucky to be fighting in such a great and important war. The fact that he's willing to fight in any war is reason enough to justify his sacrifice. A soldier's sacrifice is not the least bit diminished becuase he is fighting in an unnecessary war, like WWI, Vietnam, or Iraq, and only a spoiled, soft, pansy ass civilian would ever suggest such a thing. Soldiers sacrifice themselves as part of not only the most powerful but also the most professional military the world has ever seen, a hard fought professionalism that too many civilians like me take for granted. In America, we have a powerful military but we don't worry about coups, we don't worry about mutinies, we don't worry about an army that quits the field of battle, we don't worry about an army that demands political input, we don't worry about an army that plunders for a week after conquering a city, we don't worry about all the things that countries with strong militaries have worried about throughout all of history. Soldiers who die in the line of duty die for the honor of a military that has a damn lot to be proud of, a military whose ethos has made America stronger for more than 200 years.

Putting a yellow sticker on your car becuase you like George Bush is like patting a soldier on the head and saying, "That was a great war, don't you love the President?" It's not just vile because it's condescending, ignorant, and exploitative--it's vile because it dismisses your own responsibility to our soldiers.

As civilians, we have a responsibility to honor the sacrifice every soldier has already made when he steps on the field of battle. In this professional military, he has literally given over his life to us, promising to follow our civilian leaders even if he knows they're sending him over a cliff. Supporting the troops doesn't mean you put a yellow ribbon on your car becuase you like George Bush. Supporting the troops means you don't send them off to hell on a snipe hunt.

So, on behalf of all civilian Americans, I'd like to apologize to our troops. I knew this war was a bad idea. I tried to stop it, but I wasn't able to. I should have done more. We all should have done more--we should have debated it more, we should have demanded more from our leaders, we should have done something other than get caught up in the drums of war. And now I don't know what we have to do to fix it. I don't think any of us do. I'm sorry. You've done your job. I didn't do mine. I'll do better next time. I promise.

Bush's health insurance reform is about protecting wealth, not health.

2004-12-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

I think there's an important point to be made about George Bush's healthcare agenda and I haven't seen anyone else make it yet. Basically, George Bush is trying to turn health insurance from a health protection plan into an asset protection plan--move insurance from securing health to securing wealth.

George Bush's key initiative for the uninsured are Health Savings Accounts. The way these work is that basically, you buy a catastrophic health plan in case you get really sick and you put some money aside in a tax-free investment account for your smaller primary-care health expenses, like doctor's visits and prescription drugs.

There is some great rhetoric about how this will let people "take control of their health spending" and be more "personally responsible," but nobody's real clear on how this is supposed to make healthcare more affordable for working people. If you're really sick your insurance company will still pay for everything, so there's no money saved there. All we can really expect is that people using HSAs will be more "personally responsible" by saving their money instead of going to the doctor for checkups, taking prescription medications and other preventive and primary care stuff.

But most experts agree that we need to make low-cost primary care more, not less, accessible. You know, the whole "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Even Bush believes this, so it's quite bizarre that he's pushing plans which make it more expensive for people to get primary care. Furthermore, the way the healthcare system works, we can expect the price of healthcare to actually go up (PDF) if healthy people switch to catastrophic policies. So we're not making healthcare more affordable, we're not making people act more responsibly--what's going on here?

What's going on here is a massive disconnect between the Bush administration and the reality of most people's lives. Most people could get catastrophic insurance today but choose not to. They choose not to becuase in most cases catastrophic insurance doesn't protect health, it protects wealth.

Most people believe that if they become sick, hospitals and doctors will still provide necessary care. This is wrong, but most people believe it. Therefore, most low-income working people won't buy catastrophic insurance. They recognize they may have to declare bankruptcy if they get sick, but heck, they may have to do that anyway. Why waste money on insurance?

However, better-off people will buy catastrophic insurance because their concern isn't whether or not they'll receive care, it's whether or not they'll have to sell their house (or their yacht) in order to pay for it. They're not willing to take the risk that a health crisis may bankrupt them.

And that's the key point here. The people who need a "traditional" health care plan are working people who need it to help them pay for doctors' visits, prescription drugs, and their kids' asthma medication. They need health insurance not to protect their assets, but to access healthcare. And as stated above, as more people move into a HSA-type plan it will get harder and harder for working-class families to afford traditional health care plans, and fewer employers will provide them. So it will be harder for working people to access health care. But, of course, wealthier people's assets will still be protected, and at a far cheaper price than before.

When you turn a health insurance plan into a tax shelter, you undermine the health care system and you make it harder for working people to afford the care they and their families need. The point of health insurance should be to protect health, not wealth. George Bush and the Republicans don't get that. And that's a problem.

Social Security--A fifty-cent problem.

2004-12-22T17:57:00.000-05:00

So, according to George Bush, in the very worst-case scenario, we have a $3.7 trillion shortfall over the next 75 years in Social Security. That sounds ghastly. Trillion is a VERY big number. Huge, even.

But if we look at it another way, it's pretty clear that George Bush is just a big fat drama queen.

3.7 trillion dollars over 75 years, spread out over 300 million people works out to--WAIT, $0.45 dollars a day? Less than fifty cents??

So, fifty cents a day is the size of this problem. If you want the future equivalent of $925 a month in guaranteed retirement, it’s gonna cost you all of fifty cents. Drop 50 cents in the “social security” bucket on your way to work ($1.50 on Fridays!), and you’re sure to get your Social Security check when you’re an old fart, even in the worst case scenario in which there’s no population growth, there’s no scientific or technological innovations leading to higher productivity, and the economy is in the crapper. You're 100% certain to get this part of your nest egg, even if your 401k totally collapses, your house burns down, and your rich Aunt Millie leaves everything to her cat.

Or alternatively, you can give up your guaranteed retirement. And in exchange, George Bush will give you a shiny quarter today to invest in the stock market for your retirement! Because the stock market always does great, and it does especially great when the economy is in the crapper. And lord knows, it’s not like you’ve already got money in the stock market and would really prefer to have something you can count on if the market goes sour.

Speaking only for myself, I’d happily gamble my social security if I really thought I was screwed. But even in the president’s highly exaggerated doomsday scenario, we’re not looking at a huge problem. If you don't believe me, look at what economists are saying with real math. They're saying sure, there's a problem we've got to deal with, but it's just not a crisis.

It’s immoral to force people to give up a guarantee and gamble their retirement just because the President thinks the stock market is nifty and he wants to throw his friends on Wall Street a bone. And it’s irresponsible for the President to propose wasting money on some half-baked privatization scheme when we have real problems in Medicare and Iraq that need his attention and our tax dollars.

You don’t throw away your car just because it has a flat tire. We can fix social security when and if it becomes a problem.

And am I crazy, but haven't we heard this whole "we must take drastic action now or we're doomed," song and dance from this guy before? This time, I'd like to see some evidence of crisis before we all start freaking out and making hasty decisions we regret later.

George Bush says: "This Christmas, if you're hungry you should just eat your babies!"

2004-12-22T13:29:00.000-05:00

By now we're all aware of the Bush Administration's habit of releasing bad news when it's likely to be overlooked. With Christmas coming up, not only is the public's attention distracted from real news (apparently focusing all their attention on Bill O'Reilly's disingenous lie that Jews and Atheists are trying to ruin Christmas), but also, experienced editors and writers are on vacation, so news organizations are less likely to pick up on a significant story.

I get it from a PR perspective. But it's more than a little disgusting that Bush is taking advantage of the Christmas lull to announce he's cutting off the food aid America promised to starving people. Because if you call yourself a Christian and a Compassionate Conservative often enough, then you don't have to actually feed the hungry. Especially not at Christmastime.

So, Kristof, when they start actually following through on their press releases about feeding the hungry by actually feeding the hungry, then we'll work with them. But I really don't think there's any need to strive for bipartisanship when all we're really doing is adding some (D)'s to the caption below their photo-op.

Ah, but you'll only be mostly dead...

2004-12-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

In a follow-up to my previous post, Celebrex now linked to heart attacks. Ironically, those who paid the least attention to the news in the weeks leading up to this revelation probably have a better understanding of this issue than those who followed it closely. Rock on, media.

Cocktail Party Ammunition: Social Security

2004-12-16T20:46:00.000-05:00

(In Understandable English, with jokes and pictures of naked women!)

Okay, I’m lying about the naked women. And probably about the understandable. Now on to business:

Lately we’re hearing a lot about the “crisis” in Social Security. Since this is probably going to be a big topic of political conversation at your better cocktail parties, I figured a primer may be helpful for the many of us who have better things to do with our time than research social insurance programs. Well, the many of you.

History
Social Security was started by FDR during the Depression, when basically everybody lost their life savings. Losing everything is awful when you’re 25 and can work for food, but it’s downright lethal when you’re 70 and can’t. Republicans strongly opposed Social Security for a lot of reasons. None of their reasons was that they wanted to help starving old people--basically, all their arguments were about communism and why letting old people starve was somehow an integral part of making America strong and prosperous.

In the roughly 70 years since Social Security was started, people have been ranting that it’s going to be the death of America, either by going bankrupt or through some other insidious trick. And it’s pretty much not been doing either of those things. And also, it’s widely agreed, even among those interested in reforming the program, that it’s been fantastically successful in achieving its goals of reducing poverty and creating a safety net.

Financing (This is the hard part. A cold beer aids comprehension.)
Most government programs are funded by general revenues. This is like the money you get from your job, which you use to pay all the bills that come in. Social Security, on the other hand, is funded by a special dedicated tax, the payroll tax. This is like deciding you want to pay for your kids’ private school, so you take a second job and you put all the money you make in your second job towards your kids’ school.

All About the Payroll Tax
The payroll tax is a totally evil tax. While general revenue includes taxes on all kinds of stuff, like investment income and corporate profits, the payroll tax only taxes work, and it only really taxes the work done by the middle class. If you’re Paris Hilton, making a million dollars from your trust fund, you/re not on anyone’s payroll, so you don’t pay the payroll tax. Nice life, Paris. But if you actually earn money by doing real work (even if you’re self-employed), then you pay the payroll tax. It’s no joke—6.2% of your pay if you work for someone else, and 12.2% if you own your own business (it’s that “FICA” thing on your paycheck).

And another evil thing about the payroll tax? It only taxes the first $88,000 you earn. So, a CEO making fifteen million dollars a year pays a payroll tax of about $5,500, and his secretary making 90 grand pays the exact same $5,500. So while trust fund babies don’t pay this tax and rich CEOs barely notice it, it takes a huge chunk out of the paychecks of people who actually work for a living. This is why it’s evil.

What’s all this about trust funds and crises? I remember a lockbox…
Right now, the payroll tax is like a really great second job—it’s paying more money than you need to send the kids to school. So, the question is what should you do with the extra money? Some people would think, “Hey, the kids are going to college eventually, so let’s put this money in the bank (or a lockbox!).” Other people would think, “Hey, let’s lend the money to my shiftless ex-husband who swears he’ll pay me back.” The Social Security Trust Fund gave the money to the ex-husband. It’s not their fault--Congress made ‘em do it.

For decades, the Trust Fund has been giving its extra cash (its surplus) to the federal government in exchange for IOUs in the form of Treasury Bonds. These are just like the Treasury Bonds your grandmother used to give you at Christmas. The Social Security trust fund is jam-packed with these Treasury Bonds. They’re tripping over ‘em on their way to the tree. It’s pandemonium!

Screw trees, what about this crisis? Well, here’s the crisis: in 10 years or so, the number of elderly is increasing—in other words, the kids are going to college. The second job (ie, the payroll tax) will still pay most of the tuition, but it won’t pay the whole thing with money left over anymore. This really isn’t a crisis, though, because we’ve got all those Treasury bonds from our shiftless ex-husband, right?

Ah, there’s the crisis. That deficit they keep talking about? That’s all the money your ex-husband is running up on his credit cards to buy stuff for his rich friends. All the money you lent him, he spent. He spent it on stuff like Iraq and a Medicare drug benefit and tax cuts for the rich.

So the crisis isn’t Social Security. It’s that the Federal Government is acting like a deadbeat ex-husband, and the Bush Administration is saying that since the payroll tax (your second job) doesn’t cover the full cost of Social Security benefits (your kids’ entire tuition), then you’ve got a problem. But wait, it’s not your problem, it’s HIS problem! You both knew this day was coming, and when you lent him the money, he promised he’d give it back starting around now! You’ve got the Treasury Bonds to prove it!

So what should you do?

Possible Solutions
The best solution is to tell your shiftless ex to repeal his stupid tax cuts for his rich friends and pay you back the money he owes you! This isn’t just an analogy-- Bush financed his tax cuts for the wealthy by borrowing the Social Security surplus. If he doesn’t pay it back, that means rich people just partied with money that was earned by people who work for a living! So, this is the most obvious solution, it’s the most moral one, it’s the most fiscally responsible one. Still, how likely do you think Bush is to repeal tax cuts for the wealthy to pay back the money he borrowed from working folks? Yeah, not very. So, the best solution now is to table discussion until we get a fiscally responsible person back in office. Remember the Clinton surplus? We’ll do it again, and this time we'll use it to pay our debts.

There are some other solutions which all boil down to cutting benefits, either financially or by raising the retirement age. These are mostly crappy solutions. Okay, that’s an exaggeration—cutting benefits for rich elderly people is not entirely crappy, as they’re not going to be stuck eating dog food. But across the board cuts that affect poor people are just immoral. You wouldn’t think it was OK for your kids to go to a worse school so your husband could throw a party for his rich friends, so why is it OK for Bush to cut benefits for retirees so he can keep his tax cuts for the wealthy?

Another possible solution to the projected future shortfall to raise the payroll tax. I think we can all agree that’s a bad idea. The last thing we need is a higher tax on work, to increase taxes on work so we can keep tax cuts for the wealthy? Wow, that's just sick and wrong.

Non-Solutions
And then there are the solutions that are really stupid if you’re trying to stabilize social security, but are really clever if you’re trying to dismantle it without admitting that’s what you’re doing. Private accounts tops this list.

Bush wants to borrow a trillion dollars and force people to privately invest it in the stock market with no guarantees on return. If they hit the jackpot, great; if not, then no Social Security for them! This forced gambling of Social Security in the stock market is deeply ironic, considering the program’s roots in the greatest stock market crash of all time. One can be opposed to this “borrow and privatize” scheme or support it on ideological grounds, arguing about who hates markets and whether or not benefits should be privatized or should be shared. But that argument just boils down to calling people communists and doesn’t really address the real issues.

First of all, their arguments don't make sense. Bush’s folks say stocks will give people way better returns than the current social security system. But when it comes down to crunching numbers, they use best case economic scenarios when they look at stocks, and worst case economic scenarios when they look at the current system. That’s just crazy. When the economy sucks, stocks tend to suck too, and vice versa. So you can’t simultaneously project that 2042 will be the worst economic year ever when it comes to calculating returns under the current system and predict it’s going to be the best year ever when it comes to calculating stock returns! It’s like saying that next week, the temperature will be 90 degrees and it will also be snowing. It’s just nutty, and they’re hoping you’re not paying attention.

The more important thing is, we’ve got a system that’s worked for more than 60 years, and the entire time its opponents have claimed that it is going to fail and take America down with it. But even now in this time of supposedly terrible crisis, the worst case scenario is that between Treasury notes and payroll taxes, this program is fully funded through 2042! Given that we’ve already got a huge problem with the deficit because of Bush’s tax cuts, does the minor problem we think we’re going to face in 2042 justify taking on a trillion dollars in additional debt to finance an incredibly risky “Hail Mary” venture that, golly gee, might not even work?

Wait, are we suggesting that Social Security is perfect? Hell, no! Women, because they live longer and are in the workforce shorter than men, aren’t well supported by Social Security. Also, sometime near 2042 we might either have to slightly cut benefits (preferably for rich retirees) or slightly increase taxes (preferably not the evil payroll tax). But frankly, that’s a trifling concern for another day, a problem we may never have to face because things may be better than the worst-case scenario (as they often are).

Finally, this debate comes down to a question of credibility. Honest people know that there are far bigger problems than Social Security looming on the horizon. And there are far bigger problems today. Do we really believe that the people who have opposed Social Security from its inception are now so worried about its future that they’re putting everything else on the back burner to fix it? Perhaps it is more credible to believe that “fixing” Social Security is really not what private funds are all about—perhaps they are about in the short-term rewarding Wall Street and in the long-term making Social Security less something that people can count on (an entitlement) and more something they receive if they’re lucky enough to afford a good stockbroker (an investment).

Here endeth the lesson.

Alternative Energy is a GOP issue, apparently...

2004-12-09T23:29:00.000-05:00

Today, in two unrelated stories, we learn of two fabulous innovations in alternative energy.

This would be just another cool science story except for the fact that one of the articles says, "[the inventor] is not assuming that the United States will shift from fossil fuels to the hydrogen economy by 2020, as touted by the Bush administration, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and many scientists."

It's not media bias--Wired magazine isn't exactly Fox News. What we see is yet another area in which Democrats have utterly failed to seize the initiative, and this neglect has allowed Republicans to define the terms of the debate to their advantage.

George Bush has a lousy energy policy, and it goes far beyond favoritism towards polluters. Of far greater consequence is the fact that he's failed to demonstrate real leadership by instituting policies that put us on the road to energy independence. Heck, he's failed to even use the power of his bully pulpit to call for energy independence.

Democrats, however, have not stepped in to fill the vaccuum. We aren't hitting hard on the fact that our dependence on oil forces us to support undemocratic regimes throughout the Gulf States. We're not pointing out that Osama bin Laden is a goddam oil prince, and he would never have come to power if the Middle East weren't awash in oil profits. We're not pointing out that our complete and total dependence on foreign oil undermines every single one of our strategic initiatives in the war on terror.

And we aren't giving people an alternative plan. We aren't calling for a billion dollar Manhattan project for alternative energy. We aren't demanding zero emission energy production by 2015. We aren't even promoting projects like the Apollo Alliance. Instead, we're allowing the debate to be "Arnold and George like hydrogen energy, Democrats like solar." That's a losing proposition for Democrats.

We don't want to be in a position where the argument over energy policy is characterized as each side placing bets on which energy source is going to prove to be the best one. We want to be in a position where we're the party that's demanding progress and they're the party that's beholden to special interests and standing in the way of security and progress! And if we let ourselves be dragged into a debate on the merits of hydrogen vs. solar debates, then we're allowing George Bush to get away with doing nothing--nothing to protect our security and nothing to find the fuel of tomorrow's economy. That's not just bad for Democrats--that's bad for America.

I'll talk about this more in the future, but it's time for Democrats to start behaving like an opposition party. Compromise is over--it's time to make the differences stark and clear, and present a real choice to Americans. Because we'll win once they know what we stand for.

Reason #2,312 why I love New York

2004-12-07T09:22:00.000-05:00

Minimum wage increase. Granted, a 40 hour work week will now bring home a whopping $14, 872 (compared to the prior $10,712), but it's still better than before.

Blue Staters should focus on initiatives like these during the next 4 years -- locked out at the federal level, we need to build ourselves up in the states and locally. Initiatives like these serve three purposes: first, they show we're the folks who are going to improve people's lives; second, they promote cooperation between progressive groups and strengthen new groups; and third, they allow us to test different approaches to framing our issues.

The minimum wage campaign in NY did all three. Obviously, regardless of what Cato would have you believe, lots of hardworking people are going to do better as a result of the increase. Fighting for the increase strengthened local coalitions -- the Working Families Party, a political party supported by labor and community organizations, was the driving force behind this initiative. With an accomplishment like this under their belt, they are undeniably a political force to be reckoned with. Finally, progressives have been all over the news this week, dropping great lines like "It's a pretty good day for about a million people in the state who will have better food, be able to pay their rent, spend a little time with their children. These are family values."

So get local!

**Incidentally, the WFP is well worth checking out. (Full disclosure: I've got friends working there. But I used to vote WFP back in my political virginhood before I knew any of 'em, so I figure this isn't true pimping) It's a very effective third party, and has been able to take advantage of its ballot line to not only support progressive candidates, but also to pressure incumbents to take certain positions.

This has been possible because NY State has fusion, allowing candidates to be endorsed by multiple parties with votes from all parties counted toward their total. The upshot is that people don't have to throw away their votes to make a statement. For example, in NY State, the WFP can run Kerry on its line and progressives can vote their conscience by pulling for Kerry on the WFP line. The WFP thereby gains power not by acting as a spoiler, but by acting as an enabler -- it's a much better situation for all progressives to have Kerry win New York by a tight margin with WFP's votes making the difference, rather than by losing New York by a tight margin with WFP's votes making the difference. It's about the only way I've seen for a third party to actually be useful and relevant, as opposed to creating petulance and division among natural allies. Like, ahem, the Green Party's misadventures with Mr. Nader.**

Yes, but with our product, you'll be less dead...

2004-12-06T17:46:00.000-05:00

So, news reports indicate that Celebrex is three times safer than Vioxx! Yay!

Well, Russian roulette is three times safer with one bullet instead of three. That doesn't make it a good idea.

I'm not trying to beat up on Celebrex here. For all I know, it's a miracle drug that'll cure your gout and make your wife love you more. But I am picking on Celebrex because this article is an example of the poor health reporting we see all the time.

Both journalists and researchers share a common bias -- they want to find something new. Both professions thrive on a "publish or perish" mentality, and the best way to get published is to report new things first.

As a result of this pernicious bias, we end up with articles full of misleads like this one. We read along, blissfully thinking there's scientific evidence that Celebrex is safer than Vioxx, and it's not until the 6th paragraph that we get our first indication this finding might not live up to its banner headline. A full third of the way into the article we learn, "But the researchers also found that patients using either drug were not at a significantly greater risk of having a heart attack than those who did not use either drug."

Huh? I thought the FDA pulled Vioxx because it caused heart attacks. But this study didn't find Vioxx caused heart attacks. So what can I learn here? Why should I care how safe this study tells me Celebrex is when it's also telling me Vioxx is safe? I mean, if a guy is telling me grenades are safe for children, should I listen to him when he tells me that land mines are three times safer?

I'm not suggesting that anyone was cooking the data or falsifying their sources. Check out the original journal article -- it's telling the same story as the article, albeit with more exciting math. What I'm saying is that journalists and scientists really wanted this study to have something newsworthy in it. So they found something.

It's bad science and it's bad journalism. Waiting until the end of the article to quote another expert as saying "these types of studies are not conclusive," isn't enough. I mean, it was important enough to get that headline and a full article! Can you blame a reader for thinking there's some news of importance here? A little "he said, he said" isn't going to meaningfully challenge that assumption. When a headline should actually read, "Jury Still Out on Celebrex's Health Risks," a few last minute hedges aren't really going to undo the false impression created in paragraph one.

So what's the answer? Scientists have to stop inflating the significance of their findings, and reporters need to be less credulous about the integrity of scientists when it comes to the significance of their findings. Since neither of those things seems likely to happen, I suggest we read every health article from the bottom up -- start where the facts are, and end with a good laugh at the overblown headline.

True Blue Liberal Quote of the Day

2004-12-05T23:20:00.000-05:00

"My center has collapsed. My right flank is weakening. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”

When Idiots Attack…

2004-12-05T23:16:00.000-05:00

“George Bush got more votes than any president in American History!”
“And George Bush had more votes cast against him than any president in American History. It’s called population growth, you nitwit.”

“George Bush is the first president to win a majority since Reagan!”
“I’m so shocked more voters didn’t choose Ralph Nader over Kerry or Bush.”

“Look at all the red on that map. Clearly, it’s a mandate.”
“Because we all know that in a democracy, the opinion of the wheat fields of Kansas should matter more than the 8 million people living in New York.”

“It’s a broad, nationwide victory!”
“George Bush didn’t win a single state in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Last I heard, ‘coast to coast’ didn’t mean ‘from Virginia to Texas’.”

“Kerry supporters were limited to the liberal holdouts of the East Coast”
“Liberal holdouts like New Hampshire. And since when is Wisconsin on the East Coast?”

But I’m just a little hobbit! What can I do?

2004-11-15T23:18:00.001-05:00

We lost this election for 2 reasons: people don’t know what Democrats stand for and we’ve got a bad reputation on national security. We’re going to change both those things in the coming months, but first we’ve got to play a little defense. You can help.

Today, Democrats say things like: “I see your point, let’s figure out some way we can figure out a mutually acceptable solution to this problem.” Under normal circumstances, this instinctive bipartisanship is a great thing.

We’re not under normal circumstances.

Understand the Enemy:
Responsible Americans don’t oppose George Bush because of where he stands on the issues. Heck, Democrats thought prescription drugs for Medicare was a great idea!

George Bush must be opposed because the most dangerous thing in American politics is a leader who does not observe the checks and balances of our democracy, whose cronies believe they should have carte blanche to take any action they desire and who are willing to undercut any American tradition or institution in order to consolidate their grip on power. It doesn’t matter if they justify it by claiming divine right or a nonexistent electoral mandate, it’s dangerous and we’ve got to fight it tooth and nail.

Radical Right Republicans are nothing like your Republican friends. They do not want to engage in honest debate and persuade the nation to accept an agenda that they believe is in the best long-term interests of the people of the United States. They simply believe they should be in charge. They want to take power and keep it forever. Period.

Demand Leadership
We’ve been beaten enough with the bipartisanship bat. It’s time to stop treating these guys like responsible adults, and time to start treating them like the genuine threat to democracy they are. Unbelievably, this message has still not gotten through to Democrats—Joe Lieberman is still saying that if Democrats are just a little kinder and gentler, George Bush will have a change of heart and play nice.

So ask yourself, what are you afraid is going to happen with George Bush in power? Do you care about the environment? Do you care about appointing judges who will defend liberty (pro-choice, anti-torture)? Do you care about civil rights? Freedom of the press? Leading the world with a strong foreign policy? Winning the war on terror by going after foreign terror networks and having real domestic security?

Decide what’s important to you and then write a letter or call your Senator or Representative about it (emails don’t work; use real paper and a stamp). Tell them that it’s not enough to quietly mitigate some of the damage that Bush’s laws and appointments are doing—we have to let people know what we’d do differently. Demand they get aggressive, and tell them to be loud about it—start showing people why voting for Democrats will make America better, stronger, and safer! It’s time to fight for what we believe in!

This is a damn good start. Let’s be clear, this bill will not pass. But it’s just the kind of fight we need to pick. It’s high-profile and it tells every American who we are: Democrats are the ones trying to give kids healthcare, and Republicans are the ones who actually could do it, but who won’t. We all need to sign this petition, not only to tell people what we stand for, but to send a message to every Democrat that we want them to fight. More like this, please!

True Blue’s Pro Forma Condemnation:

2004-11-15T23:18:00.000-05:00

True Blue does not approve this message, but we really must admit it sounds like something we’d say after one too many. Just remember, the US really looks like this, and there is a beautiful South.

Interesting Stat:

2004-11-15T23:17:00.000-05:00

In the 2004 election, Democrats running for Senate got 3 million more votes than did Republicans.

True Blue’s Inspiration Corner

2004-11-15T23:08:00.001-05:00

Democrats are winning at the state level. This sounds pretty lame (sort of like “You forgot Poland!”). But it’s actually very good news. State legislatures control important things—for one, how congressional districts are drawn. It’s a lot easier to win back the House if your party controls the gerrymandering! Also, the states where Dems are getting stronger are western states like Colorado and Montana, while Republicans are only getting stronger in Southern states. We’re broadening our appeal and their tired old show still can’t draw a crowd outside of Dixie. The future, she looks bright…

What's True Blue?

2004-11-15T23:08:00.000-05:00

Recently, we’ve all had the bitter realization that sometimes in a democracy, the other guy wins. True Blue was created because you can only drink for so many days straight. And because living in a free democracy means that even when the other guys win, you’re still able to keep fighting for what you believe. In fact, it’s your responsibility as a citizen to keep up the good fight. It’s never over, no matter who wins.

So put the beer down and stop filling out Canadian immigration forms!

True Blue has also heard that many proud progressives don’t get a thrill from speculating about what drove voter turnout in PA-08, and have exciting, fulfilling lives outside of politics. This newsletter is offered to you as a public service, a way of keeping y’all in touch with political happenings and keeping the progressive movement tight and strong.

True Blue is not just for smugly superior folks in blue states – which anyone who’s been to Staten Island knows are full-o-red themselves. True Blue is for anyone who’s blue at heart, brave enough to fight for true American values of respect, tolerance, diversity, liberty, community, responsibility, hard work, open debate, and government accountability. Bluehearts everywhere, it is time to say: "we have not yet begun to fight!"

This is a collaborative effort – let me know what features you like, what’s boring, what rhetoric you find stirring (or flat), and what issues or news you want to hear more about. Also, if anybody can format this dang thing and make it pretty, I’d be eternally grateful…