Fiscal Conservatives

via TPM, this:

The states that declined to expand Medicaid will lose out on a total of $8 billion in federal funds, have millions more residents uninsured, and spend about a billion dollars more on uncompensated care as compared to states that accept the expansion.

That’s the conclusion of a new study in Health Affairs by two RAND Corporation scholars, who model the impacts on the first 14 states that opted out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which was made optional by the Supreme Court.

In total, mathematician Carter Price and economist Christine Eibner find, the 14 states that rejected the expansion will wind up with 3.6 million more uninsured people, $8.4 billion less in federal funds, and up to $1 billion more in spending on uncompensated care in 2016.

But, but, but…FREEDOM!

I’ll add only this editorial aside:  the number that really counts there are the 3.6 million more uninsured.

That’s a lot of human cost, suffering that should not happen.   That it comes at a significant dollar cost to the states that so choose to put their citizens in harm’s way is only icing on the cake.

Actually, I can’t resist one more bit of editorializing.  As I think about the in-your-face religiosity of a fair subset of those opposing Obamacare, I can’t help but think of what Albert Einstein said on being asked for his message to the German people in the second year of that conflict whose name should have retired the irony prize for all time, the “Great War”:

Honor your Master Jesus Christ not only in words and songs, but rather foremost by your deeds.

That is all.

Image:  Jan Steen, The Sick Woman, c. 1663-66

(PS:  I’m on the road with very sporadic internet for the next week+.  Given my highly sporadic approach to blogging, no one is likely to notice — but if you do, that’s why.)

Blind Pigs, Acorns

I suppose it’s not really a surprise that someone who sprays as much verbiage as Mr. Newt Gingrich must on occasion come up with something which which I can agree:

It would be a major mistake to put American troops in Syria.

No one in the region wants us invading yet another country.

None of our allies want our strength diverted from Iran.

There is no practical mission American forces could accomplish without a very large commitment.

Yup, that’s about right.

But still, I’m not going to give Gingrich any props for this one moment of clarity.  The problem with Newt is not that he is incapable of clear thought at times, but that he chooses to relinquish that capacity when it’s convenient.

Which is to say that I’m with Tom Kludt, the author of the bit at TPM from which the quotes above are taken,  when he suggests that the odds of Gingrich saying something more or less sane sensitively depend on whether or not he’s running for something at the time:

At a Republican presidential debate last year in Arizona, the former House speaker mocked President Barack Obama for not doing more in Syria.

“This is an administration which, as long as you’re America’s enemy, you’re safe,” Gingrich said. “You know, the only people you’ve got to worry about is if you’re an American ally.”

And thus the real problem.  It doesn’t actually matter much what Gingrich says when no one (outside of the credulous Village) is listening.  We have a deep problem in our politics that derives directly from the fact that the leaders of that feral beast the Republican party has become give tacit and sometimes overt permission to the crazies that form the hardest core of their supporters. Ted Cruz and the Pauls, Bachmann, Gohmert, and all the rest talk apocalypse.  The allegedly “responsible” leadership — Gingrich himself in this case, domesticates the truly wild-eyed, the folks who accuse Obama of high crimes and misdemeanorsor.  Or recall Romney, dog whistling during the campaign last year:

“Sometimes I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.” This line was straight out of the “Alien in the White House” playbook, a riff that reinforced the worst impulses of some in the audience, as one woman at a Romney rally named Katheryn Sarka eagerly reaffirmed when I asked her what she thought of the line: “Obama doesn’t understand America. He follows George Soros. Obama is against our Constitution and our democracy.”

After his big Nevada win, this line of Mitt’s scripted victory speech stood out: “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.”

As discussed yesterday, we live in a country where 3 out of ten Americans, and 44% of the GOP expect armed rebellion in the next few years.  This is not a view compatible with democratic process.  The destruction of the American polity is not a both-sides-do-it phenomenon.  It is a hail mary act of intimidation, and perhaps outright violence to come, by a failed political party, one whose hopes of gaining legitimate power shrink with every passing year of demographic change.

Hmmm.  A reckless, failing political movement threatening violence unless its minority hold on power persists.  When before now have we seen that in American history?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Clown — Claude Renoir, 1909

“You Can Keep The Gun” — Guest Post

What follows are friend-of-the-blog Jim Bale’s reflections on our recent bad days in Boston, Cambridge, Watertown and environs.  He picked up the loathesome suggestion by an Arkansas state rep who misunderstands so much about both Boston and the concept of society that I could come up with nothing but sputtering obscenities.  Jim, a better man, has something much smarter to offer.

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Jim Bales here, with thanks to Tom for the loan of his soapbox.

During the hunt for the Marathon bombers, Arkansas State Rep. Nate Bell (a Republican) tweeted:

“I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”

He followed with an apology for the timing of his words, but not the words themselves.

 

I sent him the following email (his contact information is at http://www.arkansashouse.org/member/256/ )

Dear Representative Bell,

I am fortunate to have had multiple opportunities to visit the beautiful state of Arkansas, and to spend time staying with friends and relatives in your state. I was taken aback to read your tweet that you wondered “how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?” I was then saddened to read your apology for “for the poor timing of my tweet earlier this morning.”

What you don’t seem to understand that your words themselves are offensive and ignorant, no matter when expressed. I urge you to take the time to reflect upon your words, and try to wrap your head around the fact that the good liberals in Boston (and I am one of them) recognize that only a fool believes that a personal firearm is a magic talisman that makes one safe.

Our safety is based on our recognizing that we are a Commonwealth – that our individual well-being is strengthened by our commitment to each other, through our words, our deeds, and our taxes. We put our tax money into training and equipping our law enforcement officers. We put our trust and our support behind them. We don’t try to do their job for them, and we understand that possessing an AR-15 cannot magically make us invulnerable.

And so, because we have faith in our law enforcement officers, we did not cower in fear behind a firearm. Rather, we calmly stayed home, were alert, and stayed out of the way of our brethren in law enforcement.

I urge you, in your capacity as Member of the House of Representatives of the great State of Arkansas, to review the support your state gives its law enforcement agencies, and (if necessary) vote to increase taxes to ensure that the good people of Arkansas can reasonably enjoy the same level of faith in those agencies as we in Boston (and Massachusetts) enjoy in ours.

Trust me; having competent, well-trained and well-funded law enforcement is far more reassuring than holding an AR-15!

Image:  John Singer Sergant, Repose, 1911.

 

Best,

Jim Bales

 

120,461

That’s the minimum number of years lost to guns in the United States of America in the 99 days of this blood-soaked year.  Click the link for an amazing data visualization that captures the loss of lives and  years to homicides (and some suicides) thus far in 2013

The scandal, of course, is that the last three months or so is no more crimson than any similar slice of time in recent memory.  Here’s the 2010 version of the same data visualization, representing homicides only (and not quite all of them, if the CDC is to be believed).  The tally that year:  9,595 people, robbed of 413,838 years.

Ass long as the rump of gerrymandered Confederate and exurban white voters can be turned to provide the .01% sufficient political power to keep on robbing us blind, there is seemingly no end in sight.  Guns trump vaginas, non-pale folks, even moochers as the eternal touchstone of aggrieved right politics.  And until that chain that binds power to the untouchable civic virtues of 30-round clips, we’ll continue to live in a country where some 30,000 people each year will fall too soon to the wrong end of a gun.  That most of them will be gun owners themselves; hell that most of them will take their own lives [PDF -- see p. 19] makes no difference to the debate.

One hundred and twenty thousand, four hundred and sixty one years that will never pass.  2,739 of our fellow citizens gone.  Obama is still trying.  Reid is still trying.  Maybe they’ll be able to rescue a life or two.  But not if the leaders of the  Party of Death have their way.

It’s gorgeous outside my window as I type this; sunny, 70 degrees and something, convertible top down weather.  Why does it feel so damn grim in these United States?

PS:  Optional soundtrack for this post.

Eduoard Maney, The Suicide, 1877-1881.

Just Another DFH

Over at Balloon Juice, DougJ got the day started with yet more evidence that the Republican Party remains committed to a program of immiserating the miserable.

I dug into my note pile to find yet one more DFH squealing his soft-headed liberal pieties in the face of such intellectual courage:

Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconvenience to the society? The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labor are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the laborer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious than where they are low.

Who wrote such bilge?

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, Book I chapter 8.

Image:  Hendrick ter Brugghen, The Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus,  1625.

A Reminder: What the Hagel Farce Was Actually About – Outsourced to Peter Beinart

I don’t generally link to the Daily Beast (for many and various reasons) but led by Bruce Bartlett’s twitterizing, I got to Peter Beinart’s clear, succinct description of what was really at stake in the Hagel nonsense:

The right’s core problem with Hagel wasn’t his alleged anti-Semitism. From Jerry Falwell to Glenn Beck to Rupert Murdoch, conservatives have overlooked far more egregiously anti-Jewish statements when their purveyors subscribed to a hawkish foreign-policy line. The right’s core problem with Hagel was that he had challenged the Bush doctrine. Against a Republican foreign-policy class that generally minimizes the dangers of war with Iran, Hagel had insisted that the lesson of Iraq is that preventive wars are dangerous, uncontrollable things. “Once you start,” he warned in 2010, “you’d better be prepared to find 100,000 troops.”

The point isn’t that Hagel “favors” containment and deterrence. Like virtually everyone else, he’d much rather Iran not get a bomb. But by reminding Americans of the potential costs of preventive war, Hagel was implying that containment and deterrence might be preferable. He was suggesting that if the U.S. can’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons short of war, it should make the same tradeoff that Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy made when they allowed the Soviet Union and China to get the bomb. This horrifies hawks for two reasons. First, some of them, echoing Benjamin Netanyahu, claim Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. But were that their sole concern, they’d pay more attention to the near-consensus view among top Israeli security professionals that although Iran poses a threat, it does not pose an existential one, in large measure because Iran’s regime, while vile, is rational when it comes to preserving its own existence.

The second reason hawks find Hagel’s view so frightening is that it concedes the limits of American power. Although Bush said that after 9/11 the United States no longer could afford to rely on the deterrence and containment of hostile states, what he really meant was that the U.S. no longer needed to rely on deterrence and containment, because it was now strong enough to prevent nuclear proliferation via force. For many hawks, conceding that the U.S. can’t do that means conceding American decline.

Beinart goes on to point out the absurdity of the neo-con fear that acknowledging the fact of limits to power equals American decline.* That’s another way of saying (a) read the whole thing and (b) there is a very depressing realization (familiar to readers of this blog) that sinks in should yo do so:  Beinart has achieved here nothing more than a well-stated penetrating glimpse of the obvious.

Or to put it another way: if America is in fact in decline then the cause isn’t that some of our leaders have noticed that the capacity to blow up any building anywhere in the world is not the same thing as exercising power to an end beyond rubble.  Rather, it is that so many in our media and political elites can’t or won’t.

*The concept of imperial or superpower decline is tricky.  Are we in decline if we continue to grow in wealth and capability, but other nations do so with enough vigor to approach levels that in the unique circumstances of the post-World War II decades we could occupy on our own?  Britain, shorn of empire, is wealthier, more equal, more comfortable now that it has ever been for the great bulk of its citizens, for all that Cameron and Osborne are trying to undo some of that.  Are we impoverished if we advance into a world in which the Chinese middle class, still a small proportion of that country, may soon achieve economic status equal to our own?

As I say, tricky.  One more thing, though. Such caveats to the threnody of decline do not in themselves mean that we cannot in fact propel ourselves into an actual, unmistakable loss of power, influence and so much relative economic standing that the conditions of national autonomy and agency the US now possesses will erode.  Could happen; may be happening.  But not because Chuck Hagel thinks it makes sense to ask first what one gets out of sending 100,000 American troops to the far side of the world.

Image: Michael Sweerts, Soldiers Playing Dice, c.1655.

GOP Hospitality, North Carolina Style

Following Elon’s post below, here’s one more from the Tarheel state…

Fresh on the heels of the President Obama’s executive order allowing temporary residency for those undocumented immigrant kids brought to the country as children, North Carolina’s Republican leaders have come up with this:

Gov. Pat McCrory says he signed off on the controversial “pink licenses” that will be issued to some young illegal immigrants who were granted protection from deportation for two years.

The new North Carolina governor said he thought it was important that the driver’s licenses for immigrants clearly distinguish “between legal presence versus legal status.”

Critics have decried them as a modern-day scarlet letter. The new driver’s licenses will have a bright pink stripe and bold words “NO LAWFUL STATUS,” written in red capital letters across the front, according to mock-ups. (h/t Think Progress)

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure this must be how you let those from elsewhere feel welcome in your big tent.

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I’ve can’t shake this image:  I’m seeing those old ship bridge telegraphs to the engine room.  You know — the ones with a lever that pulls the marker round one side of a circular dial that reads “Ahead Full; Ahead Half; Slow Astern: and so on.

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Except in this case it’s a personality dial and the GOP’s is frozen in place all the way ’round at “Full Asshole.”

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Seriously?  A pink stripe?  Might as well go full Hawthorne and require these young men and women to wear a vivid red U on their persons whenever they summon the temerity to use a public thoroughfare.

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This is just mean, of course: a deliberate slap and perhaps worse, extended to some of our most vulnerable neighbors.  I wish it weren’t happening.

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But there is one useful element to all this. Once again we all see, in this demographically evolving America, just where our friends on the right side of the aisle — and the wrong one of history — actually stand.

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Images:  Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Boaz and Ruth, 1655.

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Engine-order telegraph, 2001

Will No One Rid Me Of This Vexatious Solon?

I’m guessing that most of those who read this blog will already have heard about John McCain’s latest descent into former decency:

Constituents at a town hall hosted by Sen. John McCain Wednesday in Phoenix cheered after the Arizona Republican told the mother of an Aurora, Colo. shooting victim that an assault weapons ban could not get through Congress.

“My 24-year-old son, Alex, was murdered in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.,” Caren Teves said. “These assault rifles allow the shooter to fire many rounds without having to reload. These weapons to do not belong on our streets.”

“I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States,” McCain responded. The video, posted Thursday by Phoenix’s KTVK, showed the line drawing applause and cheers from the crowd.

YMMV, but from where I stand, it takes a special sort of person to tell the mother of a murdered child that they need “straight talk.”  And by “special” I mean…

…you know what I mean.

He’s got the self-righteous condescension act down, certainly.  I have no doubt that Ms. Teves has an abundance of experience of blunt reality, but John McCain still found it in him to set her straight. That’s impressive — albeit in a wholly unimpressive frame.

So far, we’re on familiar territory. John McCain is no maverick, never has been.

 

But for all that I didn’t catch the next level of wretchedness in this encounter until dinner time, when I told my son about it.  He listened, and then asked the question so obvious that I’m still wondering why it didn’t occur to me first:

Would McCain, my twelve year old wondered, would he have told a man that he needed some straight talk about his murdered son, and the implications of that death?

Who can say?  It’s a counterfactual, meant to stimulate thought, not to secure a certain answer.

But damn, that’s an instructive question.

The dismissive tone of McCain’s answer was obvious, of course.  But I didn’t at first quite hear the gender condescension.  If McCain’s questioner had been a 6′ 5″ guy with muscles and facial hair, would he have so blithly offered “straight talk?”

Maybe.  But I can’t convince myself that the president-of-the-Sunday-morning-shows would have let it fly quite so readily.

In any event, my takeaway from this (besides that I am, as usual,  proud of my son) is it sure took guts for John McCain to bully Caren Teves to make a few points at a town hall, didn’t it?  In that context, ISTM that the defining quality of all those few, unhappy few members of the GOP’s should-no-better faction  (and yes, I’m looking at you, Lindsay Graham, et al.)… is that core property of the sane-ish rump of the national party is cowardice.

It’s ugly as hell to watch, but I am comforted that these are the markers of an institution far down the oblivion express.  I share John’s weariness at having to whack the same damn moles day after day — but I am increasingly confident that it hurts them more than it hurts us.

And with that — it’s time to return to the last of the wine to wash down an excellent (and on-sale) rib-eye.

Image:  Alfred Bierstadt, Study of Wild Horses, before 1902

 

Serious People…

It’s getting sad, really, watching Senator Graham twist and turn as he tries to find some way of avoiding being Lugared next election.

Here he is on how to avoid the damage of the sequester:

“Here’s my belief: let’s take Obamacare and put it on the table,” he said. “If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at Obamacare. Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.”

Here’s the Congressional Budget Office on what the budget would look like without the health care reform measure that is the signature accomplishment of President Obama’s first term:

Assuming that H.R. 6079 is enacted near the beginning of fiscal year 2013, CBO and JCT estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting that legislation would cause a net increase in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2013–2022 period. Specifically, we estimate that H.R. 6079 would reduce direct spending by $890 billion and reduce revenues by $1 trillion between 2013 and 2022, thus adding $109 billion to federal budget deficits over that period.

So forget the fact that there is exactly zero chance that the President or his party would acquiesce in this latest ham-fisted South Carolinian attempt at the nullification of duly passed federal law. Pass over in silence the fact that this kind of nonsense is exactly what is needed to continue to paint the GOP as the party of rigidity, incapable of anything other than fighting the last war…

…and ignore all of the reasons that the utterance of this crap may play great on Fox News — and that such theater is exactly what (some) Republicans themselves have noticed constrains the party’s ability to speak past its dwindling core.

Instead, do what is sadly laughable in our politics today:  pay attention to the actual policy.

If you do, you’ll notice that a sitting, senior senator just proposed deficit reduction by increasing the deficit.*

That this fact doesn’t earn immediate ridicule from the mainstream media — and not just us DFH bloggers — is a pretty precise measure of how deep is the sh*t in which our polity now wallows.  To be sure, this is hardly the most risible, or most corrosive of Graham’s recent performances; nor that of the GOP at large.  But the sheer bald obviousness of the big lie here gets my goat. Does he think we’re that stupid?

Don’t answer that.

*I do know that Graham’s statement could suggest something other than the repeal examined in the CBO analysis cited above.  But every GOP proposal on health care that I can recall that calls for something other than a total reversal of Obamacare makes the fiscal picture worse.  So unless and an until Sen. Graham advances a specific plan, I’ll default to the existing corpus of Republican “ideas” on the matter.

Image: Matthais Robinson, Charge of the Light Brigade, 1864.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Via twitterer @Dhunterauthor, we learn that America’s sheriff, Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio may have some — how should we put this?– issues with his unsolicited provision of defenders of youth.

You may recall that Arpaio, last seen vainly trying to keep Birtherism on life support (whilst the Kenyan Usurper enters his second term of occupation of the Definitely-Not-Black-House) had declared that his posse (his term) of possibly (house) trained armed yahoos would provide a weaponized security presence at local schools, whether or not those schools sought or welcomed such “assistance.”

Nothing to worry about, right?  Nothing says “good idea” like kids and guns.

Let me surrender the floor to Wonkette:

Arpaio told ABC/Univision in December that it was not up for debate whether the schools had posse members posted outside.

“It doesn’t matter whether they like it or don’t,” he said. “I’m still going to do it. I can’t imagine criticism coming when they’re given free protection.”

Well, yeah! Who would object to free protection from volunteers who are no doubt carefully vetted and very responsible and definitely good people to be carrying firearms? Oh wait:

And then there was Jacob Cutler. According to a Flagstaff police report, Cutler threw his girlfriend to the ground and choked her while trying to sexually assault her in 2008. When she didn’t cooperate, he allegedly threatened to call police and said they would side with him, because he “has a badge.” He was a member of Arpaio’s posse at the time.

There’s more, up to and including report that the posse now offering unavoidable “protection” to schools that just happen to be filled with kids (who knew?) includes a member with a record of arrest for “sexual crimes against children.”

So I guess this is the line of reasoning:  more guns, even those wielded by thugs with toy badges, make us safer.  Good to know.

Go get the rest at Wonkette — but better lock the alcohol away first; this is truly one of those drive you to drink stories.

Image: Arthur William Devis, Emily and George Mason, between 1794 and 1795.