From The Washington Post -- March 26, 2012:
Repeal the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law
By Eugene Robinson
The “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida and other states should all be repealed. At best, they are redundant. At worst, as in the Trayvon Martin killing, they are nothing but a license to kill.
Police in Sanford, Fla., cited the statute as grounds for their decision not to file charges against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Martin, 17, was strolling home from a convenience store, armed with an iced tea and a bag of Skittles, when Zimmerman — a neighborhood watch volunteer and wannabe police officer — spotted him and decided he looked suspicious.
Zimmerman, who is 28, happened to be armed with a handgun. He followed Martin, despite instructions from a 911 operator not to do so. They had an encounter that left Zimmerman suffering from minor injuries and Martin dead on the ground from a gunshot wound. While we don’t know exactly what happened, we know that Zimmerman initiated the contact by stalking a young man who had done nothing more sinister than walk down the street wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
Police decided to release Zimmerman without charges because of the Stand Your Ground law. The relevant part of the statute says that “a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked . . . has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.”
Zimmerman claimed self-defense, was given the benefit of the doubt required by law and released.
This was a shocking travesty, as we now know. The “person who [was] not engaged in an unlawful activity and who [was] attacked” was Martin. Under the Florida law, as I read it, he had every right to feel he was in “imminent peril of death or great bodily harm” from the stranger who was following him. He had every right to confront Zimmerman — to stand his ground — and even to use deadly force, if necessary, to defend himself.
Imagine that Martin, not Zimmerman, had been carrying a legal handgun — and that it was Zimmerman who ended up dead. The law should have compelled police to release Martin, a young African American in a hoodie, without charges.
Somehow, I doubt that would have happened.
The consensus view, which I’ve heard expressed by supporters of Stand Your Ground, is that police were wrong to extend the law’s self-defense immunity to Zimmerman so quickly without a more thorough investigation — and that, given what we have learned about Zimmerman’s pursuit of Martin, the law does not seem to apply.
But why does Florida, or any other state, need this statute? State laws already allowed the use of deadly force in self-defense. By making explicit that the person who feels threatened has no obligation to retreat, all the state Legislature accomplished was to lessen the odds that a hot-tempered confrontation would be allowed to cool down without violence.
The Florida law took effect in 2005. Five years later, the Tampa Bay Times said that reports of justifiable homicide across the state had tripled. The newspaper found cases in which the protection of Stand Your Ground had been invoked by persons who felt — perhaps with good reason, perhaps not — that they faced imminent attack in their homes. Those incidents were at least in keeping with the intent of the legislation. But the newspaper also found the law being used to excuse violence committed during fights at house parties, disputes between neighbors and disagreements in public parks.
“Gangsters are using this law to have gunfights,” state’s attorney Willie Meggs told the Times.
Following Florida’s lead, about 20 states have enacted similar legislation. I doubt you will be surprised to hear that the National Rifle Association has lobbied hard to get these dangerous and unnecessary statutes approved.
These laws encourage hotheads to go into potential confrontations with loaded firearms. They give permission to shoot first and ask questions later. This may be good for gun manufacturers, funeral homes and the NRA, but it’s tragic for justice in America.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Multiple Disasters That Republican Conservatives Are Inflicting on America
From The Washington Post -- March 25, 2012:
The right’s Etch a Sketch imperative
By E.J. Dionne Jr.,
Clarifying moments are rare in politics. They are the times when previously muddled issues are cast into sharp relief and citizens get a chance to look past the spin and obfuscation.
Americans were blessed with three such moments last week.
Rep. Paul Ryan made absolutely clear that he is not now and never was interested in deficit reduction. After a couple of years of being lauded by deficit hawks as the man prepared to make hard choices, he proposed a budget that would not end deficits until 2040 but would cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over a decade while also extending all of the Bush tax cuts, adding an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit. Ryan would increase military expenditures and then eviscerate the rest of the federal government.
Oh yes, Ryan claims he’d make up for the losses from his new tax cuts with “tax reform” but offered not a single detail. A “plan” with a hole this big is not a plan at all. Ryan’s main interest is in cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 35 percent. His message: Solving the deficit problem isn’t nearly as important as (1) continuing and expanding benefits for the wealthy and (2) disabling the federal government.
Robert Greenstein, president of the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is tough on deficits, careful in his use of numbers, and measured in his choice of words. These traits make his assessment of Ryan’s proposal all the more instructive.
“It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history),” Greenstein wrote. “Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured.”
Thanks to Ryan, we now know that this election is not about deficits at all. It is about whether we will respond to growing inequalities of wealth and income by creating even larger inequalities of wealth and income.
Last week the nation also focused seriously on the “Stand Your Ground” laws that the National Rifle Association has pushed through in state after state. These statutes came to wide attention because of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
George Zimmerman, the man who pulled the trigger, was not under serious investigation until there was a national outcry because under the Florida law, a citizen has a right to use “force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
These laws perfectly reflect the NRA’s utopia. No longer will we count on law enforcement to preserve the peace. Instead, we will build a society where all citizens are armed and encouraged to take the law into their own hands. If you feel threatened, just shoot.
Since when did conservatives start believing that laws should be based on “feelings” and subjective judgments? What kind of civilization does this create? Surely this moment should inspire the peaceable majority to challenge the entire gun lobby worldview — and that most certainly includes the legions of timid Democrats who have been cowed by the NRA.
There was, finally, that toy metaphor from Eric Fehrnstrom, a top aide to Mitt Romney. Asked on CNN if the primary campaign had forced Romney “to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election,” Fehrnstrom replied that “everything changes” after the primaries. “It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch,” he added, “you can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
The context matters because Romney later said Fehrnstrom was talking about post-primary changes that would be made “organizationally,” a claim that is plainly untrue. Ironically, the semi-denial reinforced the lesson Fehrnstrom taught: To win, Romney is willing to change not only his own positions but also reality itself.
Conservatives will need an exceptionally powerful Etch a Sketch to wipe the nation’s memory clean of the education it received during the 2012 campaign’s most enlightening week so far.
The right’s Etch a Sketch imperative
By E.J. Dionne Jr.,
Clarifying moments are rare in politics. They are the times when previously muddled issues are cast into sharp relief and citizens get a chance to look past the spin and obfuscation.
Americans were blessed with three such moments last week.
Rep. Paul Ryan made absolutely clear that he is not now and never was interested in deficit reduction. After a couple of years of being lauded by deficit hawks as the man prepared to make hard choices, he proposed a budget that would not end deficits until 2040 but would cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over a decade while also extending all of the Bush tax cuts, adding an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit. Ryan would increase military expenditures and then eviscerate the rest of the federal government.
Oh yes, Ryan claims he’d make up for the losses from his new tax cuts with “tax reform” but offered not a single detail. A “plan” with a hole this big is not a plan at all. Ryan’s main interest is in cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 35 percent. His message: Solving the deficit problem isn’t nearly as important as (1) continuing and expanding benefits for the wealthy and (2) disabling the federal government.
Robert Greenstein, president of the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is tough on deficits, careful in his use of numbers, and measured in his choice of words. These traits make his assessment of Ryan’s proposal all the more instructive.
“It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history),” Greenstein wrote. “Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured.”
Thanks to Ryan, we now know that this election is not about deficits at all. It is about whether we will respond to growing inequalities of wealth and income by creating even larger inequalities of wealth and income.
Last week the nation also focused seriously on the “Stand Your Ground” laws that the National Rifle Association has pushed through in state after state. These statutes came to wide attention because of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
George Zimmerman, the man who pulled the trigger, was not under serious investigation until there was a national outcry because under the Florida law, a citizen has a right to use “force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
These laws perfectly reflect the NRA’s utopia. No longer will we count on law enforcement to preserve the peace. Instead, we will build a society where all citizens are armed and encouraged to take the law into their own hands. If you feel threatened, just shoot.
Since when did conservatives start believing that laws should be based on “feelings” and subjective judgments? What kind of civilization does this create? Surely this moment should inspire the peaceable majority to challenge the entire gun lobby worldview — and that most certainly includes the legions of timid Democrats who have been cowed by the NRA.
There was, finally, that toy metaphor from Eric Fehrnstrom, a top aide to Mitt Romney. Asked on CNN if the primary campaign had forced Romney “to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election,” Fehrnstrom replied that “everything changes” after the primaries. “It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch,” he added, “you can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
The context matters because Romney later said Fehrnstrom was talking about post-primary changes that would be made “organizationally,” a claim that is plainly untrue. Ironically, the semi-denial reinforced the lesson Fehrnstrom taught: To win, Romney is willing to change not only his own positions but also reality itself.
Conservatives will need an exceptionally powerful Etch a Sketch to wipe the nation’s memory clean of the education it received during the 2012 campaign’s most enlightening week so far.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Are Conservative Republicans Idiots?
The following is an Incisive, Accurate and Important Internet Posting by Eric Demaree. Bravo, Eric! Right On! To Wit:
Are Conservative Republicans Idiots?
What happened to our robust economy? It should have continued being vibrant; no external disaster derailed it. But something did derail it—Reaganomics! If you have lost your job—that’s Reaganomics! If you have lost your house—that’s Reaganomics! Yes, the rich are indeed getting richer, as this idiotic theory demands, but the poor are not getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. Reaganomics’ primary goal is to make the rich as rich as possible and hope some money trickles down to the poor. That concept is so idiotic Reagan’s own vice president, the senior Mr. Bush, called Reaganomics “voodoo” economics. That is, Bush likened Reagan to a sorcerer who was casting an economic evil spell over America.
Reaganomics is now devastating more people than ever because conservative Republicans are still under Reagan’s evil spell. They stupidly believe the rich need to be richer and that the rich create jobs. Why would the rich hire people to produce goods, if no one is able to buy them? Somehow these Republicans are too ignorant to look at Mexico or the Philippines and understand those countries’ failed economies are perfect examples of Reaganomics. Reagan’s “supply side economics” does not work there or anywhere else. Only when the poor and middle class have enough money to demand goods and services do the rich hire people to produce those goods and services.
The policies of the Republican Party have been oppressing the poor for decades. Every time raising the minimum wage has come up for a vote, the Republicans have voted against it. They always use the same idiotic excuse—it will hurt jobs. But it NEVER does. These Republicans are economic idiots because they remain blind to the fact it is the poor who stimulate job creation when they spend the disposable income raising the minimum wage gives them.
The bailout of the automotive industry by the Obama administration has been an astounding success; that bailout, according to unbiased sources, saved over one million jobs. Now Republican Karl Rove insists it is wrong for the automotive industry to celebrate this great success in its advertisements. He says that would unfairly promote President Obama’s wisdom. Although Rove does not say it, these advertisements also emphasize the the idiocy of conservative Republicans who are STILL raging against the saving of over 1,000,000 jobs! Of course it is wrong for Rove and his idiot friends to celebrate saving jobs—they are conservative Republicans. But it is never wrong for those who love America to celebrate this success.
It is certainly not the poor who are the enemy of jobs, neither are senior citizens nor the environment the enemy of jobs as Republicans would have you believe. It is the IDIOT REPUBLICANS who are the enemy of jobs!
But why would otherwise intelligent people remain economic idiots? Conservative Republicans remain economic idiots because they are blinded by their hatred for the poor. The philosophy of the Republican agenda is revealed in the ranting of their champion—Rush Limbaugh. He continually derides anyone who helps the poor as a “bleeding-heart liberal.” Every day, just like a modern Goliath, he gets on his mountaintop and mocks humanity by spewing hatred for anyone who follows the Biblical directive to show mercy (Matt. 9:13). He has even gone so far as to berate Bill Gates for providing free mosquito nets to the poor in Africa. Limbaugh has said repeatedly, with all the disgust he can muster, “Bill Gates is into mosquito nets.” If Bill Gates wants to do deeds of mercy with his own money, what is that to Limbaugh? It seems Limbaugh hates the poor so much he thinks they should all die a painful feverish death of malaria. And then he has the audacity to declare himself a “compassionate” conservative. How hateful does this lying reprobate need to be before America wises up to him? Also, he claims he will do everyone’s thinking for them. But he does not do thinking. What he does do is supply his listeners with rationalizations and denials of facts so they are free to feed their lower nature with both hands. If Limbaugh can get away with hatreds and denials, his listeners think they can too.
“The way things ought to be” (Limbaugh’s book title) is that Limbaugh ought to be punished until he wishes he had never opened his hateful mouth. And if there is any truth to the Bible—that is the way things will be. Do you think he could still have a conscience after raging against the human qualities of mercy and reason day after day and year after year? No wonder he has needed drugs to keep his wicked mouth running, just like Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his witch hunt!
Limbaugh has led many to the altar of hate, but if you are not yet married to hate, repent while you still have a conscience.
Glenn Beck is almost as bad. He slings as much self-made mud against the wall as he can just to see what will stick. He called President Obama a racist without so much as a fabricated rationalization to back it up. When it wouldn’t even stick with his own devotees, he just moved on to other hatreds, never bothering to apologize for his slander. Why should he apologize for hate when his devotees crave hateful tirades against those who help the poor? More than anything, Beck and his devotees foam at the mouth with hatred for President Obama. Why? President Obama’s policies indirectly force them to have mercy on the poor. Since they have no bond with humanity, they say to themselves, “Why should I help the poor? They’re not me!”
A Republican oriented Fox News program, which claims to be a “no spin” zone, recently promoted the wickedest and most idiotic spin going. In Luke 18:25 Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The host, Bill O’Reilly, reported that the Biblical “eye of a needle” was a gate for camels and not a literal eye of a needle. However, no archaeological or historical evidence exists for such a gate. Also, Jesus’ disciples, who are astonished by His statement, reply, “Who then can be saved?” The host’s spin on this verse is an idiotic attempt to invalidate the teachings of Jesus in order to cater to the mega-rich.
Here is another example of Fox News conversations: “I don’t like Obama. Do you like Obama?” “No, I don’t like Obama either.” That’s news? Of course not, it is completely unfounded idiocy of the worst kind. Fox News: fair and balanced and IDIOTIC.
And then there is the extremist Tea Party. On almost all other issues they are divided, but not when it comes to hating the poor. They recently showed their solidarity at a debate among Republican candidates. The moderator asked a candidate about the poor who have no health care options. He asked, “Should we just allow the poor to die without any medical attention?” Immediately the Tea Party members in the audience shouted, “Yes, yes, let them die.” Worse yet, EVERY REPUBLICAN kowtows to this wicked idiocy! Not one has said a word against it.
If you have ever listened to ex-Gov. Huckabee’s ad deriding the Affordable Care Act, you will hear him use the term “Obamacare” over and over as spitefully as he can. Why is he trying to sabotage your brain with this derisive term and with emotionalism? He is doing this because sound reasoning condemns his argument. If reason were on his side, he would appeal to reason! But instead, he vigorously tries to get every one his listeners to take a sharp stick, poke out the eyes of their understanding and become a hate-those-who-help-the-poor, emotional idiot like himself.
The Congressional Budget Office has served both parties with unbiased facts for decades. It declared the Affordable Care Act would save the country billions. But Republicans deny that and say this Act would cost trillions. As long as they are lying, they might as well make it big and say trillions. In addition, they sabotaged the most important part of this Act; they forced the elimination of the government option. A few years ago health insurance companies took only 5% profit from premiums paid. Now their skimming has quadrupled to 20% of premiums paid; and that does not include their gigantic salaries and bonuses. Even after taking on the worst health risks, it would be difficult for the government option to lose money competing with these fat companies and their huge profit margins. But the Republicans eliminated the government option, the only honest competition available. And so health insurance companies continue to gouge the American public. Thanks idiot Republicans.
One of the most tragic idiocies of the Republicans is their disregard for the environment. Thousands and thousands of scientific facts support the fact the earth is dangerously warming. But Republicans again simply deny all these facts. Why do they deny sound science? If they acknowledged these facts they would be disciplined by them and be forced to act responsibly. Sadly for our planet, idiot Republicans continue to insist that dumping billions of tons of garbage into the atmosphere could not possibly cause any harm.
Rigid principles are the enemies of reason and the enemies of our democracy, which is based on reason. Ignorant spoiled brats, for example, refuse to be reasonable and stick to their principles, “I want that candy and I want it now.” But Republican Rand Paul has taken a direct stand for principles over reason. He implied he was too much of an idiot to know the difference between good government and bad government, so to stand up for his principles he voted against a bill he was in favor of! He boasts he has always stuck to his idiotic principles; that is, he boasts he has always refused to add even one fact to his mind’s picture of reality.
Consider Republican Joe Barton’s comment after the oil spill that killed almost a dozen workers and devastated thousands. He apologized to British Petroleum. BP was only asked to set aside a fund for the possibility of settling the claims of those who were devastated, but Barton apologized to BP for that! He had no concern for those killed or for those devastated. How corrupt and idiotic is that wicked clown? How can he not be accepting an immoral payoff from the oil industry?!
This country became a superpower with a 90% tax bracket for the mega-rich. And that was not a coincidence. That bracket did not stifle creativity, inventiveness or jobs. What it did stifle was greed and corruption. The catch-phrase then was, “Why cheat the poor; the government will get it all.” But now greed and corruption are rampant thanks to the idiotic tax cuts Republicans have given the rich. A high tax bracket was, in the early 20th century, and is now a NECESSITY to stifle greed and corruption.
Throughout the history of civilization it has been unheard of for citizens to say they are not paying enough taxes. However, some of the mega-rich realize that to save our economy the rich need to pay more taxes. But when they say so, idiot Republican traitors mock and ridicule these patriots and do everything they can to discredit them. It seems these Republican traitors are so depraved they cannot even imagine someone following the directives of their conscience.
Because of their blithering idiocy Republicans are not only destroying our economy, they are also threatening our democracy. They are turning our democracy into a plutocracy—a country controlled by the rich. The rich have completed their stranglehold on Mexico and the Philippines. Those countries are no longer democracies because their citizens’ right to vote has been overruled by the power of the rich.
And the rich are beginning to have the same stranglehold on this country. Already we are paying taxes, not only to the Federal government, but to General Electric as well. Because Republicans have been morally corrupted by donations and lobbyists, GE pays no Federal income tax but instead directly receives billions of our tax dollars. The oil industry, the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the banking industry, to name a few, are all riddled with questionable, greedy practices and outright corruption. But idiot Republicans are against properly regulating these industries. They say that would be too much interference by the government. If Republicans are allowed to continue their idiotic pandering to the rich, the rich could easily become powerful enough to make our elections meaningless, the hallmark of a plutocracy.
Conservative Republicans are also undermining our democracy in a more sweeping way. To justify their hatred for the poor, they must also hate reason: the process of adding facts to your mind’s picture of reality. And by hating reason, they stupidly hate the foundation of our democracy (just ask Thomas Jefferson) and hate what makes this country a great place in which to live. And as a result of their hatred for reason conservative Republicans are traitors to their fellow Americans, traitors to the environment, traitors to science, traitors to the economy and traitors to our democracy. They ought to be ashamed of their hatreds and idiocies, which reek of McCarthyism. But they are not the least bit remorseful because CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS HAVE NO DECENCY!
Al Gore made a mistake assuming conservative Republicans are decent humans when he presented hundreds of facts to them that reveal the earth is warming. Conservative Republicans scoffed at those facts. Gabrielle Giffords also made the mistake of assuming conservative Republicans are decent humans. Her last plea to Congress was, “Please be reasonable.” Of course conservative Republicans ignored that plea. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the only assumption that works in dealing with conservative Republicans is the Biblical theory that they no longer have an intact conscience (I Tim. 4:2).
For the record, I am not a Democrat, just an independent Bible believing philosopher. I am certain that if conservative Republicans are allowed to overthrow our reasonable government and build a government on the foundation of hate the result will be worse than catastrophic. Also, I do think some Republicans including John McCain and Colin Powell are honorable because they are fairly reasonable, unlike conservative Republicans.
Again, conservative Republicans are making a fatal mistake in raging against the human qualities of mercy and reason. However, conservatism attracts many who are simply too ignorant to know who is lying to them. So if you are a conservative Republican out of ignorance, I hope you can repent of your principles of hatred and idiocy before it is too late. “Come now, and let us reason together.”—The Biblical God (Isaiah 1:18)
Copyright 2012 by Eric Demaree
See: reasonablegovt.blogspot.com
Are Conservative Republicans Idiots?
What happened to our robust economy? It should have continued being vibrant; no external disaster derailed it. But something did derail it—Reaganomics! If you have lost your job—that’s Reaganomics! If you have lost your house—that’s Reaganomics! Yes, the rich are indeed getting richer, as this idiotic theory demands, but the poor are not getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. Reaganomics’ primary goal is to make the rich as rich as possible and hope some money trickles down to the poor. That concept is so idiotic Reagan’s own vice president, the senior Mr. Bush, called Reaganomics “voodoo” economics. That is, Bush likened Reagan to a sorcerer who was casting an economic evil spell over America.
Reaganomics is now devastating more people than ever because conservative Republicans are still under Reagan’s evil spell. They stupidly believe the rich need to be richer and that the rich create jobs. Why would the rich hire people to produce goods, if no one is able to buy them? Somehow these Republicans are too ignorant to look at Mexico or the Philippines and understand those countries’ failed economies are perfect examples of Reaganomics. Reagan’s “supply side economics” does not work there or anywhere else. Only when the poor and middle class have enough money to demand goods and services do the rich hire people to produce those goods and services.
The policies of the Republican Party have been oppressing the poor for decades. Every time raising the minimum wage has come up for a vote, the Republicans have voted against it. They always use the same idiotic excuse—it will hurt jobs. But it NEVER does. These Republicans are economic idiots because they remain blind to the fact it is the poor who stimulate job creation when they spend the disposable income raising the minimum wage gives them.
The bailout of the automotive industry by the Obama administration has been an astounding success; that bailout, according to unbiased sources, saved over one million jobs. Now Republican Karl Rove insists it is wrong for the automotive industry to celebrate this great success in its advertisements. He says that would unfairly promote President Obama’s wisdom. Although Rove does not say it, these advertisements also emphasize the the idiocy of conservative Republicans who are STILL raging against the saving of over 1,000,000 jobs! Of course it is wrong for Rove and his idiot friends to celebrate saving jobs—they are conservative Republicans. But it is never wrong for those who love America to celebrate this success.
It is certainly not the poor who are the enemy of jobs, neither are senior citizens nor the environment the enemy of jobs as Republicans would have you believe. It is the IDIOT REPUBLICANS who are the enemy of jobs!
But why would otherwise intelligent people remain economic idiots? Conservative Republicans remain economic idiots because they are blinded by their hatred for the poor. The philosophy of the Republican agenda is revealed in the ranting of their champion—Rush Limbaugh. He continually derides anyone who helps the poor as a “bleeding-heart liberal.” Every day, just like a modern Goliath, he gets on his mountaintop and mocks humanity by spewing hatred for anyone who follows the Biblical directive to show mercy (Matt. 9:13). He has even gone so far as to berate Bill Gates for providing free mosquito nets to the poor in Africa. Limbaugh has said repeatedly, with all the disgust he can muster, “Bill Gates is into mosquito nets.” If Bill Gates wants to do deeds of mercy with his own money, what is that to Limbaugh? It seems Limbaugh hates the poor so much he thinks they should all die a painful feverish death of malaria. And then he has the audacity to declare himself a “compassionate” conservative. How hateful does this lying reprobate need to be before America wises up to him? Also, he claims he will do everyone’s thinking for them. But he does not do thinking. What he does do is supply his listeners with rationalizations and denials of facts so they are free to feed their lower nature with both hands. If Limbaugh can get away with hatreds and denials, his listeners think they can too.
“The way things ought to be” (Limbaugh’s book title) is that Limbaugh ought to be punished until he wishes he had never opened his hateful mouth. And if there is any truth to the Bible—that is the way things will be. Do you think he could still have a conscience after raging against the human qualities of mercy and reason day after day and year after year? No wonder he has needed drugs to keep his wicked mouth running, just like Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his witch hunt!
Limbaugh has led many to the altar of hate, but if you are not yet married to hate, repent while you still have a conscience.
Glenn Beck is almost as bad. He slings as much self-made mud against the wall as he can just to see what will stick. He called President Obama a racist without so much as a fabricated rationalization to back it up. When it wouldn’t even stick with his own devotees, he just moved on to other hatreds, never bothering to apologize for his slander. Why should he apologize for hate when his devotees crave hateful tirades against those who help the poor? More than anything, Beck and his devotees foam at the mouth with hatred for President Obama. Why? President Obama’s policies indirectly force them to have mercy on the poor. Since they have no bond with humanity, they say to themselves, “Why should I help the poor? They’re not me!”
A Republican oriented Fox News program, which claims to be a “no spin” zone, recently promoted the wickedest and most idiotic spin going. In Luke 18:25 Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The host, Bill O’Reilly, reported that the Biblical “eye of a needle” was a gate for camels and not a literal eye of a needle. However, no archaeological or historical evidence exists for such a gate. Also, Jesus’ disciples, who are astonished by His statement, reply, “Who then can be saved?” The host’s spin on this verse is an idiotic attempt to invalidate the teachings of Jesus in order to cater to the mega-rich.
Here is another example of Fox News conversations: “I don’t like Obama. Do you like Obama?” “No, I don’t like Obama either.” That’s news? Of course not, it is completely unfounded idiocy of the worst kind. Fox News: fair and balanced and IDIOTIC.
And then there is the extremist Tea Party. On almost all other issues they are divided, but not when it comes to hating the poor. They recently showed their solidarity at a debate among Republican candidates. The moderator asked a candidate about the poor who have no health care options. He asked, “Should we just allow the poor to die without any medical attention?” Immediately the Tea Party members in the audience shouted, “Yes, yes, let them die.” Worse yet, EVERY REPUBLICAN kowtows to this wicked idiocy! Not one has said a word against it.
If you have ever listened to ex-Gov. Huckabee’s ad deriding the Affordable Care Act, you will hear him use the term “Obamacare” over and over as spitefully as he can. Why is he trying to sabotage your brain with this derisive term and with emotionalism? He is doing this because sound reasoning condemns his argument. If reason were on his side, he would appeal to reason! But instead, he vigorously tries to get every one his listeners to take a sharp stick, poke out the eyes of their understanding and become a hate-those-who-help-the-poor, emotional idiot like himself.
The Congressional Budget Office has served both parties with unbiased facts for decades. It declared the Affordable Care Act would save the country billions. But Republicans deny that and say this Act would cost trillions. As long as they are lying, they might as well make it big and say trillions. In addition, they sabotaged the most important part of this Act; they forced the elimination of the government option. A few years ago health insurance companies took only 5% profit from premiums paid. Now their skimming has quadrupled to 20% of premiums paid; and that does not include their gigantic salaries and bonuses. Even after taking on the worst health risks, it would be difficult for the government option to lose money competing with these fat companies and their huge profit margins. But the Republicans eliminated the government option, the only honest competition available. And so health insurance companies continue to gouge the American public. Thanks idiot Republicans.
One of the most tragic idiocies of the Republicans is their disregard for the environment. Thousands and thousands of scientific facts support the fact the earth is dangerously warming. But Republicans again simply deny all these facts. Why do they deny sound science? If they acknowledged these facts they would be disciplined by them and be forced to act responsibly. Sadly for our planet, idiot Republicans continue to insist that dumping billions of tons of garbage into the atmosphere could not possibly cause any harm.
Rigid principles are the enemies of reason and the enemies of our democracy, which is based on reason. Ignorant spoiled brats, for example, refuse to be reasonable and stick to their principles, “I want that candy and I want it now.” But Republican Rand Paul has taken a direct stand for principles over reason. He implied he was too much of an idiot to know the difference between good government and bad government, so to stand up for his principles he voted against a bill he was in favor of! He boasts he has always stuck to his idiotic principles; that is, he boasts he has always refused to add even one fact to his mind’s picture of reality.
Consider Republican Joe Barton’s comment after the oil spill that killed almost a dozen workers and devastated thousands. He apologized to British Petroleum. BP was only asked to set aside a fund for the possibility of settling the claims of those who were devastated, but Barton apologized to BP for that! He had no concern for those killed or for those devastated. How corrupt and idiotic is that wicked clown? How can he not be accepting an immoral payoff from the oil industry?!
This country became a superpower with a 90% tax bracket for the mega-rich. And that was not a coincidence. That bracket did not stifle creativity, inventiveness or jobs. What it did stifle was greed and corruption. The catch-phrase then was, “Why cheat the poor; the government will get it all.” But now greed and corruption are rampant thanks to the idiotic tax cuts Republicans have given the rich. A high tax bracket was, in the early 20th century, and is now a NECESSITY to stifle greed and corruption.
Throughout the history of civilization it has been unheard of for citizens to say they are not paying enough taxes. However, some of the mega-rich realize that to save our economy the rich need to pay more taxes. But when they say so, idiot Republican traitors mock and ridicule these patriots and do everything they can to discredit them. It seems these Republican traitors are so depraved they cannot even imagine someone following the directives of their conscience.
Because of their blithering idiocy Republicans are not only destroying our economy, they are also threatening our democracy. They are turning our democracy into a plutocracy—a country controlled by the rich. The rich have completed their stranglehold on Mexico and the Philippines. Those countries are no longer democracies because their citizens’ right to vote has been overruled by the power of the rich.
And the rich are beginning to have the same stranglehold on this country. Already we are paying taxes, not only to the Federal government, but to General Electric as well. Because Republicans have been morally corrupted by donations and lobbyists, GE pays no Federal income tax but instead directly receives billions of our tax dollars. The oil industry, the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the banking industry, to name a few, are all riddled with questionable, greedy practices and outright corruption. But idiot Republicans are against properly regulating these industries. They say that would be too much interference by the government. If Republicans are allowed to continue their idiotic pandering to the rich, the rich could easily become powerful enough to make our elections meaningless, the hallmark of a plutocracy.
Conservative Republicans are also undermining our democracy in a more sweeping way. To justify their hatred for the poor, they must also hate reason: the process of adding facts to your mind’s picture of reality. And by hating reason, they stupidly hate the foundation of our democracy (just ask Thomas Jefferson) and hate what makes this country a great place in which to live. And as a result of their hatred for reason conservative Republicans are traitors to their fellow Americans, traitors to the environment, traitors to science, traitors to the economy and traitors to our democracy. They ought to be ashamed of their hatreds and idiocies, which reek of McCarthyism. But they are not the least bit remorseful because CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS HAVE NO DECENCY!
Al Gore made a mistake assuming conservative Republicans are decent humans when he presented hundreds of facts to them that reveal the earth is warming. Conservative Republicans scoffed at those facts. Gabrielle Giffords also made the mistake of assuming conservative Republicans are decent humans. Her last plea to Congress was, “Please be reasonable.” Of course conservative Republicans ignored that plea. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the only assumption that works in dealing with conservative Republicans is the Biblical theory that they no longer have an intact conscience (I Tim. 4:2).
For the record, I am not a Democrat, just an independent Bible believing philosopher. I am certain that if conservative Republicans are allowed to overthrow our reasonable government and build a government on the foundation of hate the result will be worse than catastrophic. Also, I do think some Republicans including John McCain and Colin Powell are honorable because they are fairly reasonable, unlike conservative Republicans.
Again, conservative Republicans are making a fatal mistake in raging against the human qualities of mercy and reason. However, conservatism attracts many who are simply too ignorant to know who is lying to them. So if you are a conservative Republican out of ignorance, I hope you can repent of your principles of hatred and idiocy before it is too late. “Come now, and let us reason together.”—The Biblical God (Isaiah 1:18)
Copyright 2012 by Eric Demaree
See: reasonablegovt.blogspot.com
Republicans Have Zilch to Offer America
From The Huffington Post -- March 20, 2012:
What Republicans Argue When They Have Nothing Left to Say
By Robert Reich
Republicans are Desperate. They can't attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.
Their attack on the administration's rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.
Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.
Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.
Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.
So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.
It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.
It doesn't matter than the plan doesn't detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan's original voucher plan -- which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.
It doesn't even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.
"House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates," says Bloomberg Businessweek. "Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform," says Reuters. "GOP's Budget Targets Taxes," blares the Wall Street Journal.
Presto: Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.
What Republicans Argue When They Have Nothing Left to Say
By Robert Reich
Republicans are Desperate. They can't attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.
Their attack on the administration's rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.
Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.
Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.
Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.
So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.
It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.
It doesn't matter than the plan doesn't detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan's original voucher plan -- which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.
It doesn't even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.
"House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates," says Bloomberg Businessweek. "Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform," says Reuters. "GOP's Budget Targets Taxes," blares the Wall Street Journal.
Presto: Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Inmates Have Taken Control of the Asylum
Rick Santorum has Won the Alabama and Mississippi primaries.
FOX NEWS Lies Again to Defend New Racist Law Created by South Carolina to Disenfranchise Minority Voters
From Media Matters for America -- March 13, 2012:
Fox's Fraudulent Defense Of South Carolina's Voter ID Law
In a January 3 segment on Fox News' Fox & Friends, correspondent Jim Angle promoted a number of falsehoods and misleading claims about voter ID laws and the Justice Department's action preventing one such law from being implemented in South Carolina.
Angle Left Out Justice Department's Rationale For Blocking South Carolina Law
Angle Provided South Carolina's Rebuttal But Not DOJ's Reasoning For Stopping SC Voter ID Law From Taking Effect. From the January 3 edition of Fox & Friends:
ANGLE: There would be one more new law in South Carolina except that Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department recently blocked it. State officials are challenging the move in court, noting the IDs are free and that no voter is turned away.
ALAN WILSON (South Carolina Attorney General): In our law, the person can show up to the polling place the day of the election. They can basically sign an affidavit stating they had a reasonable impediment while they didn't have a photo ID. And the presumption's against the state. Their vote will be counted. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/3/12]
DOJ: South Carolina Failed To Meet Burden To Prove Their New Law Would Not Abridge Right To Vote On Account Of Race, As Required By Voting Rights Act. In a letter to South Carolina Assistant Deputy Attorney General C. Havird Jones, Jr., U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez wrote:
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the submitting authority has the burden of showing that the proposed changes have neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Georgia v. United States, 411 U.S. 526 (1973); Procedures for the Administration of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 28 C.F.R. 51.52(c). The voting change at issue must be measured against the benchmark practice to determine whether it would "lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise." Beer v. United States, 425 U.S. 130, 141 (1976).
Until South Carolina succeeds in substantially addressing the racial disparities described above... the state cannot meet its burden of proving that, when compared to the benchmark standard, the voter identification requirements proposed in section 5 of Act R54 will not have a retrogressive effect. Because we conclude that the state has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that section 5 of Act R54 will not have a retrogressive effect, we do not make any determination as to whether the state has established that the proposed changes to its voter identification requirements were adopted with no discriminatory purpose. [Department of Justice letter to South Carolina, 12/23/11, emphasis added]
DOJ: South Carolina's Data Indicate Minority Registered Voters "Nearly 20% More Likely To Lack DMV-Issued ID Than White Registered Voters." From the letter:
In assessing the impact of the proposed photo identification requirements in section 5 of Act R54, we turn first to the data that the state has provided concerning registered voters within the state. The most recent voter registration data available from the State Election Commission indicate that, as of October 1, 2011, there were a total of 2,701,843 registered voters in the state, of whom 69.6% were white and 30.4% were non-white. These data also show that of the total number of registered voters in the state, 239,333 (or 8.9%) did not possess DMV-issued photo identification (either a driver's license or a non-driver's photo ID card) that would satisfy the requirements under Act R54. When disaggregated by race, the state's data show that 8.4% of white registered voters lacked any form of DMV-issued ID, as compared to 10.0% of non-white registered voters. In other words, according to the state's data, which compare the available data in the state's voter registration database with the available data in the state's DMV database, minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised by Act R54's new requirements. We note that the voter registration data matched against the DMV database, and provided to us by the state, does not include several categories of existing registered voters listed as inactive voters, and hence, the number of registered voters without DMV-issued ID may well be higher than even these numbers suggest.
Put differently, although non-white voters comprised 30.4% of the state's registered voters, they constituted 34.2% of registered voters who did not have the requisite DMV-issued identification to vote. Non-white voters were therefore disproportionately represented, to a significant degree, in the group of registered voters who, under the proposed law, would be rendered ineligible to go to the polls and participate in the election. [Department of Justice letter to South Carolina, 12/23/11, emphasis added]
Fox's Fraudulent Defense Of South Carolina's Voter ID Law
In a January 3 segment on Fox News' Fox & Friends, correspondent Jim Angle promoted a number of falsehoods and misleading claims about voter ID laws and the Justice Department's action preventing one such law from being implemented in South Carolina.
Angle Left Out Justice Department's Rationale For Blocking South Carolina Law
Angle Provided South Carolina's Rebuttal But Not DOJ's Reasoning For Stopping SC Voter ID Law From Taking Effect. From the January 3 edition of Fox & Friends:
ANGLE: There would be one more new law in South Carolina except that Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department recently blocked it. State officials are challenging the move in court, noting the IDs are free and that no voter is turned away.
ALAN WILSON (South Carolina Attorney General): In our law, the person can show up to the polling place the day of the election. They can basically sign an affidavit stating they had a reasonable impediment while they didn't have a photo ID. And the presumption's against the state. Their vote will be counted. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/3/12]
DOJ: South Carolina Failed To Meet Burden To Prove Their New Law Would Not Abridge Right To Vote On Account Of Race, As Required By Voting Rights Act. In a letter to South Carolina Assistant Deputy Attorney General C. Havird Jones, Jr., U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez wrote:
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the submitting authority has the burden of showing that the proposed changes have neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Georgia v. United States, 411 U.S. 526 (1973); Procedures for the Administration of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 28 C.F.R. 51.52(c). The voting change at issue must be measured against the benchmark practice to determine whether it would "lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise." Beer v. United States, 425 U.S. 130, 141 (1976).
Until South Carolina succeeds in substantially addressing the racial disparities described above... the state cannot meet its burden of proving that, when compared to the benchmark standard, the voter identification requirements proposed in section 5 of Act R54 will not have a retrogressive effect. Because we conclude that the state has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that section 5 of Act R54 will not have a retrogressive effect, we do not make any determination as to whether the state has established that the proposed changes to its voter identification requirements were adopted with no discriminatory purpose. [Department of Justice letter to South Carolina, 12/23/11, emphasis added]
DOJ: South Carolina's Data Indicate Minority Registered Voters "Nearly 20% More Likely To Lack DMV-Issued ID Than White Registered Voters." From the letter:
In assessing the impact of the proposed photo identification requirements in section 5 of Act R54, we turn first to the data that the state has provided concerning registered voters within the state. The most recent voter registration data available from the State Election Commission indicate that, as of October 1, 2011, there were a total of 2,701,843 registered voters in the state, of whom 69.6% were white and 30.4% were non-white. These data also show that of the total number of registered voters in the state, 239,333 (or 8.9%) did not possess DMV-issued photo identification (either a driver's license or a non-driver's photo ID card) that would satisfy the requirements under Act R54. When disaggregated by race, the state's data show that 8.4% of white registered voters lacked any form of DMV-issued ID, as compared to 10.0% of non-white registered voters. In other words, according to the state's data, which compare the available data in the state's voter registration database with the available data in the state's DMV database, minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised by Act R54's new requirements. We note that the voter registration data matched against the DMV database, and provided to us by the state, does not include several categories of existing registered voters listed as inactive voters, and hence, the number of registered voters without DMV-issued ID may well be higher than even these numbers suggest.
Put differently, although non-white voters comprised 30.4% of the state's registered voters, they constituted 34.2% of registered voters who did not have the requisite DMV-issued identification to vote. Non-white voters were therefore disproportionately represented, to a significant degree, in the group of registered voters who, under the proposed law, would be rendered ineligible to go to the polls and participate in the election. [Department of Justice letter to South Carolina, 12/23/11, emphasis added]
Friday, March 9, 2012
Another Worthless Piece of Breitbart's Anti-Obama Video Garbage Is Blown Out of the Water
From Salon -- March 8, 2012:
Young Obama on display
The “smoking gun” video confirms Obama’s strength and weakness: He always tries to have it both ways
BY GARY KAMIYA
Just before he died on March 1, the right-wing attack dog and disinformation specialist Andrew Breitbart promised to reveal explosive videos of a racially charged speech made by the young Barack Obama that would “change this election.”
Breitbart’s death at age 43 led wingnuts on the right to mutter darkly that he was taken out by nameless forces, presumably working for a Satanic Commie Muslim with the initials B.O. Now the video has been released, and it is safe to say that if the Obama administration did dispatch a hit team to silence Breitbart, it was a serious miscalculation. If Breitbart really believed that this feeble artifact would change the election, it would have been much better for the White House if he remained a key member of the right-wing brain trust charged with reclaiming the White House.
The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.
As the video opens, Obama says, “And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first-year black law students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front and not giving us a lecture, but engaging us in conversation. And speaking the truth.”
Here Obama says something indecipherable; there may be a gap or edit in the video. Then, after apparently praising Bell’s achievements, Obama goes on to rhetorically ask, “How did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” After loud applause, there is another apparent gap or edit in the video. Obama’s final words are “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
Before he died, Breitbart claimed that this video would show “why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” Sure enough, right-wingers have seized upon it to portray Obama as a race-card player and friend of white-hating academic extremists. It’s this year’s version of the Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “scandals,” in which Obama was accused of playing footsie with, respectively, a radical Weatherman, a Palestinian academic and an incendiary black clergyman.
Obama’s association with Derrick Bell will turn out to be even more of a non-event than those fizzled bombshells. But the story does shed some light – for better and for worse — on Obama’s temperament, his intellectual style and his racial politics.
To understand the video, one must understand the context. Academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was roiled by an enormous controversy over “multiculturalism.” The debate took many forms. In the humanities, multiculturalists argued that works by minorities, women and gays had been systematically excluded and devalued by institutions of higher learning, and that it was time to change the canon to end the hegemony of “dead white males.” Students at Stanford marched through campus chanting “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Activists demanded that campuses create Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies departments, and hire more minority faculty members. The conflict was bitter, long-lasting and spawned an enormous literature.
Perhaps the most extreme variant of multiculturalism was found in law schools. Called “Critical Legal Studies,” this movement asserted that law was essentially political and served the hegemony of the white racist power structure. As one of its leading figures, Derrick Bell argued that racism was intractable and permanent and that minority professors were systematically excluded simply because of that racism. He further argued that minority professors, by virtue of the oppression and discrimination they allegedly experienced, possessed unique talents and perspectives not available to white professors, and should be hired on that basis alone.
Bell was given to writing in “non-traditional” forms, like science fiction, and argued that narratives and the like should have the same academic standing as footnoted, peer-reviewed papers. In one such story, “Space Traders,” Bell imagined that a group of spacemen had come to earth and offered to remove all of America’s black people, in exchange for vast wealth and other benefits.
The leaders of America agree, and all of America’s blacks are sold into slavery.
In another allegorical fable, “The Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action: The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” Bell imagines how an elite law school would react to the hiring of a super-qualified African-American candidate who, if hired, would increase the faculty’s minority percentage to 25 percent. The white dean in Bell’s parable refuses, saying that doing so would change the racial character of the school to an intolerable degree. The hiring would “threaten, at some deep-seated level, the white faculty members’ sense of ideological hegemony.”
In a devastating critique of Critical Legal Studies in the June 1989 Harvard Law Review (available online via many public libraries), Randall Kennedy demolished the arguments of Bell and two other leading CLS scholars, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda.
“Stated bluntly, they fail to support persuasively their claims of racial exclusion or their claims that legal academic scholars of color produce a racially distinctive brand of valuable scholarship,” Kennedy wrote, and then proceeded to back his argument up in detail. For example, he noted that Bell refused to even engage with the obvious reason that there were so few minority candidates, namely that not enough were qualified. Instead, Bell simply asserted that the criteria of judgment was flawed in some nameless way. Bell was clearly only interested in the outcome, not the process. If it took putting a thumb on the scales to get more black people hired, so be it. The scales were rigged anyway.
What Kennedy wrote of Matsuda was equally true of Bell: By claiming that being a member of a minority group automatically connotes a certain and superior worldview, he argued, she “stereotypes scholars.” The CLS racialism simply inverted pernicious white stereotypes about black people: Instead of being inherently inferior, they were inherently superior.
Kennedy also noted that various CLS supporters came to him (he doesn’t say it, but Bell was among them) and urged him not to publish his piece because it would hurt the movement – behavior more befitting members of a Communist cell than scholars interested in dispassionate inquiry. Of Kennedy, Bell said, “the cause of diversity is not served by someone who looks black and thinks white.”
In short, Bell was a crude racial essentialist. He believed there was such a thing as “thinking white” and “thinking black.” As James Traub noted in a New Republic piece, he was so afraid of giving aid and comfort to white people, and causing harm to blacks, that he refused to condemn the abhorrent anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
As befit his racialist ideology, Bell was also a consummate race-card player. His academic career consisted of a long series of racial confrontations with the institutions he worked for. After being hired as an avowed racial token at Harvard, Bell left for Oregon, where he became the first black dean of a non-black school. But he resigned his deanship when the faculty voted against giving tenure to an Asian woman. He then went to Stanford, where a bizarre incident unfolded. Many of the students in his constitutional law course complained about his teaching, saying it was disorganized and excessively politicized. Some began to audit other courses. In possibly the most impolitic move in the history of academia, the university then set up a parallel series of lectures, which were designed to “supplement” Bell’s courses. When black law students protested, the parallel series was canceled.
Bell then returned to Harvard, where he staged a five-day sit-in to protest the school’s failure to hire two radical CLS faculty members, both white. This led a faculty member to say, “This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South.”
The episode that led to Obama’s involvement started in April 1990, when Bell announced that he would leave Harvard if a black woman was not hired. He demanded that Harvard hire Regina Austin, a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania. But – in a real-world demonstration of one of the problems Kennedy criticized – Bell was unable to defend her credentials, which made her look like a token. When Austin was predictably and summarily rejected – the appointments committee refused even to vote on her candidacy –Bell took heat from feminists for chauvinism. Austin never forgave Bell for the public humiliation she endured.
Enter Obama
This is where Barack Obama, second-year law student, came in. According to Thomas J. Sugrue’s 2010 book “Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race,” “the Black Law Students Association (of which Obama was a member) accused the law school dean of racism, railed against the fact that Harvard had no tenured black women and only a handful of nonwhite faculty members, and led a series of teach-ins and protests … to demand the diversification of the law school.” The debate was bitter, with both sides claiming the mantle of the civil rights movement.
Obama took part in the protests. At one rally, according to Sugrue, he even compared Bell to Rosa Parks. But – and this is the key point – Obama tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute. It is worth quoting the relevant passage from Sugrue at length:
Despite his sympathies with Austin and Bell, Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”
Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.
Sugrue concludes that “Obama’s experience at Harvard tempered his sympathy for the race-conscious politics of the black freedom struggle.”
The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.
Anyone who has read Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” in which Obama grapples with the long-standing tension in the black community between colorblind universalism and Black Power-tinged separatism, will realize that the Bell case put Obama in a difficult situation. As a member of the Black Law Students Association, for him to have sat this dispute out would have been extremely difficult. It was a mom and apple pie issue. He would have come across as a race traitor. (It should also be noted that Bell, whatever his shortcomings as a scholar and thinker about race, was praised as a fine mentor to black students.)
At the same time, Obama was not a racial bomb-thrower. As Sugrue notes, Obama’s racial views were not yet fully formed, but Obama never subscribed to Bell’s crude racial essentialism and guilt-card playing. If he had been forced to openly state whether he agreed with Bell’s racialist theories, he would have been caught in a bind, trapped between the racial solidarity that was expected of him and the universalism he was inwardly inclined toward. But he was not forced to. He was able to live to fight another day by mouthing bland generalities about how Bell’s scholarship “opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” In short, he displayed the chameleonic abilities of a future politician.
In his 2008 book “A Bound Man,” Shelby Steele argues that Obama’s Achilles’ heel is precisely his attempt to have it racially both ways. For Steele, Obama is trapped by his need to simultaneously assert black solidarity and a universal identity. The Bell case is a small example of this double bind in action.
Does it matter? At the political level, no. This isn’t a scandal. Who cares if a young law student went racially along to get along? Besides, Obama was just demonstrating for “diversity,” an anodyne goal that has now received a quasi-official societal imprimatur as well as an explicit legal one. (Much as I hate to agree with Justice Scalia about anything, there is a connection between Bell’s crude racial essentialism and the Supreme Court’s 2003 pro-“diversity” ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.)
Nor does it matter at a personal level. I don’t think that America cares that much about whatever convoluted Hegelian racial dialectic Barack Obama may have gone through in the course of creating his identity.
But it may matter at another level. Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to – and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness. The big question, if he is elected for a second term, is whether he is capable of unifying the opposite strands of his character, forging a single identity. That would mean letting the chips fall where they may, and living up to his promise to transform America by finding within himself the only attribute he has so far lacked: courage.
Young Obama on display
The “smoking gun” video confirms Obama’s strength and weakness: He always tries to have it both ways
BY GARY KAMIYA
Just before he died on March 1, the right-wing attack dog and disinformation specialist Andrew Breitbart promised to reveal explosive videos of a racially charged speech made by the young Barack Obama that would “change this election.”
Breitbart’s death at age 43 led wingnuts on the right to mutter darkly that he was taken out by nameless forces, presumably working for a Satanic Commie Muslim with the initials B.O. Now the video has been released, and it is safe to say that if the Obama administration did dispatch a hit team to silence Breitbart, it was a serious miscalculation. If Breitbart really believed that this feeble artifact would change the election, it would have been much better for the White House if he remained a key member of the right-wing brain trust charged with reclaiming the White House.
The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.
As the video opens, Obama says, “And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first-year black law students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front and not giving us a lecture, but engaging us in conversation. And speaking the truth.”
Here Obama says something indecipherable; there may be a gap or edit in the video. Then, after apparently praising Bell’s achievements, Obama goes on to rhetorically ask, “How did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” After loud applause, there is another apparent gap or edit in the video. Obama’s final words are “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
Before he died, Breitbart claimed that this video would show “why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” Sure enough, right-wingers have seized upon it to portray Obama as a race-card player and friend of white-hating academic extremists. It’s this year’s version of the Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “scandals,” in which Obama was accused of playing footsie with, respectively, a radical Weatherman, a Palestinian academic and an incendiary black clergyman.
Obama’s association with Derrick Bell will turn out to be even more of a non-event than those fizzled bombshells. But the story does shed some light – for better and for worse — on Obama’s temperament, his intellectual style and his racial politics.
To understand the video, one must understand the context. Academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was roiled by an enormous controversy over “multiculturalism.” The debate took many forms. In the humanities, multiculturalists argued that works by minorities, women and gays had been systematically excluded and devalued by institutions of higher learning, and that it was time to change the canon to end the hegemony of “dead white males.” Students at Stanford marched through campus chanting “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Activists demanded that campuses create Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies departments, and hire more minority faculty members. The conflict was bitter, long-lasting and spawned an enormous literature.
Perhaps the most extreme variant of multiculturalism was found in law schools. Called “Critical Legal Studies,” this movement asserted that law was essentially political and served the hegemony of the white racist power structure. As one of its leading figures, Derrick Bell argued that racism was intractable and permanent and that minority professors were systematically excluded simply because of that racism. He further argued that minority professors, by virtue of the oppression and discrimination they allegedly experienced, possessed unique talents and perspectives not available to white professors, and should be hired on that basis alone.
Bell was given to writing in “non-traditional” forms, like science fiction, and argued that narratives and the like should have the same academic standing as footnoted, peer-reviewed papers. In one such story, “Space Traders,” Bell imagined that a group of spacemen had come to earth and offered to remove all of America’s black people, in exchange for vast wealth and other benefits.
The leaders of America agree, and all of America’s blacks are sold into slavery.
In another allegorical fable, “The Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action: The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” Bell imagines how an elite law school would react to the hiring of a super-qualified African-American candidate who, if hired, would increase the faculty’s minority percentage to 25 percent. The white dean in Bell’s parable refuses, saying that doing so would change the racial character of the school to an intolerable degree. The hiring would “threaten, at some deep-seated level, the white faculty members’ sense of ideological hegemony.”
In a devastating critique of Critical Legal Studies in the June 1989 Harvard Law Review (available online via many public libraries), Randall Kennedy demolished the arguments of Bell and two other leading CLS scholars, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda.
“Stated bluntly, they fail to support persuasively their claims of racial exclusion or their claims that legal academic scholars of color produce a racially distinctive brand of valuable scholarship,” Kennedy wrote, and then proceeded to back his argument up in detail. For example, he noted that Bell refused to even engage with the obvious reason that there were so few minority candidates, namely that not enough were qualified. Instead, Bell simply asserted that the criteria of judgment was flawed in some nameless way. Bell was clearly only interested in the outcome, not the process. If it took putting a thumb on the scales to get more black people hired, so be it. The scales were rigged anyway.
What Kennedy wrote of Matsuda was equally true of Bell: By claiming that being a member of a minority group automatically connotes a certain and superior worldview, he argued, she “stereotypes scholars.” The CLS racialism simply inverted pernicious white stereotypes about black people: Instead of being inherently inferior, they were inherently superior.
Kennedy also noted that various CLS supporters came to him (he doesn’t say it, but Bell was among them) and urged him not to publish his piece because it would hurt the movement – behavior more befitting members of a Communist cell than scholars interested in dispassionate inquiry. Of Kennedy, Bell said, “the cause of diversity is not served by someone who looks black and thinks white.”
In short, Bell was a crude racial essentialist. He believed there was such a thing as “thinking white” and “thinking black.” As James Traub noted in a New Republic piece, he was so afraid of giving aid and comfort to white people, and causing harm to blacks, that he refused to condemn the abhorrent anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
As befit his racialist ideology, Bell was also a consummate race-card player. His academic career consisted of a long series of racial confrontations with the institutions he worked for. After being hired as an avowed racial token at Harvard, Bell left for Oregon, where he became the first black dean of a non-black school. But he resigned his deanship when the faculty voted against giving tenure to an Asian woman. He then went to Stanford, where a bizarre incident unfolded. Many of the students in his constitutional law course complained about his teaching, saying it was disorganized and excessively politicized. Some began to audit other courses. In possibly the most impolitic move in the history of academia, the university then set up a parallel series of lectures, which were designed to “supplement” Bell’s courses. When black law students protested, the parallel series was canceled.
Bell then returned to Harvard, where he staged a five-day sit-in to protest the school’s failure to hire two radical CLS faculty members, both white. This led a faculty member to say, “This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South.”
The episode that led to Obama’s involvement started in April 1990, when Bell announced that he would leave Harvard if a black woman was not hired. He demanded that Harvard hire Regina Austin, a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania. But – in a real-world demonstration of one of the problems Kennedy criticized – Bell was unable to defend her credentials, which made her look like a token. When Austin was predictably and summarily rejected – the appointments committee refused even to vote on her candidacy –Bell took heat from feminists for chauvinism. Austin never forgave Bell for the public humiliation she endured.
Enter Obama
This is where Barack Obama, second-year law student, came in. According to Thomas J. Sugrue’s 2010 book “Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race,” “the Black Law Students Association (of which Obama was a member) accused the law school dean of racism, railed against the fact that Harvard had no tenured black women and only a handful of nonwhite faculty members, and led a series of teach-ins and protests … to demand the diversification of the law school.” The debate was bitter, with both sides claiming the mantle of the civil rights movement.
Obama took part in the protests. At one rally, according to Sugrue, he even compared Bell to Rosa Parks. But – and this is the key point – Obama tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute. It is worth quoting the relevant passage from Sugrue at length:
Despite his sympathies with Austin and Bell, Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”
Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.
Sugrue concludes that “Obama’s experience at Harvard tempered his sympathy for the race-conscious politics of the black freedom struggle.”
The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.
Anyone who has read Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” in which Obama grapples with the long-standing tension in the black community between colorblind universalism and Black Power-tinged separatism, will realize that the Bell case put Obama in a difficult situation. As a member of the Black Law Students Association, for him to have sat this dispute out would have been extremely difficult. It was a mom and apple pie issue. He would have come across as a race traitor. (It should also be noted that Bell, whatever his shortcomings as a scholar and thinker about race, was praised as a fine mentor to black students.)
At the same time, Obama was not a racial bomb-thrower. As Sugrue notes, Obama’s racial views were not yet fully formed, but Obama never subscribed to Bell’s crude racial essentialism and guilt-card playing. If he had been forced to openly state whether he agreed with Bell’s racialist theories, he would have been caught in a bind, trapped between the racial solidarity that was expected of him and the universalism he was inwardly inclined toward. But he was not forced to. He was able to live to fight another day by mouthing bland generalities about how Bell’s scholarship “opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” In short, he displayed the chameleonic abilities of a future politician.
In his 2008 book “A Bound Man,” Shelby Steele argues that Obama’s Achilles’ heel is precisely his attempt to have it racially both ways. For Steele, Obama is trapped by his need to simultaneously assert black solidarity and a universal identity. The Bell case is a small example of this double bind in action.
Does it matter? At the political level, no. This isn’t a scandal. Who cares if a young law student went racially along to get along? Besides, Obama was just demonstrating for “diversity,” an anodyne goal that has now received a quasi-official societal imprimatur as well as an explicit legal one. (Much as I hate to agree with Justice Scalia about anything, there is a connection between Bell’s crude racial essentialism and the Supreme Court’s 2003 pro-“diversity” ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.)
Nor does it matter at a personal level. I don’t think that America cares that much about whatever convoluted Hegelian racial dialectic Barack Obama may have gone through in the course of creating his identity.
But it may matter at another level. Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to – and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness. The big question, if he is elected for a second term, is whether he is capable of unifying the opposite strands of his character, forging a single identity. That would mean letting the chips fall where they may, and living up to his promise to transform America by finding within himself the only attribute he has so far lacked: courage.
How Non-Obama-Care Is Destroying the American Health Care System
From The Washington Post -- March 3, 2012:
Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France
By Ezra Klein
There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.
That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.
There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, “it’s the prices, stupid.”
As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians.
“The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do,” they concluded. “This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services.”
On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else.
Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.
“Other countries negotiate very aggressively with the providers and set rates that are much lower than we do,” Anderson says. They do this in one of two ways. In countries such as Canada and Britain, prices are set by the government. In others, such as Germany and Japan, they’re set by providers and insurers sitting in a room and coming to an agreement, with the government stepping in to set prices if they fail.
In America, Medicare and Medicaid negotiate prices on behalf of their tens of millions of members and, not coincidentally, purchase care at a substantial markdown from the commercial average. But outside that, it’s a free-for-all. Providers largely charge what they can get away with, often offering different prices to different insurers, and an even higher price to the uninsured.
Health care is an unusual product in that it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the customer to say “no.” In certain cases, the customer is passed out, or otherwise incapable of making decisions about her care, and the decisions are made by providers whose mandate is, correctly, to save lives rather than money.
In other cases, there is more time for loved ones to consider costs, but little emotional space to do so — no one wants to think there was something more they could have done to save their parent or child. It is not like buying a television, where you can easily comparison shop and walk out of the store, and even forgo the purchase if it’s too expensive. And imagine what you would pay for a television if the salesmen at Best Buy knew that you couldn’t leave without making a purchase.
“In my view, health is a business in the United States in quite a different way than it is elsewhere,” says Tom Sackville, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government and now directs the IFHP. “It’s very much something people make money out of. There isn’t too much embarrassment about that compared to Europe and elsewhere.”
The result is that, unlike in other countries, sellers of health-care services in America have considerable power to set prices, and so they set them quite high. Two of the five most profitable industries in the United States — the pharmaceuticals industry and the medical device industry — sell health care. With margins of almost 20 percent, they beat out even the financial sector for sheer profitability.
The players sitting across the table from them — the health insurers — are not so profitable. In 2009, their profit margins were a mere 2.2 percent. That’s a signal that the sellers have the upper hand over the buyers.
This is a good deal for residents of other countries, as our high spending makes medical innovations more profitable. “We end up with the benefits of your investment,” Sackville says. “You’re subsidizing the rest of the world by doing the front-end research.”
But many researchers are skeptical that this is an effective way to fund medical innovation. “We pay twice as much for brand-name drugs as most other industrialized countries,” Anderson says. “But the drug companies spend only 12 percent of their revenues on innovation. So yes, some of that money goes to innovation, but only 12 percent of it.”
And others point out that you also need to account for the innovations and investments that our spending on health care is squeezing out. “There are opportunity costs,” says Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton. “The money we spend on health care is money we don’t spend educating our children, or investing in infrastructure, scientific research and defense spending. So if what this means is we ultimately have overmedicalized, poorly educated Americans competing with China, that’s not a very good investment.”
But as simple an explanation as “the prices are higher” is, it is a devilishly difficult problem to fix. Those prices, for one thing, mean profits for a large number of powerful — and popular — industries. For another, centralized bargaining cuts across the grain of America’s skepticism of government solutions. In the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, for instance, Congress expressly barred Medicare from negotiating the prices of drugs that it was paying for.
The 2010 health-reform law does little to directly address prices. It includes provisions forcing hospitals to publish their prices, which would bring more transparency to this issue, and it gives lawmakers more tools and more information they could use to address prices at some future date. The hope is that by gathering more data to find out which treatments truly work, the federal government will eventually be able to set prices based on the value of treatments, which would be easier than simply setting lower prices across-the-board. But this is, for the most part, a fight the bill ducked, which is part of the reason that even its most committed defenders don’t think we’ll be paying anything like what they’re paying in other countries anytime soon.
“There is so much inefficiency in our system, that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit we can deal with before we get into regulating people’s prices.” says Len Nichols, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University. “Maybe, after we’ve cut waste for 10 years, we’ll be ready to have a discussion over prices.”
And some economists warn that though high prices help explain why America spends so much more on health care than other countries, cutting prices is no cure-all if it doesn’t also cut the rate of growth. After all, if you drop prices by 20 percent, but health-care spending still grows by seven percent a year, you’ve wiped out the savings in three years.
Even so, Anderson says, “if I could change one thing in the United States to bring down total health expenditures, it would definitely be the prices.”
Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France
By Ezra Klein
There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.
That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.
There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, “it’s the prices, stupid.”
As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians.
“The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do,” they concluded. “This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services.”
On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else.
Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.
“Other countries negotiate very aggressively with the providers and set rates that are much lower than we do,” Anderson says. They do this in one of two ways. In countries such as Canada and Britain, prices are set by the government. In others, such as Germany and Japan, they’re set by providers and insurers sitting in a room and coming to an agreement, with the government stepping in to set prices if they fail.
In America, Medicare and Medicaid negotiate prices on behalf of their tens of millions of members and, not coincidentally, purchase care at a substantial markdown from the commercial average. But outside that, it’s a free-for-all. Providers largely charge what they can get away with, often offering different prices to different insurers, and an even higher price to the uninsured.
Health care is an unusual product in that it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the customer to say “no.” In certain cases, the customer is passed out, or otherwise incapable of making decisions about her care, and the decisions are made by providers whose mandate is, correctly, to save lives rather than money.
In other cases, there is more time for loved ones to consider costs, but little emotional space to do so — no one wants to think there was something more they could have done to save their parent or child. It is not like buying a television, where you can easily comparison shop and walk out of the store, and even forgo the purchase if it’s too expensive. And imagine what you would pay for a television if the salesmen at Best Buy knew that you couldn’t leave without making a purchase.
“In my view, health is a business in the United States in quite a different way than it is elsewhere,” says Tom Sackville, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government and now directs the IFHP. “It’s very much something people make money out of. There isn’t too much embarrassment about that compared to Europe and elsewhere.”
The result is that, unlike in other countries, sellers of health-care services in America have considerable power to set prices, and so they set them quite high. Two of the five most profitable industries in the United States — the pharmaceuticals industry and the medical device industry — sell health care. With margins of almost 20 percent, they beat out even the financial sector for sheer profitability.
The players sitting across the table from them — the health insurers — are not so profitable. In 2009, their profit margins were a mere 2.2 percent. That’s a signal that the sellers have the upper hand over the buyers.
This is a good deal for residents of other countries, as our high spending makes medical innovations more profitable. “We end up with the benefits of your investment,” Sackville says. “You’re subsidizing the rest of the world by doing the front-end research.”
But many researchers are skeptical that this is an effective way to fund medical innovation. “We pay twice as much for brand-name drugs as most other industrialized countries,” Anderson says. “But the drug companies spend only 12 percent of their revenues on innovation. So yes, some of that money goes to innovation, but only 12 percent of it.”
And others point out that you also need to account for the innovations and investments that our spending on health care is squeezing out. “There are opportunity costs,” says Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton. “The money we spend on health care is money we don’t spend educating our children, or investing in infrastructure, scientific research and defense spending. So if what this means is we ultimately have overmedicalized, poorly educated Americans competing with China, that’s not a very good investment.”
But as simple an explanation as “the prices are higher” is, it is a devilishly difficult problem to fix. Those prices, for one thing, mean profits for a large number of powerful — and popular — industries. For another, centralized bargaining cuts across the grain of America’s skepticism of government solutions. In the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, for instance, Congress expressly barred Medicare from negotiating the prices of drugs that it was paying for.
The 2010 health-reform law does little to directly address prices. It includes provisions forcing hospitals to publish their prices, which would bring more transparency to this issue, and it gives lawmakers more tools and more information they could use to address prices at some future date. The hope is that by gathering more data to find out which treatments truly work, the federal government will eventually be able to set prices based on the value of treatments, which would be easier than simply setting lower prices across-the-board. But this is, for the most part, a fight the bill ducked, which is part of the reason that even its most committed defenders don’t think we’ll be paying anything like what they’re paying in other countries anytime soon.
“There is so much inefficiency in our system, that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit we can deal with before we get into regulating people’s prices.” says Len Nichols, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University. “Maybe, after we’ve cut waste for 10 years, we’ll be ready to have a discussion over prices.”
And some economists warn that though high prices help explain why America spends so much more on health care than other countries, cutting prices is no cure-all if it doesn’t also cut the rate of growth. After all, if you drop prices by 20 percent, but health-care spending still grows by seven percent a year, you’ve wiped out the savings in three years.
Even so, Anderson says, “if I could change one thing in the United States to bring down total health expenditures, it would definitely be the prices.”
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
The Cowardly Candidates of the GOP Are Going to Defend America? Ha! Ha Ha! Tell Me Another One
From The Washington Post -- March 5, 2012
Rush Limbaugh instills fear in GOP candidates
By Eugene Robinson
How’s this for political cowardice? Right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh launches a vile attack, full of sexual insults and smarmy innuendo, against a young woman whose only offense was to speak her mind. Asked to comment, the leading Republican presidential candidates — who bray constantly about “courage” and “leadership” — run from the bully and hide.
“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” said Mitt Romney. I wonder what language Romney thinks Limbaugh should have used to call Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” said Rick Santorum. I doubt seriously that Fluke found it entertaining, in an absurdist kind of way, when Limbaugh creepily suggested she and other women post sex videos on the Internet. I hope and trust that Santorum wasn’t entertained, either.
As for Newt Gingrich, the cat got his tongue, and apparently didn’t return it until Limbaugh had already apologized to Fluke for his “insulting word choices.” Gingrich went out on a limb Sunday and called Limbaugh’s apology “appropriate.”
Which it wasn’t, by the way. Limbaugh’s claim that “I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke” is an obvious lie; there’s no impersonal way to call a woman a slut. His abuse of Fluke — who advocated publicly last week that the health insurance she receives through Georgetown, a Catholic university, should be required to cover birth control — was no one-time gaffe. He poured it on, day after day.
And when he decided to back down, Limbaugh apologized only for his choice of words — not for the bitter misogyny he now believes he should have cloaked in prettier language.
Of the GOP candidates, only Ron Paul seemed to notice the insincerity of Limbaugh’s regret. “I don’t think he’s very apologetic,” Paul said. “He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off his program. It was his bottom line he’s concerned about.”
Why will Paul say the obvious while Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are barely willing to clear their throats? Because Paul, who is in this campaign to spread the gospels of libertarianism and Austrian economics, knows he can’t win the Republican nomination. The others, who think they do have a chance to win, are afraid of making Limbaugh into an enemy — or, in Romney’s case, into more of an enemy than he already is.
So let’s get this straight: These guys want us to believe they’re ready to face down Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Eun, the Taliban and what’s left of al-Qaeda. Yet they’re so scared of a talk-radio buffoon that they ignore or excuse an eruption of venom that some of Limbaugh’s advertisers — nine, at last count, have said they would no longer sponsor the show — find inexcusable.
I would have thought that crass political calculation might lead the would-be GOP nominees to the correct position on Limbaugh’s rhetorical depravity. Women constitute a majority of voters. If they merely lean toward the Democrats this fall, as they usually do, Republicans still have a mathematical chance to win the presidency by racking up a big majority among men. But if the GOP is perceived to endorse Limbaugh’s hateful rhetoric about “feminazis” and his stance of male grievance, female voters could turn what looked like a winnable election for Republicans into a debacle.
But Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are so frightened of being labeled insufficiently conservative — in this context, meaning “not nice enough to Rush” — that when given the opportunity to show some backbone, they go all wobbly.
What does this say about these men? To me, it suggests that maybe Romney isn’t as smart and disciplined as he’s said to be. Maybe Santorum isn’t as sincere, compassionate or moralistic as he appears. Maybe Gingrich’s vaunted intellectual courage is afraid of its own shadow.
As it happens, President Obama called Fluke last week to express his support. Perhaps, as a father, he imagined how he would feel if one of his daughters were attacked so viciously. Perhaps, as a canny politician, he saw the benefit of denouncing Limbaugh’s caustic caterwauling.
Either way, Republicans spent yet another week talking about contraception. Casey Stengel once said that “most ballgames are lost, not won.” He could have been talking about elections.
Rush Limbaugh instills fear in GOP candidates
By Eugene Robinson
How’s this for political cowardice? Right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh launches a vile attack, full of sexual insults and smarmy innuendo, against a young woman whose only offense was to speak her mind. Asked to comment, the leading Republican presidential candidates — who bray constantly about “courage” and “leadership” — run from the bully and hide.
“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” said Mitt Romney. I wonder what language Romney thinks Limbaugh should have used to call Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” said Rick Santorum. I doubt seriously that Fluke found it entertaining, in an absurdist kind of way, when Limbaugh creepily suggested she and other women post sex videos on the Internet. I hope and trust that Santorum wasn’t entertained, either.
As for Newt Gingrich, the cat got his tongue, and apparently didn’t return it until Limbaugh had already apologized to Fluke for his “insulting word choices.” Gingrich went out on a limb Sunday and called Limbaugh’s apology “appropriate.”
Which it wasn’t, by the way. Limbaugh’s claim that “I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke” is an obvious lie; there’s no impersonal way to call a woman a slut. His abuse of Fluke — who advocated publicly last week that the health insurance she receives through Georgetown, a Catholic university, should be required to cover birth control — was no one-time gaffe. He poured it on, day after day.
And when he decided to back down, Limbaugh apologized only for his choice of words — not for the bitter misogyny he now believes he should have cloaked in prettier language.
Of the GOP candidates, only Ron Paul seemed to notice the insincerity of Limbaugh’s regret. “I don’t think he’s very apologetic,” Paul said. “He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off his program. It was his bottom line he’s concerned about.”
Why will Paul say the obvious while Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are barely willing to clear their throats? Because Paul, who is in this campaign to spread the gospels of libertarianism and Austrian economics, knows he can’t win the Republican nomination. The others, who think they do have a chance to win, are afraid of making Limbaugh into an enemy — or, in Romney’s case, into more of an enemy than he already is.
So let’s get this straight: These guys want us to believe they’re ready to face down Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Eun, the Taliban and what’s left of al-Qaeda. Yet they’re so scared of a talk-radio buffoon that they ignore or excuse an eruption of venom that some of Limbaugh’s advertisers — nine, at last count, have said they would no longer sponsor the show — find inexcusable.
I would have thought that crass political calculation might lead the would-be GOP nominees to the correct position on Limbaugh’s rhetorical depravity. Women constitute a majority of voters. If they merely lean toward the Democrats this fall, as they usually do, Republicans still have a mathematical chance to win the presidency by racking up a big majority among men. But if the GOP is perceived to endorse Limbaugh’s hateful rhetoric about “feminazis” and his stance of male grievance, female voters could turn what looked like a winnable election for Republicans into a debacle.
But Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are so frightened of being labeled insufficiently conservative — in this context, meaning “not nice enough to Rush” — that when given the opportunity to show some backbone, they go all wobbly.
What does this say about these men? To me, it suggests that maybe Romney isn’t as smart and disciplined as he’s said to be. Maybe Santorum isn’t as sincere, compassionate or moralistic as he appears. Maybe Gingrich’s vaunted intellectual courage is afraid of its own shadow.
As it happens, President Obama called Fluke last week to express his support. Perhaps, as a father, he imagined how he would feel if one of his daughters were attacked so viciously. Perhaps, as a canny politician, he saw the benefit of denouncing Limbaugh’s caustic caterwauling.
Either way, Republicans spent yet another week talking about contraception. Casey Stengel once said that “most ballgames are lost, not won.” He could have been talking about elections.
The Demise of the Right-Wing SlimeBall, Andrew Breitbart
From The Washington Post -- March 5, 2012
Andrew Breitbart, a bomb-thrower without ideas
By Richard Cohen,
It is not nice to speak ill of the dead, my mother once told me. But it is okay, I think, to speak ill of those who praise the dead when the deceased was best known for sliming a well-intentioned and wholly commendable public servant or for exposing a politician who had already exposed himself. I am referring to Andrew Breitbart, whose passing was noted and mourned throughout the conservative firmament. His eulogies tell us more about the movement than they do about him.
Almost immediately, conservative commentators let out a wail signifying the passing of one of their own. True, Breitbart was shockingly young, a mere 43, but then in those few years he had done much — a good deal of it revolting and some of it unethical or sloppy. He claimed enormous credit for revealing that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was a flasher, but the so-called crime had no victim and was not in the least way political. Breitbart had ousted a liberal from Congress not in an election or in an exchange of ideas but because he caught him with his pants down. Conservatives cheered. They have, as we all know, considerable trouble with any kind of sex.
Earlier, Breitbart reported that Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official of epic obscurity, had confessed to discriminating as an African American against whites. Breitbart had a tape of her remarks and he put it out there to a grateful nation. But the full tape — not the snippet he offered to the ravenous Internet — showed nothing of the sort. It was just the opposite, in fact. Breitbart had failed to check it out, he claimed. Why?
Every journalist knows the expression “too good to be true.” But for Breitbart, the Sherrod story was too good not to be true. It had to be true. She was exactly the kind of person that a left-wing, socialist, Muslim president like Barack Hussein Obama would like to appoint to high federal office. Call Breitbart’s tactics what you will, it wasn’t journalism.
James Q. Wilson also died last week. He was a scholar and a damned fine writer and also a conservative. He was mostly famous for writing, along with George L. Kelling, an Atlantic Monthly article that outlined the “Broken Windows” theory of criminology. Some police officials took note, among them William Bratton, later to become New York City police chief under Rudolph Giuliani. Bratton applied Wilson’s theories about tending to the little things — fare-jumpers in the subways, for instance — and crime plummeted.
Wilson was my kind of conservative. He was ruled not by dogma or ideology but by common sense. He was of the same school of intellectuals who once wrote for Commentary or the Public Interest and National Review. These journals twitched with new ideas and they were alive to challenging liberal orthodoxy, a necessary, even moral, obligation at times. The writers who created and wrote for these publications would never have abided rigid pledges about not raising taxes or wondering about evolution or rejecting global warming for ideological — not scientific — reasons. The nomination of Sarah Palin would probably have appalled William F. Buckley, had he not died some months before.
The distance from Wilson to Breitbart is one way to measure how deeply lost the American conservative movement has become. The recent lineup of earnest fools who have proclaimed their readiness to rule the nation and the world was — and remains — a depressing and frightening sight. Imagine President Perry or Santorum or Bachmann or Palin or Gingrich. This horror is partially the product of a Republican intellectual and political establishment that has only one value: to win. The party’s hierarchy patronizes its own base. It will use its energy and grievances to regain power so that a select few can lead. It offers nothing by way of rebuke to religious figures, such as the astoundingly bigoted Franklin Graham, who dress their prejudice in the glad rags of piety.
Peggy Noonan writes that Andrew Breitbart had many charming qualities. I take her at her word. But it’s not a huge leap from Breitbart’s libel of Sherrod to Rush Limbaugh’s sliming of Sandra Fluke — an older African American, a young woman: caricatures both. A public man should be judged by his public acts. And in Breitbart I can find nothing of value. He thought politics was like war. Wilson thought it was about ideas. That’s why you can only read about Breitbart. You can, however, always read Wilson.
Andrew Breitbart, a bomb-thrower without ideas
By Richard Cohen,
It is not nice to speak ill of the dead, my mother once told me. But it is okay, I think, to speak ill of those who praise the dead when the deceased was best known for sliming a well-intentioned and wholly commendable public servant or for exposing a politician who had already exposed himself. I am referring to Andrew Breitbart, whose passing was noted and mourned throughout the conservative firmament. His eulogies tell us more about the movement than they do about him.
Almost immediately, conservative commentators let out a wail signifying the passing of one of their own. True, Breitbart was shockingly young, a mere 43, but then in those few years he had done much — a good deal of it revolting and some of it unethical or sloppy. He claimed enormous credit for revealing that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was a flasher, but the so-called crime had no victim and was not in the least way political. Breitbart had ousted a liberal from Congress not in an election or in an exchange of ideas but because he caught him with his pants down. Conservatives cheered. They have, as we all know, considerable trouble with any kind of sex.
Earlier, Breitbart reported that Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official of epic obscurity, had confessed to discriminating as an African American against whites. Breitbart had a tape of her remarks and he put it out there to a grateful nation. But the full tape — not the snippet he offered to the ravenous Internet — showed nothing of the sort. It was just the opposite, in fact. Breitbart had failed to check it out, he claimed. Why?
Every journalist knows the expression “too good to be true.” But for Breitbart, the Sherrod story was too good not to be true. It had to be true. She was exactly the kind of person that a left-wing, socialist, Muslim president like Barack Hussein Obama would like to appoint to high federal office. Call Breitbart’s tactics what you will, it wasn’t journalism.
James Q. Wilson also died last week. He was a scholar and a damned fine writer and also a conservative. He was mostly famous for writing, along with George L. Kelling, an Atlantic Monthly article that outlined the “Broken Windows” theory of criminology. Some police officials took note, among them William Bratton, later to become New York City police chief under Rudolph Giuliani. Bratton applied Wilson’s theories about tending to the little things — fare-jumpers in the subways, for instance — and crime plummeted.
Wilson was my kind of conservative. He was ruled not by dogma or ideology but by common sense. He was of the same school of intellectuals who once wrote for Commentary or the Public Interest and National Review. These journals twitched with new ideas and they were alive to challenging liberal orthodoxy, a necessary, even moral, obligation at times. The writers who created and wrote for these publications would never have abided rigid pledges about not raising taxes or wondering about evolution or rejecting global warming for ideological — not scientific — reasons. The nomination of Sarah Palin would probably have appalled William F. Buckley, had he not died some months before.
The distance from Wilson to Breitbart is one way to measure how deeply lost the American conservative movement has become. The recent lineup of earnest fools who have proclaimed their readiness to rule the nation and the world was — and remains — a depressing and frightening sight. Imagine President Perry or Santorum or Bachmann or Palin or Gingrich. This horror is partially the product of a Republican intellectual and political establishment that has only one value: to win. The party’s hierarchy patronizes its own base. It will use its energy and grievances to regain power so that a select few can lead. It offers nothing by way of rebuke to religious figures, such as the astoundingly bigoted Franklin Graham, who dress their prejudice in the glad rags of piety.
Peggy Noonan writes that Andrew Breitbart had many charming qualities. I take her at her word. But it’s not a huge leap from Breitbart’s libel of Sherrod to Rush Limbaugh’s sliming of Sandra Fluke — an older African American, a young woman: caricatures both. A public man should be judged by his public acts. And in Breitbart I can find nothing of value. He thought politics was like war. Wilson thought it was about ideas. That’s why you can only read about Breitbart. You can, however, always read Wilson.
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