Category: Rants

If it is not yet apparent, perhaps it is time for the last holdouts among us to accept the fact that the American healthcare system is never going to undergo any meaningful reform. Whatever comes out of this Congress and ends up on the desk of the suddenly-not-so-bold President will be watered down, ineffective, costly, and of little use to people who really need it – the working uninsured who are too "rich" for Medicaid and too poor to pay out-of-pocket.

I believe there are three main reasons for the impending and perpetual failure of reform.

First, insurance industry shills and more importantly their ideological allies now have too prominent a pulpit for spreading disinformation. ClintonCare in 1994 represented the last, best shot at reform because it was the last pre-Fox News effort. Fifteen years ago the industry lobby had to engage in a very expensive anti-reform PR campaign, most memorably the "Harry and Louise" TV ads which showed a respect for the truth on par with that of an Alabama used car salesman. Now? They don't even have to spend a dime. The right wing media does the hatchet job for them.

Why bother with PR campaigns when people from national celebrities like Limbaugh down to dopey 7th-string imitations on bad websites and local AM stations will rail against it for hours gratis?

Second, the timing is just spectacularly inept.

Even the d-bag the NY Times hired to replace Bill Kristol understands this:

But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all. That’s why Franklin Roosevelt waited until 1935, when the Great Depression seemed to be waning, to push Social Security through Congress. It’s why Lyndon Johnson established Medicare at the peak of the long post-World War II expansion. And it’s why Massachusetts’s health care plan and California’s cap on greenhouse-gas emissions both passed at the height of the recent boom, rather than the bottom.

This might have worked after a prolonged period – 12 to 18 months – of sustained positive economic news.

Maybe in late 2011, just in time for the 2012 election. But now? It might not even get to a floor vote. This is an unqualified fuck-up on the White House's part and the first serious misjudgment by a President who suddenly sounds a lot more like Eisenhower than the election year FDR comparisons would lead us to believe.

Third, I have serious doubts about the American public's ability to meaningfully process this issue. It is universally (see what I did there?) recognized as a complex problem with correspondingly complex solutions. They are being pitched to an electorate in which 14% of adults – one out of every seven people sitting on the bus with you – are functionally illiterate. They can't read this blog or the instructions on their Easy Mac let alone understand what a single-payer system would entail and how it would affect them personally. I feel like the public listens up to the point at which they can no longer understand it – which doesn't take long, sadly – and then the shields go up.

After that, they either decide that they fear change or that they should hide their lack of comprehension behind some slogans they heard on Glenn Beck's show. There is a reason elected officials spend so much time talking about what political scientists call easy issues – those for which citizens need no information whatsoever to form valid-sounding opinions (i.e. "moral" issues like gay marriage or abortion, which anyone can declare Right or Wrong).

Until any of these things change, and I'm certainly not holding my breath, it is pointless to even propose a serious overhaul of the status quo let alone expect one to pass.

America's inboxes lit up on Monday with the tale of a young woman who is suing her alma mater for the cost of her tuition because she can't find a job – or so the forwarded emails claim.
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She is actually filing suit because she alleges that the school's placement office is treating her differently than other students, but regardless of how her situation is or is not misrepresented she is presented as one might suspend someone over a dunk tank and charge sunburnt and corn dog eating rubes a quarter to whip baseballs at the target. That is what the media do best: make Straw Man arguments based on isolated examples of complete idiots, often complete idiots filing frivilous lawsuits, so that lazy, entitled sacks of shit across the nation can let fly torrents of indignation.
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CNN's narrative barely disguises its contempt and suggestions about how we should feel:

As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe's career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.
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This is the point at which we're supposed to get on our high horses and bloviate about laziness, hard work, personal responsibility, The Greatest Generation, and the Way Things Used to Be but no longer are. While the person in this isolated example does sound like somewhat of a knucklehead, this story is still instructive of a growing social problem: we are selling a lot of expensive college degrees to students who walk out the door and find that they aren't worth a whole lot.
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How can $70,000 for a Bachelor's from for-profit "Monroe College" be considered anything but a con? Plenty of students are leaving "good" schools and entering the bottom rung of the economy doing jobs which barely require a high school diploma. What a recent bestseller labelled The Quarterlife Crisis is transitioning from a personal issue to a social phenomenon. We're at risk for developing a sizeable generation of young people whose cynicism, social isolation, and sense of futility will make the much-publicized Generation X from the early 90s look like Up With People. The idea of having the kind of careers that previous generations enjoyed – stability, promotion, and retirement on pension – disappeared decades ago when our Baby Boomer parents sold it to Mexico and China hoping to cash out with their 401(k)s. Now the idea of finding any employment at all to justify the cost of higher education is starting to slip away.

I can hardly blame recent college graduates for adopting the overwhelmingly disinterested, what-difference-does-it-make-anyway attitude. How long can you be unemployed or working a minimum wage, no-benefit job with 50, 70, or 100 grand in college debt? How many people can graduate and celebrate the passage into adulthood by moving back in with mom and dad before they give up altogether? For how long can we perpetuate the idea that education is the cure-all for these economic trainwrecks without tangible evidence that it's worth it? This news-of-the-weird item might prove that suing universities is not the answer, but it also raises the question of whether attending them is any more productive.

I can't help but notice that almost exactly 6 months into the Obama presidency the first histrionic wingnut attempt to cash in on it has already arrived in bookstores. Yes, Michelle Malkin stopped picking the corn out of her own shit for long enough to churn out Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, the title of which was meticulously chosen by a panel of 11 year-old boys.

Have you ever sat down and tried to write a book? It's agonizing, slow, and not unlike sitting down in an open field with a hammer and a stack of two-by-fours and saying "OK, time to build a house." To have churned out a book about a presidency which has yet to go on longer than the average baseball season requires either herculean research and writing skills or the employment of some creative time-saving measures. It's 376 pages. Three hundred and seventy-six fucking pages! I mean, I know there are some ginandtacos readers in the publishing industry and the idea that a book of that length could even be edited, revised, typeset, and printed in this timeframe would be extraordinary let alone considering that A) it had to be written (376 pages!) and B) enough things had to happen for an author to actually write about. One of three things must be true in the exercise of Malkin's tradecraft:

1. The book was written in 2008 right after it became apparent that the Republican field was not going to produce a successful candidate – you know, around January 1 – and the names of the winner and his "cronies" were filled in with a simple ctrl-f find-and-replace session. INSERT NAME HERE sure is a corrupt, godless little liberal, after all.

2. The book is a hastily-assembled pastiche of glorified blog posts which involved absolutely no research and thus could be written in just a couple of weeks, albeit at great effort. For context, the average ginandtacos post is about 800 words and, if it involves minimal fact-finding, takes around an hour. In Word that would be about a single-spaced page. So, you know, do that about 250 times and you'd have Malkin's book. Unless it has 3" margins, which wouldn't surprise me in the least.

3. 342 of the 376 pages are reproduced transcripts of the Oliver North trial.

If you want to feel like shit about this country, please understand that the book immediately rocketed to the top of the Amazon bestseller list where it currently resides snugly behind Glenn Beck's Common Sense. Who buys this shit? Can they possibly read it? Can they read? Skim the comments to learn that, contrary to the expectations one might have about a book about the first six months of a presidency but released six months and seven days after said presidency began, the book is fabulously well-researched:

Ms. Malkin did her homework and the facts, figures, and resource information presented in this cogent, well crafted, invaluable book make for a must read. Culture of Corruption will confirm what many have long suspected about this president and his administration, or will be a real eye opener for Obama supporters who went along for the ride for no other reason than the catchy slogans and still don't get why they ought to be alarmed. As an aside – this illuminating book dovetails handsomely with the important work Ms. Malkin does every day on her blog site keeping the citizenry informed. Thank you Ms. Malkin and keep on fighting the good fight.

Of course that review was written on July 28, twelve hours after the book was released. So the person who wrote that review, unless working for the publisher and privy to advance copies, didn't even read it. That is, on so many levels, fitting. Art imitates life; reviewer imitates author.

I gained about 20 pounds while taking my qualifying field exams three years ago. It took me all of three months to gain it yet for the last three years I've been trying to lose it with zero success. The fact that weight is infinitely easier to gain than it is to lose, combined with the fact that the most attractive people are often the least interesting, is the surest indicator that life simply isn't fair. In an ideal world every journey would be on level ground, but when it comes to our metabolism the process of getting fatter is downhill while getting thinner is uphill. Up an icy hill. Into a tornado.

We have no control over these facts of life, so all we can do is lament them. In the political world, however, we do have control over a lot of things. Californians, if I can run with the analogy, have binged themselves into budgetary oblivion and are now resorting to drastic procedures to combat the reality that it is far easier to fuck up a government's financial health than it is to unfuck it. If the average state's unhealthy financial position today is like a person with 10 or 20 unwanted pounds, California is bedridden, weighs half a ton, and waits patiently for firemen to knock out the bedroom wall and remove him with a crane.

As medical professionals have to resort to dramatic and often risky procedures to treat a person who is 600 pounds overweight, California has been self-administering some radical surgeries lately, whether sending out IOUs instead of checks, wantonly hacking things out of the budget, getting its bond rating downgraded to near junk, jacking up tuitions while slashing education spending, or engaging in waves of mandatory furloughs. And of course none of it is enough. The depressed global and national economy is going to exert significant downward pressure on the state's income and property tax reciepts next year, meaning that whatever gap-fix solution presented today is likely to leave the state in the exact same situation next summer.

How did things get so bad? Well, the state made it easier for itself to get fat than to lose weight. In 1978 voters passed Proposition 13 which required a 2/3 majority in the legislature to impose new taxes or raise existing ones. No one, of course, was smart enough to realize what would happen if the opposite – a 2/3 majority required to cut taxes – was not also imposed. Combined with other portions of the law which limit property tax assessments to 1% of total property value, Prop 13 greased the skids for California to binge on tax cuts while making it difficult and painful to raise taxes. It's a complex situation with many causes, but the impact of the "tax revolt" can't be overstated.

Orange County, birthplace of the "tax revolt" (along with the subdivision, the strip mall, and the eponymous and christ-awful TV show), went bankrupt in 1994. It remains the largest Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in the nation's history, and the final nail in its coffin was the rejection by voters of a 1991 ballot proposition to raise sales taxes by half a fucking cent to pay for county courts and jails (you know, to handle that War on Drugs of which Orange County's meatheaded legions were the most fervent supporters).

The only options at this point are painful budget cuts or painful (and nearly impossible to achieve) tax increases. When the budget is finally pared down to the point at which the state's voters can tolerate no further cuts in education, services, and policing, maybe they will have learned enough to revisit the wisdom of their 1978 decision to make slashing taxes as easy and mindless for the legislature as wolfing down the entire damn bag of chips while staring at the TV is for us.

We all harbor the lingering fear that there is no idiot so ignorant or so vulgar that the American public will not elect him or her to office. Hence the last eight years and the cold dread we all feel as we watch Sarah Palin drool her way through public life. We stare and think "We couldn't possibly…" but stop because deep down we know that we could. Hence my hesitation to say "This is too far." about any outgrowth of stupidity from our political culture. It will inevitably lead to eating my words. Nonetheless…

If its elected officials do not take a stronger stand against it – and, God help them, if they continue to flirt with embracing it – this Obama birth certificate conspiracism is going to be the death of the GOP. Like the "secret Muslim" stuff during the 2008 Election, this issue is forcing mainstream Republicans to face up to just how bat-shit insane their party base is these days. Note the parallels between these two videos, one from last summer and the other from just a few days ago:

If you can't watch a/v at the moment, the first video is the infamous clip of McCain confronted with a supporter who insists that Obama "is an Arab." The second is Delaware Republican Rep. Mike Castle dealing with a "birther" – and from the sounds of it, quite a few fellow travellers in the background – at a town hall meeting. Apparently Castle's antagonist is well-known as a lunatic who has actually been banned from calling the local right-wing talk radio station. Note both men's pained "Oh my God, what has become of my party" demeanor as they attempt to be calm and speak Logic to what are obviously unhinged and potentially dangerous rubes.

If birtherism sounds like something dreamt up by the tinfoil-hatted, it is. But if it sounds like something that is confined to the realm of the tinfoil-hatted, it isn't. As my Instaputz colleague notes, with helpful links, in response to Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry's claim that birthers are just a tiny fringe blown out of proportion by the liberal media:

Let me see now, those "few" include, just off the top of my head: at least 17 elected Republicans in Congress, numerous Republican state legislators, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Liz Cheney, Michael Savage, Alan Keyes, G. Gordon Liddy, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax and Free Republic.

Oh, and the National Review.

Just a few cranks!

This is to credibility among conservatives what 9/11 twoofers were to the anti-Bush crowd. Look. Here is a picture of his birth certificate. Regarding the claims that he must produce a second long-form certificate with multiple signatures, please read the bottom of this one: "This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding." There is no longer a requirement, politically or legally, for the President to continue to entertain this fantasy. While I understand the whole "Well, just release it and be done with it" argument, which sounds suspiciously like an effort to endorse the possibility of the legitimacy of these claims without overtly stating it, there is no good reason for Obama to get suckered into a debate here. If he produces the long-form certificate they will just claim it is forged. He should stick with the sanitized version of, "You need more evidence? Fuck you. That's my evidence." from now on.

I once heard a Jewish professor state that she refused to debate Holocaust deniers in a public forum because if 1000 people watch, only one will leave convinced by the denialists' argument but all 1000 will leave thinking the issue is open for debate. There is nothing to be gained by debating some people and legitimizing their claims, however insignificantly, can be damaging. Nothing Barack Obama says or does will make any difference to this movement. They will simply move on to something else or disregard whatever additional evidence he provides as forged or biased. So to engage them does nothing except make them look relevant. "Secret Muslim" and "Where's the birth certificate?" are really just sanitized PC-era euphemisms for "nigger" anyway, the desperate Hail Mary play from a group of people choking on their rage over the idea that a liberal black guy with a funny-soundin' foreigny name beat the tar out of his Republican opponents. There are only so many times one can show conspiracists the evidence before concluding that they have no interest whatsoever in drawing conclusions based on evidence. While the unanimous vote on the House resolution affirming Hawaii as Obama's birthplace is a step in the right direction, mainstream Republicans have their work cut out for them in squashing this nonsense without alienating the retards who make up 2/3rds of their party base these days.

Americans believe anything that feels like it should be true and, as a nation, know absolutely dick about economics.
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Thus bits of folk wisdom based on an Econ 101-level understanding of macroeconomics quickly rise to the status of gospel truth – half urban legend, half unadulterated bullshit. The Federal minimum wage is set to rise to .
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25 on Friday and, as we all "know," raising the minimum wage makes jobs disappear.

Whenever Americans appear to be at risk of forgetting this kind of wisdom, a corporate-backed front group emerges with a marketing campaign to ram home the point. The "Employment Policies Institute," which pitches itself as a think tank (while the media happily play along) but is actually a lobbyist- and business-funded anti-living wage group, fills that role today. Their point is simple. The money in our economy represents a zero-sum game; if wages must go up, the number of jobs sharing the finite pool of cash available for wages must decrease.
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Write that on the final exam and revel in your C-. Then get a job writing syndicated financial columns with your sophomoric logic.

Disregard the fact that half of the states already have the $7.25 minimum and there is not the slightest bit of evidence that any state or Federal minimum wage hike in the past led to job loss. Why, in the zero-sum game, must the variables be limited to the number of jobs and the minimum wage? If the number of employees and hours worked at a business are held constant, then the cost of employing a minimum wage workforce will increase. Why must that result in job loss? Why can it not result in a 10 cent price increase on your Whoppers Junior? Why can it not result in a seven-figure bonus for the higher-ups instead of an eight-figure one? Why can the cost not be recovered from other non-wage costs of operating the business?

None of those scenarios can be proposed because the purpose here is not, and never has been, to discuss the role of labor costs in the economics of operating a business.
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The purpose is to scare ignorant or desperate people into thinking that they will lose their job of they don't speak up to protect the boss's right to pay them like illegal immigrants. As the current marketing campaign to this effect is speaking out against a wage hike which has already been signed into law, I'm guessing that understanding the relationship between wages and job supply is not the only aspect of economics that the Employment Policies Institute and its followers fail to grasp correctly.

Any skeptics about lingering racism and gender biases in our society would do well to pay some attention to the Sotomayor nomination and confirmation process (and lord knows there's little other reason to pay attention). Now, when those terms are mentioned people immediately think "But I don't hate Mexicans!" and "I don't oppose her because she has a vagina!" These statements are probably true. Her political opponents (discounting Tom Tancredo) may not hate Hispanics or women, but they are less than shy about concluding that she is not otherwise qualified for the office.

The argument starts from a basic premise: the President chose Sotomayor from a pool of potential nominees which, in theory and according to the letter of Art. III of the Constitution, includes every American citizen because she is a woman and she is Hispanic. It's the basic Identity Politics argument. This conclusion can stand alone, i.e. supported by the belief that white men are, by definition, the most qualified people and others can only be elevated as a form of tokenism or "affirmative action." It can also be based upon a form of logic, which is an accurate description inasmuch as "shit that is wrong and does not actually make sense" is a kind of logic.
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And it is. It is bad logic.

While the Constitution leaves the door wide open for Supreme Court nominations, in the context of modern politics I think we can agree that the pool of potential choices is limited to people with law degrees.
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We might go even further and state that the pool is limited to people with judicial experience. Either way, this creates a pool of applicants in which white men are the most numerous demographic. This leads people who are bad at thinking to conclude that the probability of the most qualified individual in the applicant pool being a white male is higher than any other demographic group. In other words, if most judges are white men then the most qualified judge is most likely a white male. Or, to put it another way, if you have 20 socks in your drawer and 15 are white, a blind grab in the drawer is most likely to produce a white sock.

But at this point the logic is already irrevocably shot to shit. The preponderance of white males in the pool of potential Supreme Court nominees supports only the conclusion that a randomly selected member of the group is likely to be a white guy. Race and gender are two variables in the process and qualifications are the third. So to draw an accurate inference about tokenism or Identity Politics we would need to define the pool of qualified applicants and then observe its racial and gender composition. So let's treat Qualification as a dichotomous variable (i.e., either Yes or No).

What would make a judge unqualified? Blatant disregard for the law or inability to interpret it reasonably, either of which could be revealed by studying the percentage of said judge's decisions which are overturned by a higher court. If an appellate court is overturning half of someone's decisions, said judge probably has no idea what he or she is doing. Or he or she has an ideological ax to grind. Experience would also be a measure of quality (hence Clarence Thomas's 12 months on the bench led many to conclude that he was unqualified). But once we have defined this group of people who meet the minimum threshold to be called "qualified," then what? Any Federal judge or state Supreme Court justice who performs the duties of the job without problems is probably "qualified." Who, then, is "most qualified?"

The answer is that no one is, obviously. The top 30 or 40 candidates for the Supreme Court are, on paper, largely indistinguishable. They've all sat on the bench. They all went to big-name law schools. They could all be thrown on the Supreme Court and perform the required duties adequately. So the President's choice is – sit down for a moment, Mr. Beck – personal. That's why the Constitution stipulates that a person should make it. From a group of equally qualified candidates, the President is tasked to choose the person whose philosophy, temperament, and personality mesh with his. After all, this is the choice of a person who will be a major part of defining a President's legacy.

This process is not the damn BCS or the eHarmony personal compatibility test.
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The purpose is not to develop a computer program to weight characteristics and rank-order the candidates from most to least qualified. It's a process in which the Senate's role is to ensure that the President's choice reaches the threshold to be called Qualified. Beyond that the process is and, more importantly, is intended to be a subjective and personal one. The Most Qualified Candidate is a straw man and the quest to find him (and it's inevitably Him) is a search for last night's thunderstorm.
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