Brooks Gets One Right

The Republicans have lived for decades in mortal fear that the Democratic Party would create an effective national healthcare system, true universal medical coverage. Fortunately for them, the Democratic Party is intent upon passing a horribly defective bill that, in what seems to be its most likely form, is likely to be both ineffective and extremely unpopular. David Brooks observes,

Republicans are going to oppose this health care bill. Oppose, oppose, oppose. And I can half understand where they are coming from. The Democratic approach does involve a lot of government control. Moreover, it is very likely that many Congressional districts that are now Democratic will turn Republican as a result of backlash against the bill. It’s hard to ask a party to punch a gift horse in the mouth.

I'm not sure what he means by "a lot of government control", but I do think he's correct that the Baucus bill (even the "new and improved" proposal) is likely to create a significant backlash among people who are forced to buy bad insurance policies or pay a penalty. Whether people get stuck with useless, overpriced insurance, or pay a penalty to avoid having to spend even more on that useless insurance policy, they're going to be angry.

Something that impresses Brooks leaves me unimpressed:

Fourth, Republicans have all along said that the bill should not make our fiscal situation worse. The Congressional Budget Office says the Baucus bill is deficit neutral over the first 10 years and would save money over the next 10. The C.B.O. number may not take into account the various political inevitabilities. Still, that’s pretty darn impressive.

We're back in the mode of trying to create a bill that's "everything to everyone", and thereby undermining every logical goal of true healthcare reform in the name of being "deficit neutral."

The Baucus Debacle

Max Baucus has apparently figured out that his atrocious healthcare reform bill isn't going to work very well, so he's... softening the penalties in a manner that will undermine universality - and make it financially appealing, and often beneficial to pay a penalty instead of paying for worthless insurance.

If Cohen's Right....

One can only hope that he and Obama become fast friends.

Telling somebody what seems obviously true, "Dude, don't do it, you'll only embarrass yourself, and you'll hurt your party" is now defenestration? Is Cohen channeling Homer Simpson, or something?

Rehabilitating Bush

Boy, Ross Douthat must have a serious man crush to take on this task. "The Self-Correcting Presidency"? Douthat opens with a litany of Bush's failures - let's see which of them were corrected by Bush:

On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose.

That would be... none of the above. So where does Douthat find evidence of "self-correction"?

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Let's take those one at a time.

The Iraq war.... I know Dothat took Bill Kristol's spot at the Times, so maybe this column recycles a draft Kristol threw away before his contract expired? Or maybe one of Kristol's old columns, barely starting to yellow at the corners, that somehow ended up under a printer or left in a forgotten file folder? ("Never mind the facts you see before you - Bush will be vindicated!") Before you ask, "But isn't that the sort of analysis that makes you wonder why the Times hired Kristol in the first place, let alone why it took them so long to send him packing," well... it's now a pattern, isn't it.

When we say "the surge worked", we mean that the the deaths of members of the U.S. military have declined, that an escalating civil war has been pushed back, and that there's room for political progress. It's undisputed, save perhaps on right-wing radio, that the surge is not a solution and its benefits cannot be sustained indefinitely in the absence of political progress.

Douthat's providing a less complete version of what Peter Beinart attempted in January, attempting to recast the surge (and history) as a vindication of Bush. (I responded to Beinart's arguments here.) Revisiting Bush's own standards for when we'll know the surge to be a success, as stated almost three years ago:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

Well, they did eventually hold provincial elections, and have made progress on taking responsibility for their own security, but the rest? The surge can only be defined as a success if we throw out Bush's own standards by which its success was to be measured.

Douthat also suggests that Bush had a choice between action and inaction - as if the Congress would have sat idly by while the conditions in Iraq continued to deteriorate. Bush's options were to fold or go "all in", and he chose the latter. That served to stabilize the situation in Iraq, at further detriment to the mission in Afghanistan, but has not resulted in anything that can reasonably be described as "success". The surge, and the related strategic changes that preceded it, have been crucial to opening a window of opportunity, but Bush when it came to taking advantage of that window Bush again proved himself a failure. The hard part was left to his successor. Contrary to Douthat's thesis, this was not Bush repairing his mistakes - the surge was a patch job that has, fortunately, held up longer than expected but can't hold forever. Also, we're well past the point where we can deny that "the surge" was anything short of an escalation. So when Douthat elaborates,

On foreign policy, Bush looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson - but only if Johnson, after years of unsuccessful escalation, had bequeathed Richard Nixon a new strategy that enabled U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam with their honor largely intact.

A distinction without a difference, as ironically highlighted by Douthat's choice of words - should we call the Iraq withdrawal "Peace with Honor"?

I think Douthat's actually a bit hard on Bush, blaming the housing bubble on him. Sure, he encouraged it. Sure, Bush's claimed "economic successes" were predicated upon spending enabled by the housing bubble, and claimed economic growth and growth in productivity were predicated upon the excesses of the financial industry. But the foundation for that bubble was already in place. Sure, a better President might have declared that a time of war is not a time for tax cuts and profligate spending, imposing fiscal discipline and trying to keep the budget deficit under control - and those steps likely would have arrested the bubble even with continued disregard of the economic Cassandras who saw it coming.

And yes, the response to the collapse of the financial industry - a response that likely did prevent a much worse global economic catastrophe or depression - was started in Bush's watch. So we should be looking for Douthat to write an editorial defending this year's massive deficits as the inevitable result of Bush's policy, not something that should be blamed on the Obama Administration, right? And castigating those who criticize Obama for being too soft on the financial industry, or too fast and loose with bailout funds, right?

But seriously, Douthat shouldn't elide Bush's eight years of fiscal imprudence - financial recklessness - from the picture. We probably would still be hearing the same critiques had Bush followed a more sensible budgetary policy and had we nonetheless ended up with a similar financial crisis, but the cry, "we can't afford it", has a lot more resonance in the wake of Bush's multi-trillion dollar run-up of the deficit.

As Douthat admits, neither the surge nor the financial industry bailout were formulated by Bush. As with the surge, the financial industry bailout seems born of desperation, not careful policy considerations. Going to Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke and saying, "Here's a blank check - fix this" isn't something that's particularly worthy of praise. Like the surge, it was a Hail Mary.

But maybe it makes sense that Douthat is most impressed by Bush's Hail Mary's. After all, Douthat's arguing that those are the moves for which another president might "get canonized".

Douthat next tries to rationalize away some of Bush's other remarkable failures:

In reality, many of the Bush-era ventures that look worst in hindsight were either popular with the public at the time or blessed by the elite consensus. Voters liked the budget-busting tax cuts and entitlement expansions. The Iraq war’s cheering section included prominent Democrats and scores of liberal pundits. And save for a few prescient souls, everybody - right and left, on Wall Street and Main Street - was happy to board the real-estate express and ride it off an economic cliff.

Blessed by an "elite consensus"? Does Douthat mean Bush, Cheney, and the elites of the "Club for Growth"?

Passing legislation that's popular with voters generally doesn't make you a good President. As Bush demonstrates, sometimes its part and parcel of why you're a bad President. Had he passed a literal "chicken in every pot, car in every garage" bill, it likely would have been popular with voters - that doesn't mean it's good policy, even if its popular and thus difficult for politicians to vote against.

Further, Bush wasn't honest in his policy formation. The arguments he made in favor of his tax cuts were situational and self-serving. "The economy's strong - tax cuts will sustain this!" "The economy's faltering - tax cuts will restore it!" "We're in a recession - tax cuts will fix this!" On top of that he shrouded his true intention - massive tax cuts for the wealthy - in a modest tax cut for the middle class. Anybody who pointed out the irresponsibility and top-heavy nature of the tax cuts risked being branded as engaging in "class warfare" or fighting against the American value that people should be able to keep the fruits of their successes.

Douthat also pulls a bait-and-switch, conflating the argument that, "This policy is not entirely wrong, and may even be a good idea, but it's implementation is horrible," with full-throated support. The Medicare prescription drug benefit, for example, was a poorly executed piece of legislation. (To its credit, though,Max Baucus might have come up with something even worse.) It was unnecessarily expensive, unnecessarily confusing, unnecessarily involved private health insurers, stupidly prevented government negotiation over drug prices, and imposed a "donut hole" in its coverage likely to prevent the seniors who most needed the bill from being able to fully benefit from it. Liking or understanding the need for the concept is different from supporting the actual legislation.

Bush had such overwhelming bipartisan support for the Iraq war that he did what? He went before Congress and the American people and said, "I know I have legislation that I think allows me to invade Iraq, but others say it's less clear. I want to be honest and direct, and to observe the separation of powers, and thus call upon Congress to explicitly authorize war on Iraq through a formal declaration of war." No, following a series of what can most charitably be called deceptions, he proceeded based upon the authority he claimed from the existing legislation. Hardly a profile in courage.

With his success and entry into the punditocracy, perhaps Douthat truly believes that everybody in the country bought more house than they could afford, mortgaged themselves to the hilt, and rode "the real-estate express ... off an economic cliff". But no. Some of us did not do that. And you know what? Those of us who didn't have been asked to pick up the pieces - pay for the pieces - of the battered, shattered economy. When Douthat tries to put me in the category apparently shared by himself and his peers, an expression comes to mind.... Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. Two words, the second is "you", the first is.... Um, well, moving on.

Bush-era bipartisanship did produce some defensible legislation (No Child Left Behind, for instance). But more often, it produced travesties like the failed attempt at “comprehensive” immigration reform, lobbyist feeding frenzies like the 2005 energy bill, and boondoggles like the Department of Homeland Security.

Yeah, bipartisanship. It was Bush's own party that killed immigration reform. I don't personally see the Cheney-led energy industry free-for-all as being "bipartisan". The Department of Homeland Security? Bipartisan in the sense that you coopt a proposal from across the aisle that you originally rejected, implement it badly, and call it a day? "No Child Left Behind" is arguably bipartisan, but its deficiencies and funding shortfalls have been obvious from its inception. To the extent that it's only "defensible", its perhaps best attributed to Bush's satisfaction with an inadequate status quo or his failure of leadership.

Douthat manages to damn Bush with the faintest of praise:

By contrast, Bush’s best initiatives often lacked a constituency outside the White House: His AIDS-in-Africa program; his insistence, vindicated by subsequent scientific breakthroughs, on seeking alternatives to embryo-destroying research; his failed second-term proposals for Social Security and tax reform.

First, that's utter nonsense. There are huge factions outside of the White House that favor a wide array of tax reform and Social Security reform proposals. And it's hardly to Bush's credit that his propose Social Security "reform" was in fact a plan for its destruction. True reform, he could have passed. As for the "tax reform" to which Douthat links, its a set of proposals from a commission. I don't recall that Bush ever personally endorsed those recommendations, let alone pushed for their implementation. Looking at the report,

The Panel’s options use different designs that represent a range of policy choices to simplify the tax code, remove impediments to saving and investment, and broaden the tax base. The first option, the Simplified Income Tax Plan, is a streamlined version of our current tax system that would reduce the size and costs of the tax code. The second option, the Growth and Investment Tax Plan, would take our tax system in a new direction by reducing the tax burden on saving and investment to boost economic growth without fundamentally changing how the tax burden is distributed. It would move our tax system closer to a consumption tax and impose a reduced flat rate tax on capital income received by individuals.

Does Douthat manage to keep a straight face when he argues that this is one of Bush's "best initiatives"? (I recognize that the report contends that 60-70% of people earning more than $200,000 per year would face tax increases, but the two proposed tax schemes seem designed to be avoided by the wealthy - and moreso by the ultra-wealthy (for whom no projected tax revenues are described.) Or perhaps Douthat's arguing that Bush's best policies were the ones he never even tried to get off the ground, given his reverse Midas touch?

Bush's AIDS-in-Africa program and his stance against stem cell research please Douthat, who is a dogmatic adherent of Catholic doctrine on birth control and abortion. Even then, despite its huge flaws, Douthat might be right about the AIDS-in-Africa program - something that probably didn't actually lack a constituency, as such, but certainly didn't have a constituency in Bush's own party. It's a shame that Bush insisted upon limiting family planning counseling, and advanced a childish, counter-productive "abstinence only" education model in place of sound medical guidance, but you do have to give him credit for providing significant funding for treatment programs. But there has been no scientific vindication of Bush's myopic hamstringing of stem cell research, or the delays in research programs that resulted from his myopia. But these defects directly pandered to Douthat's constituency, hence Douthat's ear-to-ear smile.

Despite Douthat's gentle attempts to reinvent his record, it's unlikely that Bush will ever be viewed as having "become a good president" by virtue of his efforts to extricate the country from his own messes. Douthat does make one point that few will dispute:

This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow.

Understatement of the year?

Health Care Reform

One of the biggest problems with healthcare reform is the insistence that it must take the form of a single bill, and that bill must be "everything to everyone." That is, the bill must:

• Bring about universal or near-universal coverage;

• Limit the abuses of the insurance industry; and

• Maintain or reduce present levels of healthcare expenditure;

The Washington Post adds a fourth demand,

• Malpractice reform,

despite there being no evidence that malpractice reform will advance any of the three other goals of reform - and plenty that it will not. (I've written quite a bit about the fiscal reality of "malpractice reform".)

It's not the worst unsigned editorial the Post has ever run, but Fred Hiatt is out to maintain the editorial board's reputation as a gang that can't shoot straight. At least half the time they time they don't know the target, don't actually want to hit it, or both. The editorial praises the atrociously deficient Max Baucus "reform" bill, while at best hinting at its most significant deficiencies: its deliberate underfunding of insurance costs for the uninsured working class, and its deliberate failure to provide any mechanism to pressure insurance companies to bring down insurance costs for people who don't have the good fortune to participate in employer-sponsored group plans. The Bacus bill bends over backwards to make sure that co-ops would be hamstrung and useless. I could cynically ask, how much did the insurance industry pay him (or promise to pay him) - except given the extent to which he kowtows is it truly cynical to ask?

A few years ago, I was paying for insurance through COBRA, continuing my wife's coverage through a full service Blue Cross/Blue Shield group plan. Over the course of eighteen months the price went from "really high" to "extraordinary", inspiring me to check out what I could get from other sources. Even through supposed "group rates" available through some professional organizations of which I'm a member, I couldn't find anything that came close to the group plan's benefits. In fact, the typical plan offered vastly less coverage, very high copays and deductibles, and... came at a similar cost. The only way I could "save" money would have been by using a catastrophic policy and covering "routine" medical expenses out-of-pocket, but given the health problems my family was experiencing at the time that would have been worthless. So I kept on paying under COBRA until my wife found a government job where... she became eligible for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield group plan that wasn't quite as good as her former plan, but was nonetheless very good - and, once again, offered at a group rate that was vastly below the "group" plans available to me as a self-insured individual.

The Baucus plan, quite deliberately, changes none of that. In that same position, I would have been offered only one other option - the co-op option Baucus has deliberately sabotaged, the overpriced "group" plan, or the useless "catastrophic care" plan. Had I faced a mandate at the time, but been ineligible for COBRA, I would have found the absolute cheapest catastrophic insurance plan that met the terms of the mandate, and been very angry at the government for making me waste my money on a useless POS of an insurance policy. The right-wing should be celebrating Baucus's crappy bill - in its present for, it stands to make their angry supporters even angrier.

Not surprisingly, given his obeisance to corporate interests, Hiatt's editorial page doesn't express any concern for the quality of health insurance that will be available to individuals. It does mention cost:

Asking families earning $66,000 a year to devote 13 percent of their income to insurance premiums - and more once deductibles and co-payments are involved - is asking them to assume a heavy lift.

They have a gift for understatement. A head of household with a $66,000 income takes home about $52,000. After the cost of housing, one or two cars, food, clothes... it's unlikely that the family has a great deal of wiggle room in its budget. Asking them to devote more like 16-17% of their take-home pay to an insurance plan - even more, to an overpriced insurance plan... and "more once deductibles and co-payments are involved" - is going to push a lot of families into foreclosure or bankruptcy. What a solution - rather than having your medical bankruptcy after you get sick (and your insurance proves inadequate), Baucus will force you into a preemptive medical bankruptcy! What's not to love?

I recognize why the disingenuous cowards, Jack Kingston and Darrell Issa, are afraid to put their (or is it our) money where their mouths are, and introduce an option allowing individuals to buy into the current federal insurance plan. (Maybe Kingston wrote a bill, but accidentally left it somewhere with his flag pin, never to be found?) But why doesn't Baucus have the cajones to add that option? (Or are we back to that "bought and paid for by the insurance industry" thing?) Conversely, if he thinks his watered-down co-ops are worth the paper their written on, why not require that federal employees obtain their coverage through co-ops? Including, of course, Senators? No, as you know, when a self-serving Senator is involved (and you rarely find another kind) sauce for the goose is never sauce for the gander - if he did that he would either have to fix the myriad defects in his co-op proposal or face hurricane-force blowback.

Top it off with this:

In addition, the proposal's version of an employer mandate - a so-called "free rider" provision that would penalize employers not offering insurance only if their employees obtained government subsidies - could have the perverse effect of discouraging employers from hiring workers from low-income families.

Are we sure Baucus hasn't changed parties? Given his apparent eagerness to cause the uninsured working and middle class to hate the Democratic Party, I'd swear he has his eyes on Michael Steele's job....

"Obama's Just Like Bush", Round... I've Lost Track.

David Brooks serves up an oblivious "Obama's just like Bush" argument,

The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

I guess here the distinction is supposed to be that Bush's redistribution was to the idle rich (is there any group in this country better described as "condescending, manipulative elites" than the top 1% of the country that most benefited from Bush's economic policies and tax cuts?), whereas Obama's proposed health insurance scheme would benefit the poor. Except that people who don't work can already avail themselves of Medicaid, Bush massively expanded Medicare benefits to people without regard to whether or not they work, and many of the "hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways" would benefit from a good healthcare reform bill. (The Republicans know this - that's why they're fighting so hard to defeat meaningful reform.) So by this measure, Obama should be more popular with the "hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways" than was Bush, right? Yeah, right.

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

The "MBA President", delegating to a team of experts, wasn't leading a government of the highly educated? His "movement" didn't include urban politicians, academics and celebrities? He didn't fuse federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector? Has Brooks even heard of Dick Cheney? Forgive me for asking, David, but what alternate universe do you live in?

Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top - since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.

Lets accept that for most of Obama's critics race isn't a factor. (Let's admit that for a small number it is, most certainly, a factor, but that the larger movement would be directed at any Democratic President.) Why is it that these same people didn't rise up in protest against Bush?

Brooks loves a certain romanticized "red state" America, with its fictionalized Applebee's restaurants, and all that. He loves "hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways", even though he's not one of them and probably wouldn't last five minutes in one of their jobs. (Er... I'm not sure that he loves those "hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways" who work union jobs, make useless things like automobiles, and tend to vote for Democrats, although I'm sure that, given the opportunity, he could find some way to explain how they're "different".) But his simplistic sociology doesn't hold water. He's either wrong about the people he claims to be describing, wrong about their motivation, or both. (And it's probably both.)

Wait, You Mean... Losing a Parent is a Bad Thing?

It's all so confusing. First, relying upon the best social data he can muster, David Brooks tells us,

[Sonia Sotomayor's] father died when she was 9, leaving one such gap [in her relationships]. (It is amazing how many people who suffer parental loss between the ages of 9 and 13 go on to become astounding high achievers.)

(Usual challenge: Okay, David... how many?) But then Michael Gerson insists,

[T]he fatherless are some of the most disadvantaged, betrayed people in our society, prone to delinquency, poverty and academic failure.

I can almost imagine a debate between Gerson and Brooks over whether having your parent die is better for you than divorce, or whether divorcing parents should also aim for the "age 9 through 13" sweet spot. Fortunately I am able to stop myself.

Gerson's imagining "the good old days" when people engaged in "courtship", married for life, and raised kids in intact marriages. I suspect, though, he would be just as happy with the other "good old days" when marriages were arranged and divorces were available only to the wealthy and influential.

While it's interesting to see the overlap in "thinking" style between Brooks (with his "hasty generalization") and Gerson (with his trust in a shallow conventional wisdom that suits his argument), life isn't that simple. Many children of divorce (or whose parents never marry) do "just fine, thank you very much," and don't need Gerson's condescension. Some kids of divorced parents, for economic reasons, end up living in a less safe, higher crime neighborhood, attending more dangerous, lower quality schools, and having less supervision after school. For others, the roots of bad behavior may lie in what comes before a parent pulls them out of a drunken, drug-addicted or violent household. Some unfortunate kids experience both. Yet Gerson can't see past the parents' break-up.

When possible, I do think that kids are better off being raised in a healthy two-parent household. When that's not possible, either because the household is physically or psychologically dangerous, kids are better off when the non-custodial parent pays adequate, timely child support.

Shifting subjects a bit, Gerson tells us that

the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for women, 28 for men.

He later contends,

Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages - perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.

So... everything would be better if we could just convince the average guy to marry one year earlier? Seriously, do you think that the statistics for divorce based on age at the time of marriage might be skewed by second (and subsequent) marriages, that are well-documented to have higher rates of divorce?

Teen marriage is generally a bad idea, with much higher rates of divorce. Romeo and Juliet were, in fact, young fools.

I realize Gerson's trying to be amusing, but his quip highlights how he yearns for the "Ozzie and Harriet" version of the good old days, whether or not it actually existed, as opposed to what occurred through much of human history. Juliet had been promised to another man. She was getting married, even if not to Romeo.

In an alternate version of Romeo and Juliet, they hate each other but their parents decide that their marriage will be a useful way to mend the rift between the families and bring together their wealth, power and influence, and so it is done. As they live in Fourteenth Century Italy, divorce is not an option. But Romeo doesn't mind so much because marriage to Juliet is his duty... and, consistent with his station in life, he has a mistress or two on the side. And the children turn out okay because, as their parents remain married, they have a consistent caregiver in the form of their... nurse. Ah, the good old days.

Influence

The Atlantic 50 claims to list "the most influential commentators in the nation". It's a fascinating list, not merely due to the inclusion of many mediocre commentators, but by the way it highlights how the columnists of a handful of prominent publications almost automatically gain "influence". The definition of "influence" is a bit scary,

A survey of more than 250 Washington insiders – members of Congress, national media figures, and political insiders – in which respondents rank-ordered the commentators who most influence their own thinking.

Well, it's not the definition that's so scary, but the implications of "members of Congress, national media figures, and political insiders" admitting that they follow the lead of the likes of Rush Limbaugh. But then, they rank Paul Krugman #1, and if his thinking is influencing Congress and the media these days you would hardly know it from current policy proposals and their associated media coverage. And to their credit, the triumvirate of former Bush speechwriters didn't rank.

And boy, what a handicap it is these days to be a white male.

Cheated Out of Escheats

FIve state attorney generals object to the Google Books settlement, on behalf of their... citizens:

The issue that irks the states is that when the rights holders can't be located, the [nonprofit] Books Rights Registry would keep the proceeds on their behalf while they continue the search for those individuals or groups. Laws in the states objecting to the deal require the state treasurer to be the one who accepts an unclaimed payment on behalf of its citizens, according to a copy of the brief submitted by Missouri's Chris Koster.

Because, you know, that could turn out to be a big pot of money.

Say What?

At the American Conservatives' weblog, Scott McConnell shares some thoughts on race:

It’s as unfair as anything that happens in politics, but there it is. There’s a kind of perfect internet storm now, between the Serena Williams outburst, the Kanye West outburst, and the wilding episode posted on the top of Drudge today.

Let's pause for a second there. My last recollection of the term "wilding" being used in this sense dates back to 1989, and an assault on a jogger in Central Park.

According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding." New York City detectives said the word was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police. This account has been disputed by other journalists, who say that it originated in a police detective's misunderstanding of the suspects' use of the phrase "doing the wild thing", lyrics from Tone Lōc's hit song "Wild Thing". April 19 was known to have been a night when such a gang attack occurred, in which the suspects had entered the park in Harlem with over 30 acquaintances. The group had indeed assaulted many park-goers.

I don't recall this term ever being used to describe the behavior of white kids, no matter how outrageous. Do you? Whatever the intention, it's use in a context such as this fits with a racist sensibility that minority youths are somehow feral and predatory.

Just as Obama surely benefited from the desire of many whites to elect a black president...

I've heard that before, but exactly who are these "many whites" who had a desire to vote for Obama merely because he was black? Can I have a name or two? Will I be able to count every such person in the country on one (perhaps zero) hands? As I see it, that's a right-wing canard that seeks to cast aspersions on Obama's supporters, or at least a subset of them, and to diminish Obama's accomplishment at the polls.

... so he will be harmed by widely circulated media images of blacks that reinforce negative stereotypes.

That's quite a leap. Even assuming the initial premise is correct, how does the conclusion follow?

1. Obama benefited from the desire of many whites to elect a black president.
2. ?????
3. Therefore he will be harmed by widely circulated media images of blacks that reinforce negative stereotypes.

There's not even a hint of logic in McConnell's assertion.

Serena and West are of course very rich and talented—but gentlemanly or ladylike or gracious they surely are not.

So what? John McEnroe was a boorish clod on the tennis court - not just in one angry outburst, but time and time again. How did that reflect on President Reagan? Mel Gibson went on a drunken, anti-Semitic rant. How did that reflect on President Bush?

The wilding image is what every white parent who sends his child to an integrated school or lives in an integrated neighborhood most fears.

This "wilding" incident was a fist fight on a school bus that may turn out to be run-of-the-mill bullying instead of a racial incident. Find me a town in America where there has never been a fight on a school bus. Find me a middle or high school in America were kids of any race haven't cheered on a fight. Find me a school, anywhere, where there's never been a problem with bullying. (I didn't think so.) Now find me another such incident that was described as a "wilding". (Was this a "wilding"?)

And what exactly is it that every parent supposedly fears from school integration? That instead of getting into fist fights with or being bullied by children of the same race, the other person involved might be a minority? Seriously - I'm a parent and I have a right to be told why I supposedly fear integrated neighborhoods and schools.

It is the precisely the kind of thing that doomed David Dinkins’ mayoralty in 1993, though no New York politician was a greater gentleman.

Being held responsible for the bad behavior of African American criminals, because he happened to share their race?

Obama is obviously not anything like Serena, or Kanye West, or the thugs on the bus.

Except, as McConnell points out as the essential thesis of his post, for his race. Which is it - President Obama's nothing like them, so it's racist to hold their conduct against him because of his race, or even though he's nothing like them a race-based "guilt by association" argument can be automatically raised in relation to any bad behavior by any African American of any age?

But they have more power to bring down his presidency than all the Joe Wilsons and Glenn Becks and teabaggers in the world.

I guess it's the latter.

For those who (I count myself) supported Obama and have hopes that he will be able to carry out at least part of his agenda, it’s a bitter recognition.

I'm still at a loss. Is McConnnell deploring racism, or is he saying it's understandable and somehow alright, even though it may interfere with the President's ability to do his job?

But I’d be very surprised if the stories linked above didn’t have a negative impact on our president’s popularity.

So, basically, McConnell's on the same page as Maureen Dowd?

"But There's No Case!"

In an argument that is usually presented as a thinly-reasoned avoidance of the issues, the Washington Post argues that no suit should be permitted against John Ashcroft for his role in the detention and mistreatment of Abdullah al-Kidd because "there was no legal precedent available to Mr. Ashcroft that would have warned against such aggressive use of the material witness statute". While the existence of prior judicial guidance should be considered in borderline cases, I reject the Post's notion that anything a government actor does is presumptively in good faith unless there's existing case law explicitly prohibiting the conduct. (It's like strip-searching a child to look for an ibuprofen tablet - if nobody tells you it's a stupid thing to do, how are you ever going to figure it out for yourself, right?)

Had Ashcroft personally shot al-Kidd in the head, would even the Post find the lack of case law stating that the material witness statute didn't prohibit execution of witnesses to justify granting him immunity? Seriously, what's wrong with asking our nation's highest political leaders to apply common sense, or traditional interpretations of either the statute or the concept of "material witness"? What's wrong with observing that nothing in John Ashcroft's treatment of al-Kidd is consistent with the purpose of detaining a material witness, and asking him to explain why we should believe that he had even the slightest good faith belief that his actions were allowed under that statute?

Taxing Soft Drinks

The New York Times endorses a tax on soft drinks to... magically affect current obesity rates. And I recognize the argument that such a tax could generate revenue. But I have yet to see anybody offer any evidence that it would actually affect obesity. For example,

• Is the consumption of soft drinks higher or lower in states with deposit laws?

• Is the consumption of soft drinks higher or lower in states that already tax them, such as in states that charge sales tax on soft drinks , or in Arkansas with its excise tax on soft drinks?

• Is there any evidence that overweight people, particularly overweight young people, drink more soft drinks than their peers?

Might it be more constructive to expand physical education in schools, and perhaps also nutrition education, rather than trying to blame a particular type of beverage for the manner in which we, as a society, have chosen to keep our kids sedentary and behind desks for the rest of the school day? Or by using pop machines in schools to subsidize school budgets?

Also, given that a lot of the soft drinks young people buy are purchased by the can or bottle out of machines - the most expensive way to buy soft drinks - why should we believe that a tax will appreciably affect their willingness to pay a premium for soft drinks? As much as they might want to do so, I have not seen that any vending machine company has successfully convinced a school to pull out its water fountains.

Finally, given that it's in no small part our nation's substantial subsidies for corn that allow the production of inexpensive sugary drinks and fast food, might it not make more sense to increase the cost of the end-product not by introducing a new tax, but by reducing or eliminating the corn subsidy?

Clinton's First Term

Ross Douthat shares the opinion that the Democratic Party's losses in Clinton's first midterm election didn't follow from lies, distortions and misrepresentations about his healthcare reform plan, but instead flowed from lies, distortions and misrepresentations about his crime bill:

Instead, the crime bill became a lightning rod for populist outrage. The price tag made it seem fiscally irresponsible. (Back then, $30 billion was real money.) The billions it lavished on crime prevention — like the infamous funding of “midnight basketball” — looked liked ineffective welfare spending. The gun-control provisions felt like liberalism-as-usual.

“Every day that the Republicans delayed the bill,” Luntz remembers, “the public learned more about it — and the more they learned, the angrier they got.”

That’s exactly what’s been happening now. The health care push has opened up arguments about abortion, euthanasia and illegal immigration that the Democrats would rather avoid. At the same time, it’s become the vessel for a year’s worth of anxieties about bailouts, deficits and Beltway incompetence.

But alas, Douthat doesn't see a new Newt Gingrich on the horizon to transform the manufactured outrage over a sensible reform bill into electoral victory for the Republicans.

Samuelson's False "Balance"

Although supposedly addressing a lack of candor in the healthcare debate, Robert Samuelson's latest is itself less than honest. The NonSequitur takes Samuelson to task for personifiying (what I would describe as) the Bush-era Republican brand of "conservatism" - if the program they support will run the deficit through the roof, "that budget consequences should occupy a minor spot in our debates"; otherwise they're whine, cry, rend their clothes and wring their hands, deploring that with even a dime of new spending we're destined to go bankrupt.

Samuelson argues that President Obama's not being sufficiently candid because he's arguing that we can have expanded health coverage, generally maintain the current system, and also reduce costs. The NonSequitur kicks that argument out from under him:

Baring the fictional–yes fictional–scenario where you get to chose your own doctor and your own care (your insurance company does so long as you "qualify," which means so long as you don't get sick), every other industrialized democracy in the world has solved this problem. They get more than we do for half of the cost. That's just true folks. As Obama has argued over and over, one problem we suffer from here in our capitalist paradise is a lack of competition in health insurance. There is simply no incentive to deliver it cheaper. So you can have all three indeed. We should have all three. If we can't get all three, we will suck.

Okay, it's more than half the cost, but certainly every other nation in the industrialized world had established that you can have universal or near-universal coverage, a system where people can choose their own healthcare provider and get the care they need, and where the cost per capita is substantially less than in the U.S. - all while achieving, on the whole, better outcomes. If the Republicans and Blue Dogs in Congress prevent that from happening here, that's their fault, not Obama's. After all, when Samuelson says,

Americans generally want three things from their health-care system. First, they think that everyone has a moral right to needed care; that suggests universal insurance. Second, they want choice; they want to select their doctors -- and want doctors to determine treatment. Finally, people want costs controlled; health care shouldn't consume all private compensation or taxes.

he's effectively conceding that in an honest debate Americans would prefer the Canadian system to our own.

But there's more to Samuelson's editorial that should be addressed. The first is the false equivalence between what he describes as "frighten[ing] Americans into believing that it will harm them in ways that it won't" - that is to say, engaging in fear tactics and lying about reforms - with not showing proper candor by accepting Samuelson's pessimistic opinion over what has been proved to work in every other industrialized nation. Perhaps Samuelson should be showing some candor, as it's the healthcare industry and political right who are intent on frustrating the most cost-limiting reforms. I doubt that Samuelson is truly confused as to why Obama gave an aspirational speech, rather than a pessimistic drone about political realities dictated by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies, and the Members of Congress they own.

Another aspect to Samuelson's artifice about the three things we "want" is that he's truly concerned that "we can have any two, but not all three." He lacks the candor to admit that the three things we want (universality, choice, and cost control) can be addressed independently of another, and lacks the honesty to directly admit that the only factor he cares about (this time around) is cost. When Samuelson says "We refuse to face unavoidable - and unpleasant - choices", after all, he's already conceded that the only choice we actually have to make is whether or not healthcare reform justifies increasing the deficit.

It's due in no small part to opinion leaders like Samuelson that it's necessary to try to address all of those concerns in a single package, rather than taking a good look at each on its own, evaluating the costs and public policy aspects independently. It would be better, and would likely lead to better policy, if the various concerns about the healthcare system could be addressed independently - for example, looking at the true cost of implementing universal insurance coverage and evaluating whether or not it's worth the investment - rather than forcing everything to be wrapped into an oversized, arguably revenue-neutral or budgetarily constrained behemoth.

"That's Not My Job"

In a rather contrived expression of umbrage, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, Max Stier, complains that the President referred to government bureaucrats in his recent speech, apparently because he was supposed to call them "cool"? (Goverment 'cools'?) Never mind that Obama's use of the term was correct.

On Wednesday, you told Congress and the American people, "I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need."

Stier apparently believes that as bureaucrats have given that term a bad name, they should now be called something else.

First, it's silly to pretend that the President's comment was intended to insult government workers. His intent was obvious: He was responding to a consistent attack from the right on his healthcare reforms, that "government bureaucrats" would dictate people's choice of doctor, ration their care, and form death panels that would... do whatever the nut job Palin types imagined that "death panels" would do. A while back, opponents of healthcare reform put together a video that supposedly illustrated how a government healthcare system would work (never mind that single payer systems require a minimum of paperwork for patients), imagining the requirement of processing a blizzard of forms through a bureaucratic maze. Obama was correct to point out that such a system should be unacceptable if coming from either the public or private sector.

It's interesting that Stier has no words of criticism for the decades the political right has spent pounding "government bureaucrats", or even their framing the context in which Obama had to respond to the popular conception of "government bureaucrats" getting in the way of healthcare. It's almost as if he thinks that the perception arose in a vacuum, and all Obama has to do is say that government is "'cool' and 'competent'" and everybody will believe that it is so.

I wonder, has Mr. Stier ever encountered the following phrase,

... and other duties as assigned by your supervisor.

Why, Mr. Stier, do bureaucracies (the places where people who no longer wish to be called 'bureaucrats' work) find it necessary to include that type of language in pretty much every employee job description? People who read this blog know that I'm not one to join in mindless bashing of unions and bureaucracies, but there's a core truth to the notion of the incompetent bureaucrat with a supervisor who's either resigned to the fact that it's too difficult to fire an underperforming employee or who simply can't be bothered to step in to correct or admonish bad work. I doubt that there's a person in the country who hasn't encountered a power-tripping bureaucrat, an unhelpful bureaucrat, or one who forces you to guess what hoops you must jump through and seems to take pleasure when you get things wrong. Heck, there are individual bureaucrats who will give you all of that and more in a single visit to their desk or counter.

Sure, there are many government workers who have good work ethic, will go the extra mile, and try to give you good customer service. (Often for exactly the same rate of pay as the officious work-avoider at the next desk.) No, it's not fair to tar them with the same brush. But if you go through the wringer with a bad bureaucrat or, let's be honest, if you're an upper level bureaucrat supervising one of them, which sticks out in your mind?

The problems of bureaucracy won't be fixed by fashioning a new name for the people who work within them. You start insisting that people refer to the lazy, incompetent, rude person at a government agency as a "federal government worker", great, but unless something changes in their behavior it won't take many years before that term polls as badly as "federal government bureaucrat." Stier is correct that the question, as asked by Obama, "is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." Rather than fretting about being called a bureaucrat, Stier's energies would be better spent trying to find ways to make government work better. If he does that job well enough, I suspect he'll find that the term "federal government bureaucrat" is perceived much more favorably.

Business Cards for Manly Men

Made with meat and lasers. Seriously.

Newt Gingrich

Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

Shining a Dim Light on Healthcare Reform

David Brooks comes not to praise Obama, but to... damn him with faint praise? I expect that some on the right will claim that Brooks' latest reflects a continuing infatuation with Obama, but I think Brooks' history belies the notion of infatuation. If I were wrong, I would expect Brooks to direct happy sunbeams at Obama, the way he did with so much of Bush's (bad) policy. But instead we get the dim glow of an intellectual nightlight.

Speaking of Obama's promise not to raise the deficit as a "Dime Standard", Brooks opines that it "kills off" the House Bill in favor of a less expensive Senate Bill, and as setting "off a political cascade".

Since the Congressional Budget Office is the universally accepted arbiter in such matters, the Democrats have to produce a bill that the C.B.O. says is deficit-neutral, now and forever. That means there will be a seller’s market for any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who has a credible amendment to cut costs. It also means the Democrats will have to scale back coverage and subsidy levels to reach the fiscal targets.

Or maybe it means none of that. I recall when CBO's optimistic projections were being used to sell Bush's tax cuts. What happened when the economy tanked, again? Did Brooks call on Bush to issue a mea culpa and restore prior tax levels? Hardly. This is Brooks applying his usual double standard, albeit in a less obvious manner than Gerson: it's only Democrats who have to keep their promises, and only Democrats who have to strive for fiscal sanity.

Nothing's wrong with advocating fiscal sanity. But in my opinion, if you wish to be taken seriously on the issue, you have to apply the same standard to both parties' tax and spending policies.

What's likely is that the CBO will project an optimistic and pessimistic ten year projection, paving a path for the passage of any bill that (by whatever math is being used) falls somewhere between the two extremes. As so many aspects of healthcare reform aren't quantifiable, tremendous heat may later be directed at the question of whether or not healthcare reform was deficit-neutral, but nobody will be able to provide an accurate, meaningful balance sheet. Also, this year's bill isn't next year's budget. If Congress decides next year to increase subsidies, that doesn't mean that this bill isn't revenue neutral. If it sounds like I'm describing a big game, well, yeah. I'm just surprised Brooks doesn't yet understand (or pretends not to understand) how the game is played.

Brooks continues by describing how Obama has endorsed a "backdoor and indirect version of the cap" on the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits, and thus in his view has "no principled argument to reject" a direct cap. You know what? If that's what Congress passes, I wouldn't expect Obama to even try to reject the explicit cap. And if the Republicans want to advance a clear-cut tax increase on the middle class in advance of next year's midterm elections, I applaud their courage for being honest about the effect of a cap. So which Republican wants to sign up first?

Brooks provides some standard tropes on tort reform:

Third, the president accepted the principle of tort reform to reduce the costs of defensive medicine. Once again, the specific proposal Obama mentioned is trivial. The important thing was the concession on principle. There are already amendments being drawn up to create separate malpractice courts and to otherwise reform the insane malpractice system. The president is going to have a hard time rejecting these amendments just because they might reduce campaign donations from tort lawyers to the Democratic National Committee.

I keep forgetting the number of states in which evil trial lawyers have successfully battled back tort reform. Is it... zero? Yeah, that sounds about right. Also, Earth to David Brooks, most tort lawyers don't practice in the area of medical malpractice - that's a boutique practice, made even more so by tort reform efforts to date that have massively increased the cost and complexity of litigating a malpractice case.

But more to the point, while it's easy to repeat "tort reform" propaganda about the legal system (the worst sin of which, at least according to this NEJM study, is it's frequent wrongful denial of compensation to genuinely injured plaintiffs), there are a couple of things to consider. First, nobody is really riding the "tort reform" horse at this time. While Brooks is the first to abandon the CBO as a "gold standard" when its findings contradict his platitudes, malpractice spending (including, of course, the bulk of that spending - the cost of the defense against valid claims and of paying the victims of those claims) is less than 2% of healthcare costs.

If Brooks would defer to the CBO's projections on how money much various "reforms" would save, my guess is that most would be revenue-neutral (tort reform, even as sweeping as the near-immunity granted in Texas and Florida) has had no apparent effect on healthcare costs or inflation) to increasing the cost. Even if we assume that "defensive medicine" exists, there is no evidence that even the most sweeping "tort reform" measures will limit its "practice". The CBO has "found no statistically significant difference in per capita health care spending between states with and without limits on malpractice torts".

Further the CBO finds no relationship between so-called "defensive medicine" and healthcare inflation:

Other factors such as defensive medicine (which refers to medical tests or procedures of little or no clinical value that are ordered by physicians primarily to avoid lawsuits) and physician-induced demand (which refers to spending that is brought about at least in part by providers’ desire to augment their own income) do not appear to explain a significant part of the growth in spending, according to published analyses

It's not clear what Brooks envisions in terms of "separate malpractice courts", or how he thinks their creation will affect anything about the present tort system. Like other "tort reform" advocates who bandy about similar ideas (such as "health courts"), the specifics are always lacking.

Brooks next states that, by suggesting that he'll pass a bill that has effective reform even if it does not include a public option, the President has killed off the possibility of a public option. In fact, what he did was make clear that he will sign a healthcare reform bill that does not include a public option, if that's all that the Senate will give him. Sure, some would have preferred that he express that he would veto a bill without a public option (including some on the right who would want to see him set himself up for failure), and it's likely that any sort of public option that gets through would be implemented only if certain triggers are met. But unless Brooks knows of some way that a President's speech could have magically won him a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to back a pubic option, Obama was acknowledging political reality, not creating it.

Brooks then talks about Presidential support for "game changers" without really being clear on what he has in mind. Brooks takes umbrage at this suggestion,

Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.

grumbling,

The only risible parts of the speech came when Obama said that parts of the system work (they don’t; they’re unsustainable) and when he said he would be the last president to take on health care (we still await a president willing to take on fundamental perversities in the system).

Is Brooks serious? He thinks that there are no parts of the present system that work? I would love to read his series of editorials explaining how he would tear the system down and rebuild something entirely new, while convincing the nation's people, doctors and hospitals to obligingly trust his better judgment. But if anybody's accused Obama of arrogance, following any such series they'll have nothing on Brooks. Seriously, Brooks expected that Obama could go before the nation and state, "All proposals to date are too modest, nothing works, and so we're going to tear down the system," and have any chance of subsequently getting any sort of reform bill passed?

Also, Obama didn't say "he would be the last president to take on health care". He said "I am determined to be the last". If Obama believes he can or will be the last, that's risible. But he was actually describing his level of determination, not his actual expectations. Rhetorical excess? Sure. But hardly what Brooks pretends.

I think it's a fair criticism to state that Obama "has decided to expand the current system, not fix it." But that's because he lives in the real world, and is addressing the political realities of our system of government. Alas, David, sometimes even a capable President cannot make the pie higher.

Liars On The March

I know I was battling conventional wisdom when I argued that Obama was correct to wait to give his healthcare speech. I was responding to what I saw as a lot of Chicken Little-type handwringing that the sky was falling because Obama hadn't clearly stated a message and taken control of the debate - as if that were even possible. Now he has given a speech which many are calling one of his best speeches ever, where he clearly outlined his healthcare proposals and responded to the distortions from the other side, and....

U.S. President Barack Obama's speech to Congress on healthcare reform has galvanized activists opposed to his proposals who plan a mass march on Washington on Saturday as the next step in their campaign.

Groups that reject Obama's reform and seek limited government and lower taxes said that nothing they heard in Wednesday night's speech to a joint Congress session would deter them.

I recognize that timing is tricky, and mistakes can be deadly. Kerry waited too long to respond to the ridiculous lies made against him by the Swift Boat group, and he never recovered. And yes, in a sense it's "deja vu, all over again" with right-wing millionaire-funded the same type of propaganda campaigns through the same PR firm that advanced the Swift Boat lies.

Sometimes speaking early serves principally to give your opponent more time to dishonestly attack your agenda, while twisting and misrepresenting your words. (For goodness sake, we even had a Member of Congress breaking protocol to shriek "liar" at the President, who had just made a factual statement about his proposal). Sometimes, patience prevails. As for timing, Obama's speech coincides with Kathleen Parker's recognition that her party needs to reign in the crazies - so arguably his speech was remarkably well timed.

Obama's definitely about patience and discipline. I probably wouldn't have been able to bite my tongue this long. It seems fair to ask those who are still criticizing the President for "waiting too long to speak," how much more of his healthcare agenda do you imagine that he would be able to get through Congress, had he spoken sooner? If the answer isn't, in some fashion, "more of it" (a claim of which I would be skeptical), at best they're arguing style over substance.

Reading the Fine Print

Thinking about buying software to protect your children when they're online?

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

Apparently you can opt out, but how would you even know you needed to do so?

Get Paid!

Does your business have cash flow problems due to slow paying customers and delinquent accounts? Now in print, Credit & Collections Kit for Dummies.

(Yes, this is shameless self-promotion. ;-) )

"See - We're Not All Crazy"

Kathleen Parker offers up a "See, we're not all crazy" post-mortem on the President's speech to school children,

The only thing missing from this orgy of conservative orthodoxy was . . . a Republican president. And that is the lesson of the day.

Her willingness to call out the crazies in her party, even naming Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer as a particularly egregious example, would impress me more if it had come before the speech, let alone if she were willing to extend her disassociation with the nutjob wing of her party to other issues.

As her response to the "death panels" lie indicates, Parker is more concerned with maintaining her party's credibility than she is with trying to maintain honest, responsible discourse. Her warning on that issue:

We do need to turn down the rhetorical heat lest we miss important issues in the proposed House health-care bill.

Get this:

For purposes of civil discourse, let's assume that no one wants to kill off old people.

She's not interested in calling out the lies of her party's leaders - she's not even willing to admit that they're lying, instead merely assuming for the sake of argument that the Democrats really aren't out to kill the elderly... to be civil. Similarly, with the craziness that occurred at "town hall meetings" on healthcare reform,

One may reasonably oppose, on the merits, the views that Frank and the Democrats hold on health care - and plenty of informed people do. But when Frank is tossed into the ring with a Hitler-wielding instigator, he looks the sage from Vesuvius, and his opponents escapees from the asylum.

Given the choice of company, which would you prefer?

It's all about appearances. The craziness and lying isn't so bad as long as it doesn't put Republican Party's goals in jeopardy, so maybe it's best to... try to keep the nuttiest stuff off camera:

There isn't much we can do about the convergence of technology and the persistent plague of narcissism, but there is something we can do about Hitler. The moment he shows up in any form, turn off the cameras. Consider it an act of nonviolent protest - and self-respect.

The problem, after all, isn't that Barney Frank didn't put a loon squarely in her place on camera. The problem is that he did exactly that, to the detriment of the Republican Party's "message". So by all means, shut off the camera.

Parker references Newt Gingrich and Laura Bush as a sane wing of her party, noting that (unlike her) they were willing to stand up for the President's address to school children before it occurred. I'll give Gingrich partial credit, as he waited until the last minute when it was obvious that the attacks on Obama were close to insane. I suspect that his goals are similar to Parker's - he wants to disassociate the Republican Party from its crazy faction. But like Parker he is unwilling to do that in a broader sense, and to try to advance mature, responsible debate on public policy issues.

Laura Bush gets more credit, as she didn't have to speak out and demonstrated a certain courage in choosing to insert herself into this debate. I don't want to read too much into a sound bite, so I'll assume that by arguing that it's "really important for everyone to respect the President of the United States" she's talking about the insanity directed at Obama (and, to a lesser degree, at her husband during his Presidency... and to an intermediate degree at Clinton) as opposed to disagreement on policy issues. The media and the political parties really should draw a line and call out the crazies, including those within their own ranks, on issues like "Clinton's a murderer," "Obama's a secret Muslim who's not even a citizen," or "Bush knew the 9/11 attacks were going to occur and let them happen anyway."

But Parker's essay reminds me of her editorial during the primary campaign (before the Rev. Wright blow-up) in which she spoke of how Obama's race made it more difficult to frame attacks on him despite his shortage of "blood equity". Parker's willing to caution her party in the hazards of dragging things too far into the mud, she's willing to distinguish her party from those within its "tent" when there's a chance of "guilt by association", but she seems perfectly content with dishonest, below-the-belt tactics that can't quite be associated with her party or don't jeopardize what's left of its credibility.

Parker's not the sort of referee you would hire if you're trying to stick to the Marquess of Queensbury rules. She's the type Vince McMahon would hire, to catch and chide "pro wrestlers" for minor transgressions but whose back is always conveniently turned when they're bludgeoning each other with folding chairs.

Gerson's Latest

It's the usual story: Michael Gerson opens mouth, stupid things come out. I'll delegate to The NonSequitur for the response.

Update: Michael Gerson opens mouth, stupid things come out. I'll again delegate to The NonSequitur for the response.

The "Lucid" Slippery Slope

Amazing. After dredging up a 12-year-old essay and citing Rahm Emanuel's brother's overblown concerns about voluntary euthanasia becoming commonplace, Ross Douthat expresses,

Yet the conservatives pillorying him, unjustly, as a “deadly doctor” could just as easily be quoting him. Twelve years later, Emanuel’s Atlantic essay remains a lucid case for the existence of a slippery slope, especially under government-managed health care, to some sort of death-by-bureaucrat.

Earth to Douthat: the "slippery slope" is a logically fallacious form of argument. A "lucid" slippery slope argument, it would seem, would be one that's transparently illogical, yet Douthat approaches it as if it's sound logic.

Douthat proposes that in the United States,

it’s much easier to imagine the government going bankrupt paying for extreme life-saving procedures than it is to imagine a suddenly cost-conscious bureaucracy pressuring doctors to administer lethal overdoses.

So then, why bring up the euthanasia "slippery slope" in the first place? To placate the Republican Party? To avoid acknowledging that "death panel" fear mongering is premised on lies? Out of fear of directly calling "shenanigans" on the Sarah Palin wing of his party? To wrap the "death panel" lies in an essay by the brother of a Democratic politician, to illogically suggest that Democrats see the lies as having merit?

It sounds paradoxical to link the desire for unlimited medical treatment to the desire for physician-assisted suicide. But the idea that there’s a right to the most expensive health care while you want to be alive isn’t all that different, in a sense, from the idea that there’s a right to swiftly die once life doesn’t seem worth living.

In each case, the goal is perfect autonomy, perfect control, and absolute freedom of choice. And in each case, the alternative approach — one that emphasizes the limits of human agency, and the importance of humility in the face of death’s mysteries — doesn’t mesh with our national DNA.

It sounds paradoxical because it is paradoxical. People who fear death so much that they'll exploit every medical procedure and technology until "the bitter end" aren't apt to suddenly change their minds and embrace euthanasia. People typically choose one track or the other, not both.

It's also easy for the young to suggest that support for the right to die is selfish, somehow borne of a selfish unwillingness to embrace "death's mysteries" (even though it's a headlong rush into those very mysteries). It's fair to ask: What's Douthat's alternative? Embrace the suffering, learn from it for as long as it endures, then die? What's the lesson in that: The standard cop-out, "God works in mysterious ways"?

Douthat complains that assisted suicide

encourages relatives to see a loved one’s slow death as a problem to be solved, rather than a trial to be accepted.

So, basically, Douthat sees death, no matter how prolonged and painful, as a "trial to be accepted" unless a doctor can frustrate God's will by extending your life in which case it's a trial to be delayed. If your brain shuts down before your body, or you are so wracked in pain that you're unable to process the world through the haze of your pain medications, well, that's fine because there's a lesson in there somewhere for your family to learn. If you have no family, well, maybe it's a lesson for the nursing home staff?

What about "active" euthanasia versus "passive" euthanasia? How does Douthat respond to an individual's choice to decline life-extending treatment? A family's choice on behalf of a terminally ill loved one? A doctor's choice to allow that, even though life could be extended, perhaps for years, simply by inserting a feeding tube? What if the family is, as Douthat might put it, humble in the face of death's mysteries, and sees God as mandating that they accept that trial with a critically ill infant or child, even though the child could live for many years, perhaps even live a normal lifespan, if the family authorized a surgical intervention? Would Douthat still dictate that they follow his religious beliefs, and not their own?

Douthat's essays suggest childhood attendance of Sunday School, with no subsequent reflection on the deeper social and ethical issues behind that grade school level preaching. Just as it's not sufficient to scream "slippery slope" at everything you find objectionable, fretting that society might become comfortable with something that makes you (or your Priest or Sunday School teacher) uncomfortable is not a sufficient basis for an argument for or against anything. But it's not just Douthat's ethical argument that is hollow - what he presents as fact is just plain false:

Our move toward physician-assisted suicide springs from the same quest for mastery over mortality that leads us to spend nearly twice as much on health care as any other developed nation.

If that were the case, we should be spending to achieve the best outcomes, not spending wastefully while on the whole obtaining inferior outcomes. We do spend a lot on end of life care, but we deny sufficient medical care to tens of millions of people who could live longer, more fruitful lives if given the benefit of that care. And Douthat aligns himself with the political party that wants to maintain that status quo. (Go figure.)

Fail!

Apparently the operative word in this week's Republican Party memo to their pet columnists is "Fail!". And like the good little drones they are, David Brooks and Michael Gerson have produced poorly reasoned editorials that toe the party line. First, Brooks offered up "The Obama Slide", in which Obama's slide can mean only one thing: He should give the Republican Party everything it wants. Brooks observes,

The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals. Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does, but more and more have a growing conviction that if the president is proposing it, it must involve big spending, big government and a fundamental departure from the traditional American approach.

If Brooks is correct, you can fault Obama for allowing himself to be drowned out by the Republican noise machine. For decades the Republican Party has fought to frustrate healthcare reform, and they've consistently relied upon fear and misinformation to impede reform. More to the point, for eight years, fear has been their leading tactic in election campaigns, and the gutter tactics of Karl Rove and his ilk are stuff of legend.

It's pretty clear that Obama sensed that an onslaught of lies might be coming his way - thus the pressure to get a vote on a reform bill before the August recess. He should have anticipated the delay, and that absent a plan of counter-attack that the Republican Party, and a complacent (sometimes complicit, sometimes dimwitted) media could overwhelm his message.

But step back for a second. Brooks is stating that people don't understand the President's policy proposals. So when he claims that they've "soured" on those proposals he's being disingenuous - they've soured on ideas they don't understand due to a concerted campaign of misinformation. A responsible columnist might try to clarify the proposals, examine their policy ramifications, help educate his readers. Brooks? Get real.

Rather than addressing the core issues, Brooks prefers to drone about polls, comparisons to Clinton's healthcare proposals, whatever else he wants. Having brought up Clinton, you would think that Brooks might recall how "It's the economy, stupid", factors into a President's approval ratings. If the economic recovery takes root, and the employment market starts to rebound, Obama will have a lot less to worry about.

Brooks shares a rather insipid argument about Senate procedure,

Some now argue that the administration should just ignore the ignorant masses and ram health care through using reconciliation, the legislative maneuver that would reduce the need for moderate votes.

This would be suicidal. You can’t pass the most important domestic reform in a generation when the majority of voters think you are on the wrong path.

Actually you can. You can do all sorts of things without regard for public opinion. Recall Dick Cheney's thoughts about the importance of public opinion?

The difference between "then" and "now", of course, is that back then the memo from the party Brooks follows instructed him to cheerlead the President. And let's not pretend that the Bush-era Republican Party disliked reconciliation as a tool to cram through legislation favored by the President.

What reconciliation would do, of course, is significantly limit the scope of the reform bill. The shame of having to effect reform through reconciliation would be that some of the necessary elements of reform would be eliminated, or at best deferred. But you want to know something wild? Save for whatever hypocritical fervor the Republicans can whip up through a continued disinformation campaign, the country at large isn't going to either notice or care that a bill passed through reconciliation with "only" a majority vote as opposed to having a supermajority necessary to defeat a partisan Republican filibuster.

Brooks also presses the fabrication that Obama's healthcare reform proposals - those same proposals he previously admitted aren't understood - are not "consistent with the spirit of the nation and the times". Brooks claims to be extremely concerned about budget deficits but, although Brooks wasn't one to applaud Bush's blank check approach to government, serves as a reminder of how unimportant Brooks found these issues during G.W.'s tenure. Did he even once lecture Bush that his tax-cutting, deficit spending fiscal irresponsibility was inconsistent with the "spirit of the nation" - i.e., Un-American? Again, get real.

Brooks then lectures the President that he must "align his proposals to the values of the political center", whatever that means. After all, Brooks says people don't even know what the President's proposals are, and he gives no indication that he personally has any appreciation for Obama's proposals. (In fairness, I think he does have a decent comprehension of the issues - but his goal here is to undermine reform, not to help people understand what's at stake.)

Obama has most of his party on board with reform. Key Republicans who are supposed to be negotiating the reform bill in the Senate have been happily embracing the lies, and the tiny number of moderates remaining in the Republican Party seem cowed. Which voice which is arguably "centrist" or "moderate" does Brooks believe isn't already on board with reform?

And then along comes Gerson, repeating the party theme with a vengeance:

The incompetence of President Obama's health-care reform effort is undeniable, and unexpected.

I hope Obama's listening - if anybody should have a sense of Presidential incompetence, and how a mediocre President can turn a string of opportunities into a string of failures, leaving the country bogged down in multiple quagmires and with a devastated economy, it's Gerson. As with Brooks, "back in the day" he seemed to think that was largely a good approach to governance, but some of us prefer competence from whomever happens to be in the White House.

Gerson continues with what even he must know to be a lie:

The president's summer recess legislative deadline was hasty and unserious.

The Obama administration set a legitimate timetable, based upon the fact that these issues have been thoroughly discussed and debated, and the only thing that was likely to come from delay was... well, what we've been seeing. The legitimate debate drowned out by lies and disinformation. Had Obama succeeded with his timetable, he probably wouldn't have suffered the slide in his ratings that Brooks celebrates - he may have even seen a bounce upward based upon his victory. Why is Gerson so venomous? Because he knows that victory may yet come, along with that bounce.

As Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour points out, Obama spent more time picking out the White House dog than he permitted for comprehensive health-care reform.

You want to talk "unserious" - how about regurgitating a childish insult from a governor who lacks both the spine and cajones to correct even the most absurd fabrications about healthcare reform. And parroting Brooks and the party memo, Gerson again highlights how afraid the Republicans are of reconciliation:

And talk of imposing "go-it-alone" partisan legislation now seems desperate.

Yeah, just like G.W. and his tax cuts.

Gerson argues that some form of reform is likely so, like Brooks, he essentially argues that the best path to reform is to give in to the Republican Party's wishes and not have reform. I'm not distorting his message - look at what he actually proposes:

Obama could drop controversial plans to introduce new players in the health insurance market - either the public option or insurance cooperatives - while retaining the core elements of his current plan: health insurance reform, an individual insurance mandate and government subsidies to individuals to purchase insurance.

So first and foremost he must cave in to the Republican Party's demands that there be no new competition in the healthcare market that would press private insurers to increase their efficiencies and decrease costs, while simultaneously forcing every healthy person to buy insurance at the current, absurdly inflated "individual policy" rates that keep a lot of them out of the market. It's an insurance industry wet dream. And when people find out how little they were getting, whether in terms of a subsidy or insurance coverage, under that mandate, it would prove to be exceptionally unpopular, thereby rounding out the goals of the Republican Party.

If Gerson is serious about his next proposal, he's either totally incompetent to write about the issue or dishonest to the core of his being:

Second, Obama could abandon universal coverage and concentrate on health-care access for the poor and working class. A serious expansion of Medicaid - already included in House and Senate health proposals - is separable from other reforms and scalable to whatever level Congress deems affordable. And because this option expands an existing federal health-care role instead of creating one, it is less scary.

The primary objection comes from governors. Medicaid is a shared cost between the federal government and the states. Adding several million people to Medicaid involves a future cost to state governments. Even if the federal government foots the entire bill for a few years, states eventually would be forced to pay their share. Congress would need to offer state governments a sweet deal.

Call it "Gerson's Public Plan #1: Expanded Medicaid". The good news for the working classes - Medicaid is already available to them. All they have to do is become disabled from working and go bankrupt from their medical bills, and they qualify! And we can advance strong family values by encouraging people to divorce their sick spouses!

Really, what does Gerson think this will do for working people who can't afford insurance? Now if Gerson were proposing that Medicaid be authorized to create a "public option" form of insurance, funded by premiums, available to the working poor as an alternative to private insurance... well, that would be a "public option" which he's already told us is unacceptable. So what is it? Is he totally ignorant of Medicaid and how it works, is he incapable of completing even a simple thought on the subject of healthcare reform, or is he lying?

Gerson closes out with classic "lemon capitalism" - privatize profits and socialize losses:

Third, Obama could maintain his commitment to universality but dramatically reduce the ambition of coverage. It is catastrophic health costs - often coming after yearly or lifetime caps in an insurance plan are reached - that force individuals into bankruptcy. Obama could propose a plan that funds health costs for patients once their bills exceed a certain level.

Call it "Gerson's Public Plan #2: Government Reinsurance". In other words, we'll keep on doing what we're doing except we'll encourage insurance companies to cap benefits such that "high cost" beneficiaries are shifted onto the government. Never mind that there's an existing market for reinsurance, and that health insurers could avail themselves of that market to limit their liability. Never mind that Gerson's highlighting the absurdity of the present "health insurance" system - private companies only want to insure you when you're healthy.

Gerson expressed early concern that reform might be "ruinously expensive" and complained that it is "financed by a massive accounting trick" - so he's expanding his newfound role as a deficit hawk after taking the opposite approach under G.W.. Fair enough. Given that he proposes massively expanding Medicaid, and giving a massive subsidy to private insurers by having the government assume responsibility for the care of people who have the poor manners to become seriously ill, how do Gerson's proposals serve his needs as a nascent deficit hawk? In his own words, they do nothing to solve "the overall problem of health cost inflation". Gerson shares no ideas about how his proposals would be funded - suddenly it seems he's back in full-blown G.W. "deficits don't matter" mode. Go figure.

But who cares, right? It's about defeating Obama.