The RR isn't dead yet (unfortunately)

The crazy. It burns:

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More from Steve Benen:

First up from the God Machine this week is a look at something called the "prayercast," organized by Family Research Council Action PAC, a leading religious right outfit. The point of the event was to organize right-wing activists to pray for the failure of health care reform in the Senate.

It's hard to truly appreciate the true madness surrounding the event and its neo-theocratic organizers/participants, but I found Rachel Maddow's coverage helped capture some of the more disturbing elements.

Of particular note, remember that high-ranking, elected federal officials were integrally involved in this rather bizarre right-wing gathering. Alongside religious right heavyweights like Tony Perkins and James Dobson, Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) were on hand, and Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minn.) even helped lead attendees in prayer against health care reform.

Right Wing Watch had some of the best coverage of the "prayercast" anywhere, and posted some striking clips from the event, including this one in which Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) argues that the Bible should be a "blueprint" for American government, and this one in which James and Shirley Dobson ask God to "frustrate the plans of the Evil One."

yowza

Gimmicks, contd

When the opposition uses gimmicks and lies to oppose you, feel confident you're on the right side of the issue. Coming up with valid arguments against the current reform efforts is quite possible by thoughtful people on the left and the right, but Congressional Republicans aren't those kind of people. In this case, the joke is on the GOP: by using the printed out bill as a prop to try to make a pseudo-argument that any very long bill is a very bad bill, they continue to establish themselves as the Party of Beavis and Butthead. Retarded arguments make a party look retarded.


As I've pointed out before: Republicans love criticizing the length of the bill, as if that's a valid argument. Legislative bills are printed up with huge margins, large font, numbered lines and double spacing. This causes them to be much lengthier than typical reading material. A recent analysis by the AP finds that the length of the healthcare reform bill is actually about 209 normal pages:

Actually, Leo Tolstoy's tome [War and Peace] is longer than either bill. Full translated versions are nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

By now, the full draft of Reid's bill that had circulated in the corridors and landed so prominently on Republican desks has been published in the Congressional Record in the official and conventional manner.

The type is small and tight. No hernias will be caused by moving this rendering of the bill around. Unfurling it on the Capitol steps would not be much of a spectacle.

It's 209 pages.

That's less than Palin's new 400+ page book. I guess the GOP should be against that, too...?

The problem with being responsible

From Yglesias:

Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

Why is it that liberals keep having to concede on health care, watering down valuable reforms and cost-saving measures in the bill? Why is it that "compromise" isn't to some political center but rather a fraction of a hair to the left of business-friendly, anti-consumer conservatism? Because of f*cksticks like Lieberman who will filibuster the bill to death rather than allow it to come to a vote and then voting against it. The grown-up party realizes that failure in reforming the broken health care system literally is not an option, and so has to cater to these few Senators' every whim and fancy, as well as literally bribe them for their vote. As I've said before:

We're already bankrupting the system because of the issue of how the system is right now. The government already pays 46% of all health care expenses in the US. The private insurers pay about 37%. The rest is out-of-pocket.

The entitlements problem will continue to grow with our top-heavy population chart (more old people than young). But if we can reign in health care costs by overhauling the system then we can possibly prevent total fiscal collapse. This is a problem that Republicans kicked down the road every single time they held office and could do something about it. Everyone knows our entitlements are literally headed for failure and something must be done about it. No Republican has had the courage to face the issue since Newt Gingrich's proposal for drastic cuts in Medicare in 1995.

Let's assume the House bill passes the Senate just like it is (it won't). Paying $1.2 trillion over 10 years works out to approximately two-thirds the cost of the Bush tax cuts, half of the long-term cost of the Iraq War (including long-term health care for vets, not just the annual supplementals to the budget), and about 15% of our defense budget. That's right, we pay about $1 trillion dollars or more *every year* in defense spending, a *huge* part of that right now for two wars, the rest of which largely ends up as pork and wasteful spending and research for technologies that are completely useless (think missile defense, "Star Wars"...). Meanwhile, over 45,000 people die annually in the US from lack of access to basic medical care, ten times the casualties on 9/11. A new Harvard study estimates even higher numbers, that every 12 minutes someone dies from lack of adequate care, meaning every three weeks more people die from lack of health care than from 9/11.

Now, the GOP just can't be persuaded by these facts and reasoning, not by the specter of massive insolvency, nor by the moral burden of being the only industrialized country in the world that allows its citizens to die and go bankrupt because they get sick. What bothers me the worst is that they're quite willing to see reform completely die, that Liebeman and a few other Democrats are willing to help kill it via the filibuster, and Paul Krugman was right in characterizing them as "the party of Beavis and Butthead." It's no coincidence that these few people willing to kill the bill all receive large payouts (campaign contributions) from insrance executives. Meanwhile the "responsible" Senators have to basically give up every important change in the bill and turn it into a gift to the insurance industry to satisfy the tyranny of these four (or five) because failure is not an option.

Outward Bound and the Call of the Wild

I've gone on two Outward Bound 3-4 day group excursions. The trips really recharged me and reminded me of studying the transcendentalists. SciAm has a good article talking about what time out in nature does to us:

But a recent article by researchers at the University of Rochester shows that experiences with nature can affect more than our mood. In a series of studies, Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan, University of Rochester, show that exposure to nature can affect our priorities and alter what we think is important in life. In short, we become less self-focused and more other-focused. Our value priorities shift from personal gain, to a broader focus on community and connection with others.

To demonstrate this effect, they ran a series of studies. In their first study, the researchers randomly assigned individuals to view a slide show that either depicted scenes of human-made or natural environments. The slides were matched across a variety of characteristics, to eliminate the possibility that the results were due to things like color, complexity, or brightness of the images. The participants were instructed to try to immerse themselves in the images—to notice the colors and textures and imagine the sounds and smells. After watching the slide show (which took about 8 minutes), the participants completed a series of questions about their life aspirations.

Of particular interest were responses to extrinsic life aspirations , like being financially successful or admired by many people; as contrasted with intrinsic life aspirations , like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society. The results showed that people who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations. The effect was particularly strong for participants who reported being “immersed” in the images. This basic effect was further explored in three subsequent studies. The later studies showed the same effect for true nature experiences: being in a small room with plants, for example.

As people spend less and less time outdoors, I fear we'll see these encouraging results affect smaller portions of the population. I think if we all spent more time in nature that issues like global warming and pollution would be far less polarized. We'd all feel connected to the issues more personally.

On another (completely unrelated) note, SciAm has an article by Shermer talking about skepticism that was really good:

So many claims of this nature are based on negative evidence. That is, if science cannot explain X, then your explanation for X is necessarily true. Not so. In science, lots of mysteries are left unexplained until further evidence arises, and problems are often left unsolved until another day. I recall a mystery in cosmology in the early 1990s whereby it appeared that there were stars older than the universe itself—the daughter was older than the mother! Thinking that I might have a hot story to write about that would reveal something deeply wrong with current cosmological models, I first queried California Institute of Technology cosmologist Kip S. Thorne, who assured me that the discrepancy was merely a problem in the current estimates of the age of the universe and that it would resolve itself in time with more data and better dating techniques. It did, as so many problems in science eventually do. In the meantime, it is okay to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure” and “Let’s wait and see.”

...Most people (scientists included) treat the God question separate from all these other claims. They are right to do so as long as the particular claim in question cannot—even in principle—be examined by science. But what might that include? Most religious claims are testable, such as prayer positively influencing healing. In this case, controlled experiments to date show no difference between prayed-for and not-prayed-for patients. And beyond such controlled research, why does God only seem to heal illnesses that often go away on their own? What would compel me to believe would be something unequivocal, such as if an amputee grew a new limb. Amphibians can do it. Surely an omnipotent deity could do it. Many Iraqi War vets eagerly await divine action

...There is no positive evidence for [the origin of the universe], but neither is there positive evidence for the traditional answer to the question—God. And in both cases, we are left with the reductio ad absurdum question of what came before the multiverse or God. If God is defined as that which does not need to be created, then why can’t the universe (or multiverse) be defined as that which does not need to be created?

In both cases, we have only negative evidence along the lines of “I can’t think of any other explanation,” which is no evidence at all. If there is one thing that the history of science has taught us, it is that it is arrogant to think we now know enough to know that we cannot know. So for the time being, it comes down to cognitive or emotional preference: an answer with only negative evidence or no answer at all. God, multiverse or Unknown. Which one you choose depends on your tolerance for ambiguity and how much you want to believe. For me, I remain in sublime awe of the great Unknown.

I want to believe in the cyclic universe, but I'm quite willing to admit that no one knows, and that we may never know with any degree of certainty, how our universe came to be as it is today (although it may have never "come to be" at all).

False comparison

I've said before that I think the mainstream conservative movement is a little nuts. And in that sense, it doesn't comport to say, "both sides have fringes," since on the right these people make up a giant chunk of the electorate/base:

I continue to think this is a mistaken approach to the ideological landscape. It plays into the conventional wisdom -- "both sides" have their share of nutjobs -- but it doesn't account for the qualitative differences or the reach/influence of both contingents.

It's easy, I suppose, to just assume that the left has some nutjobs, and the right has some nutjobs, but that all of this is unrelated to political mainstream of both major political parties. Wacky liberals said ridiculous things under Bush; wacky conservatives are saying ridiculous things now. Move along; nothing to see here.

But this surface-level look is, at best, incomplete. Code Pink and Truthers don't have, and never have had, any meaningful role in progressive politics or the Democratic Party. Love these groups or hate them, we're talking about a fairly small group, with limited-to-non-existent influence. Indeed, Democratic Party leaders and officials take pains to keep the groups at arm's length. It's not as if leading Dem candidates, seeking high-profile offices, go out of their way to seek Cindy Sheehan's endorsement.

On the other hand, leading Republicans at every level can't do enough to express their support for the Tea Party crowd, and love nothing more than talking to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. We have GOP members of Congress, even some of the party's leadership, endorsing all manner of unhinged nonsense, ranging from Birther questions to state nullification.

The point is, there's a clear and impermeable line between the progressive mainstream and the left fringe. The line between the Republican Party/conservative movement and the far-right fringe barely exists.

Whereas Dems kept the fringe at arm's length, Republicans embrace the fringe with both arms. Both sides have nutjobs; only one side thinks their nutjobs are sane.

Indeed. Cindy Sheehan never had a major media program. Or a minor one. I guess Olbermann is about as liberal as it gets on MSNBC, but compare him side-by-side with Bill "fuckin' thing sucks" Orally, who is considered a "moderate" on Faux News. On the right, the most popular figures are the ones who are ball-slapping, foamy-mouthed wingnuts. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh. It's time for all the GOP reps to learn to speak teabag.

The bottom line on health care reform

Whether you argue health care reform is really about moral values or the fact that the current system is literally going bankrupt, it's difficult to logically oppose changing the system. A recent analysis by Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic finds that health care economists across the political spectrum agree that the Reid bill being debate in the Senate is the best shot we have at fixing the broken system:

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.

"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."

Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."

More from Steve Benen at Political Animal.

PS: Republicans love criticizing the length of the bill, as if that's a valid argument. Legislative bills are printed up with huge margins, large font, numbered lines and double spacing. This causes them to be much lengthier than typical reading material. A recent analysis by the AP finds that the length of the healthcare reform bill is actually about 209 normal pages:

Actually, Leo Tolstoy's tome [War and Peace] is longer than either bill. Full translated versions are nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

By now, the full draft of Reid's bill that had circulated in the corridors and landed so prominently on Republican desks has been published in the Congressional Record in the official and conventional manner.

The type is small and tight. No hernias will be caused by moving this rendering of the bill around. Unfurling it on the Capitol steps would not be much of a spectacle.

It's 209 pages.

That's less than Palin's new 400+ page book.

Follow actual principles, "centrists"

Given the fact that the Republicans are already going after supposedly "centrist" or "moderate" Democrats, painting them as wild-eyed liberals hell-bent on destroying America, perhaps their penchant for ass-covering and concern for election prospects need a new perspective. The idea that they'll win over "moderates" by supporting a Republican filibuster on healthcare reform is insane. The people who want them to support a GOP filibuster are the same people who will vote Republican anyway. I think that all of the "Blue Dogs" and the center-right Dems in the Senate should do a simple thing: support reform behind-the-scenes by voting for cloture and progressing a bill through the legislative process, and turn around and attack opponents from the left side of the debate.

Attacking Republicans from the right, or, insanely, attacking Dems from the right, will not net these Democrats a single vote. And liberals like me don't want to support candidates who act and sound more like Republicans than Democrats.

Steve Benen lays out what I think is a much smarter strategy for vulnerable Congressional incumbents:

Matt Yglesias raises a good point: "A lot of members of congress spent 1993 and '94 spiking the Clinton legislative agenda and then went down to defeat in November 1994 anyway. Wouldn't it make more sense to turn the 111th Congress into a substantive success, hope you can persuade the voters that these are good ideas, and if you fail at least manage to have gone down fighting accomplishing something important?"

If I were a campaign strategist for Blanche Lincoln, I'd go a little further -- I'd encourage her to become the biggest champion of bold, progressive health care reform in the Senate. I'd urge Lincoln to show some major leadership, get out way in front, and position herself as a Kennedy-like guardian of those suffering under the status quo.

Look, Lincoln isn't going to out-conservative the Republican candidates in Arkansas. No matter how she votes on reform, the entire Attack Machine is going after her as some kind of radical leftist. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, and it certainly doesn't matter if she votes with Republicans on the big issues of the day for the next year.

So why not go big? Why not announce that too many Arkansas families are being screwed right now by a dysfunctional health care system and Blanche Lincoln has decided to do something about it? Why not run ads saying, "I don't care what the insurance companies and their candidates say: I'm fighting for the families who can't afford their premiums, the workers who can't get coverage, the Arkansans with pre-existing conditions, the small businesses that can't afford insurance for the employees...."?

In other words, show some confidence. Voters can recognize fear, so stop being defensive. Arkansas has a high percentage of low-income families, struggling to get by, who are terrified of their health care situation. They're not going to vote Democratic on cultural and/or social issues, but they're open to the Democratic message on economic policy -- looking out for working families' interests. A candidate who positions herself as a populist people's champion has a better shot than an apologetic Democrat who hopes Republicans won't mind her party affiliation.

When Republicans accuse her of supporting an overhaul of a broken system, Lincoln might want to try saying, "You're damn right I do. Why don't you?"

Exactly.

Framing health care reform

So Republicans now use the phrase "government takeover" to describe changes to the private insurance industry's practices of denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, rescission during sickness and offering a voluntary public option (a Medicare-like plan) to a small segment of the population. The logical and evidential problems with their arguments don't even matter to opponents of reform. It's as simple as, "Government = bad. Reform = government. Reform = bad!"

It seems many CEO's aren't so stupid:


From the BRT report:

"The report also shows that reform done wrong ... could make a bad situation much worse, in which case Business Roundtable could not support the bill," Eastman Kodak (EK.N: 行情) Company Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Perez said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

Obama said it was further evidence that the U.S. healthcare system is broken.

"If we don't pass comprehensive reform, the report finds, health care costs that are already squeezing our businesses will continue to rise, and in 10 years, employment-based spending on health care for large employers will be fully 166 percent higher per employee than it is today," the president said in a statement.

"The yearly health insurance costs for the average employee will rise to a staggering $28,530," he added, citing a finding by the report.

Companies represented by the Business Roundtable, which includes such giants as Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ.N: 行情), The Boeing Company (BA.N: 行情) and Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM.N: 行情), provide health insurance to more than 35 million workers and their families. The group has been a major force behind the healthcare overhaul push.

Of course, the fact that businesses support real reform doesn't help the lies and propaganda effort to kill change by the GOP, so they're pretty pissed about it.

Learn How to Speak "Tea Bag"

Hilarious.

Anybody have a puppy who can talk?

I was sent two videos to watch by my very conservative, Faux-News-watching mother in an email: part 1, part 2. She wrote:

You wonder why we are worried regarding the health care bill. If you can't look at how the govt. has handled medicare, etc. and be afraid of this I don't know what it would take. My premium raised to 624. monthly with higher deductibles and copays so I am quite aware of the fact that reform is needed. I would start with buying ins. across state lines and tort reform. I would not throw out the baby with the bath water. If you have an open mind, I dare you to read this. Remember, you, * and * will be seniors one day. Also, I don't think this can be paid for. But you probably won't listen just like you never want to hear the other side, only send me links regarding your side which I do listen to and read. Double dog dare you. Triple dog dare you, love mom

As I watched it, I was immediately struck by how this old man talking "from the heart" about health care reform reminded me of Rep. John Shadegg's (R-AZ) use of a baby the other day during a floor speech. In both cases, the people have terrible arguments and try to compensate for that via emotional appeal.

Anyway, I started to compose a reply after watching the video but realized it would do nothing to persuade her of her folly. I tried when she sent me Christian Nation bull crap emails and she just flatly refused to acknowledge the facts. People like this don't let the facts get in the way of a strong belief. That's why they're religious too. So I decided instead to post my reply here:

Generally speaking it isn't very effective to call someone narrow-minded and then use "dares" to goad them into reading or watching something that represents a different point of view than their own.

I feel sorry for Bill Crawford. His rambling was incoherent.

Starting at the beginning...

He was taught to unquestioningly respect "leaders" like a dog rather than expect them to earn respect. That's definitely present in religious thinking. Yes Medicare has problems but I'm quite sure Bill doesn't bother to worry about those problems every time he uses his "government run" insurance. He also repeats a GOP talking point that the government is "taking over" health care and that a bureaucrat will "get between you and your doctor"...let's see Bill...when you use your Medicare do they call a government agent and ask them for permission to take care of you? Um, no. As it is right now, though, my private insurance requires "pre-authorization" for certain medical care. A private insurance agent gets "between me and my doctor" right now.

Bill is also confused about the name calling. The people likening health care reform to Nazism, death camps, etc., are *all* opponents of reform trying to scare old people like Bill. Glenn Beck loves to compare Obama to Hitler, Stalin, Lenin. It worked, obviously, and confused him. Who exactly called seniors names? I'd love it if he could point out one Democratic legislator calling opponents to reform Nazis. Perhaps he's referring to Speaker Pelosi's factually-accurate observation that some people are bringing "swastikis and symbols like that to town halls".

Bill is exactly right that people can "get health care" by going to the ER and that all of us have to foot the bill for it. One catch, though: the only guaranteed care is "life-threatening". Which is what an ER is for. Not getting antibiotics and preventative care and screenings...Which is a good reason to want to change the system. This means that those without insurance end up often having to wait until their problems become catastrophic before being able (or willing) to go to the ER.

Bill is full of shit about not getting heart transplants and cancer treatments. Period. Spin it however you want, but a lie is a lie. There is nothing, *nothing* in any bill that says that you will get "death counseling in lieu of treatment"...it's just complete hysterical nonsense from a frightened old man. Find a way to make sense of that lie. I'd love to hear it. The "death panels" BS that idiots pass around is just sad. The bill provides a reimbursement to doctors for *voluntary* counseling as a service. End of story.

If you want to read the language of the bill that just passed the House regarding this counseling, here it is (HR 3962 Section 1233):

`(3) An individual may receive the voluntary advance care planning care planning consultation provided for under this subsection no more than once every 5 years unless there is a significant change in the health or health-related condition of the individual.

`(4) For purposes of this section, the term `order regarding life sustaining treatment' means, with respect to an individual, an actionable medical order relating to the treatment of that individual that effectively communicates the individual's preferences regarding life sustaining treatment, is signed and dated by a practitioner, and is in a form that permits it to be followed by health care professionals across the continuum of care.'.

(b) Construction- The voluntary advance care planning consultation described in section 1861(hhh) of the Social Security Act, as added by subsection (a), shall be completely optional. Nothing in this section shall--

(1) require an individual to complete an advance directive, an order for life sustaining treatment, or other advance care planning document;

(2) require an individual to consent to restrictions on the amount, duration, or scope of medical benefits an individual is entitled to receive under this title; or

(3) encourage the promotion of suicide or assisted suicide.

But yet the myths continue because propaganda outlets that Bill trusts continue to promote falsehood under the pretense of "giving time to both sides of a 'debate'..."

Like many people, Bill is angry and confused and needs to be consoled. That doesn't mean that he makes any valid points.

The GOP alternative that was voted down just hours before the House bill passed was pretty funny. Did you read about it? No requirements to protect people from "pre-existing conditions" clauses. No protections from rescission. No real improvement for people who are uninsured.

As for your premises about why health care reform "can't be paid for"...think again. A lot of people use very poor logic in asking the question, "How can you spend money to save money?" That's like me arguing that if you want to save on energy costs in the long term the only solution is to cut down the thermostat. If this isn't possible, or a good option, you could invest in energy-efficient windows and a central air system. Although it requires up front investment, you save money over the long term. That's the case with health care...

We're already bankrupting the system because of the issue of how the system is right now. The government already pays 46% of all health care expenses in the US. The private insurers pay about 37%. The rest is out-of-pocket.

The entitlements problem will continue to grow with our top-heavy population chart (more old people than young). But if we can reign in health care costs by overhauling the system then we can possibly prevent total fiscal collapse. This is a problem that Republicans kicked down the road every single time they held office and could do something about it. Everyone knows our entitlements are literally headed for failure and something must be done about it. No Republican has had the courage to face the issue since Newt Gingrich's proposal for drastic cuts in Medicare in 1995.

Let's assume the House bill passes the Senate just like it is (it won't). Paying $1.2 trillion over 10 years works out to approximately two-thirds the cost of the Bush tax cuts, half of the long-term cost of the Iraq War (including long-term health care for vets, not just the annual supplementals to the budget), and about 15% of our defense budget. That's right, we pay about $1 trillion dollars or more *every year* in defense spending, a *huge* part of that right now for two wars, the rest of which largely ends up as pork and wasteful spending and research for technologies that are completely useless (think missile defense, "Star Wars"...). Meanwhile, over 45,000 people die annually in the US from lack of access to basic medical care, ten times the casualties on 9/11. A new Harvard study estimates even higher numbers, that every 12 minutes someone dies from lack of adequate care, meaning every three weeks more people die from lack of health care than from 9/11.

Yet I definitely don't remember hearing that we couldn't afford the Bush tax cuts, or the Iraq War, and we don't hesitate to throw billions and billions of dollars at a remote possibility that a few thousand people *might* die from a terrorist attack. And of course if you don't support every facet of a defense bill, including ordering planes that cost a billion dollars each to make and research on laser weapons then you're a cowardly liberal who hates their country. Or something.

I could write more but I got tired. I think I'll teach my baby how to read from posterboards and talk into a camera so I can make my own propaganda videos.

Term limits

I'm not sure how I feel about Congressional term limits. At first the idea is immensely appealing: get rid of entrenched politicians who seem most liable to corruption and influence peddling. But can't we do that via the election process? The counterargument seems to be that some people are really good at representing our interests and we should be able to keep them if we want them.

And the hilarity is how Jim DeMint is the principal sponsor of the bill, limiting House Reps to 3 terms (6 years) and Senators to 2 terms (12 years).

...DeMint served in the House from 1999 - 2005 and he's been in the Senate ever since. Think he should step down if he really believed in his own "ideals"? Want to bet whether he will?

Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"

It's a classic worth remembering from time to time:

Check out this picture:

It's easy to forget that our sun is but one star in the Milky Way galaxy, with billions and billions of other stars inside it. And our galaxy is but one in a universe with hundreds of billions of other galaxies. So the next time you think something really bad happened to you and it's going to ruin your life, just put it in perspective. Cosmic perspective.

Becoming an apostate is a hard thing to do

But Dr. Ken Pulliam did it anyway. Here's his bio:

I was "saved"(trusted Christ and Christ alone) at the age of 18 and was baptized in an independent Baptist Church in Georgia. I graduated from Baptist University of America (1981) with a B.A. in Theology. I earned an M.A.(1982)and a Ph.D. (1986) in Theology from Bob Jones University. After graduation, I taught at International Baptist College in Tempe, AZ for 9 years. After a few years of accumulating doubts, my Christian faith evaporated sometime during the course of 1996. I am no longer a believer. If I had to pigeon-hole myself, I would say I am agnostic.

Keep in mind that there are myths about such deconversions and more research needs to be done by scientists on the transition out of faith. On the flip side, a friend of mine writes about Ken's conversion:

As an apostate myself, I can imagine the pain this has caused him and his family. Ken has spent his entire life, earned and M.A. and a Ph.D. from Bob Jones University, and taught passionately for 40 years about the "truths" of the biblical account of humanity. And to live with this nagging feeling that "I think I may be wrong. I think I may be changing. I think that there may be more to life than this." is a devastating proposition to those who have not only built their lives around the faith but have built their careers around it too. I was 24 and had a much greater opportunity to start again. Ken, like another friend John Loftus, didn't have that luxury.

I just wanted to write this as I stand on the side of love with Dr. Pulliam and others and say you're not alone, you aren't a fake, you're not a fraud. For some people this is easy, for others it's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life. And know that there is life, even abundant life, as you put the pieces of your world back together.

And honestly, for me, after a while it became easier to live the life I always wanted, I became closer to people than ever before, I became more loving as I was able to move past an "us vs. them" worldview, I was able to more easily join people on their journey of life rather than be defensive against it, I discovered the compassion that Jesus, Buddha, and others had always talked about, and I spent less time focusing on the after-life and more time focusing on the now-life. I found out just how much I was missing.

To all apostates, and apostates-to-be, and Christians, and future Christians-to-be, whatever you do, don't live in fear of being the person you feel that you are right now.

On Ken's blog he does a lot of work refuting the notion that an innocent person (Jesus) can die in the place of a guilty person (sinners) in order to meet the demands of justice. This biblical concept is called the Penal Substitutionary Model of Atonement. It was definitely one of the most problematic ideas for me to swallow, especially when pastors used lame "courtroom" scenarios to try to sell it. Courts don't allow people who don't commit murder to sit in jail for people who do because they follow the law, which stipulates that the person guilty of a crime must be the one punished. More on that here.

Religious "nones" and crazy people

So a new study indicates (summary here) that if the current trend in the fastest-growing sector of American religion -- "none" or "not affiliated" -- continues, about 25% of Americans will belong to that group withing twenty years.

That's not surprising to me at all, and I actually think it may be a little low. The reason is that, as the authors report, a large chunk of the "none" crowd, or non-religious sector, as I think we ought to be referred, is young and 1st-generational. 30% of us are under 30 and only 5% over 70 (see Fig. 1.2). This means that our impact on our children will be felt in twenty years even as the current trend among our generation (Gen Y) continues.

See more atheism stats here.

I've said before (actually, quoted before) that the Religious Right is getting dumber with time. Want to see recent evidence? Check out a woman speaker suggesting that we have public abortions at the "Values Voters Summit" and this weeks' "How to Take Back America" conference co-chair elaborate on conspiracy theories. These people are complete nutjobs.

Obama Effect Redux

I played racquetball last night at a city park. Like many city parks located around large black populations, the basketball gym inside was almost entirely filled with young black males playing basketball, having fun, goofing off. What I noticed, and the reason for the title of this post, was a poster over the water fountain that I've never seen before:


It's apparently the creation of an Atlanta-based designer, King Photography and Graphics. I found it and two other posters like it on www.nomoresagging.com. It dovetails nicely with a question I raised a few months back about Obama's impact on black culture. Although he's personally weighed in against the sort of laws against sagging that Atlanta and other places have considered, he did clearly state that he thought wearing them like that was disrespectful of others.

I don't know how much of an impact things like this have now or will have later, but it is an interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Thanks, Beck

I really do lay the blame for stuff like this at the feet of the crazy wingnuts that get paid millions of dollars to terrify impressionable people about their government. Two of my favorites from MediaMatters are:

• On July 23, 2009, Glenn Beck tells radio listeners that people going “door to door collecting information” would be helping to create a “modern day slave state”.
• During a June 25 interview with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck stated that "there's a lot of people that are concerned" with the census "because they don't want to fill it out. They're not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information. They don't want to give the government all this kind of information."

Conservatives in the media are inflaming the right-wing crazies in a way that no left-wingers ever did or could.

PS: Salon has a fantastic detailed report on Beck's history and rise as a media figure. The most disturbing thing I read was when he called a station rival's wife after she had a miscarriage live on the air and asked her about it, then said that the man (rival) couldn't do anything right. I don't believe in karma, but one has to wonder when a short while later Beck's daughter Mary suffers strokes as she is born and gets cerebal palsy as a result:

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
...
Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."

Counter-protest

I found a fantastic new website that shows pictures of idiot protesters and others in the mix with them making fun of them. It seems inspired by the Westboro "God hates fags" people. I loved this one because I thought I'd hold up a sign beside the "Fag Church" sign with an arrow asking, "Where can I join this church?"

PS: On a similar note, see this.

Protect Health Insurance Executives!

Hilarious! And it's by MoveOn.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Wingnuts

Watch this Tea Bagger 9/12 video and tell me that these people aren't almost entirely Southern (listen to the accents and the religious stupidity).

I almost cried at 8:37 when a man said that, "Glenn Beck is such a logical thinker."

Read this and this for more on 9/12 and Tea Baggers.

Mindset

Comment on MJ's Hall of Fame speech:

Yes, there was some wink-wink teasing with his beloved Dean Smith, but make no mistake: Jordan revealed himself to be strangely bitter. You won, Michael. You won it all. Yet he keeps chasing something that he’ll never catch, and sometimes, well, it all seems so hollow for him.

I read a chunk of Dweck's Mindset this summer and was thinking about that as I read about how MJ rolled off grievances and pointed out when coaches and teammates underestimated him in the past. Dweck's major thesis is that people's growth-oriented mindsets are what set them apart from those who see talent as a fixed finite quality that we either have or don't. She points to athletes who find fault with everyone but themselves versus those who continually see ways to improve themselves.

You have to wonder if the drive to improve himself would've been there at all if not for this obvious resent he held for those he felt hadn't given him a fair shot. Maybe anger is a better motivator for improvement than idealism. Could he have spent hours upon hours perfecting his game without all the wrongs he suffered? We'll never know.

SC Republican Joe Wilson is an idiot and a liar

For shouting, "You lie!" during the President's speech after Obama's claim that the bills will specifically exclude coverage for illegals, Wilson proves himself both an idiot and a liar:

• CNN Fact Check
• Factcheck.org
• AP Factcheck
• Denver Post
• Newsweek
  
• ...&c.

Let's kick the loser out on his can in 2010. Elect Rob Miller.

Colbert on religion

No, the real Stephen Colbert, not in character:

Does faith still play a big part in your life?
Very much. I am highly variable in my devotion. From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I'm first to say that I talk a good game, but I don't know how good I am about it in practice. I saw how my mother's faith was very valuable to her and valuable to my brothers and sisters, and I'm moved by the words of Christ, and I'll leave it at that.

But you do teach Sunday school?
I teach the seven year olds. I'm the catechist for their first communion.

It's almost disappointing. He's no Brad Pitt. But, if you read it carefully, I find reason to think he may be skeptical.

Where all the stuff went

As we read about the economic collapse of '08 and hear mentioned the way consumer spending far outpaced earnings (leading to years of negative savings) one question seems to never get raised: what did Americans do with all the old stuff when they went out and bought new stuff? Did we just trash our old TV's when we went out and bought new plasmas on credit?

It appears the answer may be self-storage.

“A lot of it just comes down to the great American propensity toward accumulating stuff,” Litton explained. Between 1970 and 2008, real disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spending nearly all of it — all but 2.7 percent — each year. Meanwhile, the price of much of what we were buying plunged. Even by the early ’90s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. By 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schor, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.

Schor has been hacking intrepidly through the jumble of available data quantifying the last decade’s consumption spree. Between 1998 and 2005, she found, the number of vacuum cleaners coming into the country every year more than doubled. The number of toasters, ovens and coffeemakers tripled. A 2006 U.C.L.A. study found middle-class families in Los Angeles “battling a nearly universal overaccumulation of goods.” Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected in the corners of backyards. “The home-goods storage crisis has reached almost epic proportions,” the authors of the study wrote. A new kind of customer was being propelled, hands full, into self-storage.

“A lot of the expansion we experienced as an industry was people choosing to store,” Litton told me. A Self Storage Association study showed that, by 2007, the once-quintessential client — the family in the middle of a move, using storage to solve a short-term, logistical problem — had lost its majority. Fifty percent of renters were now simply storing what wouldn’t fit in their homes — even though the size of the average American house had almost doubled in the previous 50 years, to 2,300 square feet.

Consider our national furniture habit. In an unpublished paper, Schor writes that “anecdotal evidence suggests an ‘Ikea effect.’ ” We’ve spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it. The amount entering the United States from overseas doubled between 1998 and 2005, reaching some 650 million pieces a year. Comparing Schor’s data with E.P.A. data on municipal solid waste shows that the rate at which we threw out old furniture rose about one-thirteenth as fast during roughly the same period. In other words, most of that new stuff — and any older furniture it displaced — is presumably still knocking around somewhere. In fact, some seven million American households now have at least one piece of furniture in their storage units. Furniture is the most commonly stored thing in America.

The marketing consultant Derek Naylor told me that people stockpile furniture while saving for bigger or second homes but then, in some cases, “they don’t want to clutter up their new home with all the things they have in storage.” So they buy new, nicer things and keep paying to store the old ones anyway. Clem Tang, a spokesman for Public Storage, explains: “You say, ‘I paid $1,000 for this table a couple of years ago. I’m not getting rid of it, or selling it for 10 bucks at a garage sale. That’s like throwing away $1,000.’ ” It’s not a surprising response in a society replacing things at such an accelerated rate — this inability to see our last table as suddenly worthless, even though we’ve just been out shopping for a new one as though it were.

Exactly. We knew we were spending a ton of money on the new stuff, but that the old stuff was still valuable. Why this didn't make us realize that perhaps the old stuff didn't need replacing is a key psychological question. I have a feeling that the psychology of American consumerism has been altered for a while. For how long is anyone's guess.

Ego, or something like it

As I mentioned before, I once decided to weed out my facebook friends list. I decided the other day that it was that time again.

It's almost hard to believe that at one point in 2007, I had 350 friends. What's funny about that is that they were almost entirely people I knew from college. I cut the list down to about 80-some, but it crept back up to 155 (today's count) mostly from adding random people I knew from my home town, but people I didn't really care to keep up with. As of a few hours ago, I now have 53 friends, including 3 family members.

I suppose I've grown more antisocial with age and having a child. Although some basic human social drive makes us want to be liked and feel important in the eyes of our peers, I can honestly say that I think I've "outgrown" this impulse almost entirely, with the exception of colleagues at work and some people I respect. Perhaps that's why I don't have even a tinge of desire to go to my class reunion. I won't go, in fact, even if I get invited -- which is somewhat nebulous, given that I have no idea who is "in charge" of sending out such invitations or how they get to be deemed the authority.

Maybe it's a consequence of being a sort of social pariah from my recent history of atheist activism. Maybe it's my unfailing sense of moral and intellectual superiority. It's got to be ego, or something like it, that drives us first to accumulate markers of social importance and then to discard them in the belief that they are like 99.99% of the other shit that constitutes daily life: absurd.

Krugman in the NYT Magazine

If you have 30min - 1hr for economics reading, go here.

Is being gored to death by a Minotaur really torture?

I could seriously see this on Faux News. Perhaps Glenn Beck's program?

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Anonymity

** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

** UPDATE 2015: I know that most people, if digging here at this site long enough, could probably identify me. My anonymity is tenuous, at best. I just ask that if anyone desires to identify me, they consider the consequences for me: there's a reason I went from a serious blogger about ten years ago to a very infrequent blogger now. It's called family and career. And those two things take huge precedence over this little soap box. In order to protect them, I write anonymously. Thank you for respecting that. **

Dowd writes something today that is a little near and dear to me. The issue is anonymous blogging. I think the takeaway lesson is this: if you're an anonymous blogger, you have the right to say whatever you like, but there may be consequences for it when you start bashing other individuals or topics that some people are enamored with (politics and religion). But it's far less likely to wreck your life if you have an anonymous blog where you make fun of, say, Christians in general than if you have an anonymous blog where you call an individual a "skank" and "ho" and "ho bag"...After all, no judge can find for a plantiff in a defamation suit and out you if you don't single out someone by name (or identify them individually in some other way).

I think it's true that most people are anonymous on the internet due to the desire to hide from the consequences of their writing. Noble usage of pseudonyms through history was often politically-motivated and the writers feared for their lives or livelihoods. Today people just want to have a soapbox but wear a costume as they stand up there and talk. I guess you could say I'm like that now. It didn't start out that way.

The status of my being a blogger has changed a few times, for a few different reasons (most of the following links are broken because I moved all my posts to this new site and made most of the personal stuff private):

1. I began writing a blog in Nov 2005. It was a public blog that used my real name. It didn't have many readers. One day, I wrote something on Sternberg and it got linked to, and from there, I had a lot of interest in keeping readers. Some of the original research I did has been incorporated into this article at Expelled Exposed.
2. A few people from my hometown, and relatives, learned of my site and I learned of that. I got nervous in Feb 2006 and made my website private. I stupidly deleted a lot of my posts. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer religious and, while I didn't mind them knowing, I didn't want them reading my stuff in which I "debunked" their religion. If you hunger for more details, here they are.
3. I changed my mind about three months later and began writing again on a public blog. Once, I realized I was in trouble with getting my Ph.D. finished because of the time I was spending online. We see where that worry took me...
4. I ended up doing an interview on Hannity & Colmes in Nov of 2006 over a controversial topic concerning politics and religion. I got really active in doing hands-on real-world stuff for a while there and did less personal blogging.
5. That trend was fairly unbroken until I got my M.S. and started the job search. Then, I decided to go private again, because I was afraid that people at my new job would find this site and I would have to deal with a bunch of BS from it.
6. I planned to write less due to work; I'm pretty much still in that same boat, and my writing over last summer increased only because of free time.
7. Now that we have a child, free time isn't really an issue anymore, since I don't have any.
8. Finally, on around 1/11/09, I decided to use Blogger's export/import feature and start a brand new site. I used a text editor to search and replace all instances of my name and identifying information I could think of and also change all URL references to my old site to this new one -- that's why there are so many broken links, btw. I made a lot of my personal posts private (leaving only rants about politics and religion, mostly). I published them here at NSEFL. And I really want to stay anonymous here.
9. ** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

I guess I think I have lots of really important things to say and I need a soapbox. But regardless of merit, I think everyone has the right to have an anonymous soapbox so long as they don't single out individuals or put up embarrassing or defamatory things about people. At that point, IMHO (and the in humble opinion of the judge in the case Dowd writes about) you lose your right to privacy:

“...the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Indeed.

Death wish

I want to be cremated before any ceremony friends and family have in my honor. At said ceremony, I want Eva Cassidy's version of "Fields of Gold" to play. Check it out here.


Also I think I'd like this version of Sting's "Shape of My Heart" played (this other version is cool but a little dramatic). If you listen to the lyrics it may or may not seem appropriate to you, since it's about cards on the surface, but I like the subtle underlying theme and think it's a beautiful melody.

Finally, I have loved "Dust in the Wind" since I heard the original version from Kansas. Although I prefer such ballads acoustic, the only version I can find besides theirs I like are acoustic female vocals like Sarah Brightman's version.


Besides those three songs, it doesn't matter. I'll be dead, after all!

CARS

Like many people, I checked my vehicle specs to see if I could trade in a late-90's model Pontiac for a new fuel-efficient ride and get the $4500 rebate.  It's beside the point to question whether we could afford a new car, given that the Pontiac still runs pretty well, as I found I could not participate in "cash for clunkers". 

I was aggravated that the way the program was set up, your old car had a maximum mpg (18), instead of offering the rebate if the improvement in mpg was past a certain amount -- say +6 mpg -- for the new car or truck.  I thought a lot of people would be dumb and just trade in a Suburban for a Tahoe (both gas-hog SUV's).

Part of my pessimism is grounded in the fact that $4 a gallon gas seems like ancient history now, and people have short memories.  Part of my pessimism is grounded in the fact that the economy still sucks, so the people willing to take advantage of the program probably already have plenty of money and don't generally worry about gas expenses to begin with.  Part of my pessimism is just pessimism.

It looks like, so far at least, I was wrong:

The Transportation Department said Monday afternoon that based on 80,500 cash-for-clunker applications — which officials believe is about a third of the total deals so far — average fuel economy of the new vehicles was 9.6 miles per gallon better than the old ones, 25.4 m.p.g. versus 15.8 m.p.g., an improvement of 60.8 percent. The improvement, the department pointed out, is much larger than the minimum required to be eligible for the government rebate: a gain of four miles per gallon for cars and two miles per gallon for trucks.

Part of the reason for the gain was that some people were turning in old trucks for new cars. So far, 83 percent of the “clunkers” were trucks or S.U.V.’s and 60 percent of the new vehicles were cars, the department said.

Maybe we have learned our lessons -- economically, politically, environmentally, whatever.  The glory days of the big-ass American SUV are hopefully gone forever. 

I don't know enough economics or environmental stuff to say whether or not this program is "worth the money" in terms of stimulating growth and saving gas (criticisms here and here).  My feeling is that if the sales continue in the same trend -- trading larger vehicles for smaller ones -- that the program will be a success on both counts.

Gotta love the South

Oh Dixie, how I adore thee:

Related bashing of my native region here and here.

Crazy conservatives redux

Glenn Beck calls Obama a racist who hates white people (@1m19s into video). Popular media conservatives really are getting more and more unhinged.

Feldstein tells us that Obama wants single payer. That's news to me.

On another note, Orally explains that Canada doesn't have better healthcare than us, we just have more people. Their higher life expectancy is just a figment of statistical manipulation, see...

Great minds think alike

Early this morning, I wrote a post complaining how the Gang of 6, as they've come to be known, is essentially holding healthcare reform hostage to their whims. I tallied up the combined population they represent in the Senate and found it to be under 3% of Americans.

At around 10:40, Matthew Yglesias published an almost identical piece.

Great minds think alike. (H/T: Krugman)

What is "representation" in the Senate?

The notion of a Senate body in which each state gets equal voice pisses me off to begin with. Wyoming has the same "weight" in the Senate as California, though it has 1.45% of the population of the state. That's right, CA outweighs WY by a factor of 69 in population but is equal in terms of Senate representation. The concept of democracy is majority rule with inalienable minority rights. But does that mean the minority's voice has to be equal to the majority's when the latter is 70:1 larger than the former? We all know that when it comes to getting things done in Washington, the Senate is the place that lobbyists target because it's easiest to gum up the works.

And that's part of the problem. I know that everyone thinks the Founders were infallible and their wisdom about this system of checks and balances is inerrant. But when you look at the fact that the GOP has turned filibustering (another "check" on the majority party) into standard procedure, and the relative difficulty of passing bills that have huge public support, it should make you wonder.

In reading today's NYT report about how the six members of the Senate Finance Committee all but hold the healthcare reform effort hostage to their own desire, I am angry at how these 6 Senators, 3 Dems and 3 GOP, are supposed to "represent" me and the rest of the country. Let's look at what states they hail from and how large those states are in terms of their population percentage of our nation of around 304,059,724 people**:

baucus - montana (0.318%)
conrad - ND (0.211%)
bingaman - NM (0.653%)

dem total: 1.18%

snowe - maine (0.433%)
grassley - iowa (0.987%)
enzi - wyoming (0.175%)

repub total: 1.60%

rep + dem = 2.78%

That's right. The six people who have all but decided a public option isn't necessary and a surtax on millionaires to pay for reform is just too much, despite the absurd inequality that the Bush tax cuts brought about that these "fiscally conservative" hypocrites helped vote for, come from states with a total of under 3% of the US population. That just sucks.

Remember David Brooks' remark,

"It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates."

Republicans can remark that the Democratic party is full of "insular liberals" from urban areas all they want, since those same areas hold the majority of the population of this great nation.*** We members of the Urban Archipelago make up the majority of the nation in population terms, and tend to be more progressive in politics. And so the majority of us aren't as "moderate" as all the talking heads want everyone to believe, it's just that the way the Senate skews power moderates are literally holding us all hostage to what they think is right. And those of us with voting power will remember that, despite how much our constitutional right of representation gets fuc*ed by the system.

(Gail Collins also made this point about Baucus' perverse amount of power, "Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.")

**All data from 2008 figures at census.gov

***World Bank data,Table A2 Urbanization, p337 for the US shows the 2005 population of our country is 80.8% urban and that by 2015 it is expected to be 83.7% urban. From the same table, in 2005 43.3% of our national population resided in cities with a population of over 1,000,000 people.

Brad Pitt and I are so alike...

HuffPo:

ON GOD:

BILD: Do you believe in God?
Brad Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"

BILD: Is your soul spiritual?
Brad Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

Except that last part. I don't think there's anywhere "there" to "find out"...but I get his point.

NYT Healthcare Editorial

Here's Krugman on why the free market can't fix healthcare: 1) the unpredictability of the need for healthcare and the potentially devastating costs make insurance necessary, and so "consumer choice" doesn't exist between doctor and patient, and 2) experience, price comparison and other market dynamics don't work in healthcare.

Here's a good editorial of the reform effort as a whole, pros and cons, consequences and risks:

Thune Amendment

It's funny that Republicans talk about supporting "local control" and "states' rights"...until they disagree. They want to prevent states and localities from deciding their own criteria for concealed weapons permits. This goes back to an issue I've discussed before: why do citizens need to walk around with handguns when it's 3 times likelier a child will kill themselves with it and 120 times likelier their gun will be used for murder than defending themselves?

So basically the GOP is for "states' rights" and "local control" only when it comes to...

• keeping people from voting (trying to push federal ID laws)
  
• keeping people from receiving welfare and social assistance ("welfare reform")
  
• keeping people from smoking pot (medical marijuana laws)
  
• keeping people from choosing to die with dignity (assisted suicide in Oregon, Terri Schiavo)
• keeping people from choosing to lower pollution (California emissions standards)
  
• keeping people in prison longer and on death row (Bush DOJ demanding longer sentences and death penalty in specific cases)

Good to know.

The Obama effect

I would never use anecdotal evidence to argue a serious trend. But I do like to use my experiences as a pretext to make horrible generalizations. So let me do that...

The other day at B&N, I noticed a few black families in the children's section with their kids picking out books and reading. This was two days after the president's NAACP speech, which emphasized active parenting, among other things, to solve serious problems in the black community:

To parents -- to parents, we can't tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. (Applause.) You can't just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox -- (applause) -- putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. (Applause.) It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework. (Applause.)

And by the way, it means we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters. (Applause.) We need to go back to the time, back to the day when we parents saw somebody, saw some kid fooling around and -- it wasn't your child, but they'll whup you anyway. (Laughter and applause.) Or at least they'll tell your parents -- the parents will. You know. (Laughter.) That's the meaning of community. That's how we can reclaim the strength and the determination and the hopefulness that helped us come so far; helped us make a way out of no way.

It also means pushing our children to set their sights a little bit higher. They might think they've got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers -- (applause) -- doctors and teachers -- (applause) -- not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be the President of the United States of America. (Applause.)

Perhaps it's just racist of me to assume that there aren't already a lot of black families going to B&N on a Sunday afternoon, but I've been in a lot of bookstores and it definitely made an impression on me as something I don't see often (anecdotal, I know). I guess I'm prone to overestimating the effect that Obama will have on black culture. The fact that so many children are born out-of-wedlock to black women is tied directly to perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime.

While 28 percent of white women gave birth out of wedlock in 2007, nearly 72 percent of black women and more than 51 percent of Latinas did.

That is just unbelievable. Part of it may be that white women are more likely to be on birth control, part of it may be that white women are more likely to have the financial resources to get an abortion. Adding to this problem comes the higher religiosity of black women, which will guilt them into thinking they shouldn't have an abortion and instead drop out of college.

Some part of me just thinks that having a black president really has and really will continue to make a serious difference in the cultural attitude of black America. Maybe I'm overly naive.

I also wonder if there's any evidence of this in the serious drop in violent crime rates:

The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

"Experts did not see this coming at all," said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Time will tell, I guess...

Are conservatives crazier than they used to be?

I really don't think conservatism is "dying" as an ideology. But I am afraid it's getting dumber and crazier.

I realize that as a left-of-center type of person I'm inclined to exaggerate the stupidity of conservatives in some ways. However, watching/listening to Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Hannity, and others just makes people go fuc#ing bananas. I mean they aren't just complaining about what Obama's doing, which is their profound right and responsibility. They are literally selling people on the idea that our country is turning into either a Nazi state or a Commie one. Some of them (and their followers) are so dumb that they don't know the vast difference between a free democratic capitalist country with some government intervention and Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.

I know that not all conservatives think this way, but the ones who represent the greatest danger to democracy do: the ones who don't think critically, or for themselves, and are constantly misinformed by idiots. And what's scary is just how influential and popular these idiots are. I mean Beck has one of the most popular shows on television. Faux News has almost quit trying to appear nonpartisan (or sane).

I also know that other liberals have commented on this trend lately and pointed to examples like this that go way back in time. So perhaps it's just that I wasn't informed/interested enough during the Clinton years to appreciate it, because this seems new. And one has to wonder, with the recent shootings by all these bigoted gun nut conservatives, if the combination of Antichrist rhetoric and Glenn Beck's rodeo clown antics aren't pushing more over the edge than before.

Last night at B&N I saw a lady ask where DeMint's new screed about the Nazi USA could be found.

Today I read things like the founder of Freeperland calling for a revolution that begins by removing every elected official in government. I have to agree with this guy's analysis:

There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.

Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.

This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.

You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.

Basically: is it just me, or are some conservatives just going fuc*ing nuts?