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.