Conservatives
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2009Well, now we've reached flat out thuggery. He must be a moderate: he only punched him in the face, he didn't shoot him in the face. From Miami:
A 65-year-old man rallying in favor of healthcare reform was knocked to the ground by a man who disagreed with the call for a government-run health plan outside of a Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce meeting headlined by Sen. Bill Nelson.
Luis Perrero of Coral Gables was standing among about 40 Democratic activists and union workers when a man in a Ford pick-up truck pulled up to the rally at Jungle Island and began arguing with the crowd. The man,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 31, 2009Republican Dick Armey supports an option to enroll in Medicare. Which isn't socialism. Or something.Hunh? Dick Armey in an interview with The Economist:
If you in fact freely choose to enroll in Medicare that's a wonderful gift, it's a charity, it's something I applaud. But when they force you in, that's tyranny.
That's what the strongest version of the public option--Medicare for All--would entail. You have a choice between private plans and a public one.
[jaw hits floor]
The incoherence from the right is staggering, although still effective.
I CAN HAS FREEDOM NOW?
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2009R.J. Matson, St. Louis Post Dispatch
Ezra Klein nails it:
There is an impulse to honor the dead by erasing the sharp edges of their life. To ensure they belong to all of us, and in doing, deprive them of the dignity conferred by their actual choices, their lonely stands, and their long work. But Ted Kennedy didn't belong to all of us. He didn't even belong to all Democrats. He was not of the party that voted for more than a trillion in unfunded tax cuts but cannot bring itself to pay for health-care reform. He was not of the party that fears the next election more than the next failure to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2009One of the more successful healthcare interventions has been home nurse visits to families that have recently had a child:
"Optional Coverage of Nurse Home Visitation Services" certainly doesn't sound controversial. The initiative, which has existed in various forms at the state and local level for decades, would fund programs that "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains...modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child." Most similar programs have…
mikethemadbiologist | August 16, 2009Following on yesterday's post, we read that Rick Perlstein has similar thoughts:
Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2009Or perhaps, health insurance deductions--of mice and men. In response to McCain's healthcare proposal, during the 2008 election, I laid out why tax deductions (or even credits) are a stupid healthcare policy. While I think it's foolish, at least, it attempts to be serious. But this is why I can't take Republican policy initiatives seriously:
Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter has proposed the Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years (HAPPY) Act.
McCotter's HAPPY Act would allow pet owners to take a $3,500 tax deduction for expenses related to pet and veterinary care.
As an avid…
mikethemadbiologist | August 8, 2009
Yesterday, I raised the possible specter of violent intimidation breaking out at a health care townhall meeting. Turns out I was off by about twelve hours:
Tampa, Florida-- Fireworks were expected, but organizers of a town hall meeting on health care reform were caught off guard Thursday night by just how explosive the issue became.
Hundreds showed up for the 6:00 forum held at the Children's Board of Hillsborough County on Palm Avenue in Tampa. The auditorium which holds around 250 people, filled up so quickly eventually Tampa Police were ordered to begin turning people away.
Inside, U.S.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2009...falling out of the stupid tree and smacking into every branch on the way down would be another. By now, you might have heard about the corporate lobbyist-organized healthcare offensive, which is designed to 'confront' officials at public meetings about healthcare--that is, heckle, intimidate, and shut down these meetings. Democratic Representative Gene Green (R-TX) wasn't having any of it:
During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they "oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care." Almost all the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2009So Arthur Laffer, the creator of the Laffer Curve, which was used to justify lower taxes on the grounds that the increase in economic activity would actually increase the amount of tax revenue despite the lower rates, just crapped out on national television this pearl of wisdom:
If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.
If I were a Very Serious Blogger, I'm sure I would have something trenchant to say, but, damn, what a fucking moron. Laffer is the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2009Because fiscal responsibility is a conservative frame:
In its healthcare messaging, the White House has taken an issue more intimate and immediate than perhaps any other in a voter's life and transformed it into an abstract, technical argument about long-term actuarial projections. It's a peculiar kind of reverse political alchemy: transforming gold into lead....
Obama has inherited a shared political vocabulary in Washington (with phrases like "fiscal discipline," which he himself employs) that shapes the contours of the possible and semantically militates against progressive politics at…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2009Research 2000 conducted a poll where they asked the question, "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?" It's probably not too surprising that only four percent of Democrats and eight percent of independents thought so--there will always be fucking morons who walk among us.
But what shocked me is that 28 percent of Republicans thought Obama was not born in the U.S. Well, actually, it doesn't shock me at all. It is depressing, however, to see a major political party headbutt the crazy train.
What's even more bizarre is the regional distribution of…
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2009Because ScienceBlogs borked this post yesterday, I'm reposting it here. 'Upgrade' is a four-letter word as far as I'm concerned. Anyway...
Retiring Republican Senator George Voinovich lashed out recently at the Southern influence on the GOP. As Steve Benen noted, while Voinovich didn't make the point very tactfully, the GOP has become a regional party. Where I think Benen goes wrong is this (italics mine):
Voinovich will no doubt get slammed for his remarks, but it's not his fault the party's power base has become focused on one conservative region.
So whose fault is it? Mine? Benen's…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2009Retiring Republican Senator George Voinovich lashed out recently at the Southern influence on the GOP. As Steve Benen noted, while Voinovich didn't make the point very tactfully, the GOP has become a regional party. Where I think Benen goes wrong is this (italics mine):
Voinovich will no doubt get slammed for his remarks, but it's not his fault the party's power base has become focused on one conservative region.
So whose fault is it? Mine? Benen's? Of course, this is Voinovich's fault. He's a senior senator from a politically critical swing state. While manufacturing has been…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2009Katrina vanden Heuvel makes a good point about some bad framing in the healthcare debate--the 'centrists' aren't in the center at all:
Even a good regional paper like Louisville's Courier-Journal-- in rightly blasting the Blue Dogs as "deplorable" for being "unable to muster the spine to pay for health care reform with even so innocuous a measure as higher taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans"--calls them "centrist".
The danger is that promoting the view that these conservative Democrats are somehow at the center of our politics plays into the hands of those who would like to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2009I should never have to tag a post with "Secession." Moving right along...
Having grown up in Virginia, I'm well aware of the propensity of batshit lunacy: this is the state whose Republican Party nominated Ollie North for Senate. But Republican VA state delegate nominee Catherine T. Crabill has elevated the lunacy to a whole new level. To start with, she's an Oklahoma City bombing truther. But Crabill veers from the lunatic to the outright dangerous:
Crabill... claimed the Obama administration is pursuing legislation that will turn it into "the thought police" and wants to put…
Corruption Is Integral to the 'Intellects' of the Conservative Movement: Why This Matters to Science
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2009One of the advantages the conservative movement has is that it can be very lucrative to be a professional conservative, whereas being a professional liberal is rather difficult. There isn't the tight integration of think tanks, conservative magazines, cozy book deals, and the occasional faculty sinecure (e.g., torturer John Yoo) on the left. What keeps this beast fed is money. Last week, Politico described the fickle ideological allegiance of one conservative think tank:
The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group's support…
mikethemadbiologist | July 18, 2009One of the things that I find maddening about the Republicans' sloganeering is that they're never held accountable for the consequences of their slogans ("It's not the government's money, it's your money"--actually, it is the government's money, but that's a separate discussion). Well, the Obama administration called Republican Senator Jon Kyl's bluff, after Sen. Kyl criticized the stimulus package:
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is standing up for his colleague Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., under heavy fire from President Barack Obama's administration and national Democrats for suggesting that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2009This finishes the very silly part of the post
With Sarah Palin's unconventional resignation, there's been a lot of discussion of what Sarah Palin means, and why she has such appeal for a subset of Americans. While people have described Palin as engaging in identity politics, but that sells identity politics short. Palin along with the proto-movement surrounding her--Palinism--practices what could be call 'politics of the blood.' It's derived from Giovanni Gentile's description of fascism: "We think with our blood."*See Godwin disclaimer below In Palin's case, it's an emotional appeal to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2009Monday's NY Times, in a story about the remote possibility of torture investigations by the Justice Department, describes the Obama administration's concerns:
A series of investigations could exacerbate partisan divisions in Congress, just as the Obama administration is trying to push through the president's ambitious domestic plans and needs all the support it can muster.
"He wants to dominate the discussion, and he wants the discussion to be about his domestic agenda -- health care, energy and education," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University who…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2009He wasn't as pithy as let them eat cake, but the sentiment is the same. What's gone missing in the debate over a public option for healthcare (although when more the seventy percent support it, it's hard to see how this qualifies as a debate) is that tens of millions of people already have a public option: it's called Medicare. So, if you're 65 or over, you get government healthcare. So why can't I have the same options my parents have? One of my parents works so they can choose the employer's private plan or Medicare. Why can't I?
Having said that, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of…