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Tea partiers heckle woman whose daughter-in-law died because she didn’t have health insurance.

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 23, 2009 at 4:48 pm

At a town hall event on health care reform hosted by Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL) earlier this month, Midge Hough told the tragic story of how her daughter-in-law, Jenny, and her unborn grandchild died recently because they didn’t have health insurance. Jenny came down with “severe double pneumonia, Septic shock and Respitory failure,” Hough said, “and laid in an ICU unit for the next two months at a cost of $22,000 a day.” Her baby died in the womb and Jenny died a few weeks later. But as Hough was telling her story, tea partiers at the meeting “ridiculed” her, the South Town Star reports. “They moaned and rolled their eyes and interrupted,” laughing loudly and shouting her down at points. Watch it (beginning at 1:30):

Chicago Tea Party Patriots sent out a flyer to encourage attendance at the event, saying Lipinski had “sold us out!” by voting “to pass socialized medicine.” In defense of the heckling, an organizer for the group falsely claimed that the Houghs fabricated their story and called them operatives of President Barack Obama who “go from event to event and (cry) the same story.” At another recent event, Hough told Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) that she has been “personally attacked” by tea party activists at her home address. (HT: Crooks and Liars)

Yglesias

The Celebrity Party

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 23, 2009 at 4:43 pm

Ross Douthat observes that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee emerged from the 2008 election as the two conservative figures with some charisma and enthusiastic followers, but “both had the same Achilles’ heel: They seemed unready for high office, and owed their appeal more to personality than to substance.”

This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity?

For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.

I think this is all pretty much right. And as Douthat goes on to argue, there are a number of right-of-center policy wonks who’ve tried to articulate some kind of meaningful response to the nation’s problems, only to be ignored. But is he right that “there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism?” I’d like to think he is. But it also seems to me that going all the way back to the rise of George W. Bush in 1999 we’ve seen the conservative movement tending to fetishize stupidity and put forward the notion that there’s something actually un-American about being thoughtful, having respect for scholarship, or incorporating any kind of nuance into your discussion.

9/11 served to intensify this and for a while turned it into a mainstream attitude. The idea that the country was just kind of screwed to have a dim bulb in office amidst a national crisis was too much to handle, so instead The New York Times started running articles saying “many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naive and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising his and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs experience an issue in the campaign, did not win.” That moment has, fortunately, waned somewhat in the mainstream. But not, I think, in the conservative movement.

Alyssa

Pirates of the Caribbean: A Minor Retrospective

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 23, 2009 at 4:42 pm

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of nikoretro.

I am deeply susceptible to weekend movie marathons on cable channels.  I can lose an entire day watching Frodo and Sam head to Mount Doom and Aragorn get around to being comfortable being King in between commercial breaks.  As someone who reads quickly, and who frequently multi-tasks while watching television or movies, I’m often happy to dive into the same art multiple times, knowing that while I have a high comprehension rate, I’ll probably find something new each time.  And so, on a lazy weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find my Saturday night plans made for me, in the form of a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon.

I’d forgotten how much fun the movies are.  They’re wildly inconsistent in quality, especially as the double-crosses and the plot twists mount,.  But Gore Verbinski and the writers do an impressive job of creating plot arcs, starting the series with Elizabeth Swann singing a “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” and ending it with her son singing the same thing, and having Jack Sparrow enter Port Royal on one boat not befitting his ambition, and giving him the means to leave on a similarly unworthy vessel.  The sheer number of extremely good actors slumming it in what is basically broad entertainment is marvelous.  One of the great tragedies of our moviegoing times, I think, is that we think big, enthusiastic, popular popcorn flicks are not the proper place for the serious actors of our era.  (There are some exceptions, like Sigourney Weaver, for which thank goodness for James Cameron for seeing her action-heroine potential.)  Folks like John Turturro or John Voight will turn up, winking and mugging, at the edges of the Transformers franchise, but the business is left to the likes of Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf, with predictable results.  How much better is it to have a big, juicy, special-effects picture where Geoffrey Rush, Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp are all strutting their not-inconsiderable stuff, having fun, and giving us a gift while doing it?

And the movies deserve a lot of credit for establishing the enormous bankability of Johnny Depp’s delightful brand of weirdness.  If anything, I think the series’ singular flaw is in backing off from the sexual menace Depp projects in the first movie, when he wants Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), and she’s unable to admit that she wants anyone (including Orlando Bloom and Depp) for a great deal of the flick.  By the third movie, the sexual chemistry between Depp and Knightley’s been reduced to a joke, partially in the services of the plot (Jack Sparrow goes slightly mad, she winds up with the blacksmith’s apprentice-turned-immortal-pirate captain), but not really excusably.  If Elizabeth can go from proper colonial lady to pirate queen, why can’t she take up with Jack Sparrow?

There’s something nice about the fact that Depp and Rush’s characters will be perpetually chasing after each other, grappling for possession of the Black Pearl.  And it might actually work for subsequent movies, if Jack hadn’t been reduced to something of a hallucinating cliche: at the end of the third movie, he’s back on a dock with a dinghy instead of a true ship making allusions to penis size.  It’s meant to be a return to where he started, but somehow, Sparrow’s arrival in Port Royal on the mast of a sinking boat had a hell of a lot more dignity and style.  But by the end of the series, all the serious emotional energy has shifted to Knightley and Bloom, who can’t exactly bear the freight of it.  For movies that make the (factually dubious but in certain scenes emotionally compelling) case that piracy represented a kind of freedom, it’s unfortunate to reduce the leading pirate so much at the end.  If he decided not to come back for subsequent movies, I could hardly blame him.

Economy

Democrats Considering Direct Jobs Program — Will Deficit Fearmongering Prevent It?

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 23, 2009 at 4:20 pm

AP090316031054Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post reported today that “as desperate Democratic lawmakers cast about for ways to create jobs from Capitol Hill, a 1970s-era jobs program is getting a fresh look”:

Known as CETA — the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act — the program provided direct government funding to hire temporary workers. At its peak in 1978, it had created 725,000 public service jobs and shaved roughly one point off the unemployment figure…The version of CETA being discussed by Democrats would be some type of public-private partnership through which the government would pay part of an employee’s salary, while he or she would train under and work for a private firm.

Of course, as in most other issues, Republicans automatically voiced their displeasure with the idea, as Michael Steel, a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “gave CETA the instant thumbs down.”

While I would prefer a straight, WPA-style program (both for efficiency and accountability purposes), instead of a public-private partnership, it’s encouraging to see that Congress is finally willing to put such a plan on the table, albeit far later than it should have. There’s no reason that direct job creation — particularly for young people — has been avoided for so long.

However, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the administration is “lukewarm about proposals by congressional Democrats to introduce broad legislation to create jobs, instead favoring targeted measures that would be less likely to inflate the deficit.” “Hamstrung by the nation’s $1.4 trillion deficit and his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans, Mr. Obama is keen to avoid any measures suggestive of a second, big-ticket stimulus,” the Journal said.

As Paul Krugman noted today, deficit hysteria amounts to “scaring the government into inaction on unemployment.” That, combined with Republican insistence that repealing the stimulus is a sound jobs policy, are going to make serious job-creation proposals difficult to engineer. But as former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder wrote:

Direct public-service employment is straightforward. As long as the new government jobs do not compete with the private sector, the net job creation should be one-for-one. So hire people to repair parks, not shopping malls. And if we restrict ourselves to low-wage jobs, the cost will not do grievous harm to the budget. For example, at an average all-in cost of $30,000 a year, one million new jobs would cost $30 billion.

As James Galbraith noted, in the absence of additional steps (including fiscal aid to states, which are seeing tax revenues plummet) “double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger — perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections.”

Of course, much like the brouhaha over stimulus accounting errors, a direct-jobs program opens its advocates up to criticism when, as Dean Baker put it, “reporters inevitably find some chump claiming to be employing his brother while splitting the government paycheck.” Does that making taking such a step not worth it? I don’t think so.

Yglesias

Obey Calls for War Tax

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 23, 2009 at 4:12 pm

225px-Dave_Obey,_official_Congressional_photo_portrait

Back in October, David Obey floated the radical idea that war spending in Afghanistan should be put in a “normal” budgetary context and put in the same fiscal constraints as health reform. Today he’s taken that idea one step further and said an escalation in Afghanistan should be paid for via a “war surtax” on high-income households.

It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this. Does he put together a bloc of progressive legislators who say they’ll only back a tax-financed version of the war? Would any Blue Dog budget balancers join such a group?

Politics

Lou Dobbs On Whether He’s Thought About Running For President: ‘Yes Is The Answer’

By Matt Corley on Nov 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm

Lou Dobbs Last week, rumors spread that former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs might challenge Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in 2012. But in an interview on Fred Thompson’s radio show today, Dobbs said that he is actually considering a run for the White House:

THOMPSON: Lou, one way to have a voice — you’ve already had a big one, but another way to have a voice is in public service. Have you given any thought to perhaps running for president?

DOBBS: I’m talking — yes is the answer. And I’m going to be talking some more with some folks who want me to listen to them in the next few weeks. You know, I, so I just don’t even what to tell you in terms of where I’m leaning because right now I’m fortunate to have a number of wonderful options. I do know this, I’m going to have the best advice. I may make a terrible decision, but I’m going to have great advice.

Listen here:

In 2008, Dobbs was rumored to be considering a shot at becoming the governor of New Jersey. When Dobbs announced he was leaving CNN, he said that “some leaders in media, politics, and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving.”

Dobbs gave no indication of what, if any, party affiliation he would campaign under. A self-described “independent populist,” Dobbs would likely run as an Independent candidate. “I think something on the order of an independent movement will come if these two parties fail the American people again,” he said in 2007.

There are already multiple Draft Dobbs for President websites, although the “Lou Dobbs 2012″ site will soon be shutting down due to a lack of funds.

Climate Progress

UK Guardian: To stop a climate catastrophe ¦ Scientists must stop sanitising their message

By Joe Romm on Nov 23, 2009 at 3:27 pm

I’m updating this post from April since so many in the media and elsewhere still seem to be pushing the myth that climate scientists have been overhyping the threat posed by climate, when the reverse is true.

Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction.

The professional global warming disinformers and their enablers and some in the media want you to believe that scientists are exaggerating the threat — which is why conservatives and conservative-leaning independents believe just that (see “Gallup poll shows failure of media, conservatives still easily duped by deniers, scientists & progressives still lousy at messaging“).

But that is patently absurd. I don’t meet 1 person in 50 who has any idea whatsoever of the incalculable misery — Hell and High Water — that we are in the process of inflicting on the next 50 generations on our current emissions path.  Fewer still understand the true plausible worst-case scenario, again since the climate science community and the IPCC hardly ever talk about it (see UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon”).

While the U.S. media largely downplays or ignores the threat (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists and Study: “The U.S. media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and here) — the European media is often much blunter, which is to say, more accurate.

James Randerson — the Guardian‘s environment website editor and a top UK science journalist — issued a powerful wake-up call back in April based on the results of a poll of climate experts:

Read more

Yglesias

Why Did Barack Obama Go to China?

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 23, 2009 at 3:16 pm

American troops watch President Barack Obama in South Korea (White House photo)

American troops watch President Barack Obama in South Korea (White House photo)

James Fallows has a very interesting five-part series of posts (one, two, three, four, five) making the case that the U.S. media has been unfair in its portrayals of Barack Obama’s trip to China and that things actually went considerably better than the chatterers in DC would have you know.

He makes a strong case, but it’s difficult to get around the point that it’s hard to see why the President would fly to China unless the U.S. and Chinese foreign ministries already had some serious agreements ready to sign. There wasn’t a major multilateral conference in China that Obama had to attend. China’s not a longstanding American ally that gets a courtesy call just to say “hi.” If China and the United States weren’t prepared to announce major breakthroughs on major issues, that’s fine, but then why not save the trip for some future date when the breakthroughs are ready? There are worse things than a big trip that doesn’t end up with any key takeaways—the Bush administration appeared to have reached a one-sided nuclear deal with India a few years ago merely because they didn’t want to leave a presidential trip to India empty-handed—but it’s bound to leave people puzzled. At the end of the day, being president is a very busy job . . . what’s the need for superfluous trips?  

Health

ANALYSIS: Under Senate Bill, Families Would Pay 25% Less For Health Care In Individual Market

By Igor Volsky on Nov 23, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Over the weekend, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released new estimates for how much a typical four-person family will spend on health care under the new merged Senate legislation. Below, I’ve compared the House bill with the Senate alternative and threw in the old Senate Finance Committee (SFC) numbers to show how Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) improved the affordability measures for middle class Americans.

The chart below indicates what percentage of income a family of four purchasing coverage within the new health insurance exchanges can expect to spend in 2016 on a health care plan with an actuarial value of 70% (in 2016 dollars):

Picture 20

Meanwhile, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber ‘s new analysis relies on available CBO data to compare the cost of coverage within the Senate bill’s exchanges to the cost of an individual policy in the non-group market absent reform.

Even though the plan purchased under the Senate legislation would have an actuarial value of 70% — 10 percentage points higher than the policy sold in the individual market absent reform — a family would pay less for reform’s more substantial coverage than they would for a plan that offers less benefits and even fewer consumer protections in the unreformed individual market. Moreover, “the same plan that cost $6,000 without reform would cost $4,460 with reform, or 25% less,” Gruber concludes:

Analysis of the non-partisan information from the CBO suggests that for those facing purchase in the non-group market, the Senate bill will deliver savings ranging from $500 for singles to $1400 for families – even without subsidies. The savings are much larger for lower income populations that receive premium credits. This is in addition to the higher quality benefits that those in the exchange will receive, with actuarial values for low income populations well above what is typical in the non-group market today.

Picture 18a

Correction: the original post incorrectly assumed that the CBO calculated premiums in 2009 dollars. The numbers for 2016 are actually calculated in 2016 dollars.

Politics

Just Like Palin, Fiorina Flip-Flops On Her Support For The Bank Bailout

By Matt Corley on Nov 23, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly FiorinaAppearing at an American Spectator Newsmaker Breakfast this morning, California Senate candidate and former McCain campaign adviser Carly Fiorina said that she “probably would have voted for” Justice Sonia Sotomayor because “she seemed qualified.” Asked if she thought former Alaska governor Sarah Palin would back her campaign, Fiorina said she had “no idea,” but that she shares “Sarah Palin’s values.”

Later in her chat, Fiorina demonstrated one of the values that she shares with Palin, which is flip-flopping on last fall’s bank bailout. Fiorina told the reporters at the Spectator breakfast that she opposed bailouts:

Fiorina said that she was opposed to bailouts and President Obama’s economic stimulus package. Instead, she said, she supports low taxes and spending, and described the nation’s debt as “unsustainable.”

But in 2008, Fiorina defended the bailout, calling it “necessary”:

– FIORINA: And, finally, if you cannot get a loan for anything that you need to do, keep your small business running — in other words, the bank bailout was, unfortunately, necessary because credit is tight for hardworking Americans and small businesses. And John McCain has very specific proposals to help them get through this. [Fox News, 10/14/08]

– FIORINA: I think there are many people who are uncomfortable with the government bailout. And I think many people, including Senator McCain, supported that a bailout for the very simple reason, and only one reason, and that is credit was being cut off to small businesses, to companies, and to families in America.

So something had to be done to loosen the credit freeze. And, in fact, it appears to be working thus far. While the stock market plummeted today on fears of an economic slowdown or recession, fundamentally, we can see the credit is loosening. That is a bit of good news. [Fox News, 10/22/08]

Palin and Fiorina aren’t the only conservatives whose “values” have changed regarding the bailout. Both Mitt Romney and Glenn Beck supported the financial rescue, but now rail against it.

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