Well that didn't take long

Just days after passing their bigoted racial profiling law, members of the Arizona legislature have passed several amendments to it.

One change removes the word "solely" from the provision stating that "The attorney general or county attorney shall not investigate complaints that are based solely on race, color or national origin." Another replaces "lawful contact" with "lawful stop, detention or arrest."

Note well that these changes are supposed to deal with problems with the bill that its proponents insisted never existed in the first place. So now it's "there never were any problems with this bill and besides, we fixed them." I'm not impressed.

That's because this - of course - does nothing about the basic problem with the bill, which is that it positively invites racial profiling. Both the original provision and the changed one supposedly dealing with that are just window dressing - unless, that is, you can cite me all the times cops said "I stopped them because they were black/Latino/whatever." There's always another reason, a different reason, claimed. It may be completely bogus, but it will satisfy the fearful and the bigoted.

Moreover, as if to prove the point, the legislature - which apparently just can't help itself - passed another amendment intended to make it clear that a "police contact" over accusations of violation of local civil ordinances can lead to questioning about immigration status. So someone complains your yard is overgrown or has too many weeds and the cops can come a-calling, demanding to see your birth certificate. Yeah, sure, that provision won't be abused.

The same basic problem exists: Until the legislature can do what the governor and most police departments admit they themselves can't, which is to define what constitutes "reasonable suspicion" and explain how you can just tell someone may well be an undocumented immigrant in a way that makes no reference to "race, color or national origin" and so could apply equally well to a white Irish guy in Boston as to a Latino guy in Tucson, the law will remain what it has been from the start: a bigoted blast from people who are terrified of the fact that their world is changing color and like King Canute* are trying to hold back the tide.

*Actually, it's now generally agreed that Canute staged the demonstration to prove that he could not hold back the tide, to remind his courtiers and assorted sycophants that no person can command nature.

Footnote: This business has provided another example of what is wrong with public polling and how poll results must be used carefully. The notable recent one, of course, was with health care when polls reported on people who opposed the bill without asking them why - which meant that those (such as me) who opposed it because it wasn't good enough got lumped with the corporation-bootlickers who wanted no change at all.

Well, according to a Gallup poll from the end of April, Americans who have heard about the Arizona bill favor it by a margin of 51-39 percent. (Sidebar relating to a different sort of complaint: The headline says "most" of us support the bill. Now, 51% may be a majority, but no way is it "most.") But in reading the actual results, it turns out that people were asked how much they had heard about that law, but not what they had heard. Lacking that information, the results are utterly meaningless and may reflect more Hannity-esque crap than actual information.

Another way good liberals prove they're not DFHs

On "Countdown" on Tuesday, Keith Olbermann made Hugo Chavez the bronze winner of the "Worst Person in the World" competition. The basis? Chavez has taken to Twitter. This, apparently, is supposed to be inherently hilarious because of Chavez's (well-deserved) reputation for verbosity.

But why, you ask, a "Worst Person" award for it, a dishonor generally reserved for people who have done something either offensive or foolishly outrageous? The idea of Hugo Chavez limiting himself to 140 characters at a time may be amusing, but offensive? Outrageous?

Ah, you're missing the point. It wasn't that Hugo Chavez being on Twitter is offensive or outrageous - it's that it's Hugo Chavez. And his being on Twitter wasn't the actual point; rather, it was to gave KO the opening to describe Chavez as, his exact words, "quote President unquote of Venezuela" and "Comandante Chavez."

That is, his being on Twitter was just the excuse to indulge in a little Chavez-bashing, a little demonizing, something in which all good liberals engage from time to time to prove that they really are "serious" observers who haven't strayed too far from the foreign policy consensus and their disagreements, where they exists, arise more over matters of effectiveness and advisability, not from any fundamental difference in philosophy and certainly not from any questions about basic moral principles. And doggone it, to prove they are totally unbiased because they will criticize leftists!

They do it to show, that is, that they are not, absolutely not, DFHs.

Now, there certainly are grounds on which Chavez can be criticized - more on that shortly - but quite bluntly, the legitimacy of his position as president is not among them. He was elected in 1998, then elected again in 2000 under a new Constitution with 56% of the vote, giving him a six-year term. He survived a military coup (which the US endorsed and blamed on him) in 2002 and defeated a recall referendum in 2004, gaining 58% of the vote that time. In 2006 he was elected to a second six-year term with 63% of the vote. These votes have been conducted under the watchful eyes of international observers, such as The Carter Center, who have concluded that they were free and fair - something which even his opposition ultimately had to admit.

Regardless of what you think of him or his policies, Hugo Chavez is the president of Venezuela. He's no more "quote president unquote" than Shrub was - and considering our the 2000 election, he's a hell of a lot less "quote president unquote" than Shrub was for the first half of his presidency.

He is not the first to wear the mantle of "the leftist who liberals find it politically convenient to make a point of saying they hate," but he is one of the longest-lasting. So the good liberals will bash him, make him their convenient whipping boy, just to show how truly American they are.

They will, for example, decry his "increasingly authoritarian" rule, which, I said not quite six years ago now,

always seems to be "increasing" but never seems to actually get to being authoritarian.

Still, it is true that there are legitimate criticisms of Chavez that can be made in the area of civil liberties, but they do not arise from his being some "Comandante" or autocrat or the "would-be-dictator" of liberals' imaginations, but from the nature of social revolutions, revolutions which have a dark side that can emerge if you're not watchful. As an example of the idea, speaking of Jesse Jackson in a letter in August 1988, I wrote that

Jackson sees himself ... as the embodiment of a movement, the physical expression of a certain idealism, who’s working through the Democratic Party as a vehicle for that movement. ... [A] couple of years ago I was concerned that Jackson was developing a Messiah complex, starting to equate his personal advancement with that of the causes he espoused and represented. It’s a risk that any leader runs, especially one as overtly ambitious as Jackson.

I raised a similar concern about Chavez himself nearly three years ago: Discussing an article in "Time" magazine, I noted it said that Chavez's revolution has a weakness: "Its inordinate dependence on Chavez, its one-man-show aspect. If he were to leave the scene, there's a feeling the whole revolution would unravel tomorrow."

I argued that the article overstated the case,

but in a longer view, that is not an irrelevant concern. Rather, it is a risk run with any movement, with any attempt at dramatic change: the possibility of its turning, however unintentionally, into a personality cult that can't survive the symbol. The result is that both leader and supporters come to equate the benefit of the leader with that of the movement as a whole, and the leader who starts saying "they need me" more often and with more emphasis than "I need them" is starting down a road that may in the longer term undermine what they set out to achieve.

Venezuela is not at that point and is not close to that point - but it is not so distant from it that it can't be made out on the horizon.

I believe that condition, one of Venezuela not being an authoritarian state but still the idea of it developing into one not lying outside the range of possibility, remains true today. Yes, I am well aware of Chavez's recent aggressive and ominous moves against some opposition outlets; however, the fact is that opposition media seems always to survive and even thrive despite repeated reports of "the last anti-Chavez" whatever it was that time "being forcibly shut down."

The greater risk, I think, lies in two other developments: One is Chavez's success in winning a referendum eliminating term limits for elected officials, including the president. He pushed for it on the grounds that he needed "10 more years" to complete the work he started. That not only speaks to the "one-man-show" weakness but hints at another movement starting to equate the leader with the movement itself, always a risky prospect. The other, related risk, arises from the increasing evidence of corruption and cronyism in his administration, which is another sign of a movement with leaders who have become too self-referential.

I believe that Hugo Chavez genuinely believes in his social revolution. I believe he is truly interested in giving the poor a power and a voice which they have never had before. I believe he genuinely wants to cut poverty, to improve education, to feed the hungry. But to the very extent that the revolution becomes about him, to the very extent that there is no structure, no movement that exists independently of him and so will survive him, to that very same extent he will in the long run fail while possibly turning into precisely that of which his enemies accuse him in the process. And that, especially considering what he and his movement have both achieved and survived, would be a very great shame.

And a bit more on Arizona

First, I want to make the important observation that racial profiling is already happening in Arizona, even before the law goes into effect. It's just being done by the feds, not the staties. This is from KTVK-TV of Phoenix:

A Valley man says he was pulled over Wednesday morning and questioned when he arrived at a weigh station for his commercial vehicle along Val Vista and the 202 freeway [outside Phoenix].

The questioning was done by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appropriately acronymed ICE. He provided them his commercial driver's license and a social security number, but that wasn't good enough for the federales: He was arrested and handcuffed.

An agent called his wife, who had to leave work to go home and bring additional documents, including his birth certificate, to the ICE office before they would release him.

The two are both natural born US citizens and yes, you guessed it, they are Hispanic.

A representative at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ... said this was standard operating procedure.

The agents needed to verify Abdon[, the man arrested,] was in the country legally and it is not uncommon to ask for someone's birth certificate. She also said this has nothing to do with the proposed bill or racial profiling.

Of course it doesn't! I'm sure you question all the white drivers who pull into the weigh station and arrest any one of them who isn't carrying a birth certificate. Nothing racial at all involved.

The second thing here is to note that the prospect of a boycott of Arizona is firming up. For example,

[j]ust minutes after Brewer signed 1070 into law on Friday, the American Immigration Lawyers' Association canceled their annual fall convention. They had planned to host the September event in Scottsdale.

"We can't in good conscious [sic] spend the organization's money in a state that's going to pursue these kinds of policies," said Regina Jeffries of the AILA.

What's more,

San Francisco city officials are calling for a boycott of Arizona and businesses based there to protest the state's strict new immigration law.

The city attorney, Dennis Herrera, offered Monday to help with any challenges to the law. He says his teams will start determining which contracts between Arizona and the city and county of San Francisco and Arizona could be severed without penalty. ...

Several city supervisors are promising to introduce a resolution urging a citywide boycott of Arizona.

My wife and I were hoping to be able to afford one last big trip this fall. I had planned on surprising her by making arrangements to go to the Grand Canyon, where she has never been and really wants to go. But that's off, obviously. I can't stomach spending any money in Arizona and if I did make those plans, she'd smack me upside the head.

It really is too bad. Physically, Arizona is a beautiful state. Psychically, not so much.

A bit more on privacy...

...and why we should be concerned. You surely know that the government is amassing vast amounts of data about us. How massive is the pile? According to then-newly declassified documents obtained by Wired.com last fall and discussed in a mostly gee-whiz article,

the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners,

including

tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store....

Now it develops that not only is the government sharing at least some of that data, related to arrest records, with foreign countries, it's doing it even though it knows a significant amount of it is wrong.

On Monday, the ACLU blog cited an article in USA Today that

tells the story of Ann Wright, a former U.S. State Department official who became active in the anti-war movement after the invasion of Iraq. Wright has been repeatedly stopped at the Canadian border by immigration officials because our government gives them direct access to a database that includes her history of misdemeanor arrests for civil disobedience.

So first off, it's undeniable that such information is being shared with foreign governments, in fact not even foreign governments but individual cops of foreign governments. Just how is it that we can keep being assured of the "safety" and "confidentiality" of those records when they are so widely and freely shared, including with people not even subject to US laws regarding their dissemination?

But there's more.

The database the article discusses is managed by the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the government's primary computer system for sharing criminal justice information with law enforcement agencies throughout the country, and now beyond.... NCIC process an average of 7 million requests for information a day.

And according to Roy Weise, a "senior adviser to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division," which manages NCIC, "about half" of the arrest records in the system have not been updated to reflect the disposition. In other words, the database says you were arrested for something - but if the charges were dropped or dismissed or you were acquitted, there's a 50-50 chance it does not say that.

The ACLU goes on to note that in 2005, the Migration Policy Institute found an error rate of 42 percent in NCIC "hits" between 2002 and 2004. How could it be this bad, the ACLU asks, when the Privacy Act requires agencies to make sure their records are sufficiently accurate and updated "to assure fairness to the individual" being examined or identified? Simple: The NCIC was exempted from the Privacy Act.

Oh, well, that's okay then.

Update

A quick update on a post too old to be updated there: On April 8 I posted about the order to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. I noted at the time that I had sent a version of the post to the White House, edited to fit within the character limit imposed by the email system there. When I sent it, I checked the box saying I wanted a reply.

I just wanted to note that it's now two and a-half weeks later and I have received no reply either by mail or email, not even a pro forma, automated, "thanks for your comment" reply. Make of that what you will.

Why we keep losing privacy

An article at TalkingPointsMemo starts this way:

At the intersection of political paranoia and old-fashioned, clinical paranoia you'll find microchips.

The article concerns moves in eight states over the past few years to ban any forced subcutaneous implantation of tracking microchips in humans. Three of those states have already passed bills to do just that.

But as you can surely tell from that opening sentence, the entire attitude of the article (and most of the accompanying comments) is one of snickering derision. Besides the references to paranoia (and opening the article by referring to a woman who insists she was forcibly implanted by the DOD in her "vaginal-rectum area"), the author, one Eric Lach, calls such implants a "still-essentially-hypothetical problem" and "a problem that doesn't actually exist yet." He points to outlandish arguments raised by the opponents of chipping (such as tying microchips to the End Times) and cites a couple of the weakest arguments advanced by one concerned group while ignoring the actual cases of attempts at or proposals for widespread chipping found in that same list.

He is, in short, an oh-so reasonable, oh-so serious, oh-so sober commentator attempting - and failing - to suppress a bemused smile at the antics of the wackos.

But here's the rub: There is no question that the technology to track via microchip exists; Lach himself tacitly admits as much. In fact, it's already in widespread use: Just give a thought to your mobile phone. And there have been serious proposals to apply that technology directly to humans. Usually it's for the person's own good (of course) - such as in Alzheimer's patients or "wanderers" in nursing homes or mental hospitals. Unless it's for the public good and safety (of course) - such as for parolees or people under house arrest or truant children (who might run away) or people in prison (who might escape) or people on temporary visas (who might overstay).

Then there is the idea of implanted microchips for identification, ones that carry information about you. Just think of the benefits! You're unconscious after a car wreck, unable to identify yourself or say who to call. It's right there on the chip, accessible to the appropriate reader! And what's more, there's your entire medical history there as well for the hospital to see! Wouldn't that be wonderful? This is no fantasy: My wife, a retired nurse, tells me in response to reading this post that she attended a health fair at which there was a booth signing people up for precisely that: a subcutaneous chip that would contain your complete medical history so that if "God forbid" something terrible happened, that information would be immediately available to any medical institution with the proper reader.

What's more, that sort of technology, of ID via implanted microchip, is already in widespread use in dogs. That neither that idea nor that of tracking chips has gained a lot of traction as applied to humans does not mean the technology doesn't exist. It does, as does the desire to use it. What has stopped it so far is, pretty much, the "ick" factor. But that ick factor has been overcome many times before. This is not a looming threat, but it is a real one.

So here's the problem in a nutshell: Lach says that

[w]hen Missouri was considering its own microchip ban in 2008, State Rep. Jim Guest told the Columbia Missourian that the bill was aimed at preventing employers from mandating chips as a requisite for employment, even though no Missouri companies were then engaging in the practice.

So according to Lach, we should wait until after subcutaneous chipping is a common practice before doing anything about it. We shouldn't try to prevent a problem, we should wait until after it is already is a problem before we act.

At which point we can have an oh-so reasonable, oh-so serious, oh-so sober discussion on how utterly foolish it is to even try to "turn the clock back" and how "the technology is here to stay" and how we need to have some "regulation" or "oversight" or "controls" to "manage" implants, which will continue to be used "in appropriate circumstances" that can and will expand over time.

And that, friends, is why our privacy keeps slipping away: Because dolts like Lach and his echo chamber in comments think it's a joke until they discover that they are part of the punch line, and then it's too late.

Footnote to both of the preceding

If only to confirm what we all knew and what I said: Racism is not dead.

According to a lawsuit filed by hotel waiter Wadner Tranchant, 40, the Ritz-Carlton [hotel in Naples, Florida,] honored a British family's request not to be served by "people of color" or with "foreign accents." ...

And the lawsuit claims that this wasn't the first discriminatory demand made by a guest, and honored by the hotel. "Other employees of defendant Ritz also encountered similar treatment on multiple occasions," the complaint reads.

Under the heading of "Unintentional Humor" comes the official comments of the chain:

The Ritz-Carlton cannot comment on pending litigation but can say the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company does not allow discriminatory actions by employees or guests.

"Management," you'll note, is not included among those not allowed to discriminate.

On the other hand, it should be noted that the reason we know about the incident beyond the suit is that managing director Edward Staros insisted the request be logged and accompanied it with a note stating that the family was "very, very prejudice[d]."

A sort of footnote to the preceding

So Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed that xenophobic, racist, un-American, unconstitutional, just downright fucking offensive bill empowering, indeed pressuring, all Arizona police to arrest anyone who can't prove on demand that they are in the US legally. Making that demand requires only "reasonable suspicion." What constitutes the basis for such suspicion is undefined, positively inviting the widest possible interpretation - or, perhaps more accurately, the narrowest possible interpretation: If you're white, you're all right; if you're brown, you go down.

"This is the most reprehensible thing since the Japanese internment," said Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator and community leader. "This is the saddest day for me. It's shameful."

But oh no, Brewer insists, that's completely wrong. There will be absolutely no racial profiling involved. None at all. Nope, uh-uh. How can she be so sure? Well, because she got language in the bill prohibiting cops from “solely considering race, color, or national origins.” Oh, well, then, excuse me, I surely am, as she says opponents are, "overreacting." Because, after all, if you can't solely consider race, color, or national origin, if that can't be the single thing you use to suspect people of being "illegal," how could there be anything racist or xenophobic about it? I mean, after all!

In fact, there are lots of other ways you can tell who is an "illegal."

Law enforcement officers can spot illegal immigrants based on their clothes, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) claimed last night. ...

"They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there's different type of attire, there's different type of...right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes," Bilbray [said].

So demanding "You papers, please" of some guy because he's brown, that's right out. Will never happen. Because that would be wrong. But making the same demand because he's brown and has that kind of shoes - I mean, you know, that kind, the kind "illegals" wear - well, that's different. That's just fine. No racial profiling there.

What's more, there's a way you can be sure there will be no profiling: The law also gives legal standing to any citizen who wants to sue police for inadequate enforcement. And obviously that will only be used by good government types seeking to insure completely fair and unbiased treatment and not by some septic-brained mouth breather pissed off because "the cops ain't lockin' up enough Spics."

The ACLU is among the groups and agencies planning to challenge the "discriminatory" bill, saying it

requires law enforcement to question individuals about their immigration status during everyday police encounters. The law creates new immigration crimes and penalties inconsistent with those in federal law, asserts sweeping authority to detain and transport persons suspected of violating civil immigration laws and prohibits speech and other expressive activity by persons seeking work.

Indeed, the law essentially makes it illegal to pick up or transport day laborers (or for day laborers to be picked up) even though courts have found that solicitation of work is protected speech under the First Amendment.

"By signing this bill into law, Brewer has just authorized violating the rights of millions of people living and working here[," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona. "]She has just given every police agency in Arizona a mandate to harass anyone who looks or sounds foreign...."

Some people are predicting electoral doom for the GOP in Arizona in the longer term as a result of the anger this will generate in the Hispanic community. In the shorter term, various groups and individuals are calling for a boycott of Arizona, something like the effective boycott of Colorado in the early 1990s in protest of a vote to repeal legal protections for gays and lesbians there. Among those people is Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who got death threats as a result.

Among others is me.

With all that said, though, a question remains: Why did I call this "a sort of footnote to the preceding" post? It's because of the chief sponsor of the bill, one Russell Pearce, who called the signing "a good day for America." In an interview with NPR in 2008, he said of undocumented workers,

Invaders, that's what they are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can't be tolerated.

He also admitted to

feeling uncomfortable with the way society is changing in Arizona. He attributes it partly to Mexicans' and Central Americans' "way of doing business."

"Drive around parts of Phoenix. I get calls all the time and it's not that they're Hispanic, it's because the culture is different."

Different in a way that, according to him, means higher crime, "more violence, kidnappings are way up."

Robert Cruickshank writes that

[t]his conflation of "illegal" with "Hispanic" is by no means new, even though there are lots of Irish undocumented immigrants in the US. What Pearce represents is the very same phenomenon we're all too familiar with here in California: white anxiety at the fact that their country was never as white as they believed, and is becoming steadily more diverse. Blaming "illegals" is merely an easier way of couching one's racism.

Thus, a footnote because it seems to me I just said something quite similar to that: These people are "uncomfortable with the way society is changing." More accurately, they are scared out of their wits because whether or not the US "was never as white as they believed" it clearly is not as white as it was and never will be again. Their entire concept of their personal world is crumbling and they know it. And that leads to such as this bill and to right wing militias, to efforts to stop the "invasion" of The Other. Combining that fear-driven racism with the very real loss of economic security many of us have suffered leads to fantasies and phantoms, to screeching about "death panels" and hunting down Kenyan birth certificates. It leads to a zero-sum calculation directed against those who are weaker than you either socially or economically or both, viewing every gain for them as an equivalent loss to you. It leads to anger, to resentment, to cults of personality, sometimes to violence, all of it, at root in the masses of people (not their exploiters among the rich, the powerful, the well-established but the masses of people), a cry of "For God's sake, leave me alone!"

That's a cry both unanswered and unanswerable because the clock of history is not going to stop for them any more than it would stop for anyone else. Which is why, when I look at the TPers, even as I fear the potential harm they can do, even as I openly despise the racist agenda (such as the Arizona bill) that they enable, I can't help but see them, in the long run of history, as other than tragic figures - like Shays' Rebellion but without the dignity - or as tragicomic ones, remembered more as a slogan or a label (such as "teabaggers") than as a real movement - like the Know Nothings but without the longevity.

That, however, is in the longer term - and in the short term they still must be opposed. I just think our opposition will be more effective if we keep in mind that there are some legitimate economic grievances underneath the screaming.

A not altogether unsympathetic look at the teabaggers

Everyone knows about the New York Times/CBS survey published earlier this month of those who say they are part of the teabaggers - excuse me, the “Tea Party movement” although it really has to be Parties since there are several of them, some created by GOPpers and some merely embracing them while claiming to be nonpartisan and altogether independent and exactly why, considering what “tp” is for, being a “TPer” is supposed to be such a much better label than “teabagger” escapes me - in any event, that survey and others have shown them to be a clearly conservative grouping and a clearly political minority one. They are multiple steps to the right of the general public on a variety of attitudes - in some cases, the NYT/CBS survey reports, 20 or even 30 percentage points to the right.

Put another way, they are the typical right wing of the GOPpers: socially reactionary, xenophobic, and racist.

But is that because they are in the TP or are they in the TP because they are such people? In other words, is the teabagger movement just a collection of backward bigots who happened to get louder than normal and get some media attention by doing a lot of screaming - or do people get sucked into the movement because others play on their fears, not creating them but exploiting them, amplifying them, focusing them, turning those fears into the underpinnings of a cause for other purposes which would not function without the energy that bigotry generates?

It’s been demonstrated often enough by both psychological testing and historical analysis to be common wisdom that the one common factor that unites those who call themselves “conservative,” crossing all lines of age, sex, race, nationality, and gender, is fear of change. The more change, the more conservatism grows. Conservatism, bluntly, is based on fear - and I don’t mean fear-mongering as a political tactic here, I mean an internal fear, a personal fear, that the world around you is no longer comprehensible. I’ve written before of the idea of a “worldview,” a way of organizing the world we perceive around us such that it makes sense. As I said one time, our

worldview significantly shapes our views on matters of philosophy and morality and it informs our positions on issues of public policy. Even those who have no concern with the latter still have a worldview shaping the former. What that worldview consists of can vary wildly from person to person, but every sane, sentient being has one; you can't function without it.

If the world, if society, around you is changing in ways you can’t seem to understand, that don’t fit your personal worldview, you can become disoriented and frightened - and that fear, that fear of the changes, will make you more conservative. (Which is also why people in general tend to become more conservative as they get older: The more “set in your ways” you are, the more used you are to things being a certain way, the more disturbing changes can seem.)

Now, remember when Barack Obama was attacked during the campaign for referring to people in western Pennsylvania as “clinging to their guns and their religion?” The point was clumsily expressed and deserved a clearer explanation, but the point was entirely valid: The people in the area were suffering real economic dislocations. Jobs were disappearing and more importantly for the purpose here, the sort of stable communities on which those people had depended for generations were disappearing along with them. So of course they clung to their guns and their religion. When you are under pressure, constantly stressed, when the things you have counted on seem to be slipping away, you are going to cling ever more tightly to those things you have left, those parts of your world that still make sense, that you still can control. It is a natural, normal, entirely human reaction.

So when people already subjected to social and economic stresses inflicted by forces beyond their control and usually their understanding are faced with things becoming even more - from their perspective - unhinged, such as by the election of a black president, well that just can’t be right and racist leanings provide the seeds for conspiracy theories that serve, ultimately, to deny this really could be happening legitimately. As one TPer was quoted as saying of Obama:

He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.

We have seen this kind of thing many times before in our history. Indeed, the TPers remind me a great deal of the equally-cliched “angry white male” of the 1990s. To show how much, I’m going to include a lengthy quote from a letter I wrote to a friend in the UK in 1995. See how much of this you think still applies:

What makes the present moment more difficult is that the so-called “angry white male” is not without legitimate grievances: His hopes are shrinking, his dreams for his family and his children are fading, he keeps working harder and getting less for it - he is, in short, losing ground and has been doing it for nearly 20 years now. (Real median family income in the US peaked around 1977 and has been declining more or less continuously since, despite the fact that the average work week has lengthened and more spouses than ever are working. Consider that the rich have gained over that time, and it’s clear that the decline suffered by the middle class and the poor is considerably worse than that average.) Meanwhile, things that he thought he could take for granted in his social relationships have been subjected to almost constant assaults in which he is too often cast as the conscious villain of the piece rather than as what he is: the unwitting beneficiary of standards and (pre-)judgments that profit him in the short run but damage him in the long run.

The result is that he feels pressured, frustrated, haunted by the suspicion that he’s failed his family, that his efforts are unappreciated, and that he’s being blamed for things that “aren’t my fault” - which combine to make him bitter and defensive; ready, even eager, to have someone to blame to relieve his own guilt and creeping despair.

Bill Clinton, of all people, expressed it well in a speech on April 8: Referring to middle-aged white men who when they were 20 looked forward to a “good life” of sending their kinds to college followed by a secure retirement, he said “Now they’ve been working for 15 years without a raise and they think they could be fired at any time. And they go home to dinner and they look across the table at their families and they think they let them down. They think somehow, what did I do wrong? It’s pretty easy for people like that to be told by somebody else in the middle of a political campaign with a hot 30-second ad, you didn’t do anything wrong, they did it to you.”

And who, according to those bastards, are “they?” Intrusive big government. Irresponsible poor people. Environmental elitists/extremists/doomsayers. Selfish minorities. Pushy women. And what is it they “did?” Taxes that take away your money. Laze about on those taxes - your taxes - while you work harder than ever. Environmental laws that take away the job you have. Affirmative action programs that take away the job you deserve.

So the problem isn’t that the “angry white male”’s frustrations are without any legitimate cause. It’s rather that the very people who are most responsible for his contracting future, for his sense of loss (and for his genuine loss of economic security) - that is, the corporate elite, the rich, the powerful, those who’ve selfishly gained from the economic trends of the past two decades, those who benefit the most from the old oppressions and divisions - are the very people who are doing their damnedest (so far successfully) to get him to point his finger at anyone except them. The sad fact is, it’s always easier to blame those weaker than yourself for reasons that are not only sociological but also psychological: In a foot race, you may resent or envy those in front of you, particularly if you see them pulling away - but it’s those coming up from behind who make you feel a threat to your position. Meanwhile, challenging the legitimacy of the position of the leaders would require an adjustment in how the structure of the race itself is viewed. In other words, blaming the poor requires only calling them names. Blaming the rich requires re-thinking the nature of society. Which of those is more likely to be seized on by lost people who feel their world no longer makes sense?

Doesn't a lot of that, particularly the economic stress, the shrinking future, the looking for someone to blame, sound like today? Consider that according to the survey, TPers

are far more pessimistic than Americans in general about the economy. More than 90 percent of Tea Party supporters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, compared with about 60 percent of the general public. About 6 in 10 say “America’s best years are behind us” when it comes to the availability of good jobs for American workers.

So yes, for many of those who identify with the TPers, they are not without real grievances and not without genuine frustrations. But, as should be obvious, now just as then while the anger may be justified, the target, for the most part, is not. These people have been misguided. Misled. Lied to. Manipulated. They are directing their frustrations at the weak, not the strong; at the victims, not the victimizers; at the servants of the powerful (in and out of government), not the powerful themselves (mostly not in government). For all of the noise, all of the shouting, all of the energy, all of the speeches signs slogans, the fact is they for the most part really have no idea what’s going on, what the real causes of their stresses are. They just know they want things to be the way they used to be. They want “their country” back.

But that in turn raises the single thing that has struck me most about the entire movement - assuming it could properly be called that, which is yet to be seen. Yet I’ve seen little comment on it; perhaps that’s to be expected in the face of the overt bigotry to be seen in many expressions coming from their midst, but I still find the lack of attention a little surprising.

That something is that there is an overwhelming, an extreme, sense of what can only be called entitlement in the entire undertaking. It comes through clearly in the pronouncements of the teabaggers (in their signs and comments) and as something being heavily played by their leading voices (in their speeches and press releases). They repeatedly, repetitiously, say “it’s our country.” They loudly declare that they’re going to “take it back.” They insist that government failure to do what they want is “ignoring the will of the people.”

Leave aside the obvious responses of wondering just who it is that they’re going to “take it back” from and why elections are not “the will of the people” and consider a particular point in that NY Times/CBS survey. One question asked “Do the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans?” Some 25% of all respondents said yes - while 84% of people who identified themselves as TP supporters did.

Overwhelmingly, they are convinced that they do represent “the people," that they are "the people." According to the survey,

[t]he overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. ...

“The only way they will stop the spending is to have a revolt on their hands,” Elwin Thrasher, a 66-year-old semiretired lawyer in Florida, said in an interview after the poll. “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.” ...

“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville.

They maintain this even as their views widely diverge from - and are more to the right of - the general population on a number of significant points and to a significant degree. In some cases, the difference is not just wide, it’s wild:

For example, their opinion of the job Obama is doing as president is more negative than that of the general populace by over 40 percentage points. Not 40 percent more, 40 percentage points more. Their personal opinion of him is 50 percentage points worse. (Yes, I know many of us have an unfavorable view of Obama but that's on an entirely different basis and doesn't take away from the point, especially because an unfavorable view based on left convictions adds to the negative numbers among the general public and so reduces the gap between the TPers and the nation as a whole.)

Some other examples: On the question of government creating jobs versus reducing the deficit, the gap between what the public wants (jobs) and what the TPers want (cut the deficit) is over 30 percentage points. The gulf between TPers who want “smaller government with fewer services” and the general public is over 40 percentage points.

TPers are more than 20 percentage points likelier to say that “too much been made of the problems facing black people” and 13 points more likely to claim that blacks and whites have an equal chance of “getting ahead in today’s society,” which is another way of saying that racism just isn’t a problem any more.

Asked if income taxes should be raised on households making more than $250,000 a year to help pay for the health insurance bill, 80% of TPers said that was a bad idea while 39% of all respondents did - a gap of 41 percentage points. And while a majority of TPers approved of a ban on denying health insurance due to pre-existing conditions, they were still 22 points less likely than the general public to feel that way.

I don't want to weigh this down with numbers and you can go to the link and check the results for yourself. The point is that time after time, the views of the TPers are clearly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes stunningly, to the right of the general public - but the TPers are still convinced that their views represent those of the majority.

And that, I think, is the key or at least a key to that extreme sense of entitlement. Consider the demographics revealed in the survey: The teabaggers are, on the whole, white, male, older, somewhat richer, and somewhat more educated than the general populace. Which means that until fairly recently, these people were “the people.” That is, their views, their take on life and society and politics did define what it meant to be American. They did define the standard to which others were expected to hew, the default from which others diverged as anything from odd to abnormal to aberrant. When someone pictured "an American," they tended to picture a somewhat older, upper-middle-class white male. And it's entirely reasonable to think that those who are now TPers came to maturity thinking of themselves in just that way: that they defined "American."

But that has been changing for several decades now. The world in which they grew up, the world in which they formed their worldview, is disappearing, splintering, crumbling. To be black is no longer to be inferior, to be Latino is no longer to be alien, to be a woman is no longer to be second-class, to be a single mother is no longer to be marked for life, to be gay or lesbian is no longer to be "the love that dare not speak its name." The casual racism, the offhand ethnic slurs, the "gentlemen's agreement" about Jews, no longer prevail. No, of course this is not to say that racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism no longer exist, but it is to say they are no longer regarded as acceptable parts of normal social discourse. The world has changed, it is changing and will continue to even against resistance. (You want a good example of that? According to the survey, only 16% of TPers think same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, as opposed to 39% of all respondents. But an additional 41% of TPers approve of "civil unions." So even among the TPers, 57% approve of some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples, close to the 63% of all respondents who feel that way. And how long ago would either of those numbers have seemed an impossible notion?)

Not only are attitudes changing in ways the TPers find difficult to absorb if not beyond the pale, the demographics are as well. According to projections, by 2025, "the immigrant, or foreign born, share of the population will surpass the peak during the last great wave of immigration a century ago." By 2050, nearly one in five Americans will be immigrants as opposed to one in eight now. By that same time, something approaching 1/3 of all Americans will be Hispanic. And most shockingly for the TPers, the most difficult for them to accept, is that it is projected that by 2050 whites will make up just 47% of the population of the US and TPers will be "a minority in our own country!"

The TPers may not know those particular numbers, they may not know the particulars of the projections. In fact, I expect that they do not. But they know the feel. They know the look. They know that the world around them is changing in ways they don't understand and can't control. They are confused and frightened and worried about the future, not only the social future but the economic future as well: The TPers rate their own economic condition about the same as members of the general public do, but they are considerably more likely to rate the economy as "fairly" or "very" bad and to say it's getting no better or even getting worse. What you have there is a combination ripe for exploitation by political con artists among the right wing, the GOPpers, and the monied, who are skilled at pointing fingers and creating a "them," an "other," for people to blame.

So in some ways I understand the TPers. In some ways I share their frustrations and sympathize, even empathize, with the roots of those frustrations even as I reject the TPers' convictions on a host of issues and attitudes. Ultimately, however, I have two main overriding responses: One obvious one is concern that this could turn (again) to murderous violence: The line between TPers and such as Timothy McVeigh and Scott Roeder is not nearly as thick as they would suggest.

The other is that I feel sorry for them. Truly. First because some of the changes that are so frightening to them will not be stopped. They can adapt or they can live the rest of their lives in fear because they will not turn the clock back. They are no longer the definition of American and never will be again. Second because they are almost a sort of Greek tragedy with the doomed hero: They have, again, been manipulated and mislead into blaming their troubles on the wrong forces and the wrong people. To the very extent that their movement, if it develops that far, succeeds, to that very same extent they will lose and find themselves even deeper in the pit they themselves dug on behalf of their real masters who they failed to recognize.

Footnote: One amusing bit from the survey was the ranking of Congress. Asked "Do you approve of the way Congress is handling its job?" TPers disapproved by a whopping 96%-1%. Asked the same question about their own Congressional representative, the disapproval dropped to 49%-40%. (The figures for all respondents was 73-17 disapproval and 46-36 approval, respectively.)

So just like the population as a whole, the TPers essentially said "Congress sucks! My own Rep? Well, they're not so bad. It's all those others who really suck."

Oh, and one other thing to keep in mind in looking at the poll results: The results for the TPers were of course included in the figures for "all respondents." Which means the difference between the TPers and the rest of us, the non-TPers, is even greater than indicated.

It's just a question

Having been out of touch for a few days, it was only last night that I became aware of the newspaper reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post that President Obama had ordered the “targeted assassination” of Anwar al-Awlaki. I note that the references were not to “capturing” or “kidnapping” him so he could be brought here for trial, but to assassination. The question that arises is:

Mr. President, just who the hell do you think you are?

We (supposedly) have no king, no czar, no leader with absolute authority. So who do you think you are that you can order the murder - and let’s be honest here, that’s what we’re talking about, the cold-blooded murder - of an American citizen? An American citizen who has been convicted of no crime, who has had no day in court, but is to be stabbed or shot down in the street or have his body ripped to shreds by a bomb based solely on the kind of intelligence that has served us so well in the Middle East, from the fall of the Shah to the supposed existence of WMDs.

Mr. President, just who the hell do you think you are?

You are claiming for yourself a power, an authority, that even the Bush administration - that shredder of the Constitution, that underminer of privacy, that stripper of civil liberties, that embracer of torture, that invader of foreign lands without justification - an authority even the Bush administration did not claim for itself: the power to order, on your own authority, subject to no oversight and no need for proof beyond your personal belief, the “extrajudicial killing,” the “targeted assassination,” the murder, of American citizens.

It is bad enough that we even talk about “targeted assassinations,” bad enough that we openly embrace methods for which we previously denounced ideological enemies - and hypocritical enough that we will still denounce them for it. But with this, a bright red line is to be crossed, a bright red line that once crossed can’t be uncrossed: the officially-sanctioned, cold-blooded murder of an American citizen, someone supposedly protected by Constitutional guarantees of due process at least from their own government even if they are outside the US, guarantees that apparently evaporate in the face of the all-powerful mantra “terrorism.”

Mr. President, just who the hell do you think you are?

And once that line is crossed, where can you draw a new one? Indeed, how can you draw a new one? Bluntly, Mr. President, if some future administration approved a domestic “targeted assassination,” how could you object? Because “domestic” is different from “foreign?” That sort of absolute distinction was supposed to exist regarding US citizens. If the one can be ignored, why not the other?

Once that bright red line represented by the murder of Awlaki is crossed, what is to prevent the slippery slope, what is the impenetrable roadblock on the path, to the targeted murder of some future administration’s domestic political opponents based on a claim that they were a danger to “security?” And if that seems far-fetched, just remember that it was not that long ago that an administration embracing torture and ordering the murder of a US citizen would have seemed equally unthinkable.

Mr. President, I say again: Just who the flaming hell do you think you are?

Footnote: An edited version of the above was sent to the White House as an email; the editing was to keep it below the 2500-character limit. Which was an annoying experience because when I finally got it down to a length the WH system would accept, it turned out to be a trace over 2000 characters. The method they use to judge length, whatever it is, is seriously screwed up.

Just to say Happy Easter

Here's something for you to do: If you know some Bible-thumping Christian who mentions Easter, ask them how the day is determined.

If they say "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox," say "You pass."

If they say "the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox, which is fixed as March 21," say "Damn, you're good - or an astronomer."

A while longer

So I've been on another of my unplanned hiatuses (hiatusi?) and of course my hit count, not high in the best of times, has dropped accordingly. The truth is, I'm in another of those dark periods - I feel discouraged, tired, and overwhelmed. Mostly discouraged.

I keep thinking of the things I wanted to comment on but couldn't find the energy. Like a final post mortem on the health care bill, including expanding on the fact that now that the bill has passed, now a number of its supporters are acknowledging its shortcomings, some for the first time, and now media outlets have started to mention that a significant part of the opposition - a third by some measures - was because the bill was too weak. (Or was it true that they honestly didn't realize it, they just never thought of it? Which is worse, conscious corporatist deception or blinding stupidity?)

I especially wanted to respond to this bit by Josh Marshall, which argues

that the key condition of political success is almost always a genuine willingness to lose well. ...

A genuine willingness to lose means just that: you might lose. You might lose big.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. But I want to know - and wanted to consider at some length - why when that same sentiment is expressed by say, supporters of a national health care system (or even single-payer) or a third party candidate for office, they will be dismissed by all good "serious" people (including Josh Marshall) as "unrealistic" if not ridiculed as "believing in magical ponies," condemned as "helping the other side," or, in some cases, denounced as "stalking horses."

I also said nothing about the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In fairness to myself, I'm not sure just what I could have said beyond what I had written a few weeks earlier, but I did want to write something about the role of armed private contractors there - and never did.

I also wanted to discuss the Iraqi elections, especially the giddy response among "serious" people to - assuming it holds up - the squeaking victory of Ayad Allawi's slate over that of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. It was the end of sectarian rule! The "quintessentially democratic" expression of "unexpectedly sophisticated" voters!

Which of course it wasn't; those who are saying that sectarianism and tribalism are no longer issues in Iraq sound to me pretty much the same as those who declare "racism is dead" in the US. And in much the same sense: In each case, the influence of the forces in question may have waned some, but they are still potent. :cough: teabaggers :cough:

And I wanted to try to puzzle out the logic of those who are predicting a dramatic shift in power in Iraq based on the idea that the oh happy day pro-American Allawi will put together a coalition of his grouping, the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Kurds and oh my! You have a multi-ethnic, multi-regional government combining Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and secular parties and religious parties that shuts out Maliki's pro-Iran bloc and it's the best thing ever! A total justification of the war!

Except - not only is Sadr pro-Iran (so much so that he's now living there) but both his grouping and Maliki's are dominated by Shiite religious parties. Without Sadr, Allawi can't form a government. So precisely what is the advantage to Sadr to enter a coalition with secular Sunnis when simply by saying no he can force Allawi to the side and make a coalition with Maliki's bloc (and some Kurds) to maintain a government dominated by religious Shiites? Especially when Maliki's bloc and Sadr's bloc had an informal agreement before the election to do precisely that? I find it hard to see what Allawi could offer Sadr that would be that much better - or better at all - than what Sadr could get just by sitting on his hands.

In fact, if appears to come down to the simple hope that Sadr, who apparently detests Maliki (the feeling is mutual), will simply refuse to work with him or that his bloc will make demands Maliki would not accept, leaving an alliance with Allawi his only option.

We'll see - but what can't be denied is that Moqtada al-Sadr is in the position of kingmaker in Iraq. And I'm still not sure what Allawi could offer him that would be acceptable to his own bloc and to the Kurds other than "we're not Maliki." I doubt that would be enough.

And there was, of course (Of course!) the news about CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Anyway, those are brief mentions of things I wanted to write about at length - but I lack the spirit. And I suspect it remain that way for a few more days anyway.

Footnote to the preceding

Updated I need to mention two other areas where the health bills fall short which I could (and perhaps should) have included but also stand on their own apart from the bill, so I'm doing it here.

The first is reproductive health care; more bluntly, the right to abortion. Start from the fact that the Hyde amendment has for years required that there be no federal funding for abortion.

The issue came up with regard to the health bill because of the Stupid - the Stup - the Stupak amendment, which would essentially make it impossible for any woman who could not pay for an abortion out of pocket to get one. It remained in the version of the bill passed by the House, apparently because the leadership concluded either through a good deal of vote-counting or a simple failure of nerve that they couldn't pass the bill without him and his Gang of 12 or however many it was.

That language was "softened" in the Senate to the Nelson amendment, which required a very strict separation of funds and accounting such that, for practical purposes, for a woman to get abortion coverage in her health insurance she'd have to send two checks, one for the policy and another for what would amount to an abortion rider. After some more bluster from Stupak, he was bought off with a presidential proclamation affirming that the Nelson amendment would be enforced. (And, let it be said, got called "baby killer" and received a fax of a noose and gallows for his trouble.) So the Nelson language is now law.

Legally, the language of the Nelson amendment is no more restrictive than that of the Hyde amendment. So did the anti-choice crowd get nothing for their efforts?

Not exactly. While legally there is no meaningful change, practically is a different matter. By putting extra accounting burdens on insurers who will now be required to segregate funds in a way familiar to nonprofits but alien to them, the bill creates an incentive for those insurers to simply drop abortion coverage since they may well decide the market isn't big enough to justify the hassle - especially because it's possible that a significant number of women, faced with the need to make an additional payment for coverage, will simply forgo it because who plans to need an abortion?

The result could easily be to have fewer companies offering the coverage with those that do charging higher prices, limiting access to the ability to pay for an abortion in two ways. So again, while as a legal matter nothing has really changed, as a practical matter it is possible that access to abortion could soon become available only to those women who can pay for one out of pocket.

The other issue is immigration. As an overall issue that quite frankly is too big for me to get into on the fly here but with regard to the immediate issue, I say it is unconscionable that the bill bans undocumented immigrants from being able to buy insurance on the so-called exchanges, even if they pay the full cost with their own money.

As Jon Walker at FDL pointed out on Monday, this is fiscally irresponsible because taxpayers wind up picking up the tab for any uncompensated care at emergency rooms that people without insurance may require. But beyond that, it is absurd, it is inane, it is I say again unconscionable, to go even beyond denying people access to the protections of health insurance to actively preventing them from having such access based solely, solely, on an accident of birth and a desire for a better life.

And for what? For election year posturing? To look "tough" on "illegal immigration" lest there be some attack ad about being what, a "foreigner-lover?" (With the appropriate whispered substitute for "foreigner.") What price conscience?

Updated with this personal addendum, required because I've been getting some grief in comment threads other places in talking about this:

Making the factual statement that "the Hyde amendment has for years required that there be no federal funding for abortion" does not mean I endorse the Hyde amendment! I do not! So stop being so god damn stupid! I was addressing my dismay at how the health care bill effectively further limits access to abortion.

I've had occasion many times in the past to warn people that I strive to say what I mean and only what I mean. I do not always succeed, of course, but the result is that presuming what I think about something I haven't addressed is often a fool's errand. And I've seen several fools of late.

Regular length observation

So, with a perhaps historic number of invocations of the word "historic," the bill is law. Whoopie.

I'm not surprised something passed; I've been saying since at least the beginning of November that "we will get a health care bill - the absence of the word 'reform' is deliberate - this session of Congress" because, as I said a month later,

too many have too much invested in getting something passed to keep them from making whatever damn fool change or further surrender disguised as "compromise" will be necessary to do it.

But I simply can't get excited about it, for all the reasons I've tried to explain before now. Not only is this bill not good enough, it's not even as good as its proponents proclaim. And despite all the "first step" rhetoric, it does more to impede real reform than it does to advance it.

No, of course I'm not saying that there is nothing good in the bill; don't be a jackass. The ban on lifetime limits, for example, is a good thing - assuming the reconciliation bill, which removes the Senate bill's exemption for employer-provided health plans, is passed as I expect it will. (Lacking that change, the limit essentially only applied to new coverage, not any coverage you already had.) For a prime example of something good, I think the expansion of community health centers is great. In fact, I think that provision does more to expand access to health care - and, as we often forget, it is access to health care, not access to health insurance, that is the real issue - than pretty much anything else in entire bill. (And I admit to a certain dark pleasure in seeing so many of the bill's supporters, including some of the most strident, now saying "Well, it's not perfect, of course, but you know...," now casually admitting to shortcomings whose existence or relevance they previously vociferously denied.)

But you don't get to pass just the good parts of a bill, you pass the whole thing and it's the whole thing, the whole package, on which judgment must be passed. And on the whole, the bad parts of this clearly outweigh the good - especially since the "good" isn't what it's cracked up to be, as the unfairly-maligned Jane Hamsher* (Remember when she was the big hero as one of those live-blogging the Scooter Libby trial?) pointed out recently.

I've gone through a lot of these same points before, so just to cite a few specifics:

- Even judging by insurance access, the bill falls seriously short: The plan will leave nearly half of the currently uninsured (24 million of 54 million) still uninsured nearly 10 years from now with no plan to get them coverage.

- It does not control costs: The CBO score from November indicated essentially zero effect on premiums in 2016 and the CMS said in December that it would reduce overall spending on health care by a minuscule 0.3%.

- It does not make health care more affordable; rather, it simply forces people, many of them already struggling to keep body and soul together, to buy insurance which they may not be able to use because they can't afford the deductibles. (Parenthetical personal note by way of illustration: Because of our own particular circumstances of income and mandates, my wife has been forced onto a plan which demands a deductible of over $9,000 in a six-month period before she obtains any benefits. No, that is not a typo, an exaggeration, or a joke. Well, it is a joke - just not the good kind.)

- It does not stop rate hikes. At all.

- It does not stop recissions.

There's an additional point about recissions. Hamsher notes that there is no functioning or proposed enforcement mechanism to control the insurers. But she does not mention that the bill - unless it was changed at the last minute - allows for your policy to be canceled in the event of fraud or willful misrepresentation. That has been the law since 1996! Insurance companies still cancel policies by finding some excuse, some detail, they can claim amounts to fraud or misrepresentation. Just what is to prevent them from continuing to do exactly that?

There are other areas where the bill falls short of its advertising. One such not on Hamsher's list is that while it's true that after 2014 you can't be denied coverage or charged more for a pre-existing condition, but until then, you can - and there's no indication that at that time those rates would be cut to those others pay on a policy you already have. So expect a lot of approvals for people with pre-existing conditions with jacked-up rates over the next few years, with people continuing to pay those higher rates even after 2014. Even after that time, you can be charged up to triple based on your age and 50% more if you smoke. (So much for community rating.) And you'll have no choice but to pony up because, of course, you get penalized if you don't have insurance. Unless, that is, you decide you'd be be better off just paying the penalty - which still leaves you worse off than you were, paying a penalty and still having no coverage.

And again, that's not even the bad stuff, that's just some of the "not as good as advertised" stuff.

The bad stuff comes in two broad categories, the practical and the political, if you will, which then can be combined into one overriding concern: It will, as I have said before, as I said at the top here, do more to impede real reform than to advance it. First consider the practical aspect, expressed clearly in the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine:

What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the linchpin of health care reform...Not only does it keep them in place, it pours about $500 billion of public money into these companies over 10 years....

(Thanks to Tim at Green Left Global News & Info for the link.)

All while continuing the industry's incredibly bizarre anti-trust exemption. That is, it actually increases the power and control of the health insurance industry, creating an even bigger barrier to be surmounted before real reform could be achieved.

It wasn't just the insurance industry that cemented its place: The deal the White House cut with the pharmaceutical industry last spring, in which the drug pushers agreed to $80 billion in savings for seniors over 10 years in return for no drug reimportation, no shorter pathway to generic biologics, and, most importantly, no Medicare drug price negotiation (which together could have saved nearly $400 billion over that same time) is pretty well known. More recently, we have confirmation that Obama struck a similar deal with lobbyists for the hospital industry in which he promised, despite his what were apparently persistent lies in public, that a public option would not be part of a final bill.

That overlaps the political part of the problem: The bill strengthens the position of the existing players on the supplier side and creates no counterbalance on the consumer side. Meanwhile, there are already moves, of which I'm sure you're aware, to challenge the plan in court and the GOPpers are planning to run on a platform of repeal. That the court cases are likely to fail and that even David Frum thinks it's "a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November" changes nothing: Taken together, this still means that in the short run and in fact for some time to come (especially if the persistently-pessimistic Digby is correct) any available energy will go into defending what is rather than into improving it.

So in the short term we are going to hear a chorus of "Health care reform? We did that! Stop looking backward! We need to go forward! So move along! Don't harsh my buzz, dude!" Over the next couple of years we're going to get lectured on how "The program isn't even in force yet and you're attacking it, siding with the right wing! What's the matter with you?" After 2014, that will shift to "It's just getting started! Give it a chance! What, are you rooting for it to fail, you closet right-wingers?" And in 2019, when the plan is supposed to be "fully in force," we'll be told - if anyone is still talking about it - that those of us pointing to the failures of the system, to the tens of millions still without coverage and the scores of millions still without access to care, to the continuing need for actual reform, are "impractical dreamers" who believe in "magic ponies."

And no, don't bother telling me about the "pathway to state-level single payer." Yes, there is a waiver provision for states to opt-out if they can show they can provide the same or better care for no more money than the structure under the bill. But the waiver is nothing short of bogus. First, it's not available until 2017, meaning that in order to do this states would have to set up exchanges, run them for three years, they take them apart again for a new system. It's doubtful any state would want to or be in a position to take on that extra expense.

Just as serious if not more so, the waiver would require the approval of the Secretaries of HHS and the Treasury - but to waive ERISA, which bars states from telling employers and unions what kind of insurance to offer, you need the approval of the Secretaries of Labor and the Treasury. That is, this "pathway" does not allow for waiving the requirements of ERISA, thus leaving any state which did try to opt out in favor of a single-payer plan vulnerable to suits by the insurance industry, not to mention any business interests in the state which may oppose the idea.

(As a parenthetical sidebar, I don't think Bernie Sanders, whose proposal this was, intended to create a bogus option. But he did anyway.)

So the bottom-line fact is that those who imagine that a Congress which won't even acknowledge the existence of the idea of a national health care system, that for year after year after year has refused to even consider single-payer and declared it "off the table" at the start of the current debate, that slapped down even the great-sounding but actually rather lame "Medicare for all," who imagine that that Congress is now going to embrace anything like that because this half-assed thing was passed first and will do it in the face of an administration that is committed to keeping even the wimpiest version of a "public option" beyond the pale, an administration lead by a president who, I said nearly a year ago,

is trying to resolve the crises and shore up the institutions while changing as little as possible about the logic or principles on which they're based,

a president who has shown by his willingness to cut deals with lobbyists that he will forsake public interests for the sake of private interests, if they believe that this bill will be used as a "foundation for change" rather than a ceiling for it, if they believe that its very existence will not be used as a basis to delay and dismiss calls for real reform for the next couple of decades, then I say they are the ones who genuinely believe in "magic ponies."

And if time proves me wrong, throw this back in my face. I guarantee you that in that event I will be a little embarrassed - but not the least bit unhappy.

*If she's going to be maligned for something, it should be for her involvement in "Natural Born Killers."

Footnote A: In that November 1 post linked at the top, I said in reference to a coming health care bill that

[i]t increasingly looks like it will be a bill that will require people to buy insurance, will put no restrictions on the insurance industry (which is more than happy to do away with pre-existing condition exclusions for the sake of getting tens of millions of new customers) but will instead provide the industry billions in indirect taxpayer subsidies through subsidized premiums, provide no meaningful competition, create a "public option" not worth having, undermine state-level drives for single-payer, set back real reform by at least a decade, and 10 years from now will still leave 18 million uninsured and an unknown additional number underinsured, all of them without access to adequate health care.

It actually turns out that there is no "public option" and there will be 23 million still uninsured rather than 18 million - but other than that, I think I did pretty good.

Footnote B: I think I should explain why I labeled "Medicare for all" as "rather lame." Medicare is a good program, valid on its own merits, but contrary to frequent assertion it is not a real single-payer program - not when many of those covered under Part B have secondary supplemental insurance and Part D is a mish-mosh of private plans. People covered by Part B often find that after deductibles and co-pays, Medicare actually pays only half the bill. Again using my wife as a case in point, we calculated that allowing for her eight regular medical visits and related tests a year, after allowing for deductibles, co-pays, and the costs of Part B premiums, it was cheaper to pay out of pocket than to have the insurance. "Medicare for all" is a decent enough slogan, but as an actual program it is not a substitute for genuine health care reform.

Short observation

Until 1913, US senators were not elected, they were chosen by the various state legislatures. It took the 17th Amendment to change that to direct popular election.

Well, it seems that Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX, no surprise on either count), the man who proposed that anyone who supported the House health care bill should have to eat it before voting for it, is responding to the passage of a health care bill by calling for a Constitutional amendment to return to the old system of having state legislatures appoint senators.

Apparently believing that voters are just too stupid to be trusted with such a decision (which, considering he's from Texas, is - well, never mind), Gohmert, whose name I originally thought was the far more fitting Gomer, insists that direct elections of senators left "no check or balance on the Federal power grab for the past 97 years."

Well, Rep. Gomer - because you'll always be Gomer to me - I assume you would not demand that others live up to standards by which you yourself would refuse to stand. So I'll say this about your proposal: Eat it.

Quick observation

During a "press availability" - which is apparently a photo-op with statements but still no questions - with Rep. John Boner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi said

We in Congress stand by Israel, something we have a joint bipartisan commitment - no separation between us on this subject. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel.

Isn't that the whole fucking problem?

Diogenes redux

Updated So Dennis Kucinich has switched his vote on health care deform.

I can appreciate how intense the political pressure was and as I said myself just the other day, if I were in Congress I would be 50-50 about my vote: Given that it's this (plus, one assumes, the tweaking - and face facts, it is no more than that - through reconciliation) or nothing, the question is which course, defeat or passage, holds out a better chance for actual, honest-to-gosh reform and actual, honest-to-gosh universal access and actual, honest-to-gosh "healthcare is a right."

While, as I've said to the point of boring people, I think the best outcome would be if the bill were defeated as the result of a loud, significant, progressive shout that it's just not good enough, I strongly suspect that rejecting the bill will be seen as the right wing having killed it. I sense that Kucinich was making some of the same calculations I did, as his references to attempts to "de-legitimize [Obama's] presidency" suggest he was thinking in terms of the bill's defeat being read as a right-wing victory even if it was progressives' votes that made the difference.

So I still think I would have voted "no" but I understand Kucinich's decision and can't really fault him for it. I admit to being a little disappointed but I can't be too disappointed because of the reasons I already stated.

(Parenthetically, I can't help but notice that despite the almost routine attempts by the media and much of what passes for the left in this country to dismiss him as irrelevant, the effort the White House put into lobbying him - including four one-on-ones with Obama who also staged a rally in Kucinich's district - shows how significant his vote is: As Kucinich himself said, if he can vote for this there's no reason anyone else can't. His "yes" becomes good political cover for other progressives who voted no the first time around to switch.)

What I'm more disappointed by is the fact that this is just another case where true progressives - Let me make a detour here to make it clear here that I emphatically reject the attempt by flaccid liberals to hijack "progressive" as their new self-description as they run away from their own label because they're too fucking wimpy to fight for it. I hold "progressive" to mean what it traditionally did, referring to that space that was to the left of "liberal" but short of "radical." Anyway, this was just another case where true progressives (and there are some in Congress, a couple of dozen, anyway) are not allowed even by those who should be their allies to vote their conscience, to stand on principle. Oh no, you must be, you must be, "pragmatic," you must bend, compromise and compromise again, you must settle, you must seek only what conventional wisdom says is doable right now, never more than that, and then you must negotiate back from there to even less, you must bend until you break - because to do otherwise is to be condemned as "irresponsible" or even "reprehensible," to be mocked as living in a fantasy world and believing in "magical ponies."

But as has been said many times, progress is not won by "reasonable" people pursuing "realistic" goals but by very unreasonable people who refuse to settle for what is attained conveniently or without undue fuss - and despite all the bluster and fluster over the last year, a health care "reform" bill that not only does not challenge but in fact cements the dominance of the health insurance industry and profit-driven medicine, that makes some adjustments in how we finance health care but does not challenge how we deliver it, is, yes, "without undue fuss." It is the "reasonable" people who make the incremental improvements - but only because, only because, the unreasonable people have carved out the space in which they can operate.

I intend to continue to be an unreasonable person.

Footnote: The quote about "de-legitimizing" Obama's presidency comes from a scuzzy piece by Dana Milbank, which link I used largely for the purpose of having this Footnote.

What a pathetic piece of pap Milbank regurgitated. Writing about Kucinich's press conference, he started with a reference to "leprechauns" and "lucky charms," moved on to "diminutive" and "little man," referred to a "six-inch box" on which Kucinich stood "so that his face would be above the microphone," then reprised "leprechauns" before closing with "the little guy."

His undisguised sneering didn't stop with physical references: There was the obligatory adjective "quixotic" when referring to Kucinich's presidential runs and, Milbank scornfully insisted, now as it was then, "It was all about him." And, "keeping the spotlight on himself," Kucinich "viewed the crowd with a satisfied smile," having "luxuriated in all the attention Obama had given him."

All that in little more than 800 words, even when the word count includes the quotes from Kucinich's statement that Milbank included because he thought they make Kucinich look foolish and self-absorbed.

He also included the obligatory reference to Kucinich having "lead [Cleveland] into default" when he was mayor while of course not mentioning how and why it happened or the personal price Kucinich paid or that his actions ultimately saved the city and its residents hundreds of millions of dollars over the following years.

Dana Milbank has become much better known for his smirk than his journalism - and, as this exercise in unjustified condescension shows, deservedly so.

Updated with Two More Footnotes: First is that Glenn Greenwald discussed - and largely agreed with - a piece by

Politico's Ben Smith [which] suggested that one important aspect of Rahm Emanuel's health care strategy -- to ignore the demands of progressives on the ground that they would fall into line at the end no matter what -- has been vindicated.

Despite some huffing and puffing from some quarters that "that's not fair!" I'd say it's not only fair, it's correct. My only criticism of Greenwald's piece is that it doesn't go far enough in exploring the price progressives pay - one extracted by liberals - when they try to stick to their principles and promises, a price that can go well beyond denunciations and name-calling. For example, as Jane Hamsher noted at Firedoglake,

[t]he alternative [to capitulating], as Dennis Kucinich found out, was to be hounded from office by liberal interest groups whose job is now apparently to play enforcer on the left so the President can follow through with his PhRMA and AHIP deals.

I'll also note that among the huffers and puffers was Markos Moulitsas, despite the fact that he was just on Countdown opining grandly about the progressive failure to gain anything in the bill - which he did just a couple of days after going on the same show to denounce Dennia Kucinich as "reprehensible" for not supporting the Senate bill. A case study in being irony-challenged.

The other footnote comes from the same Jane Hamsher piece and is another entry for your Diogenes file:

Last July, in response to a campaign we launched the month before, 65 members of Congress pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option. At the suggestion of Rep. Donna Edwards, online supporters raised $430,000 to thank them. Dennis Kucinich was one of those members of Congress. ...

I spoke with Dennis following his speech [about changing his vote], and his campaign will return the money to those who have donated in support of his pledge to vote against any health care bill that does not have a public option.

Hamsher calls it "the honorable thing to do," which it surely is, and suggests the other recipients should follow suit. Let's see if any do.

The geek's alive! Alive!

A couple of science stories that have ranked high on my Kewl! meter lately:

- A report published a few issues back in "Current Biology"

argues that a population of birds [in central Europe] known as black­caps has split into two “reproductively isolated” groups in under 30 generations, despite continuing to breed in the same forests. In other words, the groups aren’t breeding with each other, setting the stage for them to evolve differently in the future.

What's more, the split was caused by humans. People began providing food in winter for the migrating birds, with the result that there's now a migratory divide, with some birds following one route and others another, influenced by the food. There are already visibile differences between the two groups:

“The new northwest migratory route is shorter, and those birds feed on food provided by humans instead of fruits as the birds that migrate southwest do,” [Martin] Schaefer [of the University of Freiburg] said. “As a consequence, birds migrating northwest have rounder wings, which provide better maneuverability but make them less suited for long-distance migration. They also have longer, narrower bills that are less equipped for eating large fruits like olives during the winter."

What is the importance of this?

“Our results now show that the initial steps of speciation can occur very quickly in a highly mobile, migratory bird,” and “it doesn’t have to take millions of years.”

And humans can directly influence that process. Eat it, creationists.

- The Fibonacci sequence is a well-known number progression where each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. It's a progression widely found in nature and as it proceeds, the ratio between successive numbers in the sequence draws ever closer to the so-called "golden section" or "golden ratio," used since the Renaissance to compose paintings and in architecture to design visually-pleasing buildings. That ratio is 1:1.618.., the ellipsis at the end indicating that, like pi, the ratio does not have an exact value but continues indefinitely. An interesting aspect to this is that if two numbers are related by that ratio - that is, if a/b = 1.618 - then they are also related by their sums divided by the larger of the two - that is, (a+b)/a = 1.618.

Now, it develops that the same sort of symmetry can be found at the quantum level.

The researchers in the new study focused on the magnetic material cobalt niobate. It consists of linked magnetic atoms, which form chains like a very thin bar magnet, but only one atom wide. They are considered a useful model for describing magnetism at tiny scales in solid state matter.

When a magnetic field is applied to the chain at right angles to an aligned “spin” of its particles, the magnetic chain transforms into a new state called quantum critical, according to the physicists. This can be thought of as a quantum version of a fractal pattern, a pattern that looks the same at any scale.

Without getting further into quantum physics, suffice it to say that the researchers discovered that they could "tune" the string of atoms to act like a guitar string - or more precisely, a series of guitar strings - with the resonant frequencies (or "notes") related by the tension between adjacent atoms.

“The first two notes show a perfect relationship with each other,” [said Radu Coldea of Oxford University,] principle author of a paper on the findings [that appeared] in the Jan. 8 issue of the research journal Science.

That ratio is 1:1.618 - which is to three decimal places precisely the same as the golden ratio. It appears that the quantum state has a hidden symmetry, it's own underlying order - and it's a pleasing one.

- Okay, if this doesn't rank high on your Kewl! meter, I don't know what would.

The colour of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper published in the research journal Nature....

An analysis concluded that Sinosauropteryx, a much smaller relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, sported bristles that were precursors of feathers in alternate orange and white rings down its tail. And the early bird Confuciusornis had patches of white, black and orange-brown colouring, scientists said. Future work is expected to allow precise mapping of colours and patterns across the whole bird. ...

The researchers from the U.K., China and Ireland reported identifying two kinds of melanosomes, or cellular structures, in the feathers of many birds and dinosaurs from northeastern China’s famous Jehol fossil beds.

Melanosomes are colour-bearing compartments within the cells of feathers and hair in modern birds and mammals, giving black, grey, and tones such as orange and brown. Because melanosomes are part of the tough protein structure of the feather, they can survive for hundreds of millions of years.

This also has a connection to evolution: The research clearly shows that feathers preceded birds, making it a clear case where something that already existed (feathers for display or heat regulation or perhaps another purpose) was adapted to an entirely different purpose (flight). It's another example of being able to answer the creationists' "How could that have just happened all at once," in this case related to birds, feathers, and flying, with "It didn't."

- Finally, there's this for all the exobiology fans out there.

The more we learn about how life can survive and even flourish in extreme environments and in places we thought it couldn't or wouldn't exist, the more we realize just how adaptable and tenacious life is - and therefore how the chances for life other than on Earth increase. And it seems we've done it again.

A NASA team drilled an eight-inch wide hole some 600 feet through the ice of western Antarctica and lowered a video camera and light down through it to get a first look at the underside of an ice sheet.

The temperature below freezing and no light reaches it. Scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could live there.

Instead, to their surprise they saw a shrimp-like creature come swimming along and settle on the camera's cable. When the cable was pulled up they found a tentacle from what they think was a foot-long jellyfish.

"We were just gaga over it," [NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler] said of the 3-inch-long, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. ...

The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

"They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in and they found not one animal but two," said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California....

Microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey suggested the creatures might have swum in from far away and don't live there permanently, but Kim doubts it, noting the nearest open water is 12 miles away and the chances of two creatures just happening to be in the tiny amount of water examined seem quite small.

Yet scientists were puzzled at what the food source would be for these critters. While some microbes can make their own food out of chemicals in the ocean, complex life like the amphipod can't, Kim said.

So how do they survive? That's the key question, Kim said.

"It's pretty amazing when you find a huge puzzle like that on a planet where we thought we know everything," Kim said.

Damn effing straight. Science is Kewl!