Yesterday Republicans came out with a tax reform plan that Jonathan Chait says isn’t that bad, or at least, isn’t stupid. Chait may just be astonished that a Republican can so much as tie his shoes. He admits the plan isn’t likely to raise revenue (why bother?).

The New York Times and Sahil Kapur at Talking Points Memo point to an interesting feature of the Republican plan — in effect, it raises taxes in blue states. Red states, not so much.

It does this in two ways. One, it would o longer allow people to subtract what they pay for state and local taxes from their tax bills. Who pays state income taxes? Who pays substantial local taxes? Blue state dwellers and city folks, that’s who.

Families making $450,000 and above would pay 35 percent instead of the current 39.6 percent, which is a tax cut, like they needed another one. But the mortage interest deduction would be limited, to make up for it. The NY Times says,

One big break that would be affected is the mortgage-interest deduction. By limiting it to $500,000, the plan would hurt many middle-class families that must borrow more than that to afford a house in expensive markets like New York. Even worse, it would repeal the deduction for state and local taxes, a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult for “blue” states to provide the services and safety-net protections that they have decided are necessary.

Mr. Camp’s plan is open about this intention: “This deduction redistributes wealth to big-government, high-tax states from small-government, low-tax states.”

Huh? It doesn’t redistribute anything. The low tax-states are getting more federal benefits than they pay in taxes, courtesy of the high-tax states. You’d think they’d be thankful.

With a hat tip to Moonbat, please see this Los Angeles Times article by Michael Hiltzik about yesterday’s “Obamacare is killing my mother” story.

Hiltzik analysis reveals, as I suspected, that Stephen Blackwood’s mother isn’t having a problem with “Obamacare”; she’s having a problem with the private insurance industry. We still don’t know why Blue Cross dumped Mother’s policy, but the most likely reason is that Blue Cross chose to dump her and gave Obamacare as the excuse. Her issues with her difficulties in navigating the insurance market are in large part because Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell deliberately made it that way. The issue about Humana not covering the cancer meds has nothing whatsoever to do with Obamacare. That’s an issue with Humana and Humana’s deceptive sales reps.

Another interesting tidbit, from a commenter — the author Stephen Blackwood, is the “president of Ralston College,” but Ralston College doesn’t actually exist. Blackwood is in the process of raising money to build it. That doesn’t make Blackwood a bad person, of course. But we really don’t know anything about Blackwood.

Hiltzik’s conclusion:

That does point to a problem with Obamacare, just not the one Stephen Blackwood and the Wall Street Journal think it does. The problem is that the Affordable Care Act not only left commercial insurers at the center of our healthcare system, but strengthened their grip on coverage. Many of the problems that have cropped up with the ACA are reflections of the private industry’s role, including its lousy customer service.

There’s no question that confusion and complexity still govern America’s healthcare system. But for millions of Americans, there’s less of that, and more fairness, than there was before the ACA. Judging from her son’s op-ed, Catherine Blackwood is still getting her cancer treatment, with the exception of a decision about medication that Humana should be ashamed about.

Blackwood wrote that “it is precisely because health care for 300 million people is so complicated that it cannot be centrally managed.” But the ACA is the exact opposite of “centrally managed” healthcare. In fact, as advocates of a single-payer system argue, if it were centrally managed, it might work better.

The Wall Street Journal is running a sob story about how “Obamacare is killing my mother,” and I’m calling bullshit.

The story in brief: Mother has cancer. Needs specific medicines. Old Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy was expensive, but it was paying for the medicines. It was a “terrific plan.” In November, Blue Cross cancelled policy, blamed Obamacare. Mother finds the exchange in her state (Virginia) was not working. Got on the phone to private insurance companies, got jerked around, just found out new policy doesn’t cover the meds. Blame Obama.

Articles of Bullshit:

1. Why was the Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy “illegal” under the ACA if it was that great? The only policies actually canceled by the ACA were those with gaps in what they covered. Was Blue Cross dumping Mother as a patient and blaming Obamacare, when in fact it was Blue Cross’s decision?

2. Viginia doesn’t have its own state exchange. The federal site was working by December. Why didn’t they use it?

3. The rest of the article amounts to how Mother was jerked around by private insurance companies she contacted directly, not “Obamacare.” Humana told her things were covered that turned out not to be covered, she said. I’ve had the same thing happen to me dealing with insurance companies, but this was back during the Clinton Administration. Obamacare traveling back in time?

Why does the new policy not cover her cancer meds, when the old “illegal” one did? That’s highly suspicious. Is it that the policy has substandard pharmaceutical coverage, or is there a deductible to be met, or what? And they’ve still got time, so why not get on the exchange now and see if they could do better?

Of course they won’t, because whining is so much more fun. See also Krugman.

If you haven’t read it already, be sure to see “Anatomy of the Deep State” at Moyers and Company. See also Juan Cole’s critique, which makes some good points.

Yesterday I mentioned the Right’s new pretty shiny thing, which is a claim that Christians are persecuted when they are not granted exclusive, special rights to discriminate against gays and ignore health insurance regulations. As ridiculous as that is, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t surprise me if the justices conceded those rights. But there’s a situation in Louisiana that may push the issue over a line even Antonin Scalia himself may have to hold his nose to cross.

This is something I wrote about a few days ago on the other blog. A 6th grade teacher in a Louisiana public school has been using her classroom to indoctrinate children into creationism, 6,000-year-old earth and all. In a brilliant example of Peak Stupid, she actually said that if evolution were true, apes would still be turning into humans today.

One of the students, identified as C.C., is a Buddhist boy adopted from Thailand. Well, here’s what happened, according to Raw Story:

One test she gave to students asked: “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The correct answer was “Lord,” but C.C. wrote in something else. Roark responded by scolding the boy in front of the entire class.

When informed that C.C. was a Buddhist and therefore didn’t believe in God, Roark allegedly responded, “you’re stupid if you don’t believe in God.”

On another accusation, she allegedly described both Buddhism and Hinduism as “stupid.”

Certainly, this teacher would know stupid. And then when the parents complained to the superintendent, the superintendent told them that maybe they should transfer the boy to another school, particularly one with more Asians.

For some perplexing reason (/snark), the ACLU has sued.

Now, here’s the update: Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is more or less saying that if the court’s stifle the teacher, this would be a violation of the teacher’s rights of free expression. His office issued this statement:

“Religious freedom is foundational to liberty in America. In this case, the plaintiffs are alleging violations of the establishment clause not the free exercise clause. We don’t want to comment on this particular case before hearing the defendant’s side of the story, but as a general rule, government needs to be very careful before making decisions that restrict any American’s religious freedoms.”

I’m sure I’ve said before that conservatives like to pretend the establishment clause isn’t there, or is somehow lesser to the free exercise clause, although in fact without the establishment clause the free exercise clause isn’t worth much. Certainly, the child being coerced into expressing belief in God by a government employee is not having his free exercise rights respected, is he?

A few days earlier, Jindal gave a speech claiming there is a “silent war” on religious liberty.

“This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.

I like the part about religion being “privatized.” That’s bad? Republicans want Medicare and Social Security, government programs, to be privatized, but religion — which is supposed to be every citizen’s own damn business, not the government’s — is to become a function of government? Is that what he’s saying?

Their vision of America is not the vision of the Founding. It’s not even the vision of ten years ago. It’s a vision in which an individual’s devotion to Almighty God is accorded as much respect as a casual hobby — and with about as many rights and protections.

Like this founding father, Jindal? And how about protecting C.C. from having to swear belief in God to get along with his teacher? Are you saying the government’s public “rights” override the rights of a citizen?

These elites have to this point faced little opposition – a non-profit here, a dedicated attorney there, a small business over there. A handful of principled organizations with the courage to stand up to the crushing weight of a liberal consensus unalterably opposed to their participation in the public square. They are the remnant who have the temerity to believe in America and its promises — and to do something about it.

What participation in the public square? You can participate all you like; just don’t try to use government to push your religious beliefs on others.

Seriously, I think this needs to be hung around the neck of the whole GOP. Whose rights do you support? C.C.’s or the teacher’s?

The Right is rallying around a new pretty shiny thing, which is seeing themselves as victims of religious persecution. They are not being allowed to discriminate against gay people and deny birth control coverage to employees. It’s just like being fed to lions!

I say, if this is what they want to go with, let ’em. These days, I think more people sympathize with gays than with fundamentalists. And if Mike Huckabee wants to argue that women are insulted when Democrats try to ease their access to birth control — well, let him. Please proceed, governor.

See Ed Kilgore, “The Central Flaw in Hobby Lobby’s Suit” and Garrett Epps, “Will the Roberts Court Follow Its Own Religious-Freedom Precedent?“

First, The Book is up to about 38,000 words now. Chapter 7 is about half done and Chapter 8 is yet to go. It’s a good thing I didn’t realize what a project this would turn out to be or I wouldn’t have started.

OK, where was I … wingnuts say many things that, on the surface, make no sense. Well, they don’t make sense, period, but it’s not hard to ascertain why the nonsensical thing is being said, anyway.

One of their more nonsensical claims is that climate change is a hoax being promoted for profit. Exactly how 97 percent of climate scientists could be in on this hoax is never explained, but whatever. I found a great example of right-wing literature on this subject that skillfully combines innuendo and guilt by association to make what feels like proof of climate change profiteering, but which doesn’t actually document climate change profiteering.

Bret Stephens writes at the Wall Street Journal that John Kerry’s recent speech on climate change included a quote from somebody named Maurice Strong. Strong is a Canadian who has been in leadership positions in some climate advocacy organizations, plus other organizations. He was a director at the World Economic Forum for a time, for example. Stephens says that in 2005 while Strong may or may not have been on a UN panel about something that appears to have nothing to do with climate change (Stephens’s wording doesn’t make this clear) accepted a check for almost a million dollars from a South Korean businessman with a history of bribing people, and this businessman was then sent to jail for attempting to bribe UN officials for something that had nothing to do with climate change, and Strong himself was cleared of wrongdoing. But, my goodness, that’s a lot of smoke, isn’t it? And this makes John Kerry a bad person. Stephens continues,

The secretary devoted much of his speech to venting spleen at those in the “Flat Earth Society” who dispute the 97% of climate scientists who believe in man-made global warming. “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact,” he said. Once upon a time people understood that skepticism was essential to good science. Now Mr. Kerry is trying to invoke a specious democracy among scientists to shut down democratic debate for everyone else.

This is of a piece with the amusing notion that the only thing standing in the way of climate salvation is a shadowy, greedy and powerful conspiracy involving the Koch Brothers, MIT’s Dick Lindzen, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and this newspaper’s editorial page. Oh, the power!

And yet there goes Mr. Kerry extolling Mr. Strong, who really does stand at the obscure intersection of public policy, private profits and the climate science that joins the two. “I have to disclose my own association with this process in my earlier role in the United Nations negotiations which established the basis for the development of these new [market] opportunities,” Mr. Strong said in a 2007 speech, noting his roles in the Chicago Climate Exchange and the China Carbon Corporation.

There is innuendo so thick it can be cut with a knife. But Stephens never actually says how Strong is personally enriching himself by promoting climate change science. Nobody is denying that many climate change acceptors are encouraging climate-change related business opportunities as one way to combat climate change. Everyone’s been pretty open about that, actually.

If George W. Bush had left office and immediately joined the boards of defense contractors building MRAPs for Iraq, hard questions would be raised. When Maurice Strong, Al Gore and other climate profiteers seek to enrich themselves from policies they put into place while in office, it scarcely raises an eyebrow.

When was Maurice Strong in elected office? Exactly how are he and Al Gore seeking to enrich themselves from policies they put into place? Which policies, exactly? How are Strong and Gore making money? Other than from Al Gore’s documentary, I don’t know how Al Gore is directly making money from the climate change issue. Maybe he is, but Stephens doesn’t explain it. In the final paragraphs he hints darkly that Strong, Gore, and others are involved in “carbon-trading schemes” and the sustainable energy “craze,” which of course are economic disasters, but if so, how are Strong and Gore making money from them?

And Mr. Stephens seems not to have thought the implications of believing that energy cannot be sustainable.

This is classic stuff, I tell you. Joe McCarthy himself couldn’t have done a better job.

For years, wingnuts argued that gays asking for marriage equality wanted “special rights” not given to anyone else. This makes no sense to me, but it’s still their argument. Just google “gays want special rights” and you get one tirade after another like this one, which basically says that same-sex marriage is wrong because the author says it is; therefore, if we let gays marry we are granting them special rights.

I agree with Nathaniel Frank that the homophobic view is pure narcissism. It makes sense only if you accept as a “given” that homosexuality is abnormal or depraved. So, in the homophobe’s minds, same-sex marriage amounts to a state approval of depravity that no one else gets.

Otherwise, their argument just plain makes no sense.

But NOW the shoe is moving to the other foot, so to speak, because wingnuts are asking for special privileges for themselves to be able to discriminate against others, or to allow employers to impose conditions on employees purely because of the employer’s religious beliefs. I say this amounts to the religious right asking for special rights and privileges other people don’t get.

I’m reacting to a couple of articles by Daniel Linker that basically says, if righties play the religion card they get to do whatever they want, because religion. (See “Is opposing gay marriage the same as being a racist?” and Are secular liberals getting cocky?) And I argue that Linker is asking for a special dispensation to ignore the establishment clause.

See also Ed Kilgore.

This made me laugh:

Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.

The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”

Part of the reason this made me laugh is that in The Book (current working title: Rethinking Religion: Being Religious in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World) there’s a chapter titled “God and Existence” that contains variations on the theme of the nature of existence, drawing on science and philosophy, to argue that “existence” is mostly indefinable, and depending on how it is defined anything could be said to either exist or not exist. The point in context of The Book is that it’s really stupid to argue about whether God exists, even assuming we had any idea what God is. But the Republican health care plan is a good example, too.

Chait’s theme is that Republican health care plans going back to the beginning of the Clinton Administration are ephemeral things that “exist” as thought-objects only as long as there’s no plan to implement them. For example,

In 1993, Republican minority leader Bob Dole supported a version of it to demonstrate that Republicans did not endorse the status quo, until Democrats, facing the demise of their own plan, tried to bring up Dole’s plan, at which point Dole renounced his own plan.

Mitt Romney, clearly too thick to understand how the game is played, screwed the pooch by putting an actual conservative health care plan into effect in Massachusetts. The Republican response has been to hang what was mostly a Heritage/Romney plan around the neck of President Obama and call it socialized medicine. The wonder is that, years ago anyway, Heritage came up with a plan that was do-able in the real world, even if clumsy. I doubt Heritage will make that mistake again. Or could if they tried.

Brian Beutler points out that current Republican “plans” on the “table” suffer from the same weaknesses they perceive in Obamacare.

The cornerstone of nearly every conservative health care reform plan is to eliminate or dramatically reduce the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance and use the revenues to help people pay for their own coverage. But the disruptions that would entail would dwarf the ones Obamacare is creating, and conservative wonks realized that by opportunistically attacking Obamacare, political operatives had just crafted the very attacks that could ultimately doom their own policymaking pursuits. …

…Two weeks ago a trio of Republican senators introduced a plan to replace Obamacare. Conservatives everywhere, including Ponnuru and his National Review colleagues, applauded it. But its authors will seemingly have to choose between actually financing it or inviting the same severe market disruptions the GOP is now on record opposing. The plan itself called, somewhat confusingly, for “cap[ping] the tax exclusion for employee’s health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan’s costs.” Yuval Levin surmised reasonably that they meant capping it at the 65th percentile of employer plans. But either way its authors became caught in the trap their own party set for them in the fall. When questions started rolling in about market disruptions, they made a dramatic change to their white paper. The cap would now be set, vaguely, at “65 percent of the average market price for an expensive high-option plan,” presumably at the expense of revenues required to finance the plan’s coverage goals.

The plan is just a prop, anyway. It’s a means to allow the Wall Street Journal editorial page to run headlines that Republicans have a better way to fix health care. It’s like the stacks of paper they were carting around when the ACA was being voted on in Congress; they’d hold their stacks of paper up at press conferences and say, see? We have a health care plan, too. But the paper was just a prop. Even after the ACA was passed and the GOP started talking about “repeal and replace,” they still didn’t have a “replace.”

I’m making good progress on The Book. Of the eight chapters planned I have five finished and the sixth is about half finished. Seven and Eight are still mostly outlines. I started out thinking I would write about 20,000 words, and now I’m at 30,000. I think some of it’s not bad.

My Zen teacher, Jion Susan Postal, died last night of cancer. This was not unexpected. But i”m not that much in the mood to write about politics just now. So go ahead and comment on whatever.