Gov. Cuomo Will Be Re-elected Next Year

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NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo is introducing legislation that will ease restrictions on abortions after 23 weeks’ gestation in New York. The law would, first of all, go beyond the usual “life and health of the mother” clause and specify that a pregnancy may be terminated late in the pregnancy if the fetus is not viable. (My understanding is that late termination of a non-viable fetus is generally considered legal under the “health of the mother” clause, already, so this really is just a clarification more than a change.) It would allow licensed health care practitioners, not just doctors, to perform some abortions. And it would remove abortion entirely from penal law and instead regulate it through the state’s health laws.

I don’t know who the Republicans might run against Cuomo next year, but if they come up with some homophobic gun-totin’ Fetus Person, ol’ Andy’s got it in the bag. And if the New York legislature fights him on this, and the issue makes a big splash, it’s going to be a big bag. And yes, I realize upstate is more conservative than the New York City area, but it’s also less populated. And I suspect even the most conservative county in New York is liberal compared to, say, Mississippi. Social conservatism in particular doesn’t go very far in this state.

The governor has said that his Reproductive Health Act would be one plank of a 10-part Women’s Equality Act that also would include equal pay and anti-discrimination provisions. Conservative groups, still stinging from the willingness of Republican lawmakers to go along with Mr. Cuomo’s push to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011, are mobilizing against the proposal. Seven thousand New Yorkers who oppose the measure have sent messages to Mr. Cuomo and legislators via the Web site of the New York State Catholic Conference.

This could be fun. Bring it on.

I was not much impressed with Cuomo early in his first term, as he started out as Mr. Austerity — balance the budget without raising taxes, etc. I’d like to see him make a stronger argument for public investment. But I won’t have any problem voting for him next year.

Naturally, the Fetus People are screaming that Gov. Cuomo is introducing “abortion on demand,” but in effect the only effective difference would be that it clarifies non-viability of a fetus as part of “life and health of the mother.” (Clue to Fetus People: That means the fetus is already dead or has no hope of survival, so you can stop hollering about killing babies, thanks much.) Currently New York has a law on the books that leaves out “health,” but that is not in effect because it’s been overruled by federal courts.

GOP Brand X

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One of the great marketing success stories of all time is the way that the Republican Party somehow came to own national security issues after the World War II era. If you consider actual history there’s no evidence that they deserved their reputation as THE foreign policy/defense party. But the idea that Republicans are “tough” on security while Democrats are “soft” came to be one of the most solid and enduring truisms of modern American politics.

For decades, Republicans packaged themselves as the party that knew how to stand up to enemies. Further, it was believed Republicans were born with a gene that allowed them to understand All Things Military better than Dems, whether they had any military experience or not.

But the pro-military aura — we might call it the Republican Military Mystique — seems to have worn off, at least among the public. Maybe they finally caught on they were being played for fools by Dubya and his War on Terra. But exit polls taken after the November elections showed that voters trusted the Democratic nominee over the Republican one on national security, for the first time in three decades.

Of course, Mitt Romney gives the impression that the only time he gets tough is when he’s taking bread from orphans. Further, the fact that the GOP just plain forgot to include the traditional Salute to War in their convention last year tells us they’ve lost focus. Well, focus on anything other than how much they hate President Obama.

The “sequestration” included massive cuts to defense spending that, theoretically, Republicans could not countenance. Well, turns out defense spending cuts are being countenanced. John Boehner is saying Republicans will not support a sequestration deal that does not balance the budget in ten years without tax increases.

See also Ezra Klein, “Clint Eastwood and Barney Frank Attack the Pentagon.”

Now that certain Republican senators are done with their male dominance displays regarding Chuck Hagel, word is votes will be switched and the nomination will be approved next week. But it’s all been too much for Fred Kaplan, who says Republicans can’t be trusted on national security.

It’s been clear, at least since the 2012 election, that the Republican Party has abrogated its role—really, abandoned any interest—in shaping or seriously discussing American foreign policy. But only recently has this indifference shifted into toxic territory, and on Tuesday the fumes formed a poisonous cloud, the likes of which hadn’t been witnessed in decades.

Republicans were a bunch of isolationists before World War II, and they’ve finally gone full circle. All that most of them know about foreign policy is Iran Bad, Israel Good. Their idea of an exotic foreign country is Honolulu. Or maybe Manhattan.

On Rats, Sinking Ships, and the GOP

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Cruising through news stories today, it strikes me that the Republican Party is tripping itself up by being too geezer-ish (couldn’t think of the right word) and too juvenile at the same time.

Robert Draper’s “Can the Republicans be Saved From Obsolescence?” covers the geezerness of the Republican Party. Draper documents that establishment Republicans are not not dealing with change — technical, demograpic, or cultural.

They are light years behind the Dems in technology. They are oblivious to recent cultural shifts. Some of them are still talking about building new coalitions of white people. Even when the Party organizes a committee to find out what it’s doing wrong, the Same Old Farts who have been running the GOP for years are put in charge of it.

Younger (and more tech-savvy) Republicans want the GOP to back off divisive social issues. Ed Kilgore comments, “if you had to choose one theme that underlies the arguments Draper’s hearing from the cool kids of the GOP, it’s that the Christian Right has gotta go.”

Even James Joyner admits that “the Republican Party is still running on a platform designed to solve the problems of the Carter Administration.”

For the juvenile side of movement conservatism, see David Corn’s “FreedomWorks Made Video of Fake Giant Panda Having Sex With Fake Hillary Clinton.” Apparently Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, has been running the advocacy group/Super PAC with all the seriousness and gravitas of a frat house jello wrestling party.

Sorta related — Haley Barbour is telling Republican insiders to stop donating money to Club For Growth Make of that what you will.

Too Crazy to Be Anywhere

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There’s a distressing story at Mother Jones about a schizophrenic man on death row in Texas. Titled “How Crazy Is Too Crazy to Be Executed?” the story explores how the Texas courts determine whether anyone is too mentally compromised to be executed. But there are a couple of other points that scream out of it.

One is that Texas has nothing that rises to the level of a “system” that identifies psychotic people and at least puts them somewhere where they can’t harm themselves or anyone else. And actual medical treatment would not be a bad thing, of course. The subject, Andre Thomas, had been identified as severely disturbed before the voices in his head compelled him to murder his ex-wife and their children. But, somehow, he remained under no supervision of any sort until he confessed to murder.

This reminded me a of Andrea Yates’s story. You probably remember that Yates was the Texas mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub. It turned out that not only was Yates massively psychotic at the time of the incident; she had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals a couple of times before the drownings. And at the time of the drownings her family had been taking her to see a doctor on a regular basis. But even then, the amount of help and supervision that she really needed just wasn’t available, somehow.

But I don’t want to pick on Texas too much, because the psychiatric “safety net” is pretty much nonexistent everywhere, from what I see. In the past such people might have been warehoused in a state psychiatric hospital, which often were awful places, but the only alternative we seem to have come up with is to just let them stumble around until they kill somebody. Or die on the street somewhere.

And this takes us to the subject of firearm purchasing. The walking crazy are among us. And it’s not always obvious at a glance who they are. The “system” is so porous that certifiably sick people go undiagnosed — or even if diagnosed, untreated — for years. So how does anyone think the “system” would be able to maintain a Crazy People Registry as part of a gun purchase background check? (Even if it were a good idea, which it isn’t.) There is no system.

Clue: We All Get Old Someday

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Ben Smith warns that President Obama is about to “screw his base.”

The passionate supporters are the youth, who voted for him by a margin of 60% to 36%, according to exit poll samples of people 29 and under. His enemies are the elderly: Mitt Romney won 56% of the votes from people 65 and over. And while one of ObamaCare’s earliest provisions was a boon to the young, allowing them to stay on their parents’ insurance through the age of 26, what follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president’s supporters. The provisions required to make any sort of health insurance plan work — not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort — require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly (saved by Sarah “Death Panels” Palin from any serious attempt to ration expensive and often futile end-of-life care) consume far more than they pay in. There is always a push and pull, however, and this year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young.

Before I go on to the main point, I want to say that I find the use of the word “enemies” a bit jarring. I don’t think a rational politician thinks of voters who vote against him as his “enemies,” but rather as a pool of people he wasn’t able to reach. Ben Smith also seems to be implying that the President should heap bennies on the young for voting for him and kick the old to the curb, rather than just do the right thing for everybody.

A larger point is that conservatives persist in supporting the idea of paying for health care through the private insurance industry, yet they also persist in being ignorant of how insurance risk pools work. If everybody only paid in what they received back in services, it wouldn’t be insurance any more, would it?

The main point is that we all get to take our turns being young people, then middle aged people, and then old people. Unless we die young, of course. Assuming an average life span, today’s hunky young dude is tomorrow’s shriveled old geezer. As individuals, we move around in the risk pool — sometimes we’re in the shallow end, sometimes we’re in the deep end — which is why risk pooling is preferred to just making people pay for stuff. In the course of a lifetime, we all take turns being givers and recipients. This is how insurance works.

Rick Ungar at Forbes explains the situation:

According to AHIP, the average premium paid by a 24 year old in the individual marketplace is $1200 a year. Using AHIP’s numbers, the price of making the cost of heath insurance more equitable for a 60 year old will potentially cost that 24 year old, on average, an extra $45 a month.

While I don’t mean to minimize this increase, as I recognize that every dollar counts when one is young and getting started, it is important to keep the actual price tag in perspective and weigh the equities when considering that those at the older age range have been overcharged for many years.

The reality is that the young have been paying unreasonably low premium rates for for a very long time–it being in the health insurance company’s profit interest to bring in as many young and healthy people as possible in the door by charging artificially low rates. The problem is that they make up for it by charging artificially high rates to the older people the insurance company would rather not have in the first place. What the ACA seeks to do is correct this situation so that 60 year olds are not precluded from gaining health insurance coverage by being priced out of the market.

I did some checking and found out that in some states, insurance companies are allowed to charge their older policy holders ten times more than the younger policyholders. When Obamacare fully kicks in next year, insurance companies will be allowed to charge their oldest policy holders no more than three times more than they charge the youngest ones.

Naturally, the Right frames the change as screwing the young. What’s sad is that so many older people have been bamboozled into thinking that the Right is on their side, when it plainly isn’t.

Next year, insurance companies must also stop charging women higher premiums than men just because they are women, as they do now. By the Right’s logic, Obamacare is unfair to men.

And, of course, it occasionally happens that a young person gets cancer or gets hit by a bus. By the Right’s logic, older people facing multiple health problems must kick in higher premiums to pay for that person’s care, but not the other way around.

It’s also the case than when an uninsured 50-year-old runs up a staggering medical bill before he dies, his 20-something children will be stuck with the bill. Paying $45 a month more to help Pops keep his insurance policy is a bargain in comparison.

If we want to help young people, how about doing something toward lowering the cost of higher education and student loan debt? And if you want to make health care as equitably low-cost as possible, how about single payer?

Update: Zandar comments,

Holy crap, Ben Smith has discovered ACTUARIAL SCIENCE. Healthy people paying for premiums and not consuming health care pays for sick people who are consuming health care. ALERT THE INTERNETS.

Update: Sarah Kliff explains why young people probably won’t be hurt by a spike in insurance premium cost.

Karl and the Baggers

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The Karl Rove vs. Teabagger fracas is a ton of fun to watch. But, as Charles Blow writes, “The skirmish speaks to a broader problem: a party that has lost its way and can’t rally around a unified, coherent vision of what it wants to be when it grows up.”

Josh Marshall published a letter from a one-time GOP staffer that is very much worth reading. The letter writer points out that for all the drama and angst and name calling going on, the GOP establishment and the baggers really aren’t that far apart on issues. What’s really eating them is something else.

Neither side in this putative civil war has been willing to reckon honestly with the consequences of the Bush administration for the country (substantively) or the Republican Party (politically). Both do their best to present their views to the public as if the last Republican President had never existed. This has left both groups of activists somewhat unmoored; in politics, you talk ideology and principles when you can’t brag about accomplishments, because voters are a lot better at relating the latter to their own lives.

Since neither the Tea Party types or the big donors and the campaign operatives working for them are thinking of repudiating a Republican administration that lost two wars and wrecked the economy, they are left to air their differences on issues no one besides campaign junkies cares about. The self-styled conservatives complain that Rove and his people say mean things about them; the moneybags wing is dedicated to recruiting candidates who will avoid gaffes. Big deal.

They are not only not repudiating Dubya for the bad consequences; they are not even willing to admit there were bad consequences. And, Steve M says, why would they? Their “ideas” are still considered the mainstream.

Yes, the tax cuts are unsustainable, but they’re now sacrosanct — Republicans wanted to make them all permanent, while Democrats have insisted on locking them in for everyone but the rich. Government-sanctioned torture, once unthinkable, is now celebrated in movies and on TV, and much of what’s worst about America’s post-9/11 foreign policy — Gitmo, rendition, indefinite detention — is still in place. In fact, Republicans are talking about Chuck Hagel as if the neocons were right about Al Qaeda and Iraq, and are right about Iran right now — and they’re getting away with it, because not enough Americans have learned to feel disgust for them.

(Regarding the Hagel hearings, I doubt most Americans were paying that much attention. Probably many of wouldn’t know whether “Chuck Hagel” was a former senator or Roy Rogers’ sidekick. But a majority have figured out Iraq was a mistake.)

So stock up on popcorn, folks. This show ain’t gonna be over anytime soon.