In the New York Times, economist Gregory Mankiw writes that if the Bush tax cuts on upper income taxpayers are not extended, he probably will not work so much. That’s because for every $1,000 of “extra” income he earns, he would only bank $523. And compounded over 30 years, that $523 would barely buy his children a hamburger, given the projected value of 2040 dollars.

OK, I made up the part about the hamburger, but not the rest of it. And that $523 is hardly worth the effort. He has everything he really needs, mind you, but he just wants us all to know that if he doesn’t write as many articles or textbooks we’d be deprived of the enjoyment of his economic wisdom.

Well, y’know, as much as that would stress me out, on the list of sacrifices I’m willing to make for the greater good, not reading Mankiw is right up there with giving up Bridezillas. Maybe even haggis. Life is hard. Kevin Drum thinks so, too.

In other news, Carl “Mr. Furious” Paladino made anti-gay remarks in Brooklyn today. Deep down, Carl enjoys being a slumlord way too much to be happy as governor.

The DNC is making a major ad buy accusing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of stealing the election with foreign money. Sic ’em.

Finally — I believe Miss Lucy may be in her final hours now. I need to spend some time with her, and I also am behind other work I should be doing, so if I’m a bit scarce in the next couple of days that’s why. I hope y’all can find stuff to talk about.

The hell with current events. I want Mystery Science Theatre.

Normal blogging will resume when I get in the mood.

Yesterday a federal district judge found the individual mandate requirement in the new health care law to be constitutional. From what I can pick out from news stories, U.S. District Court Judge George Steeh ruled that decisions about whether or not to purchase health insurance do fall under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

“The decision whether to purchase insurance or to attempt to pay for health care out of pocket is plainly economic,” Steeh wrote in a 20-page opinion. “These decisions, viewed in the aggregate, have clear and direct impacts on health care providers, taxpayers and the insured population, who ultimately pay for the care provided to those who go without insurance.”

The suit had been brought by the Thomas More Center, a Christian group apparently dedicated to making sure the poor are always with us, assuming they don’t die from medical neglect. Rob Muise, an attorney for the Center, makes a slippery slope argument explaining why the center will repeal appeal the decision:

“The trouble, if you think about it, is if Congress has authority to regulate nonactivity then it has the ability to regulate anything,” Muise said. Congress can “tell you to exercise three times a week, to take certain vitamins, to refrain from eating certain foods because, at some point, costs are going to be incurred to the health care market. I find that very troubling when we have a federal government that’s supposed to be of limited, enumerated powers,” he said.

Libertarians and other righties are willfully ignoring the larger point and have fallen into squabbling about the fine points of the judge’s language, in particular language about economic activity versus inactivity. Judge Steeh argued that failing to purchase health insurance is an economic activity rather than an inactivity, because the decision impacts everyone else. Righties are responding to this argument with much hooting and derision.

Ilya Somin writes at Volokh Conspiracy:

The problem with this reasoning is that those who choose not to buy health insurance aren’t necessarily therefore going to buy the same services in other ways later. Some will, but some won’t. It depends on whether or not they get sick, how severe (and how treatable their illnesses are), whether if they do get sick, they can get assistance from charity, and many other factors. In addition, some people might be able to maintain their health simply by buying services that aren’t usually covered by insurance anyway, such as numerous low-cost medicines available in drug stores and the like. In such cases, they aren’t really participating in the same market as insurance purchasers.

Is there a charity anywhere in the U.S. providing major medical care to the indigent, in particular one that isn’t receiving some assistance from taxpayers? I can’t think of one. And I’m not even going to bother to address the “low-cost medicines available in drug stores” comment. The bottom line is that there is no way anyone can live in such a way as to never need medical care until one drops dead from old age. And except for the mega-wealthy, the odds are very, very long that if your insurance isn’t paying the bills, you aren’t going to be able to pay them, either. The only way the enormous majority of uninsured people will not eventually be a cost to taxpayers and the insured is if they die suddenly in accidents while still young and healthy, at which point they would be a cost only to the coroner’s office

If the mere possibility that you might purchase a similar service somewhere else is enough to count as “activity” and therefore regulable under the Commerce Clause, then almost any regulatory mandate would be permissible. For example, a requirement that each citizen purchase a gym club membership and exercise for one hour per day could be defended on the basis that, otherwise, people will be less healthy, which will make it more likely they will spend more money on medical care, health insurance, and perhaps other forms of exercise.

The biggest problem with this argument is that the decision of a healthy person to not jump into the health insurance risk pool has a real and immediate impact on the cost of insurance for those in the risk pool. You can’t say the same for choosing to not purchase a gym membership.

The opinion also claims that the Commerce Clause covers “economic decisions” as well as “economic activity.” “Economic decisions,” by this reasoning include decisions not to engage in economic activity. That, however, would allow the Commerce Clause to cover virtually any decision of any kind. Pretty much any decision to do anything is necessarily a decision not to use the same time and effort to engage in “economic activity.” If I choose to spend an hour sleeping, I necessarily choose not to spend that time working or buying products of some kind.

This is silly. You could also argue that not spending the hour sleeping will reduce your productivity, since you’ll be sleep deprived. Choosing to spend an hour sleeping doesn’t negate the possibility that later that same day you will engage in the same amount of work or shopping that you would have done without the hour sleeping.

The crew at Reason‘s Hit & Run likewise are in fantasyland:

In fact, one could opt out of the market entirely if one were so inclined. Granted, most people aren’t, but a lack of religious motivation doesn’t actually constitute no possible motivation at all. Regardless, even if one doesn’t opt out of the health services market entirely, it’s relatively easy to vary the degree to which one opts in. One individual might choose to see a doctor regularly for routine or preemptive care; another might choose to see a doctor only when very sick. Today’s decision effectively declares that in order to reduce the cost of uncompensated care, the government can force individuals to buy into a particular set of benefits—it’s not merely a mandate to buy any kind of insurance, but a mandate to buy insurance deemed acceptable by the government—regardless of whether that individual would’ve purchased that same level of benefits on his or her own. (It also ignores the minor detail that the law requires taxpayers to pay in excess of $100 billion a year to solve a $43 billion problem. More on uncompensated care here.)

Again, the issue is not only that an individual without insurance will almost certainly eventually end up being a burden to taxpayers and the medical care system generally, although that is a big issue. The issue is also that when young and healthy people opt out of the risk pool there is a real and immediate impact on the cost of insurance for everyone who is in the risk pool.

One of the reasons the mandate is important is that it reduces the amount we’ll all pay for our insurance. This will be especially critical when insurers will no longer be able to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Obviously, the young and healthy would have no incentive to purchase insurance until they need it. Then the cost of insurance will be a great deal more burdensome to everyone else.

The “uncompensated care” link leads to an argument that the costs to the health care system of people who can’t pay for their care are relatively small. I don’t buy it, but I don’t have time to check the research now. The point is, again, that we’re not just talking about the costs of taking care of the uninsured.

As Jonathan Cohn wrote, “it’s not possible to regulate the insurance industry, in a way that would make coverage available to all people, without compelling every person to get coverage.”

The final argument from the Right is that all decisions to purchase or not purchase anything has an impact on the cost of that thing; lots of people buying toasters enables lowering the price of toasters. I assume that would be true, since manufacturing and shipping probably would have lower per-unit costs. That works for books, anyway, which is the one thing I know about manufacturing.

However, having to pay a couple of bucks more to purchase a toaster is not a burden to everyone in the same way a large, uninsured population is a burden to everyone — including libertarians, although they’re too blinkered by their beloved ideology to see it.

Update: Classic wingnut reaction, from Volokh:

How in the world is a decision to self-insure “shifting costs to other market participants?” The government is saying to the individual that unless you pay for something you neither want nor need, we are going to provide it for you anyway and dispoil you by force to pay for it.

The defect in this argument is its circularity. Lo Stato decrees that it has the power to command us to buy insurance for ourselves because it wishes to provide insurance for others and it need our money to do so. This reasoning is bottomless. It consists of seizing a power by a process of bootstrapping. Step back and look at it in terms of the source on constitutioal power. It admits that the power to command purchase of a good did not exist before the state asserted it.

In context of the argument at Volokh, I take it “a decision to self-insure” means not buying health insurance. And, of course, in this sense “self-insure” is a fantasy for all but multi-millionaires. And the decision by young and healthy people (I assume the writer is such and has had little dealing with the health care system) to stay out of the risk pool directly and immediately raises the cost of insurance for everyone in the risk pool.

And then when the idiot is hit by a bus or needs cancer treatment or whatever else he can’t imagine ever happening to him, the hundreds of thousands of dollars he can’t pay for his care will either fall to the rest of us, or he will find himself doing without care he needs to save his life. Oopsie!

He neither wants nor needs insurance, he says. I assure you, dude, when your time comes to need health care, you’re going to want it.

There are lots of interesting stories today that I haven’t found time to write about, but I want to be sure everyone is aware of accusations against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce using foreign money to influence elections, and Rupert Murdoch’s part in that. The Chamber is one of the organizations in the center of the nexus of money, media and manipulation that is killing America.

If you watched Rachel Maddow last night, you saw Republican honchos Ed Gillespie and Michael Steele bending themselves into pretzels defending Christine O’Donnell’s weird claim that she is “privy” to “classified information.” Greg Sargent has a transcript of exactly what O’Donnell said.

There has been much guffawing at the idea that O’Donnell has a security clearance, but so far I haven’t seen anyone point out that much of what she said about Christianity in China is nonsense. Here’s what she said:

O’DONNELL: There’s much that I want to say. I wish I wasn’t privy to some of the classified information that I am privy to because I think that I —

QUESTIONER: Can I interrupt and say how are you privy to classified information?

O’DONNELL: Because I’ve been working with various non-profit groups for over 15 years. And we’ve been sending missionaries to China for a very long time. And these missionaries go to China, risking their lives because you are not allowed to be a Christian over there.

So a country that forces women to have abortions and mandates that you can only have one child and will not allow you the freedom to read the Bible. You think they can be our friend? We have to look at our history and realize if they pretend to be our friend, they have got something up their sleeve.

First, it is simply not true that Christianity is banned in China. Doesn’t anyone else remember that President Bush attended a Christian church service while in Beijing to watch the Olympics?

And neither is the Bible banned in China. In fact, the Bible is being printed in China.

China bans foreign missionaries of any religion, but of course that doesn’t stop the determined evangelical from going there anyway. In 2008, a number of Christian mission organizations encouraged people traveling to the Beijing Olympics to do a little faith witnessing while they were there.

I doubt there have been any official Christian missions in China for several years. I understand there is very low key, “underground” Christian missionary work going on, however.

In recent years Beijing has been posing as a great friend to religion, which is why President Bush’s visit to a church was a great publicity coup for the Chinese Communist Party. But religions are considered to be something like trade unions in China, and they must be registered with the government and headed by loyal Party members. Non-registered churches are illegal; non-registered religious observances attended by more than 12 people are banned.

There are bureaucracies set up to supervise religions. In the case of Buddhism, the government often dictates what ceremonies can or cannot be performed, how many people can participate, etc. Monks receive salaries from the government, and many of the larger monasteries are more or less run as tourist attractions.

But my impression is that Beijing doesn’t care what religious beliefs people hold as long as they are loyal to China, and only China.

For example, the Catholic church in China is more or less severed from Rome, and bishops are appointed by the Party, not the Pope. And, of course, the Party has taken over the job of recognizing reborn lamas of Tibetan Buddhism.

Any resistance to government authority is absolutely not tolerated. My understanding is that China went ballistic about Falun Gong after Falun Gong members staged large peaceful protests of the way they were being treated in Chinese media. And, of course, Beijing is raving, mouth-foaming insane regarding His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

But the larger point is that Once again, we see little Christine making it up as she goes along. Along with pushing her for the details of her “security clearance,” I’d like to know which “non-profit groups” she’s been “working with” all this time. My bet is they don’t exist.

The fall of the Chicago Tribune, as documented by David Carr in the New York Times, is a must read. It’s basically a story of some hyper-aggressive hot shots with money who bought the Chicago Tribune company. And then they ran the Trib into the ground, in part because they had absolutely no understanding, or even appreciation, of the news business, and they made horrible decisions. An average sixth grader could have done no worse.

And as you read it, you might think, how did assholes get to be in charge of everything?

You really don’t have to have worked in newspapers to have experienced something like this. The Trib experience was a bit extreme, but I suspect just about everyone who has worked for a large corporation, or even smaller companies, for at least a decade has experienced being managed by a bullying, incompetent fool.

Part of the problem is that a genius for self-promotion and elbowing one’s way to the top is not necessarily accompanied by any other kind of intelligence. You see this over and over again in small organizations and committees, where the most assertive and self-assured person will end up being the leader, regardless of other experience or “smarts.”

You see this especially if you’re in departments such as production, manufacturing or engineering. The people making decisions about how you do your job usually have no clue what you do. They came up through the ranks of finance and marketing, careers that reward hubris and hyper-aggression, but not necessarily competence. They know how to make deals, but they have no clue how to make products. And, of course, they have no interest in the opinions of the people who do know how to make products.

Often the company’s actual product is an afterthought to the big shots, as it clearly was to the neanderthals who took over the Tribune. They had absolutely no appreciation for the art of newsgathering and reporting, nor did it seem to dawn on them that people buy newspapers to read the news.

Mr. Abrams, who describes himself as an “economic dunce,” was made Tribune’s chief innovation officer in March 2008. In his new role, he peppered the staff with stream-of-consciousness memos, some of which went on for 5,000 typo-ridden, idiosyncratic words that left some amused and many bewildered.

“Rock n Roll musically is behind us. NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL,” he wrote in one memo, sent in 2008. He expressed surprise that The Los Angeles Times reporters covering the war in Iraq were actually there.

The other thing that strikes me about this article is the degree to which so many people are intimidated by The System into silence. Time and time again we read,

… said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer

A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said …

Staff members who had concerns did not have many options, given the state of the media business in Chicago, the woman said. “Not many people could afford to leave. The people who could leave, did. But it was not in my best interest to have my name connected to an E.E.O.C. suit,” she said, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Indeed, there are no current E.E.O.C. complaints against the Tribune Company.)

A person who worked in security at the time confirmed to The New York Times that a security guard reported seeing the incident. That person declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Not everyone quoted was off the record, but this gives you a sense of how little freedom people have sometimes. Not that you’d ever get a libertarian to admit private business can oppress its employees.

Richard Cohen’s iPhone played Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (and why couldn’t they come up with a standard DFH name for the group, like the Perpetual Turnip or the Electric Underwear?) and he had flashbacks to Kent State. Cohen recalls that the hateful words of politicians led to National Guardsmen shooting students, leaving four dead. And he attempts to make a connection between those hateful words and today’s hateful words coming from the teabaggers.

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino’s campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about “taking back America” (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. “I’m going to take them out,” Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.

There’s a point in there somewhere, although Cohen doesn’t make it clearly, I don’t think. He says those were angry times back then, and these are angry times now, and all that anger can lead to people killing each other. Well, yes. And both then and now, he ties the worst anger to the Right.

Back in the Vietnam War era, the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied “other” who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!

I don’t want this post to lead to a long discussion of what happened at Kent State, because we’ve got more current issues to worry about. To me, the issue isn’t anger per se, but the dehumanization of the Other. Cohen sorta kinda says that, but not clearly.

And, of course, the “angry” rhetoric Cohen discusses is not just angry, but eliminationist. Hey, everybody was angry back in 1970, and a smattering of people across the political spectrum were violent. But what was shocking about Kent State, to me at least, was the way most older people of my acquaintance just shrugged it off and thought the shootings were no more significant than the slaughter of some rabid dogs.

Kent State was also somewhat unique in American history in that the “rabid dogs” were young white folks from “good” families. Most of the time, when some part of government is behind the slaughter of humans on American soil, the victims are non-white and/or poor. So, while Middle America mostly shrugged off the killings at Kent State as just what the DFHs deserved, at least the massacre got more media buzz than the Jackson State shootings a few days later.

Another connection between then and now is that while there’s lots of anger across the board, conservative elected officials and senior leaders are far more likely to indulge in eliminationist rhetoric than are progressive elected officials and senior leaders. Richard Cohen cites the words of the governor of Ohio in 1970:

The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were “worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent.”

Fast forward to earlier this year, quoting Krugman:

What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.

All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.

Every time some 20-something male showed up at an anti-Iraq War protest with a poster suggesting a violent end to President Bush, Michelle Malkin posted it as proof of that the entire Left is “unhinged.” And yes, there are those among us who are immature and lack the sense God gave toast. But show me Democratic Party leadership, progressive elected officials, or the handful of progressive “pundits” in national media spouting rhetoric that denies the humanity of conservatives and threatens death and violence against them. Anybody?

And for that matter, where is the Left’s James Addison? or Scott Roeder? or James Cummings?

You know that if Addison had spouted some leftist manifesto after killing two people in a church, the entire Left would still be apologizing for him. But since he spouted a rightist manifesto instead, we’re all supposed to pretend it didn’t happen.

Today, Predictably Dense Darleen of Protein Wisdom struggled to respond to Cohen with examples of mean things “lefties” say about the Right, and this was the best she could do:

It is Obama vowing to “kick ass”, it is Pelosi calling for investigations into people raising questions about a mosque within the footprint of Ground Zero, it is Max Baucus calling on the IRS to investigate opposition groups, it is Alan Grayson dealing in hate-filled rhetoric and it is Democrats over and over again beating the drum, amplified and disseminated by their poodle media, of how evil and treasonous are conservatives, libertarians and Tea Party participants.

President Obama said he would kick ass? OMG, put a muzzle on him before he bites somebody! (/sarcasm)

Darleen might not think it is reasonable to have Cordoba House opposers investigated, but at least Pelosi was calling for the investigation of people, not the shooting of mad dogs in the street.

And how soon they forget — Dave Neiwert from 2003 —

We’ve been hearing for some time now, from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, that Americans who dissent from Bush’s war strategy are being “treasonous,” “pro-Saddam” and “anti-American,” and from the likes of Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz that liberals now represent a “fifth column” of potential traitors who would aid the enemy. Now, from the repulsive Michael Savage sector, we’re also hearing that such dissenters are a threat and should be arrested. And finally, President Bush himself has intimated that opposition to his regime’s war plans from neighboring nations can bring about unhappy repercussions for the citizens of dissenting nations, not from the U.S. government, but from “the people” — a hint that has the distinct sound of loosing the dogs.

Look, everybody’s angry, and everybody’s language gets a bit harsh sometimes.. But the difference between progressives and “conservatives” in America right now is that progressives want better government that works for everyone, while “conservatives” just want retribution.

Update: BTW, today’s “Teh Stupid, It Burns” Award goes to Tim Graham of Newsbusters, who interpreted Cohen’s column to mean Cohen thinks teabaggers were responsible for Kent State. Graham’s prize, should he choose to accept it, is a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, plus an adult of his choice (other than me) to read it to him.

Update: Yeah, I thought of sending Graham My Pet Goat (actually The Pet Goat) too, but I think that book was written at a more advanced reading level.

Paul Krugman. Don’t miss.

Anything else?

Frank Rich seems to think Christine O’Donnell is an asset to the Right, and not the joke she seems to be.

O’Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs….

… O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”

O’Donnell’s very ineptitude makes her more attractive to the Right, Frank Rich thinks, because it means she’s “one of them,” not an elitist snob. Although it seems to me that someone who lied about attending ivy league schools on her resume is in no position to play up her populist virtues. Not that inconsistencies have ever stopped a wingnut before.

In other news — The “One Nation” progressive rally in Washington today is claiming a bigger crowd than Beckapalooza. I can’t tell from the photographs if it really was bigger, but it does appear to be less monochromatic, if you catch my drift.

I would have expected the Time magazine feature, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” to be getting a lot more attention in the blogosphere than it has been getting. Earlier this week some elements of the Right had the vapors over an appearance by Kos on Countdown (which I missed), in which Kos discussed threats of right-wing violence. Anyway, Time‘s Barton Gellman writes,

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets.

Maybe the righties are keeping quiet about the story because they don’t want to draw attention to it.

One story that I hadn’t heard before is of James Cummings, who had planned to bring a real dirty bomb to the Obama inauguration. And let me emphasize that, unlike the hapless Jose Padilla, Cummings had the goods. With the help of a large inheritance he had accumulated a remarkable amount of thorium, cesium and uranium, the means to disperse them, and enough smarts to pull it off. He intended to load his bomb into a motor home and drive it to Washington for the inauguration.

And he might have achieved his plan had his wife not shot and killed him in December 2008. Cummings had a long history as a domestic abuser, and I don’t believe Mrs. Cummings is being charged with anything. Indeed, she should get a medal.

See also Joe Conason.