I see that my state-of-origin, Missouri, voted overwhelming to nullify the health care reform law, in particular the individual mandate. The ballot proposal to nullify the law, Proposition C, passed everywhere in the state except for Kansas City and St. Louis.

Now, I know the state pretty well, and I know that in some of those counties at least 20 percent of the population is below the poverty line. Further, in big chunks of the state the the kind of jobs that come with full benefits are scarce.

So there’s little doubt that many of the people who voted for Proposition C in Missouri yesterday have no health insurance, have no hope of getting insurance, and are not getting medical care they need. They are also poor enough that when the time comes for them to purchase insurance through the exchanges they will benefit from all kinds of subsidies or will be able to enroll in Medicaid for the first time.

For example, let’s look at Washington County. According to Wikipedia, the per capita income there is $16,095. The median income for men is $27,871; for women $18,206; and for families $38,193. All of those incomes fall well below the cutoff for subsidies. According to the Kaiser health reform subsidy calculator, a median Washington County family with four kids and a 40-year-old head of household would get a tax credit for 82 percent of their anticipated annual premium, leaving them with an actual expense of $1,757 annually, or just under $145 a month.

And I wish it were lower, and I wish it were a direct subsidy and not a tax credit, but you know Republicans like their tax credits, and Republicans insisted that the for-profit insurance companies get a big enough cut so the CEOs can vacation in France. Which has better health care than we do.

But without the mandate, the premiums would be higher for everyone, and we’d be back in the same death spiral pattern we’re in now, with younger and healthier people dropping insurance, leaving the older and sicker in a shrinking risk pool with rising premium costs, causing more people to drop insurance, etc.

The state is far more conservative than it used to be. I haven’t lived there since about 1977, and back then a reasonably progressive, New Deal Democrat like Stuart Symington could do very well. I guess all those years of listening to Rush have done their job. Now the elites of the Right jerk their chains, and the people of Missouri do their bidding.

I understand there’s little chance Missouri would be allowed to opt out of the health care reform law, unless Republicans retake enough advantage in Congress to rewrite or repeal the law. And I’m sure the lemming voters of Missouri will do their best to make that happen. The state motto should be changed from “show me” to “which way to the cliffs, oh master?”

Update: John Cole writes,

Though I’m sure we’ll be hearing how it’s part of a groundswell against Obama and Congress, I’ll take the simpler explanation that everyone wants to eat cake, but nobody wants to get fat. Mandatory insurance is the unpleasant part of HCR that makes the whole thing work, and it’s not surprising that the least palatable part of the bill is unpopular.

Maybe, but I think it’s more likely My Fellow Hillbillies were whipped up by rhetoric about sending a message to Obama and not letting the Gubmint control my health care. Some of those people aren’t getting any health care, but they’re ready to do without rather than have any part of it tainted by connection to the Gubmint, until they turn 65 and can collect Medicare. And then it’s OK, as long as Gubmint keeps its hands off Medicare, because Medicare comes from Jesus, or maybe the health care fairy. Nah, probably Jesus.

Lemmings, I tell you. Stupid, ignorant lemmings. They’re charging for the cliffs as fast as they can charge, and they’re trying to drag the whole country with them.

There’s a lot of squawking about how the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan would cause pain to the families of September 11 victims, so it should not be built. But some of those families are Muslim. And notice that most of the people presuming to speak for the families of September 11 victims do not belong to families of September 11 victims, who as far as I know have not been polled for their opinions.

The Families of September 11 have made no statement about the Islamic Center that I could find on their website. The September 11 Families’ Association website hosts some news stories about the Islamic Center, but I could find no opinion or position about it on that site, one way or another.

But the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded and steered by families of September 11 victims, has issued a strong opinion. It supports the building of the Islamic Center.

I realize some individuals who lost family members on September 11 have vocally opposed the Islamic Center, but it’s a leap to assume that they speak for anyone but themselves. So I say again to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the buttinskys who don’t live in New York and have no personal connection to those who died there — MYOB.

Today New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to reject a proposal to designate as a “landmark” the property at 45-47 Park Place in lower Manhattan. That is, of course, the proposed site of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” that would not be a mosque and would not be at “Ground Zero.” And of course the proposal was made in an attempt to stop construction of the Islamic Center That Would Not Be a Mosque and Would Not Be at Ground Zero.

Via a deceptively headlined article by Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, I learned that that a Quinnipiac poll found 46 percent of voters living in Manhattan support the Islamic Center project; 36 percent oppose it, and I assume the remainder are undecided.

However, people living in the other four boroughs are less supportive, especially Staten Island voters, who oppose the center by 73 to 14 percent. All five boroughs put together show that 52 percent of New Yorkers oppose the center, but nearly as many either support it or don’t care.

This is interesting:

A mosque near Ground Zero would “foster understanding and teach people that not all Muslims are terrorists,” 42 percent of New York City voters say. Of this group, 68 percent support the mosque.

Another 42 percent of voters say the mosque “is an insult to the memory and families of 9/11 victims.” Of this group, 93 percent oppose the mosque.

So New Yorkers overall are split evenly between people who think the center (which would not be a mosque) would be a positive thing or a negative thing. But notice that a hefty minority of people who thought the center would be a positive thing still oppose building it. This suggests to me the effects of peer pressure, or perhaps people who are not personally bothered by the center oppose building it because other people are bothered. That’s not exactly a reason for trashing the Bill of Rights, though.

There have been plenty of times in American history that big majorities of Americans supported causes and policies that would appall later generations. Slavery and Jim Crow come to mind, and so do Wounded Knee, much of the Philippine–American War, and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Opposition to the Islamic center obviously fits into the same shameful, hateful category.

So sometimes a majority are wrong, which is why the Founders did not establish a purely majoritarian government. Stopping Muslims from doing something lawful just because they are Muslims obviously violates the First Amendment and is something that government has no power to do, even if it’s the will of the majority.

But conservatives, for whom the word “liberty” refers to their assumed license to stop other people from enjoying liberty, have formed a virtual mob to try to intimidate New York City officials into stopping the building of the center, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights. And if they succeed, they’ll go off to make speeches about how they support the rule of law over the rule of men.

Elsewhere — William McGurn writes for the Wall Street Journal about the Auschwitz nuns. These were Carmelite nuns who turned a building on the edge of the Auschwitz concentration camp site into a convent, intending to pray for the souls of the victims. Jewish groups took offense, and eventually Pope John Paul II asked the Carmelites to move into another convent. I infer from the WSJ editorial that the new convent is in the same city (OÅ›wiÄ™cim) as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, just not within site of it. In any event, McGurn’s argument is that the Islamic Center is analogous to the situation of the Auschwitz nuns, and the Islamic center builders should follow Pope John Paul II’s example and take the center elsewhere.

Except that it isn’t analogous. The proposed Islamic Center will not be visible from the old Trade Center site. And the people taking offense at the building of the Islamic Center are not a clearly defined group with a special connection to the site, but just people who don’t want it there.

Essentially, McGunn is saying that we can ignore the Bill of Rights whenever a big enough mob says we can.

And in associating all Muslims with the September 11 terrorists, the opponents are acting a lot more like, well, those who associated all Jews with some nefarious plot to undermine Germany. You do know who I’m talking about, I assume.

Update: Holy Joe should put the brakes on his mouth. Senators from Connecticut, not New York, should butt out.

Update: As expected, the Landmarks Commission decided the building on Park Place is not a landmark. I doubt very much that the mob will be able to stop the building of the Islamic Center. Unfortunately, the city may have to keep the construction under guard so that busloads of out-of-town yahoos don’t take it on themselves to stop construction.

Update: I can’t read the article because it’s behind a subscription firewall, but the blurb is bad enough — “An Open Letter on the Ground Zero Mosque: The location undermines the goal of interfaith understanding.” Translation: Those Muslims should understand they can’t get away with something that’s not conservatively correct.

Update to the last update: I picked up from a rightie blog that the WSJ article linked above says this:

Our deeper concern is what effect Cordoba House would have on the families of 9/11 victims, survivors of and first responders to the attacks, New Yorkers in general, and all Americans. As you have seen in the public reaction to the Cordoba House, 9/11 remains a deep wound for Americans—especially those who experienced it directly in some way. They understandably see the area as sacred ground. Nearly all of them also reject the equation of Islam with terrorism and do not blame the attacks on Muslims generally or on the Muslim faith. But many believe that Ground Zero should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims. They do not understand why of all possible locations in the city, Cordoba House must be sited so near to there.

Again somebody presumes to speak for the families of 9/11 victims, who have pretty much been rendered voiceless in all the noise. “They understandably see the area as sacred ground. … many believe that Ground Zero should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims” — there’s a bleeping strip club south of Ground Zero (the Pussycat Lounge and Shogun Room, 96 Greenwich St.) that is about as close to Ground Zero as the Islamic Center would be. There are many, many bars closer to Ground Zero than the Islamic Center would be. There’s all kinds of stuff between Ground Zero and the Islamic Center site that don’t have a bleeping thing to do with September 11. So since when is all that territory “reserved for memorials”? Give me a break.

Another update: “If He Could, Bin Laden Would Bomb the Cordoba Initiative” by Jeffrey Goldberg.

I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I’ve spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the this mosque project are giving him what he wants.

Exactly. Exactly.

Updated Again: My nominee for Flaming Useless Idiot of the Hour … I started to say of the Week, but the Right cranks ’em out way faster than that … is Jennifer Rubin, who writes for Commentary —

The left continues to feign confusion (it is hard to believe its pundits are really this muddled) as to the reasons why conservatives (and a majority of fellow citizens) oppose the Ground Zero mosque. No, it’s not about “religious freedom” — we’re talking about the location of the mosque on the ash-strewn site of 3,000 dead Americans.

No, Jennifer, the center will not be on the ash-strewn site of 3,000 dead Americans.. It will be two city blocks away and hidden from view behind two larger buildings. It will actually be much closer to the New York Dolls topless bar and “gentleman’s club” than to Ground Zero.

And we’re not at all confused about why you righties are hysterical about the Islamic Center. It’s because you’re a pack of bigoted cowards who are so fearful of a few moderate Muslims you’d sell out every value this country stands for to keep them out of your sight.

It is interesting that the word mosque is not employed by those excoriating the mosque opponents. As a smart reader highlights, why is it described as a “cultural center”?

Because it’s going to be a cultural center and not a mosque. A mosque is a particular kind of building that conforms to a specific format, and the cultural center will not be that. Instead, it will be modeled after the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural center that nobody ever calls “synagogue.”

FYI, there are a number of locations in lower Manhattan in which Muslims gather for prayer services. This has been going on for many years, long before the 9/11 attacks. No, they are not mosques, either, just rooms set aside for the purpose.

Obviously, Jennifer, you are terribly confused, and about many things. If you need anything else explained to you, let me know.

Uppity Uppity Update: Mayor Bloomberg delivers stirring defense of Islamic center that Salon editors still confuse with a mosque.

The Talking Dog lets out a first-rate rant. In part he is responding to this article in the Financial Times about the slow economic strangulation of the American middle class. The article profiles a couple of families who are hanging on to their modest homes and their very frugal lifestyles by working multiple jobs, and they are still one missed paycheck away from ruin.

As the article points out, the effects of globalization are hitting the entire industrialized world. But people in the rest of the industrialized world have paid health care, and their unions haven’t gone to rot. That’s softening the blow everywhere but here.

Anyway, the Dog points out that the stressed and worried American middle class doesn’t “have the juice” to take to the streets. Instead, people worry discretely and hide behind a facade of normal.

Ironically, the only people who do have “the juice” to take to the streets are the teabaggers, a mass of rabid lemmings trashing what’s left of the facade on their way to the cliffs.

Sorta kinda related — NPR reported on students at UCLA who manage to come up with the tuition but have nothing left over for room and board. So, they are homeless and hungry. One professor realized students were going without meals, so he set up a free food pantry in a closet. The homeless ones sleep in student lounges and shower in the gym.

Most interesting, the students try to hide their situation from other students. Like the stressed middle-class families, each student seems to deal with his situation alone and struggles to maintain the facade.

Meanwhile — in his most recent column, Bob Herbert talks to some economists who say there have been more lost jobs than can be blamed on the recession. It appears many companies used the recession as an excuse to cut staff and force employees to accept lower pay and fewer benefits.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.

Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Today, Paul Krugman:

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

If Americans of 40 years ago had woken up one morning to today’s economic conditions, there would have been hell to pay. I’m thinking massive strikes, torches and pitchforks, politicians tarred and feathered. But now most people just accept the conditions meekly and hope for the best. No juice.

Have they forgotten? Last night the House debated a bill to provide $4 billion in health care aid to September 11 rescue and recovery workers. A large percentage of those who cleared debris and recovered bodies from the wreck of the World Trade Center have suffered severe health problems as a result, mostly because they were breathing toxic fumes without adequate safety equipment. Some have died, others are dying, they can no longer work and need public assistance. The bill failed to get the needed votes, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was a tad distressed.

I understand it was mostly Republican votes that killed the bill. BTW, I’d love to know how many of those Republicans who voted no to assist the heroes of 9/11 are working their constituents up into a lather over the “Ground Zero mosque”?

In other obstructionist news, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to help get loan money to small business. Now they’ll all go home to their districts and scream that Democrats hate small business.

A new argument for not pulling troops out of Afghanistan arrived in my email inbox just now. The argument is that it would be a nightmare for Afghani women if the Taliban re-took control of most of the country. The email cited a Time magazine story about an Afghani woman whose ears and nose were cut off by the Taliban because she ran away from an abusive husband.

I would point out that this incident happened last year, and the presence of American troops in Afghanistan didn’t stop it. However, the point seems to be that if the troops were completely gone, such incidents would increase many times over.

Another aspect of this story is that the Afghan government is exploring the possibility of negotiating a political accommodation with the Taliban to put an end to the fighting. Afghani women, understandably, view such an accommodation as a betrayal. I question whether any group as irrational and fanatical as the Taliban could be negotiated with, anyway.

The only fix to this problem I can think of is to turn back time to 2002, when the Bush Administration lost its focus (if, indeed, it ever had any focus) in Afghanistan because it was obsessed with Iraq. Which is to say, there are no fixes. This is a terrible situation that should not have been allowed to get this bad, but it was allowed, so there it is. And while the impulse to keep lots of troops in Afghanistan indefinitely to protect women from the Taliban is honorable, it doesn’t seem to me to be possible. How many troops? How long? At what cost? There’s a point at which resources run dry.

If the issue is protecting Afghani women, it seems to me the most practical thing to do is to establish lots of guarded safehouses (I’d be OK with leaving troops in country for that purpose) as well as helping women leave Afghanistan, with their children, and begin new lives elsewhere. Ultimately it’s Afghanistan itself that’s got to find the will and the means to rid itself of the Taliban.

Update: Outstanding response to this issue from Greg Mitchell at The Nation.

Let us be clear: No one at the White House is talking about ending Bush’s tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 year. You can scour news stories and White House announcements all you like, and the Obama Administration’s intentions regarding the Bush tax cuts have been completely clear since the 2008 campaign.

For example, on television last week Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner discussed letting tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 a year, which would affect 2 to 3 percent of all Americans. At a press briefing yesterday, Robert Gibbs said “The President said that, as he had committed to in the campaign, he would not allow the tax cuts for the middle class to expire.”

However, if you’re getting your news from the Republican Noise Machine, you wouldn’t know that. You’d think everyone’s taxes will be going up.

Today the Usual Tools on the Right Blogosphere are frantically linking to a new “tax calculator” at the Heritage Foundation website. The calculator is supposed to tell how how much YOUR taxes will go up if the Bush tax cuts expire. In their announcement on the calculator, Heritage uses an example of “a married couple with two children under 17 earning $45,000 a year with no other income” who will, Heritage says, owe an additional $3,002 in taxes next year if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Heritage provides absolutely no evidence for its assertion that the Obama Administration plans to allow all the tax cuts to expire. But of course rightie bloggers assume that what Heritage says must be true, so like good little tools they are properly outraged about “the largest tax increase in United States history.”

(Note: in rightiespeak, “the largest tax increase in United States history” refers to any change in tax code whatsoever, when enacted by a Democratic Congress.)

What’s important to remember is that Heritage speaks for its founders and benefactors, who are (according to Sourcewatch)

* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations: Sarah Mellon Scaife, Scaife Family, Carthage
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Castle Rock Foundation
* JM Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Roe Foundation
* Rodney Fund
* Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation
* Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation
* Bill and Berniece Grewcock Foundation
* Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation
* William H. Donner Foundation
* Walton Family Foundation
* Armstrong Foundation
* John Templeton Foundation
* William E. Simon Foundation

These are foundations set up by families wealthy beyond our imaginations who use rightie think tanks like Heritage to push policies to protect their wealth. The rightie think tank infrastructure exists to push a number of policies that benefit the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

One of their more successful propaganda strategies is to convince the rubes that tax increases proposed only for the mega-wealthy are really aimed at everyone, including the hypothetical married couple with two children earning $45,000 a year. Thus the rubes can be stirred up into fear and anger about tax increases that will not touch them at all. (See, for example, “GOP Fairy Tales” by Kevin Drum.)

Another organization pushing the propaganda that President Obama intends to raise taxes on lower-income earners is Americans for Tax Reform, headed by Grover Norquist. ATR is an astroturf site established by the following foundations (according to SourceWatch):

* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Carthage Foundation; see Scaife Foundations
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation; see Scaife Foundations
* R.J. Reynolds
* Philip Morris
* Tobacco Institute

Norquist and his good buddy Jack Abramoff also scammed some Indian tribes into giving money to ATR. Apparently the chiefs were told they had to make the donations in order to have access to President Bush.

BTW, according to Lori Montgomery at WaPo, here’s the reason the Bush tax law was written to expire in ten years:

The cuts were written to expire to allow the bill to pass Congress under fast-track budget rules, known as reconciliation, and avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Just like the final piece of Obama’s health care overhaul, the tax cuts needed only 50 votes to win Senate approval, instead of the 60 required to shut down a filibuster.

Under reconciliation, legislation may not increase the deficit beyond a 10-year “budget window.” Because the tax cuts would have increased the deficit, Republicans had to write them to expire in 2011.

In other words, Congress knew full well that the tax cuts would not magically increase revenue and pay for themselves, although of course no one on the Right was admitting that in public. And never forget that those tax cuts are the single biggest cause of the current federal budget deficit, the same deficit righties shriek about whenever a Democrat proposes any policy whatsoever.

More news that isn’t news — if you were paying attention lo those many years ago (and I know you were) you remember that billions of dollars of money allocated for reconstruction in Iraq were missing. We knew this at least by 2006, if not sooner.

So, this bit just posted at Think Progress isn’t really news —

Yesterday, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its findings on how the money was spent from a special Iraq reconstruction fund set up by the Department of Defense (DOD) between 2003-2007. The account used Iraqi oil money to fund the reconstruction of Iraq. SIGIR concluded that 96 percent of the $9.1 billion the reconstruction program cannot be accounted for by the DOD.

Read more at WaPo. Naturally I want to know precisely who in the DoD was responsible for this, and if those persons were military careerists or Bushie civilian appointees.