Anti-Authoritarians for Authoritarianism

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I learned today that one of the items in the tea party grab-bag is repeal of the 17th Amendment. In other words, they want to go back to having U.S. senators chosen by state legislatures instead of voters. Evan McMorris-Santoro writes:

The “Repeal The 17th” movement is a vocal part of the overall tea party structure. Supporters of the plan say that ending the public vote for Senators would give the states more power to protect their own interests in Washington (and of course, give all of us “more liberty” in the process.)

If you feel a need to go take your blood pressure meds, I’ll wait.

McMorris-Santoro describes some Republican politicians caught between trying to appease the Baggers by rubber stamping their agenda and trying not to frighten away general election voters, who tend to be, you know, sane.

But if the tea baggers think the Senate is too “elitist” and corrupt now, just wait until Senate seats go back to being plums handed to cronies, fundraisers and relatives.

Really, this does reveal how twisted wingnut psychology has become. Even as they march around screaming about ending elitism and supporting freedom, their actions support elitism and diminish freedom. They are authoritarians spouting anti-authoritarian rhetoric in the service of authoritarianism.

I began a recent post by referring to James Madison’s Federalist #10. You might remember that much of the Federalist Papers amount to Madison, Hamilton and Jay reassuring people that a representative republic would not turn into “mob rule.” Most of the founders were well-educated, moneyed aristocrats — the elites of their time — and the last thing they wanted was for an uneducated rabble to be able to choose leaders and make policy.

Thus, senators were chosen by the states, and the Electoral College was envisioned as a panel of Wise Elitist Men who would choose the president and vice president instead of voters. That’s not how it turned out, but that’s what it originally was supposed to be.

One suspects that if the founders saw the state of politics today, they would have set up a monarchy.

I thought of those old dead aristocratic white guys yesterday when I read about the tea baggers at the Maine GOP convention who trashed the classroom in which they were caucusing:

The Republican convention was at the Portland Expo, but participants went to the nearby King Middle School to hold their caucuses. While there, they went through eighth-grade teacher Paul Clifford’s items, opened sealed boxes, stole a prized poster, and vandalized the room with Republican slogans. Some details on what they did:

– For seven years, Clifford has had “a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement” on his classroom door. He uses it “to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic ‘Four Freedoms’ illustrations.” When Clifford returned to his classroom on Monday, after the GOP caucuses, the poster was gone; in its place was a sticker reading, “Working People Vote Republican.”

– Republicans opened a “closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk” and later objected to the fact that it contained copies of the U.S. Constitution donated to the school by the American Civil Liberties Union.

– After the caucuses, “rank-and-file Republicans who were upset by what they said they had seen in Clifford’s classroom” began calling the school, objecting to student art they had seen and a sticker on a filing cabinet reading “People for the American Way — Fight the Right.”

I bet that’s one classroom full of kids who will grow up to be liberals.

Elsewhere — I found a column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the recent primaries in Ohio that made some interesting points. The Ohio “establishment” candidates soundly trounced the “tea bag” candidates, and the columnist noted that it’s in caucuses and conventions that tea baggers most effectively promote their candidates. We really haven’t yet seen that the tea baggers can consistently deliver elections. The Massachusetts “miracle” of Scott Brown winning Ten Kennedy’s seat may have been a fluke, IMO, caused by a very poor Dem candidate — apparently widely disliked in the state — losing narrowly to a Republican who is proving to be less radical than the tea baggers would like.

You, Too, Can Be an Econoblogger!

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I think I’m qualified to be the “econoblogger” for The Atlantic. That’s because the one they’ve got, Megan McArdle, is as bad at arithmetic as I am. Tbogg writes,

You really have to hand it to The Atlantic who chose to hire as their “Econoblogger” a woman whose facility with numbers would get her fired as a cashier at Wendy’s after two days.

That would be me, too, except that cash machines these days tell you how much change is owed. As long as that’s the case I could probably manage.

One difference between me and McArdle is that I’m aware that I’m bad with arithmetic, whereas McArdle seems blissfully oblivious. As Jonathan Chait wrote of her, McArdle is “frequently in error, but never in doubt.”

Another is that I’m better at basic smarts than she is, which might disqualify me for the Atlantic gig. Awhile back Brad DeLong nominated McArdle for the title “stupidest woman alive.” There’s an entire blog dedicated to her titled “Fire Megan McArdle.”

Just google “megan mcardle is an idiot” sometimes, and you’ll find links to some of the best writers on the web, reduced to blubbering at the magnitude of McArdle’s obtuseness.

In fact, opinions on McArdle constitute a shorthand intelligence test. Ask anyone on the web what they think of McArdle, and if they say they admire her, you’re looking at an idiot. Or a libertarian. But I repeat myself.

That last bit is the real key to McArdle’s idiocy. Whatever intelligence she was born with has been replaced by libertarian ideology, leaving her with the critical thinking skills of dryer lint.

I bring this up because McArdle has embarrassed The Atlantic once again, with a post called “The Health Care Reform Already Costs More Than We Thought It Would.” As Ezra Klein explains, McArdle has confused discretionary spending with new spending.

Now, I’m not a whiz with complex cost estimates, either, and this is a mistake I might have made. However, I wouldn’t have gone public with my criticism without checking with someone who has more knowledge of such things than I do. Also, I am not the business and economics editor for The Atlantic.

But, hell, if McArdle can be the business and economics editor for The Atlantic, so could I. And so could the chair I’m sitting on.

Teh Stupid Has No Limits

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The question for the day is, how stupid does a prominent wingnut have to be before he becomes an embarrassment to the Cause? I’m saying that if they didn’t hit bottom with Jonah Goldberg and Erick Erickson, there is no bottom.

Erickson found Elena Kagan’s undergraduate thesis, written in 1981. According to Erickson, it is proof she is a socialist. Erickson wrote, “This proves Elena Kagan is an open and avowed socialist. The woman declares that socialists must stick together instead of fracture in order to advance a socialist agenda, which Kagan advocates.”

I skimmed the thing; it’s a paper submitted to Princeton’s history department titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” and she examined economic, cultural social, and other reasons why socialism didn’t take hold in the city (and by extension in the U.S.) to the same extent that it did in other countries.

What it isn’t is an argument in favor of socialism. On page 126, she wrote, “The socialists’ was a sterile program, suited to a sterile party.” Not a ringing endorsement.

So if we find out that, say, Condoleezza Rice wrote a thesis about the Soviet Union (which she probably did), does that make her a Communist?

See also: Scott Lemieux, “Breaking!!!!! We Have Evidence That Erick Erickson Isn’t Very Bright!!!!!“

NRA: Tyranny of the Minority

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In The Federalist #10, James Madison discussed the concept of the tyranny of the majority. He addressed the concern that a political, ideological or religious faction might take control of the federal government and oppress people outside the faction. Factions are inevitable in a free society, he said, but in such a large country he thought it unlikely that any one faction could come to dominate the entire nation.

We should consider whether communication technology is has rendered Madison’s argument obsolete. In the 18th century, communication could take days or weeks to go from one part of the country to another, making mass organizing difficult by any but the most tenacious leaders of the most compelling causes. Today, any idiot can push a button and reach multitudes. Combine that with the pernicious influence of campaign and lobbying money, and a well-organized faction can pretty much run roughshod over everybody else.

Not content with merely supporting an individual right to own firearms, the National Rifle Association is hellbent on eliminating all restrictions on any citizens carrying guns anywhere he or she wants, including churches, workplaces, and now bars and restaurants. This is in spite of the fact that even in the most 2nd-amendment lovin’ red states a large majority of people think it’s a real bad idea for a bunch of drunken yahoos to be packing heat.

Yes, the new Tennessee law that lifts all restrictions on where a citizen can carry a concealed weapon, including into bars, provides that the carrier must abstain from drinking. Like that’s even enforceable.

A bar owner can, supposedly, keep guns out of his bar if he posts a clear, legible sign that says guns are not permitted. People opposed to the law argue that this places too much law-enforcement responsibility onto the bar owner.

Jeff Woods writes for the Nashville Scene:

As much of Tennessee reeled from the record-breaking flood, state lawmakers remained dry atop Capitol Hill last week and dealt with dispatch with the most pressing issue of the day. Yes, as the folks back home were losing their homes and livelihoods to the disaster, legislators passed yet another law to let our 270,000 state-licensed gunmen take their firearms into places that serve alcohol.

This time, they dropped the pretense that they were acting on the demands of their constituents. An MTSU poll, in fact, showed last year that 80 percent of Tennesseans are against mixing guns with booze. Law officers are against it too, and so are restaurants, hotels and essentially the state’s entire tourist industry.

No, this time lawmakers made it clear they were kowtowing to the almighty National Rifle Association—and proud of it!

One state Republican legislator named Joe McCord, who is not running for re-election, had the guts to speak the truth:

“Essentially — I’m not quoting; these are my words — the NRA is saying to us, ‘If you don’t support and vote for carrying guns in bars, we will not endorse you and will in fact oppose you,’ ” McCord said. “I’ve got a strong history of supporting and advocating for the NRA, but this line of reasoning is just bordering on lunacy.

“Your preacher, your teacher, your spouse, your parents—nobody’s 100 percent right. The NRA is not right here, and we’re not standing up to them. … It makes me wonder, what line will we not cross for the NRA? I’m just curious. At what point do we say this is too much?”

From an editorial in The Tennessean:

The Tennessee General Assembly has voted against the wishes of a majority of the people of this state for the second year in a row with its bill to allow guns in bars and restaurants.

Why would legislators do this? Why would they put the safety of citizens and the state’s hospitality industry at risk? At first, it seemed to be all about the swagger — conservative legislators and their buddies fulfilling their Old West (or maybe, their modern Mel Gibson) fantasies.

That’s frightening enough. But Wednesday night, it became apparent that legislators pursued this terrible law in the service of a different constituency: the National Rifle Association.

According to the Paris (TN) Post-Intelligencer, just before the vote was taken the House Republican Caucus invited an NRA lobbyist to address the group. “That’s a privilege usually granted only to legislative liaisons who work for government agencies,” the P-I said. “The lobbyist’s message was clear: Vote the NRA way or the organization will campaign against you in upcoming elections.”

The NRA’s argument is that while the militia may be “well-regulated,” any restriction on an individual citizen’s ability to carry a firearm amounts to an “abridgment” of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This assumes that all such rights are absolute and untouchable by law under all circumstances, but we certainly have never treated any other right that way. Freedom of speech doesn’t include a right to publish and distribute hard-core pornography, for example. Freedom of religion doesn’t rubber stamp human sacrifice.

The NRA is using bullying tactics to impose its will on lawmakers, even when a whopping majority of constituents (and probably the lawmakers’ consciences, if they have any) disagree with the NRA’s position. There are some cities and states in which a big majority would prefer some level of legal gun control, for safety’s sake.

Now the wingnuts are screaming that Elena Kagan is opposed to gun rights because —

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Note the “unlicensed” part. More recently she has said,

“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.

But that’s not good enough for the gun nuts, who predictably compared Heller Kagan to Third Reich Nazis.

The crazy part of this is that the basic position of the gun lobby — that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own firearms — is settled law at this point. And the issue of gun control isn’t even on the progressivist back burner any more, compared to, say, 15 years ago. It’s not even in the bleeping kitchen.

About the only way gun rights are going to be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future is if there is a huge swing of public opinion in the direction of more gun control. A few shoot-outs in Tennessee roadhouses might do it.

When Will Liberals Figure Out What’s in Roe v. Wade?

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Liberals have been shooting themselves in the foot over the abortion issue for years, in part because they remain woefully ignorant of what Roe v. Wade actually established. And now they’re doing it again.

In 1997 Elana Kagan, then a White House adviser, wrote a memo to President Clinton supporting a bill introduced by Sen. Tom Daschle that would have banned all abortions of viable fetuses except when the physical health of the mother was at risk. The memo has come to light, and some lefties are going ballistic about it.

But the truth is that by 1997 elective post-viability abortions already were illegal in most states, and this was not in violation of Roe v. Wade as long as an exception was made for the life and health of the mother.

This gesture on Kagan’s part was not made in a vacuum. In 1997 the Republican Congress was working overtime to pass a bill that banned the intact D&E procedure, or what the Fetus People misnamed “partial-birth abortion.” In their propaganda the FPs were conflating the D&E with “late term” abortions, even though it was mostly a second-trimester procedure.

Some Dems and a few pro-choice Republicans were talking about a simple ban on all elective post-viability abortions, regardless of the procedure used, as a kind of controlled burn to reduce the chance that a federal “partial-birth” law might pass in the future. You know, the way one was passed in 2003 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

Duh.

I am sad to say that many of my fellow liberals are too stupid to understand that being in favor of such a ban in 1997 — or now, for that matter — doesn’t mean one is anti-choice. It means one is thinking strategically. I agree with Jeff Fecke — “when we look at what Kagan actually said in her memo to Clinton, we see someone who was proposing something less than a ban on late-term abortion. Indeed, we see someone who was trying to preserve as many rights for women as possible.”

I thought the ban was a good idea at the time, for the simple reason that it would have deflated many of the FP’s misleading talking points and left intact D&E alone. In fact, I’ve thought since the 1970s that NARAL and NOW and other organizations were idiots for not pushing for a federal law that restated and reinforced what the Roe v. Wade decision established.

Instead, many pro-reproduction rights advocates took the remarkable position that they supported Roe, and supported state laws that followed the Roe guidelines, but a federal law that supported the Roe guidelines was unthinkable. And I don’t think this was because they were closet libertarians.

Yes, Roe established that states may not ban all abortions. However, Roe allows the states to ban some abortions. Specifically, states may ban elective abortions after 23 weeks’ gestation, or the point at which the fetus might be viable. A full-term pregnancy lasts for 38 weeks.

So, since 1973 states have been able to enact bans on abortions in the last 14 weeks of pregnancy, as long as exceptions are made for the life and health of the mother. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 38 states have such a ban in place.

And I understand that physicians won’t perform a third trimester abortion unless there is a medical reason to do so even where it is not specifically illegal. Because terminating a pregnancy becomes much more medically complicated later in the pregnancy, as a practical matter women who are terminating for non-medical reasons should terminate as early as possible. And, in fact, 88 percent of abortions in the U.S. are performed in the first 12 weeks of gestation. Only 8% of all abortion providers in the U.S. offer abortions at 24 weeks.

I understand the one thing the Daschle ban would have changed is to place more restrictions on post-viability abortions done for mental health reasons as opposed to physical health reasons. I explained a couple of years ago that this was not necessarily a problem, as long as the legislation made clear that a pregnancy could be terminated if the fetus was severely compromised and would not long survive after birth.

And I’m going to keep explaining this as long as there’s anyone out there who is confused. Which is pretty much everybody.

Again With the Jerking Knees

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There may be many legitimate reasons for progressives to feel skeptical about Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice. But it boggles the mind that anyone bright enough to finish college thinks that lack of prior judicial experience is one of those reasons.

I found lists of the most and least conservative (i.e., “liberal”) Supreme Court justices since 1937, according to some law prof. Here are the liberals, most liberal first.

  • Marshall
  • Douglas
  • Murphy
  • Rutledge
  • Goldberg
  • Brennan
  • Black
  • Warren
  • Ginsburg
  • Cardozo

Of these, three had no prior judicial experience — Douglas, Warren and Goldberg (see complete list). And of those, Warren’s record prior to his nomination would have sent today’s liberals — me included — to the barricades to fight his confirmation.

And the fact is that several justices have proved to be far more liberal after being seated on the court than their record suggested they would be (Earl Warren being a prime example). I’m not saying that Kagan will prove to be more liberal than expected. But if liberals are going to oppose her nomination, they need to come up with a better reason than her lack of judicial experience. (Conservatives, of course, don’t need a reason …)

Elena Kagan to Replace John Paul Stevens

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It appears to be official that Elena Kagan is the choice to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Progressives are pretty uniformly underwhelmed. The consensus is that she’s an unknown quantity. Scott Lemieux writes that Kagan has “no judicial experience, very limited political experience, and no record of influential scholarship.” Glenn Greenwald writes, “Nothing is a better fit for this White House than a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration’s lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.”

On the other hand, James Doty writes that Kagan has spent her career working with or for liberals (clerking for Thurgood Marshall, for example, whom Kagan has called her “legal hero.”). Doty presents an argument that Kagan reliably will vote with the Court’s liberals on most issues.

While I share the opinion that President Obama could have seized the opportunity to appoint someone with a clearly liberal record, I’m withholding judgment on Kagan. The fact is, today’s liberals would have fought tooth and nail to keep John Paul Stevens off the Court, because his record as a judge in the federal court of appeals was moderately conservative.

And let us not forget that Earl Warren, who arguably pushed the court into being as liberal as it ever was, had been one of the primary movers behind the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

So, having read some background on Kagan, I can’t say I have a strong opinion one way or another. There’s no way to predict how she will vote.

Update: This comes under the heading of “Why African Americans vote for Democrats.” The Hill reports that the RNC is using a 1987 speech by Thurgood Marshall to slam Kagan. As explained above, Kagan was once Marshall’s clerk and also has praised him as her “legal hero.”

In the speech, Marshall — referring primarily to the infamous “three-fifths” clause — said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.” So now the RNC is circulating talking points that taunt Kagan — “Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?”

I infer from this that today’s Republican Party wants to restore the three-fifths clause, since they don’t think the clause was defective. It ain’t the Party of Lincoln any more, is it?

Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?

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Neocons (and, yeah, that was a label) Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn write at the end of a long article,

There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam.

This is no accident. Janet Napolitano never used the word “terrorism” in her first appearance before Congress as secretary-designate of Homeland Security on January 15, 2009. Shortly thereafter, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration had dropped the phrase “Global War on Terror” in favor of “Overseas Contingency Operations.” And just last month, we learned that the White House’s forthcoming National Security Strategy would not use religious words such as “jihad” and “Islamic extremism.”

When asked why she did not utter the word “terrorism” in the course of her testimony, Napolitano explained that she used “man-caused disaster” instead to avoid “the politics of fear.”

The Department of Homeland Security was created after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history to prevent further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the head of that department is worried that using the word “terrorism” is playing the politics of fear.

As many people have pointed out, the label “war on terror” is, um, stupid. It’s not “terror” we’re supposed to be “fighting,” but a movement that foments terrorism. Further, affixing the label “war on terror” on something limited to “radical Islam” is a distortion of reality, since radical jihadists are not the only terrorists potentially active in the U.S.

Even more further, as I wrote a few days ago, there are pragmatic reasons why it’s useful to keep the rhetoric toned down. The only real effect of wantonly tossing around the words “terror” and “terrorist” is to make people more terrorized. Making people feel more terrorized is hardly an effective way to counter terrorism.

Most furthest, slapping the label “terrorism” on something doesn’t change what it is. If we hear news stories saying some Muslim guy tried to blow up a car in Times Square, does it really add anything to our knowledge or understanding of the incident to label it “terrorism”? It was what it was. It might be useful if we were all more discriminating about the use of the word terrorism and confined it to a limited definition, but when you slap it onto every alarming act that happens to have been committed by a Muslim, the word no longer has a useful purpose.

I think the authors do have a point when they say,

But success in the war on terror is not apprehending terrorists after their attacks fail. Success is preventing them from attempting the attack in the first place.

However, the idea that there could ever be 100 percent prevention is sheer fantasy. Real success, the ultimate goal, is reducing the level of extremism in the world so that fewer people will be inspired to attempt acts of terrorism. Even then, there’s no way to prevent lone wolf whackjobs from, say, killing 14 people in a shooting rampage. And let’s not forget those who bomb abortion clinics or blow up a federal building.

How many times has some individual committed some act of mass violence, after which people commented, Wow, I never would have thought he would have done something like that. He was such a quiet guy? The only way you could attempt to prevent all such incidents would be to turn the U.S. into a police state, encouraging people to report to authorities every time their family members and neighbors make an offhand remark about wanting to shoot somebody.

And, of course, that much statist authority would provoke a lot of people into violence.

Hayes and Joscelyn continue,

The Times Square attack was the third time in the past six months that an individual terrorist with ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas has launched an attack on the American homeland. In each instance, America’s vast, multibillion dollar intelligence and law enforcement establishment failed to detect the terrorists’ plans beforehand. And in each instance Obama administration officials moved quickly to minimize the significance of the attack and downplay the connections that the attackers had with international terrorists.

The degree to which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan or Faisal Shahzad had “ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas” is a bit squishy, but this is coming from Stephen Hayes; he and Dick the Dick were among the last holdouts to abandon the much debunked “Atta in Prague” story (if indeed they ever really abandoned it). So you know Hayes really wants there to be “ties to high-level Islamic radicals overseas,” and will see ties whether they are there or not.

Anyway, my understanding is that Abdulmutallab and Hasan were in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, thought to be a high-level al Qaeda recruiter. But it seems doubtful they were acting under the direction of al Qaeda leadership (and if they were, al Qaeda leadership ain’t what it used to be). They and Shahzad seem more like wannabees than anything else. Even the Right’s one-time hero Gen David Petraeus is saying that Shahzad acted on his own. He was “inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn’t have direct contact with them,” Petraeus said.

The vast, multibillion dollar intelligence and law enforcement establishment is, I hope, tuned to the machinations of real high-level radicals, Islamic or otherwise. The fact that only low-level lone-wolf amateurs have been able to slip through the cracks ought to be reassuring, I would think.

All three men appear to have turned to radical Islam after making a mess of their personal lives or otherwise wandering into some psychological cul-de-sac. One suspect their radicalization was as much a product of psychological pathology as anything else. Their ethnic and religious backgrounds determined how the pathology expressed itself, of course. These three fancied themselves to be warriors for Allah as opposed to, say, freedom fighters striking a blow against big government.

But in Hayes’s world, death and destruction fomented by radical Muslims is more worser than death and destruction fomented by radical [fill in the blank]. This is why the labels are so important to him, I suppose.

Spoiled Brat Corporations Whine Again

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Immediately after the health care bill passed, some major corporations complained that the bill would cost them millions of dollars. AT&T claimed it would suffer a $1 billion loss. A new article in Fortune says these companies are considering dropping their employee benefit health insurance and paying the fine instead. They think it might be cheaper to “pay” than to “play.”

The Fortune writer, Shawn Tully, wrote “The legislation eliminated a company’s right to deduct the federal retiree drug-benefit subsidy from their corporate taxes.” Read that carefully. The corporations were deducting a government subsidy from their corporate taxes as if it were a cost. They’ve lost that “deduction,” which was actually bare-assed corporate welfare.

They’ve been doing this since January 2006, when the Medicare Part D act went into effect. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) had the government reimbursing employers 28 percent of the cost of retiree drug benefits that met certain requirements. But the same act also allowed employers to deduct 100 percent of the cost of prescription drug benefits, including the 28 percent that was subsidized by taxpayers already.

As Brad DeLong pointed out, this meant that for companies in the 35 percent tax bracket, $63 of every $100 spent on prescription drug benefits was being paid by taxpayers.

The just-passed health care reform bill closed the “double dip” and allows companies to deduct only that part of their prescription drug benefit costs they paid themselves. And now some of these companies are complaining that their business models will just about collapse if they can’t continue to deduct the subsidy, because just deducting the amount they actually spend on drug benefits will break them.

Of course, a gaggle of rightie bloggers jumped on this article as proof that Obamacare will destroy America, screaming about taxes and penalties, when what really happened is a cut in corporate welfare.

Now, it may very well be true that dropping employee health benefits and paying the penalties would be more cost effective for these companies, but it would have been even more cost effective for them to drop employee health benefits before there were any penalties. And they didn’t. And they didn’t because it would be harder for them to hire quality people if they don’t offer benefits. As long as that’s true, they’re going to offer benefits.

The other Big Lie implied in the righties’ screeds is that the health reform law will drive up health care costs more than they would have gone up otherwise. Ain’t so. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that without reform the average cost of an employee benefit family policy could go from $13,375 (the average in 2009) to $30,803 by 2019.