Mobs on Medicare

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[Updated below.]

A rightie blogger with comments disabled posts photographs to show that “the mob” isn’t scary after all, and writes,

I am the mob. My kids are the mob. My grandma is the mob. My family members did not shed blood for this country so that their elected officials could silence them into shame if they dared to speak out and voice their concerns.

I don’t see anyone in the photographs being silenced. Many of them appear to be old enough for Medicare, however. Are they so committed to “no government-run health care” that they refuse Medicare? I doubt it. It’s fine for them to get their health care paid for by the taxpayer dollars of others, but everyone else can go bleep himself?

And does anyone on the Right have a brain in his or her head? Not that I’m seeing.

Update: Some right-wing blogs are picking up these photographs, repeating the claim that it shows people who are representative of others whose rights to free speech have been curtailed. Not one has noticed the photographs show people calmly participating at a meeting and even speaking into microphones, so certainly the people in the photographs are speaking freely. And not one has noticed that many are old enough for Medicare, which is a government-run health care system very similar to Canada’s.

Update: Via Brian Beutler:

“Based on the news that health care events are edging into violence, an anti-health care reform protester in New Mexico named Scott Oskay is calling on his hundreds of online followers to bring firearms to town halls, and to ‘badly hurt’ SEIU and ACORN counter protesters.”

People are calling SEIU and making not-too-veiled threats of gun violence against Union members.

Threats of violence qualify as terrorism, even if they don’t carry it through.

“They’ve Become Political Terrorists”

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Here’s a video of the riot outside last night’s Tampa town hall meeting:

If you listen, at one point you can hear someone by the doors who appears to be a police officer trying to explain that the hall was filled to capacity and that allowing more people in would be a violation of fire safety code. The rioters weren’t buying it.

Jeffrey Feldman:

With fists pounding on exterior windows like a street mob out of a 1930s newsreel, a crowd of right-wing agitators against health insurance reform descended on a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida, “banging on windows” until police and organizers were forced to end the event. The result? A violent mob silenced the voices of each and every American desperate to find a way out of the endless cycle of fear, shame and family bankruptcy brought on by an inhumane, profit-driven health insurance market. Moreover, by using violence to shut down civic discussion between neighbors, this right-wing horde trampled underfoot one of the most sacred and historic symbols of American democracy.

Paul Krugman:

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Steve Pearlstein :

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don’t agree. Today, I’m going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

They’ve become political terrorists. Yeah, pretty much.

Apparently at a meeting in St. Louis, the wingnut mob was met by equal numbers of pro-reform counter-protesters, and at least one counter-protester (and a Post-Dispatch reporter) were arrested. It’s very possible the St. Louis police held counter-protesters to a different standard.

Even so, I say again that if anyone is going to go to the town hall meetings to counter the mob, non-violence is essential. Otherwise you’re just taking the bait.

That said, I found a list of upcoming town hall meetings on an astroturf site that the mob is using to pick its targets. Do what you think you need to do.

Update: Ellen Goodman writes a thoughtful and intelligent column about end-of-life decisions. However, flaming wingnuts screaming about socialism and killing granny dominate the comments. I am genuinely disturbed.

The GOP Is Going to Get Somebody Killed

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Just fistfights, so far.

Police broke up a raucous crowd outside a Tampa, Fla., town hall meeting on healthcare Thursday, and a fistfight broke out inside the meeting, witnesses said.

Hundreds of people turned out for the meeting at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County, and people on opposing sides yelled and chanted outside, WTSP-TV, Tampa Bay, reported.

From what I can make out from news stories, people who showed up to stop the meeting were outraged that there were people there who actually supported health care reform and who got seats in the hall.

Congratulations, wingnuts. You’ve turned into the new DFHs.

Wingnut Mobs and What to Do About Them

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Harold Meyerson writes in his column today:

Judging by the first public meetings on health-care reform that members of Congress have begun convening in their districts, America is in Second Coming time, in the William Butler Yeats sense. The best may or may not lack all conviction, as Yeats wrote in his classic poem, but the worst are sure as hell full of passionate intensity.

Meyerson notes that the forces of progressivism — unions, for example — are not turning out crowds at town meetings to match the mobs. No, they aren’t, but I’m not sure they should. Unless the progressive counter-protesters are able to a person to be as nonviolent as Gandhi, such a confrontation could easily turn into a brawl. People could get hurt, even killed.

Of course, people are likely to be hurt or even killed anyway. I think it’s only a matter of time before somebody in the mob pulls a gun. It’s a wonder it hasn’t happened already.

I say the mobs are a test of my “Bigger Asshole” rule, that I have explained in posts in the past. Basically, the “Bigger Asshole” rule is that public protests work when the people being protested are perceived by the onlooking public to be bigger assholes than the protesters.

See also Sara Robinson, who writes about the importance of trust and inspiration. Mass protests that actually effect positive change tend to be those that inspire, not frighten and intimidate.

However, there have been times when angry mobs did effect change. The storming of the Bastille does come to mind. And where else in history can we find an example of a populist mob manipulated and supported by the conservative, moneyed elite? Hmmm?

Although there are times to step aside and let assholes be assholes, I don’t think ignoring the current organized mayhem is wise. But how should they be handled?

The DNC has put out this video:

I’m not sure this video is as effective as it could be — the scary voice-over is such a cliche — but it could be a step in the right direction.

I think it’s important to emphasize that many of the “mobsters” who attend townhall meetings to disrupt them are from other districts. I’m wondering what would happen if the congresspersons had people screened at the door, admitting only people with a driver’s license or other photo ID proving they live in the district. That’s not necessarily something I would endorse as standard policy, but it would be an interesting experiment.

See also this bit from Think Progress:

During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Almost all the hands shot up. Rep Green quickly turned the question on the audience and asked, “How many of you have Medicare?” Nearly half the attendees raised their hands, failing to note the irony.

These are not people who can be reasoned with.

Geniuses

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Paul Krugman: “Art Laffer (why is he, of all people, on my TV?) asks what it will be like when the government runs Medicare and Medicaid.”

Really, he said that. Here’s the video.

And the dippy CNN moderator let it slide. Another genius.

In WaPo, John Bolton published a op ed titled “Clinton’s Unwise Trip to North Korea.”

Shortly after, we learned that Big Bill obtained the release of the two American journalists held by North Korea.

The Right Hates You

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Click to view larger image.

Click to view larger image.

The cartoon at left is from the cover of the April 2008 issue of Reason magazine. Reason is a libertarian publication with the motto “Free Minds and Free Markets.”

The cartoon, of course, shows three of the front-running presidential candidates pandering to a slob, with John McCain attempting to keep Ron Paul from squeezing into the room. What fascinated me about this cartoon at the time was the slob. The slob represents the American voter.

What does this tell us about the conservative/libertarian worldview? IMO it reveals a mindset that pretends to value freedom but is unconsciously authoritarian and elitist. (Which makes Reason‘s calling Sonia Sotomayor an “authoritarian” especially rich.) How dare the hoi polloi expect government to pay attention to them?

When I heard about Michelle Malkin’s absurd “cheese” comment, the cartoon sprang to mind. Malkin seriously believes that unemployment benefits keep people from going out and finding a job.

If you put enough government cheese in front of people they are just going to keep eating it and you’re just kicking the can down the road and just to hammer this point about the unemployment benefits extension again it was Larry Katz, who’s a chief labor economist under the Clinton labor department who came out with a study and there are a lot of these economists who say this that if you keep extending these “temporary” unemployment benefits you’re just going to extend joblessness even more.

Larry Katz said nothing of the sort, of course, as Paul Krugman explains. I say the Right’s inner elitism also is coming through loud and clear in their condemnation of the “cash for clunkers” program. My favorite criticism of the program comes from Representative Jeb Hensarling, R-TX: “Maybe we should have a ‘Cash for Cluckers’ program and pay people to eat chicken?”

A Thought Experiment

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At the Boston Globe, James Carroll has a very thoughtful column on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You might remember that the Hiroshima bombing occurred 64 years ago this week. Carroll does not defend the bombings — in his words, they were “a mistake and a crime” — but he acknowledges that people who were adults in 1945 saw the bombings very differently from those of us who know them from history books. However, he says that “To firmly regret atomic use in the past is to invite absolute renunciation of nuclear weapons in the present and future.” Firm regret is an imperative.

Within the spirit of firm regret I’d also like to see a little more — well, actually, a lot more — humility across the board regarding the bombings. Living memory of World War II is fading, and it’s unrealistic to expect people who have firmly held a point of view for many years to change it. But I think it would be very useful for those of us who came along later to be able to acknowledge that the decision to bomb Hiroshima was not as simple at the time as it seems to most of us today.

Please let me be clear that I am not defending the dropping of the bomb. However, I think if we could put ourselves in the places of the decision-makers of 1945 — knowing only what they knew, feeling what they felt — there are lessons to be learned that we have not learned from the way we remember Hiroshima.

Except on the extreme Right there is widespread consensus that the bomb should never be dropped again, and that’s good. But because we’ve enshrined the bombings of Hiroshima and Hagasaki as events apart from the course of ordinary history, we are not hearing everything the bombings are saying to us.

With the passage of time, events can take on symbolic meaning that obscures factual events and muddies the lessons we might have learned. We see this a lot on the Right, where historic figures become archetypes for virtues or faults that have little to do with reality. For example, Winston Churchill represents never-back-down resolve, when at times the real Churchill did advise backing down. The hapless Neville Chamberlain has been cast in the role of “liberal appeaser,” when in fact Chamberlain was a Conservative whose style of governing closely resembled that of George W. Bush.

My point is that people and events of history can, over time, take on symbolic meaning that can be considerably removed from the actual person or event, and these symbols are often made by our own projections more than by what the real historical person actually did or how the real historical event actually happened. And then the deeper lessons we might have learned are brushed aside in favor of our own biases.

It’s useful, I think, to acknowledge the atomic bomb today has taken on a symbolic meaning it didn’t have in 1945. Consider that possibly as many or more people had been killed in the March 1945 Tokyo firebombings, by conventional bombs dropped from B-52 29s, as would die in Hiroshima. Deaths in Japan from all conventional bombs dropped in the course of the war far exceeded the number of people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the conventional bombings of Japan have passed from the collective consciousness of the American general public, and today “conventional bombing” lacks the metaphorical clout of “mushroom cloud.”

Indeed, some seem to have the attitude that conventional bombing isn’t that big a deal; it’s only nuclear bombing that is unthinkable. Is that the lesson we should be taking?

Let’s go back to 1945. It would be a few years, I believe, before the lingering danger of radioactive fallout would be fully appreciated. It would be a few years before it began to dawn on most people that full-scale thermonuclear war could wipe out our entire species. At the time, as far as most decision makers knew, what they had was a really big bomb with no more moral weight attached to it than any other bomb they had dropped already. Even many of the physicists didn’t seem to fully appreciate what it was they had made until after it was dropped.

And for those whose knowledge of the bloodbath in the Pacific was fresh, raw and oozing — not acted out heroically by John Wayne on the big screen — and who anticipated more months of hand-to-hand carnage, the bomb must have seemed the mother of all magic bullets.

Yes, there were military experts who believed the war could have been concluded as quickly without the bomb. But there were other experts, with titles just as impressive, with just as many stars on their shoulders and medals on their chests, who said otherwise. Would you have known which argument to believe in 1945? How would you have known?

I think it’s important to be able to acknowledge the decision was difficult, because otherwise we take no lessons from it that we can apply to other decisions. This applies to those who defend the decision to drop the bomb as much as to those who think the decision indefensible. It would be useful to suspend judgments and look at the decision, and the decision makers, dispassionately. What did they know? What did they not know? What were the reasons expressed at the time for dropping or not dropping the bomb? How might we know how and when the war would have ended had the bomb not been used? How much did bias and emotion effect the decision? What lessons can be taken from this (beyond “the bomb is bad”), and how can we apply those lessons to national security decisions being made today?

It may be that history repeats itself, but never in exactly the same way. If the only lesson we take from Hiroshima is “don’t drop nuclear bombs,” what are we missing? The next magic bullet to come along and promise to end an intractable situation probably will not be a nuclear bomb, but something entirely different. When the decision is made whether to use that shiny new thing, will we have learned any lessons from Hiroshima?

Spielberg Remakes “Harvey”

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I don’t normally do entertainment news, but I just heard Steven Spielberg is remaking “Harvey.” The 1950 James Stewart version is one of the all-time greatest films, IMO. Stewart re-filmed “Harvey” for television in the 1970s, as I remember, but I don’t think I’ve seen that version since.

Spielberg hasn’t cast the film yet. Who could come even close to James Stewart? I’m thinking Tom Hanks, although Hanks has been a bit weird lately.

What’s Not to Like?

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Matt Yglesias quotes a commenter at Marginal Revolution.

At birth, someone living in the Netherlands can expect to live 2.35 years longer than someone born in the US, but at age 65, the difference is reversed, and someone living in the US can expect to live 0.4 years longer than someone living in the Netherlands. This difference can be explained by assuming that semi-socialized health care is better for young and worse for old people, or, at least as likely, different policies are not the main cause of the difference.

Sources: CDC national vital statistics 2004, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_09.pdf and RIVM 2007 levensverwachting, www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_document/o2309n18838.html (in Dutch).

Matt jumps in and points out what was invisible to the commenter — after 65, Americans get health care through Medicare.

Americans over the age of 65 participate in a Canadian-style national health insurance scheme known as Medicare. The data, if we want to take it seriously, indicates that the Dutch system is better than private sector medicine but worse than Medicare and tends to support a “Medicare for all” approach.

In a recent post I cited an article in Roll Call that said states whose citizens have the least access to health care also have the highest Medicare costs, per person. The authors speculate that the bump in Medicare costs reflects lifetimes of health care neglect.

Put another way, if you want Medicare costs to go down, give people better health care in the first 65 years of their lives.

Regarding Medicare costs, Paul Krugman wrote recently,

Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.

How do these numbers not show us that Americans are getting substandard medical care? But as Jonathan Alter says, our current system is great! What’s not to like? (Read Alter before commenting.)