Tortured

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Greg Sargent:

The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. The paper cites “allies” of the White House as a source.

Dem Congressional staffers tell me this report is the “holy grail,” because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives.

Of course, anything the Obama Administration does triggers howls of protest from conservatives. Nor do I think release of such a document would cause Dick Cheney to go away, because I think Dick slipped his tether to reality some time back.

Memo to the Titanic

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Nate Silver has picked up on my generational political “imprinting” hypothesis, which says that at the point a new generation becomes old enough to be aware of politics, it is “imprinted” with whatever narrative is playing out in politics at the time. That imprinting carries with it political memes and values that will stick with most people of that generation the rest of their lives, no matter what.

My hypothesis was based on pure observation, but Nate, bless him, has real data. And he says that much voter behavior hinges on the question “Who was president when you turned 18?”

Nate has a chart that shows people who turned 18 during the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations are more likely to identify themselves as “Republican” than people who turned 18 during any other recent administration. And if this trend continues, the GOP had better be worried. The crop of young folks who turned 18 during the G.W. Bush administration is the least Republican generation ever.

Nate says this political partisan imprinting can be “quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse.” In other words, once imprinted, the imprinting tends to stick, even if political reality changes. The imprinting going on now will impact politics for the next half century.

Heh.

Along the same lines, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais write for the Los Angeles Times that “The Republican Party ignores young ‘millennials’ at its peril.”

The “millennials” — the generation of Americans born between 1982 and 2003 — now identify as Democrats by a ratio of 2 to 1. They are the first in four generations to contain more self-perceived liberals than conservatives. …

…Only 9% of millennials polled expressed a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Only 7% were positive about the GOP’s congressional leaders. By contrast, 65% of millennials had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, and a majority also approved of congressional Democrats.

The authors attribute this shift to how the millennials were raised, but I think the real difference is George W. Bush and the current Republican Party. These young folks came of age during a national train wreck.

For the first time in living memory, young people do not assume their lives will be as financially blessed as their parents were. Even those who go to college and who get “better” jobs spend much of their early adulthood paying off college loans instead of saving for the first house. “Job security” has become an oxymoron. Once they’re too old to be carried on their parents’ health insurance, vast numbers of young people are cut off from receiving medical care.

And the GOP is utterly oblivious to this. Republicans are not addressing these issues at all except to call for continuing the failed policies that created the current reality. This is not to say Democrats will do a better job of addressing these issues, but at least Democrats seem to have a clue.

Millennials tend to be more knowledgeable about environmental issues and more accepting that global climate change is real than previous generations. They also are less homophobic. The current GOP is laissez faire on economics and business, but authoritarian on social issues. But millennials tend to be laissez faire on social issues and want to see government play a more pro-active role in steering the economy. They feel locked out and want the nation’s wealth to be “redistributed,” dammit!

Two other op eds at the Los Angeles Times deserve mention. Mickey Edwards, who appears to be a conservative, argues that “The Nation Needs a Better GOP.”

If Democrats control the legislative and executive branches without meaningful opposition, the country will be the weaker for it. Some of President Obama’s initiatives would dramatically shift the boundaries between public and private, reshape the relationship between citizens and government and alter the lens through which America views its international commitments. These are serious matters and deserve serious, and constructive, engagement.

In the long run it is far better for the country if a broad range of views — or, at least, as broad a range of views as one finds in American politics, which generally isn’t that broad — is represented in government. It’s good when the majority view is challenged intelligently by a thoughtful minority. If nothing else, it keeps the majority on its toes and goads them into thinking through their proposals more clearly. However,

Today, the Republican belief system has degenerated into an embarrassing hodgepodge that worships political victory more than ideas; supports massive deficits; plunges the nation into “just-in-case” wars without adequate troops, supplies or armor; dismisses constitutional strictures; and campaigns on a platform of turning national problem-solving over to “Joe the Plumber.” It’s hard to see how all that points the way to a reawakening of voters to trust in the GOP. …

… Merely attacking administration proposals and labeling Obama a “socialist” will only ensure that instead of rebounding, as the GOP did in 1968, the party will slip even further into irrelevance. And that will not be good for America.

Finally, one other op ed says “What Republicans need is a mutiny.” To take the party away from the troglodytes, yes? Alas, this op ed was written by Richard A. Viguerie, a troglodyte’s troglodyte.

Democrats have nothing to fear from today’s Republican Party leaders. That’s why Democrats have taken to targeting Rush Limbaugh and others who aren’t in formal leadership positions in the GOP but who forcefully articulate a conservative vision.

To paraphrase the Gipper, anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh is forcefully articulating “a conservative vision” is the problem, not the solution.

Update: Fred Barnes actually wrote this for next week’s Weekly Standard:

Improving the party’s image is a worthy cause, but it isn’t what Republicans ought to be emphasizing right now. They have a more important mission: to be the party of no. And not just a party that bucks Obama and Democrats on easy issues like releasing Gitmo terrorists in this country, but one committed to aggressive, attention-grabbing opposition to the entire Obama agenda.

I hope all Republicans read this and pay close attention to what Fred says.

If Republicans scan their history, they’ll discover unbridled opposition to bad Democratic policies pays off. Those two factors, unattractive policies plus strong opposition, were responsible for the Republican landslides in 1938, 1946, 1966, 1980, and 1994. A similar blowout may be beyond the reach of Republicans in 2010, but stranger things have happened in electoral politics. They’ll lose nothing by trying.

GOP: Barnes is a wise man, and you should do what he says. Please.

Ayn Rand and Infantile Omnipotence

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If you’re in the mood for something a little weightier than the ever-popular “righties stink,” check out this essay on Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes by Mary Midgley at The Guardian.

The basic theme is that both Hobbes and Rand wrote about the individual in relation to society, but came to opposite conclusions. Hobbes stressed the individual’s need for security, and he promoted the ideal of a strong commonwealth with a powerful sovereign at its head. Rand went in the other direction, warning of the evils of “collectivism” and promoting absolute individuality to the point of denouncing altruism as evil.

Hobbes’s ideas belonged to the age of the Sun-King, Midgley says, and Hobbes has little to say to us today about dealing with intolerable government. Rand, on the other hand, is still influencing politics. “Noam Chomsky has called her deeply evil,” Midgley writes. “This may seem like taking her too seriously, but we surely do need to take seriously the ideas that she stands for.”

This paragraph seems to me to be especially insightful:

What chiefly emerges here is surely how important it is, when we are confronted with these extreme and simple doctrines, to understand the guiding visions behind them and in particular, just what danger they aim to protect us against. Rand’s guiding vision is clearly what used to be called infantile omnipotence – the childish hope of total control – and her doctrines have great influence because that hope is still always strong in the depths of our hearts. The fear that haunts her is the fear of having to obey someone else. This fear, intelligently disciplined, does indeed lie at the root of our emphasis on liberty, but there is nothing to be said for erecting it on its own into a “heroic” stance of self-admiration.

I’ve long felt there was something both infantile and desperately fearful at the base of Randism. And for all their supposed admiration for rational thought, there is nothing rational about an ideology that denies the basic nature of humans and human civilization. We are social creatures who depend on each other and live for each other, whether we like it or not. Civilization may have come up with ways to make the interdependence impersonal, but we are still interdependent. Individual humans, isolated from other humans and from civilization, do not survive well.

So when a Randbot says, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” that’s both a scream of denial and a tantrum.

More Infantilism

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For the past several days the Right Blogosphere has been excusing Bush Administration torture by taking what, to them, is the moral high ground — The Dems were in on it too. Specifically, they’ve been pointing fingers at Nancy Pelosi, who allegedly was briefed on torture early on, and said nothing. Emptywheel has been fact-checking.

I’ve been mostly ignoring this, because what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it is far from the biggest issue facing us today. But the righties aren’t letting go of it. Everything is about political gotcha with them.

If Pelosi or any other Democrat appears to be guilty of something, by all means, investigate, and indict where appropriate. This “Pelosi did it too” nonsense is just plain infantile.

Olbermann did a segment on this that’s worth watching:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Disconnections

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During my recent adventures in physical therapy, I overheard an elderly woman, also in physical therapy, talking about a relative who had received bad medical care while traveling in Italy. Then she shook her head and made a disparaging remark about “socialized medicine.” I wanted to ask her if Medicare paid for her physical therapy, although I didn’t. I suspect that if I had told her Medicare was “socialized medicine,” she wouldn’t have believed it.

I thought of this woman as I read Joe Conason’s article in Salon called “Stop ‘Hillary-care’ now!” He calls the Right’s attempts to scuttle health care reform pathetic, and on many levels they are. But that doesn’t mean they won’t work.

Conason writes that the Right’s strategy is to stoke fear of government bureaucrats.

But as his memo indicates, that task is becoming more difficult as the actual conditions that Americans confront grow worse. No longer is it sufficient to deny the reality of crisis in the healthcare system — and if Republicans continue to do so, the overwhelming majority of the American public that is demanding reform will dismiss them. What Luntz urges his party to do instead is to redefine the crisis not as an existing problem of millions of uninsured families and unaffordable care, but as a looming threat of government medicine run amok.

Maximizing fear is the true message of the Luntz memo: fear of government-run healthcare, fear that bureaucrats will intercede between doctors and patients, fear that those same faceless bureaucrats in Washington will deny lifesaving procedures to helpless people. He urges the Republicans to promote “horror stories” about care delayed and denied in countries with national health insurance. If they heed his advice, we can expect to see ads warning that “your child could die” because government bureaucrats held up a critical operation until it was just too late.

Of course, bureaucrats at private insurance companies have been doing these terrible things for years, but we’re not supposed to notice.

Conason reports something said by Republican Senator Jon Kyl: “Imagine needing a new hip that will make it easier to get around, but just because you’re over 75, the government denies you that surgery. We can’t allow that to happen in America.” But Medicare pays for hip replacements all the time. So won’t Americans notice how absurd the GOP’s arguments are? I say some will. But some won’t.

The Right has done an amazing job of turning Americans into people with bifurcated brains. There’s a clear cognitive disconnection between “big expensive government programs” and “programs I like (that are run by the government).”

Remember this Bushism from the 2000 presidential campaign?

We trust individual workers, and so our plan says we’re going to keep the promise to our seniors. But we’ll allow younger workers at their choice to invest some of their own money in the private markets to get a better rate of return so that the Social Security promise will be kept.

And this frightens some in Washington. Because they want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. We understand differently though. You see, it’s your money not the government’s money.

Of course, Al Gore pounced on that remark, and in a sane world candidate Bush would have been hooted out of the campaign. But Bush was not hooted out of the campaign, and I think that’s partly because many of the people who heard the “like its come kind of federal program” remark didn’t catch the problem with it.

And I know in my bones that you could find people who have been denied care by insurance companies, or who have no insurance at all, who are opposed to “socialized medicine” because they don’t want “government bureaucrats” making decisions about health care.

Conason writes,

In a typical Luntz language memo such as this one, he commands Republicans to repeat certain words and phrases over and over again, on the humiliating assumption that both they and their constituents will behave like mindless stooges. His underlying aim is to strip words of their meaning to evoke automatic responses — and to shut down rational thought.

Yes. And y’know what? They are really good at stripping words of their meaning to evoke an automatic response. Think of what the Right has done to “liberty” and “freedom” for example. They play “freedom” like a trump card. It doesn’t matter what they’re defending, including torture and warrantless wiretapping; once “freedom” is thrown on the table, the trump card is supposed to win the hand. But within the context of the ideas they are defending the word “freedom” has no meaning.

On the other hand, I can think of times in which a majority of the American people saw through the sham. I’m thinking of the privatized social security scheme Bush tried to sell, and the Terri Schiavo debacle. I’ve thought for years that eventually the percentage of Americans with really bad experiences with the health care system would grow into a critical mass. And when that happened, I thought, maybe we could get reform.

But then there are lobbyists. Someone should work out a citizen-to-lobbyist influence ratio, as in how many irate citizens does it take to cancel out the influence of one lobbyist? It would be a really big number.

Then again, citizen opinion must count for something, or the Right wouldn’t even bother to scam us, nor would the insurance industry have paid for those “Harry and Louise” ads of yore. Perhaps all is not lost.

One-Way Bridge

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This article from Wall Street Journal illustrates by alarm bells should go off whenever anyone speaks of “common ground” on abortion. Laura Meckler writes that President Obama is inviting advocates from across the political spectrum to try to find common ground on abortion. And that’s grand. But notice where the “common ground” is:

Ms. Barnes told participants that the White House is interested in hearing ideas in several areas, among them: sex education; responsible use of contraception; maternal and child health; pregnancy discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere; and adoption.

Those are all ideas any good feminist/liberal/progressive/pro-choicer can accept easily. That’s including adoption, as long as the decision to give up maternal rights is made without coercion of any sort.

The White House position is to reduce the number of abortions in America by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in America. Again, that’s a position any feminist/liberal/progressive/pro-choicer is comfortable with. We’ve been making the same argument for years.

Now, who is not in favor of better sex education and greater access to contraceptives? The so-called “right to life” movement is not in favor of those things. Anti-choice organizations run the gamut of taking no position on contraceptive use to being actively opposed to contraceptives. They’re all opposed to sex education, preferring the sham substitute, “abstinence only.”

I talked about the alarm bells — there are some allegedly “progressive” religious leaders making noises about common ground on abortion, and they talk about reducing abortion rate. But when you hear the term “abortion reduction,” look under the hood to see what’s running the engine. Sometimes “abortion reduction” is a code word for reducing the number of abortions by chipping away at abortion access through creative legal restrictions.

So, I prefer to talk about reducing unwanted pregnancy, not reducing abortion, although fewer abortions certainly is one of the outcomes of reducing unwanted pregnancy. And providing material support for women who don’t want to abort but are in a place in their lives where pregnancy and child care are untenable is fine with me, too, as long as reducing unwanted pregnancy is the first priority.

I’ve long argued that the way the abortion controversy is presented in media is a false dichotomy. The conventional wisdom is that the pro- and anti-choice sides are equally extreme and must meet in the middle. Although you can find people with all manner of extremist positions, if you look at the major pro- and anti-choice organizations, you are not looking at two equally extremist sides. One side —

  • Supports avoiding unwanted pregnancy as much as possible through contraceptive use and informed sexual behavior. This in turn will reduce the rate of abortion.
  • Supports Roe v. Wade, which includes the provision that states may prohibit elective third-term abortion as long as exceptions can be made for life and health of the mother.
  • Supports the decisions of women who choose to carry pregnancies to term.

The other side —

  • Either refuses to support contraceptive use or is actively opposed to it.
  • Wants to criminalize all abortions, even very early ones, including non-elective abortions in cases of medically compromised pregnancies.
  • Wants to take the ability to make reproductive decisions away from women.

This is just not two equally extreme sides.

As Lynn Harris writes at Salon, media lazily equate positions such as those advocated by the White House as a “compromise” with anti-choice positions.

… it’s not necessarily accurate to portray such framing — no matter who does it and what issues one may have with the particulars — as a “compromise.” Especially given the increasingly vocal opposition to contraception, since when is supporting it a compromise? When it comes to abortion, lots of us have been talking about prevention, and about how “it’s not just about Roe” — or, for that matter, “choice” — for a good while. I’d call this expanding the debate, not ceding ground. And now that legislators and journalists have picked up on it, the longer the focus on prevention and healthcare gets misrepresented as “compromise,” I say the longer we’ll be fighting.

Update: Obama budget eliminates funding for “abstinence only” education. Time for the dancing banana —

The Monster They Created

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Eric Boehlert writes that Clear Channel Communications is drowning in debt and struggling to stay in business (yes, we weep and we mourn). Already this year it has shed 12 percent of its workforce. The workers remaining are losing company matching contributions to their 401K plans.

Yet last year Clear Channel gave Rush Limbaugh a 40 percent pay raise. And Boehlert marvels at this, because it’s not as if any other radio entity could have offered him more money than what he was making before. Boehlert writes,

The astronomical worth of Limbaugh’s eight-year pact: $400 million. The amount of money Clear Channel execs have been trying to scrimp and save this year as they lay off thousands from the struggling company: $400 million. Ironic, don’t you think? …

…Last summer there was nobody else in a position to steal Limbaugh away. Clear Channel was basically bidding against itself and decided, in the end, to give Limbaugh a 40 percent raise, which included writing a $100 million signing bonus check to celebrate his contract extension. That right: A nine-figure signing bonus. At the time, it was a puzzler. Looking back at it today, the $100 million goodwill gesture, viewed against the backdrop of Clear Channel’s doomsday woes, makes no business sense whatsoever. (That $100 million bonus could have saved maybe 1,000 Clear Channel jobs this year alone.)

Some of the fired employees were popular local radio personalities and reporters. Apparently Clear Channel is going to be the Rush Limbaugh Channel.

Lee Fang writes that at a recent Heritage Foundation dinner, Limbaugh mocked the poor and laughed at the very idea there might be a recession. One of his better lines was “So I always believed that if we’re going to have a recession, just don’t participate.”

Kind of fascinating, in an OMG that’s week-old roadkill way.

What Is the Purpose of a Health Care System?

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This is something of a follow up to “Why Is There an Economy?” The Center for American Progress has an alarming report on the number of Americans losing their health insurance every day. The rate of uninsured Americans is growing in every state, and most of the uninsured have jobs.

Matt Yglesias comments,

Right now, a person who develops a serious medical problem can continue to enjoy health insurance coverage if and only if he or she is able to maintain health insurance continuously. But if you lose your insurance because you get laid off, and then can’t find a new job for a while because of generally bad labor market conditions, then even though you’ll be able to get a new job when the economy revives, you’ll now find that your illness means you can’t get coverage for your medical problem. That’s totally rational business practice, but it completely defeats the purpose of a health care system which is precisely to ensure that sick people can get health care.

If you pay close attention to right-wing arguments against national health care, you notice the underlying assumption: The purpose of a health care system is to support a profitable health care industry. For example, regulations that mandate insurance companies insure people with pre-existing conditions are bad, because they are bad for business.

On the other hand, if your underlying assumption is that the purpose of a health care system is to provide health care to people who need it, you must be a liberal.

I did a news google looking for a right-wing argument against national health care, and this is the first one that came up. It’s not as strident as many. It does begin with the straw-man assumption that people who want a national health care system expect it to be free. I have never met anyone who thought that.

The author also falls back on the assumption that “government bureaucracies” always are more expensive and inefficient than private enterprise. But the American health care “system” already is the most inefficient on the planet. We spend much more on health care per capita than any other nation and get poorer results.

In any event, the argument that government bureaucracies always are more inefficient than private enterprise simply is not supported by facts. Any large organization, whether a business or a government, can be run well or poorly. It’s true that consumer products companies work at being cost effective in order to survive. But notice a lot of them aren’t exactly surviving these days.

And as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the laws of supply and demand do not apply to health care in the same way that they apply to mp3 players. People don’t shop for health care in the same way they shop for toasters. If you want to buy a toaster, you go to a retail store and pick out the nicest one you can afford. This provides an incentive to toaster manufacturers to make better toasters that cost less. However, with health care, it’s more like you buy a membership in the retail store — your health insurer — and the store decides what toaster you can have, and even whether you will get a toaster at all.

The author of the anti-national health care article writes,

Advocates of national health insurance argue that preventive care is cheaper than trying to care for patients who have become seriously ill. This is true, but preventive care is more expensive than no care – which is what uninsured people usually choose. If we adopt universal health insurance, people who normally do not go to the doctor will go, and some one will have to pay for that care.

Kind of stunning, yes?

Social security insurance and Medicare have worked to provide more money and better health care for the elderly. But as a consequence old people live longer, collect more social security, and need more Medicare. Both programs have become vastly more expensive than was originally projected.

See, if we could just let more people die younger, it wouldn’t be such a strain on the system.

The author then brings up the awful specter of rationing health care, without noticing we are already rationing health care — if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get health care.

The author is correct that one reason health care is more expensive than it was many years ago is that medical science has developed new technologies and therapies that are excellent, but expensive. A century ago, if you broke your leg, the doctor would diagnose this by feeling your leg. Then we went to X-rays. Now there are MRIs. Very expensive stuff. But for that very reason, the old system of letting people pay the doctor however they could doesn’t work any more. And the more recent system of providing health insurance through employment is breaking down, also.

The author doesn’t bring up right-wing arguments against so incremental a step as a public insurance program that might compete with private insurance. Such a public program might be able to provide lower cost insurance by widely pooling risk and through subsidies. And that’s not fair to private insurance companies. See, it’s better to let millions of Americans go without decent health care than to not be fair to private insurance companies. As I said, to the Right, the purpose of a health care system is to support a profitable health care industry.

There’s nothing wrong with profits, and those nations that have the best health care systems as measured by cost per capita and results tend to have mixed public and private systems. It’s not just the government pulling the whole load; there is still a place for private enterprise. But those nations with the most cost-effective health care systems have the crazy idea that the purpose of a health care system is to provide health care. Radical.