Month: August 2009

Josh Marshall is on a mini crusade against them – and reporters mischaracterizing their tactics:

It now seems clear that 'tea party' movement types, organized by highly-funded corporate backed outfits like "Freedom Works" are putting together a plan to disrupt and shut down as many town hall events as possible. That's entirely different from making sure you've got a lot of activists at events with t-shirts or protesting with pickets outside the venue or making sure one of your activists gets to ask a question. This amounts to a sort of civic vigilanteism.

But watch closely whether reports covering these events recognize the difference.

 And now he jumps on Ambers:

Marc Ambinder seems to think the tea-bagger effort to shut down Democratic town hall meetings is just working from the Dems 2005 anti-Social Security privatization playbook. Really?

I watched those events unfold pretty closely. And what the Dems did in 2005 consisted almost entirely of protest outside town halls and anti-privatization activists trying to get into the meetings to ask questions to pin members of Congress down on their position. What made it so uncomfortable for Republican and some Democratic members of Congress is that they got questions they didn't want to answer.

Did some meetings get heated? Sure. But these weren't organized attempts to shut down the meetings themselves. Does Marc remember what happened four years ago?

Note that in this video, posters of the congressman literally with devil's horns are waved about. Chris Good has more. This is the debate the GOP wants us to have and the tone they wish to have it in.

Robert P. George argues against marriage equality in the WSJ:

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

Of course, marital intercourse often does produce babies, and marriage is the form of relationship that is uniquely apt for childrearing (which is why, unlike baptisms and bar mitzvahs, it is a matter of vital public concern). But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation.

My italics. And who would disagree? But if non-procreative sex can consummate a heterosexual marriage, then why not a homosexual one? I covered all this at length in either. He was interested in truth as the source of doctrine; not doctrine as the source of truth.

It also seems to me to be important to ask George what he proposes should be available to gay couples. Does he believe that we should be able to leave property to one another without other family members trumping us? That we should be allowed to visit one another in hospital? That we should be treated as next-of-kin in medical or legal or custody or property tangles? Or granted the same tax status as straight married couples? These details matter to real people living actual lives, real people the GOP seems totally uninterested in addressing.

I suspect George would not want to prevent couples going through immensely complex legal hoops to secure as many of these rights as we can. His cruelty is refracted through less obvious means. But until he can show how these legal rights would prevent other family members from swooping in, litigating or trumping these contracts, using the legal concept of family he favors, these crumbs are crumbs. And they come at the behest of others – and remain vulnerable to the whims of others. 

There is also, moreover, no positive social policy actually crafted for gay people in George's view. What does he believe we should do with our lives? Should we try to construct stable relationships – or not? In an era in which an entire generation was decimated by HIV, is it not conservative to seek greater stability and responsibility among gay citizens, by providing actual legal and social incentives for stabler lives? Alas, having studied George's work for years, I can tell you his social policy toward me and my kind. It is that gay people should be celibate, and if not celibate, invisible. But this much we know: gays in free countries are neither going to be celibate nor invisible for the foreseeable future. So what is George's prescription except quixotic when it isn't demotic?

Beneath the elegant philosophical language is a blunter message to George's gay fellow human beings: be straight or go away. And since when is that a practical option in the 21st century?

I repeat to conservatives: we know what you're against, in healthcare, energy, counter-terrorism, taxation, gay rights, abortion. What are you actually for? How do you intend to actually address the questions of our time and place? And if conservatism cannot do that, what use is it?

Fallows reports on stories in the Asian press of a meeting between the leaders of North Korea and Burma. Yes: the notion that Burma's grotesque regime could get nukes is apparently not fantasy. And that's the kind of 3 am call you never want to get.

The title says it all: healthcare insurance reform. Framed like that, it has real traction if explained right. Background here.

CBS captures the awkward exchange between Ahmadi and Khamenei. Semiotics here. A touch of Gervais, no?

Ambers has a great report on the Democratic strategy to start demonizing insurance companies in order to energize their base for the big health-care fight in September:

The industry is easy to demonize. Most insurers are motivated by profit, which they accrue by making decisions about who and what to cover. Their incentive is to try and deny as much coverage as possible without risking a wholesale hemorrhage of companies who purchase their coverage. […] That said, there are good insurance companies and bad ones. Some companies do great work with certain diseases, like cancer, and drop the ball with, say, preventative medicine.

The industry concluded that reform was inevitable. In order to save their industry, they decided to partner with the White House from day one. They’ve accommodated the demands of Democrats to scrap discriminatory policies against people with pre-existing conditions, have agreed to various premium caps, have agreed to accept various different types of basic coverage plans.

In exchange, the industry gets to exist; it gets millions of more Americans with a mandate to buy coverage; it gets some flexibility in terms of risk pools; it doesn’t accept onerous restrictions on its profit-to-loss ratios. So far, the White House hasn’t gotten any votes out of this arrangement, but they’ve gotten the industry to hold its fire.

No longer. By creating an enemy out of the insurance industry, the White House is risking a real turn-about. The hedge is that there’s no way, having invested so much in crafting a pro-reform image, the insurers will begin to oppose it.  On the other hand, if the industry did suddenly decide that the reform project ought to be killed, the White House would have a real enemy — and would be able to frame the debate much more clearly as a choice between progress and obstruction.

Marc later interviews Karen Ignagni, the president of the America’ Health Insurance Plans, asking what she will do now as “the enemy.”

Bringing a whole new meaning to “paper jam”. It gets better and better:

HP – invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

Publius offers a less-than-idealistic take on the reform movement in Iran:

The Iranian economy is in very poor shape, and the regime is considered to be a contributing factor to the poor economy. […] The election was the spark. But the ultimate cause (the dry forest that was susceptible to fire, if you will) was Iran's economic problems. It's more romantic, of course, to see the struggle in ideological terms as a fight for freedom and reform, etc. But it seems more like an economic fight to me.

It's a key difference between the Chinese and Iranian regimes. The Chinese regime also suppresses personal liberty. But, it is seen as useful to prosperity. China's economy has generally done pretty well lately. Iran's regime is not perceived that way.

A reader writes:

What I was observing was the portrayal of something clearly organized by one political as something spontaneous. As for genuine concern about healthcare, I think that's essential to getting the right answer(s). But so far, all I'm hearing are hecklers, and abstract hysteria about socialism. I have yet to hear from the tea-bagging right how they plan to prevent soaring healthcare costs from bankrupting private industry and decimating the public purse. And I never heard from them about how they intended to cut spending and balance the budget.

Given the lack of substantive alternatives to real communal problems, they strike me as simply a form of emotional reaction to the end of the far right's dominance of American discourse. And that's really a problem for conservatism, not Obama.