Month: July 2010

I will, in part to piss him off. I don't believe in treating the sick as suddenly tender souls who cannot enjoy humor and debate – and that would apply in truckloads for my dear friend. I'm delighted that no one ever pulls a punch with me on the grounds of chronic disease and I'm sure Hitch would feel the same way. Goldblog meditates with pitch-perfect tone on this conundrum. Money quote:

This matter of theology brought to mind one of my favorite theologians, our mutual friend Rabbi David Wolpe, who has debated Hitch on innumerable occasions on the question of God's existence or non-existence. I asked David what sort of intercessory praying a believer should do on behalf of a declared non-believer, or if one should pray at all, and he wrote back with some very wise words: "I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying helps, to pray.  It is in any case an expression of one's deep hopes.  So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying that he should be grateful for my prayers."

Amsterdam, Netherlands, 8.55 pm

"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, [Afghanistan] was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. … It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed," – Michael Steele, still chairman of the RNC.

Wow. The RNC chair is now offering a brutal critique of the utopian delusions of neoconservatism. Pity Steele is an idiot. We could actually have a debate on the right on this if others in the GOP start to echo this common sense.

USA Today does some polling and reporting. Some thoughts. There is still no positive set of proposals on offer. What you get are complaints but no solutions; we know what they are against. They wanted no stimulus, no bailouts of the banks, no new access to private healthcare insurance for millions … if any of these meant government action. My own view is that unemployment could be well over 12 percent by now – and probably worse – if this had occurred. But one can see how they have a no-risk position: if that had happened, they would have blamed Obama anyway. Nonetheless, I like their broad philosophy:

"We've been running deficits for years, and we've been saying we're doing it to win the Cold War or to fight terrorism and fight poverty," says Michael Towns, 33, a linguist from Tallahassee who was among those surveyed. "I think our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves because they never would conceive that we would do this."

I just don't think the movement merits serious examination until it fleshes out what it's actually for. Then this:

Citing links to the Revolution has been a mainstay of American politics since the nation's beginnings, Lepore says, but the way the Tea Party uses those symbols and language is original. "It is a fundamentalist way of thinking of the past: The founding documents are gospel; they come alive for us," she says.

This is a form of secular fundamentalism – the analog to "originalist" versions of constitutional interpretation. Now, I feel I understand it better. Having tried Biblical fundamentalism, the GOP is now trying secular fundamentalism. As a psychological response to a bewildering modernity with lots of least-worst options, this is a powerful force. As a practical politics, it is just performance art.

Why have they not disclosed that one of their bloggers also moonlights for the Obama administration?

A reader writes:

Your reader stated:

Someone earning $156,800 would have a tax increase of $6,200 under this proposal.  If that person supports a family of four in the DC metro area on that salary, are they rich?  Certainly not.

Your inbox is probably already full with dissents to this idiotic statement.  It always amazes me just how clueless some of my wealthier fellow citizens are about how the rest of the country lives.  Even in D.C., $156,800 for a family of four would be firmly in the upper class of incomes – maybe not "rich" like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates but certainly far better off than 85% of the country AND the District.  Households making over 150k are in the top 7% for the country and the top 15% for D.C.  It's these type of loony assertions about lack of wealth that make me (and probably many many others) far less sympathetic to arguments against raising any taxes on the rich.

Another writes:

I find your reader's anger at the suggestion that we raise the limit on social security taxes laughable.  A family of four making $156,800 already gets plenty of breaks from the government:

a credit for being married; for having kids; for mortgage interest; for their 401k contributions; for charitable donations; for employer-provided health insurance; for child care and even for using public transportation.  If they're long-time homeowners, they get a subsidy on their property taxes in many states.  They likely have capital gain and dividend income, which is taxed at lower rates than regular income.  They'll likely avoid the estate tax.  Every year, the AMT gets fixed so that it doesn't hit them.  Their marginal tax rates are lower than they were during the Reagan Administration.  And on top of all that, they want a regressive Social Security tax and benefit cuts for people who don't get quite so many gifts from the tax code?

Another:

Your dissenting reader objects to your characterizing the ceiling on income that can be taxed for Social Security as a "loophole", and calls it instead an "across-the-board marginal rate increase" of 12.4%.  Well, "Wow" back!  This argument could only be made by someone misled by the privilege of wealth.  I make over $106K per year, and every year in around late September I get an un-asked-for, automatic, and highly appreciated "raise" when that Social Secuirty tax deduction drops off my pay stub.  People who earn less than $106K do not get that raise.  I get a raise because I earn more than them.  How is that not perverse?  Why should the very part of my income that puts me in the top 15% (more or less) of wage earners not be subject to Social Security withholding?  Why should I get a bonus for being wealthier than people who make less than $106K? 

Believe me, I love getting that raise each fall, but I'm smart enough and honest enough to know that it is poor policy and definitely a loophole for high wage earners. It should be eliminated.

Another:

The reader's dissent is well taken, but there is a serious factual error.  The Social Security tax is shared between the employer and the employee.  The impact on the hypothetical DC couple would be 6.2%, not 12.4%.  This equates to around $258.00 a month.  It is hard to imagine that an additional $258.00 a month could have "serious detrimental consequences for labor supply and … economic growth".  

There are no free solutions to addressing Social Security.  Raising the retirement age, changing the basis for inflation indexing, means testing benefits – each of these will have an impact on some constituency and the same $258 argument will be made.  If it was easy and popular to fix, it would have been fixed already.  

The irony is that, under means testing, the hypothetical DC householder is likely to lose more than $258 a month (and at a time when that income is more significant).

Because it's Friday of a Holiday weekend:

Marcy Wheeler finds that the NYT's defense doesn't hold up:

Three years passed before the NYT started balancing those defending waterboarding with quotations calling it torture in less than half of their articles discussing the practice.

So what explains the delay?…It’s possible the formal admission of waterboarding to Congress by Michael Hayden on February 5, 2008 changed things. It’s also possible that John McCain’s presidential campaign–heating up in 2007–offered a reason to consider calling waterboarding torture okay. Or, it’s possible that the NYT didn’t want to call torture torture until the Iraq war made Bush so unpopular that it became okay to let torture critics have a voice in the paper.

Whatever it is, the NYT’s own narrative about how they balanced their capitulation to the Administration with quotes from torture critics is anachronistic.

My lengthy response to unfounded charges of hypocrisy in my criticism of offering $100,000 to get emails written under the assumption of privacy got quickly buried by a fast blogging day yesterday. If you’re still interested, here it is. Andrew has invited me to debate this with him in public. I hope we can do that soon.

Deborah Newell Tornello points to a double standard she finds "exceedingly sexist and unfair":

A man who says he has fought in combat–an act that is fraught with life-and-death decisions and details that would spin the heads of the more squeamish among his audience; that affects a person, both emotionally and physically, for the rest of his life; and the retelling of which narrative treads through extremely sensitive grounds–does so knowing he'll incur the admiration and support of a large, electorally significant group of voters.

A woman who says she has carried and given birth to a special-needs infant (after first satisfying her speech-giving obligations as governor, then, incredibly, flown across a continent while in labor)–an act that is, by any stretch of the imagination, fraught with life-and-death decisions and details that would spin the heads of the more squeamish among her audience; that affects a person, both emotionally and physically, for the rest of her life; and the retelling of which narrative treads through extremely sensitive grounds–does so knowing she'll incur the admiration and support of a large, electorally significant group of voters.

With the former candidate, any inconsistencies and lies in his narrative are dug up and military records–personal and sensitive as they may be–are called for and examined.

Reporters might talk to those who served with him (if indeed he served); newspapers and televised news programs discuss the serious problem with his story. … Yet with the latter candidate–who in this case is embodied by one Sarah Palin, former half-term governor of Alaska, vice-presidential running mate and likely, if not certain, presidential candidate in 2012–the vast sea of inconsistencies and outright lies in her narratives is simply accepted, or else acknowledged in private by those with functioning ears and eyes but never questioned fully and responsibly by our national media, and, to a great extent, by bloggers of any political persuasion.