Month: August 2011

"Looking for votes? I'm looking for hands to shake, and I'm looking for fried butter on a stick and a fried Twinkie as soon as I can get there, just looking to talk to the good people of Iowa, these good hardworking farm families, I love it. … I don't think I'm stealing any spotlight," – Sarah Palin, set to appear live on Hannity's show tonight at the state fairgrounds. More on her grand entrance here.

A reader writes:

Have you all seen this? It appears in elevators around the country. And it seems like a direct rip-off loving homage to your own series.

Murtaza Hussein makes the connection in the wake of the UK riots:

When considering the actual premise of "national security," one would have to look at a country which has descended into widespread internal chaos as being "insecure." For all the money spent on aggressive wars against ill-defined enemies in obscure parts of the world, the most dangerous threat to the actual physical safety of individuals within a country remains from their fellow citizens given a breakdown of social cohesion.

It is a sign of dangerously confused priorities that defense spending is considered to be a budgetary holy grail which must be left untouched when discussing cuts to overall spending; but deep cuts to social services which directly affect the lives of millions of Americans are considered fair game. Nothing is more of a threat to the safety of Americans than a social system which will produce a generation of angry, disaffected young people and give rise to the types of scenes Britons are witnessing today.

Sesame Street responds to the calls for them to come out of the closet:

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

Julian Sanchez isn't buying it:

Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples. Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are   your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. And, of course, human characters Maria and Luis got married on the show. What all of these have in common, of course, is that they’re heterosexual couples. …

What Sesame Street gives us, then, is a picture of reality (in New York, of all places) where loving coupled relationships are exclusively presented as heterosexual. That exclusion is a choice. And the implicit message sent by that choice is that the very existence of same-sex couples is, like swearing or violent street crime, an aspect of urban reality that’s inappropriate for children to be exposed to, unlike all the normal, unremarkable heterosexual couplings depicted on the show. That omission is not neutral.

Dan Amira has the scoop.

I want the man to succeed, but I have a hard time disagreeing with this reader:

Huntsman had a huge chance to stand out last night but failed. If there's unanimity in something except for one person who breaks from the mold, a disproportionate amount of attention flows to the rebel (e.g., Ron Paul being able to weigh in on every foreign policy question). When everyone raised their hand to reject 10:1 ratio of spending cuts to taxes, can you imagine how much attention Huntsman would have received if he had chosen to not raise his hand?

Bret Baier would have immediately asked Huntsman for comment on why he was so different from the rest of the field. Huntsman (for the purposes of this fantasy) could then explain that a true leader would be crazy to reject that kind of deal, that the GOP world has gone mad, and that he is the man to get behind to get stuff done. Wouldn't he poll better after that kind of move? He's not getting the nomination in any event, but why not make a break from the pack like he did with civil unions?

Or like he did at another point in the debate:

Nicholas Mancusi picks apart the philosophy of Louis C.K.:

Camus uses the story of Sisyphus, a mythological troublemaker doomed by the Gods to push a boulder to the top of a hill over and over for eternity, to illustrate the struggles of the absurd hero, but Louis makes a fine modern stand-in. Each time Sisyphus gets the boulder to the top, he watches it roll back down to the bottom. Each time Louis wakes up in the morning, as he says, “My eyes open and I reload the program of misery.”

But Camus famously decided that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, content and even joyous to accept rock-pushing as simultaneously the method and meaning of his existence, and indeed Louis seems the same way; dedicated father, motivated artist, and still not a suicide after 43 years of being beaten down by life. In fact, the shittier his life, the funnier his material. Wrote Kierkegaard, “The more one suffers, the more, I believe, one has a sense for the comic.”

As the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declares the mandate unconstitutional, this Dish thread continues. A reader writes:

Ilya Somin says that failure to purchase health insurance is like "virtually any failure to engage in activities, especially economic transactions…. This is true of failures to purchase broccoli." That is patently absurd. Unless a person without insurance dies without ever needing medical care, that person will need to avail him or herself of the health care system at some point.  Life is not at stake in the purchase of broccoli. Any person can go an entire lifetime without purchasing broccoli, and no one will be required to buy that person broccoli in order to save that person's life.

Insurance is different than a market transaction based on personal desires.  No one chooses to need health care.  It is something that happens to a person. If it happens to someone who has had the opportunity to purchase health care (even when offered a government subsidy) but has chosen not to, that person's choice then imposes costs on the entire health care system. That same person's choice not to purchase broccoli does not impose costs on society.

Another writes:

As a lawyer, I believe there are genuinely held ideological objections to the notion that the U.S. population should have universal health care, but I submit that there is no legitimate argument that the Commerce Clause does not empower Congress to regulate the direct payment of health care costs – – an industry equal to an estimated 1/6th of the U.S. economy and a line item cost that is factored into the overwhelming majority of every product and service provided by businesses and service firms throughout the country.  The pages of arguments against HCR's constitutionality based on notions of a "slippery slope" to a Congressional dictatorship and/or a "parade of horribles" that the federal government could force you to "eat your broccoli" are logically and legally incorrect.  But that point has been extensively set forth on your site (and others).

What I think is the interesting and overlooked point is that this HCR "constitutional" debate only exists because the Obama administration chose in legislative arguments and bill drafting to characterize the enforcement mechanism as a "penalty," and did not dare use the word "tax."  No one disputes that the federal government's taxing authority would allow it to tax individuals who did not purchase health insurance (or to issue a "tax credit" to those who did).  And if HRC was presented as an issue of the government's taxing authority, there would be no constitutional question.  None at all.

On that point, in the article you posted, Robert Levy (Cato Institute) quickly and early dismisses the taxing authority basis for HRC, arguing that "[t]he Taxing Power rationale hasn’t garnered support from any court – principally because the penalty was neither intended nor structured as a tax."  Notably, he does not, and could not (plausibly), argue that HRC was not perfectly "legal" under the taxing authority of Congress.

Now, despite Mr. Levy's quick dismissal, it is not clear that HCR's enforcement mechanism is not a tax, and the Obama administration has argued vigorously in courts that it is a tax.  But, in the end, what is clear is that the ongoing and voluminous debate about whether Congress had the power to enact HCR, and whether the U.S. (like all other Western countries) could democratically vote to have universal health care,  only exists because it was politically impossible in the current Republican environment to use the word "tax."  If HCR had said a "tax" would be imposed, instead of a "penalty," this issue would never be debated, much less a greatly anticipated Supreme Court ruling on the Commerce Clause.   

So, at bottom, this HRC "debate,"  like the last threatened government shut down, and the debt ceiling crisis, is really the product of the Republican lock-step insistence that there be no tax increases or elimination of tax deductions – no matter the merit of the position.  And, again, this is not about purity on tax issues.  Republicans have effectively captured the tax issue as a tremendously effective tool to enact or block a score of non-tax ideological issues.  In this case, it has been to complicate and potentially block a universal healthcare bill.  But there is no "constitutional" reason that the U.S. could not have universal health care.  

Palin arrives in Iowa.

"Michele Bachmann's first answer, Mark Halperin, was "I wish the federal government had defaulted." Had defaulted, a week after Americans had lost–some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401(k)s, when trillions of dollars went down the drain [pounds the table] with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause, and if anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way when this rolls out of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, in the early stages, and really gets going, they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines. I'll let you go now. I got it off my chest.

Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. And now I will pass it on to you. Her answer is a joke, her candidacy is a joke, and anybody that sits here and says she has any chance of winning anything is out of their mind. Take your straw poll, take your caucus, but Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again," – Joe Scarborough.

If Bachmann is a joke, what does that make Palin?