Year: 2013

Reality Check

The Washington Post finds that Americans are increasingly unhappy with the GOP:

WaPo Polling

Larison analyzes the poll:

It’s true that most voters aren’t pleased with Congressional Democrats or Obama, either, but both the extent and the intensity of disapproval are significantly worse for the GOP. (Strong disapproval of Republicans’ handling of things among registered voters is a little higher still at 53%.) That’s not a surprise when no one, including Republicans in Congress, can explain what the GOP hopes to achieve at this point.

Pew’s latest (pdf) shows that a plurality of Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown and that fewer Americans are blaming Obama:

Pew Polling

JPod tries to talk sense into GOP partisans:

The Illogic Of The GOP’s Spin

Beutler observes that the GOP’s shutdown and debt ceiling strategies are at odds:

Once the Treasury can no longer borrow to finance deficits, it will have to arbitrarily slash spending on everything the government does — from defense, to social insurance, to medical research, and eventually to debt service.

The government currently borrows about 30 cents on every dollar, which means that irrespective of the impact on U.S. creditworthiness and global financial markets, the effects on these services will be enormous. … [T]he House has already attempted to force Treasury to prioritize interest payments to U.S. creditors — to “Pay China First,” as Democrats say — and benefits for Social Security recipients in the event of a breach. That effort failed. But if it had succeeded, it would mean everything else — all the things Republicans are rallying around right now — would take a harder hit if U.S. borrowing authority lapses this month.

The GOP’s current position thus boils down to to the laughable idea that nothing’s more important than reopening federal monuments, funding clinical trials, and spending money on veterans services for two weeks, until we breach the debt limit and they have to be shut down again.

Banksy Takes New York

dish_banksy

For the month of October, the famed street artist “will be attempting to host an entire show on the streets of New York.” His first creation, pictured above, was painted over within a day, “presumably by someone who hasn’t recently checked the artist’s auction results:

The ongoing event is accompanied by a phone number (800) 656-4271 that you can call with a specific code correlating to each artwork. The current recording for #1, shown above, involves a satirical message that completely skewers typical audio tours found in museums and galleries and pokes fun of the artist as well, referring to him repeatedly as “Ban Sky”.

His latest creation popped up today in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

(Photo via Better Out Than In)

Quote For The Day

“Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech in the UN demonstrates that ensuring Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons is not his only goal. Netanyahu needs to make the Iranian publicly surrender, to beat them, to humiliate them. He wants to win big, to be a real man. And real men don’t only talk, real men shoot. Or at least threaten to shoot until the other side is begging, down on its knees. Netanyahu wants to see the other side on their knees. Not only Iran, but the Palestinians too … If Israel wants security, it needs to build trust with those who are our current enemies. Netanyahu cares far too much for our pride and honor and far too little for our safety. Mister Prime Minister, one doesn’t achieve peace or security with pride or honor. Peace and security are achieved through negotiations. It is time we give up victimhood and take responsibility for our safety and well-being. Time to support negotiations with Iran and to sign a peace and security agreement with the Palestinians,” – MK Merav Michaeli.

Mental Health Break

An otter that thinks it’s a dog:

But Doug Barry gets an uneasy feeling:

If you take a closer look at this video (which appears to feature a jaunty otter playing with some people), you’ll realize that the otter is no ordinary otter — it is a scout otter, sent from the great Otterman Empire to ascertain the relative strength of human warriors. The report? Humans are trusting and weak — they shall be easy to conquer.

Be on the lookout for ostriches on the horizon.

DFW’s Other Half Of The Story

Adam Plunkett reviews the first book by Karen Green, the widow of David Foster Wallace:

Bough Down is the story of Green’s mourning, first and foremost. But a layer of it challenges the sensibility she mourns and may partially blame. “Honey, you smell agathokakological,” she writes, that word meaning made of both good and evil. I think that she cares less to lay blame than to define her husband’s streak of moral absolutism, a sensibility restlessly upset about the dross in himself. Green is both despondent and funny, both hopeful and desperate, both out of control and contained. She is comfortably unsure, and she goes through the vicious cycles that characterize so many Wallace protagonists without pushing the reader away or being undone by her own introspection. She takes apart the pieces of her thought, as does Wallace, but not to fleece herself for bad habits by obsessing over her own motivations. He would “[name] the impulse mistaken or accidental”; she doesn’t. He was famous for the either/or of ironies—either I love you or need you, either I’m selfish or able to care for you not just to make myself feel better, either I’m free or I serve a false god—stretched out from sentences to meganovels. Where his sensibility was either/or, hers is both/and, and a celebration of imperfect life.

How Your Neighbor’s Insurance Covers You

Kurt Eichenwald argues that – even if you have health insurance – if “more people in your community are uninsured, your care will be worse”:

Hospitals don’t have poverty wards; if a patient comes in the door in bad shape, they don’t do a wallet biopsy before deciding what care that person should receive—everyone at a hospital receives the same quality. But if a community has a higher number of uninsured, that means the latest and greatest technology and treatments will drive up the amounts of unreimbursed care. In essence, hospitals that provide the best, most modern, and most expensive treatments in an area with lots of uninsured will be forced to pass unsustainable amounts of cost to their prices. Insurance companies won’t pay it, local governments won’t finance it, and the hospitals will go out of business.

The only option then? Don’t provide the top-quality care to anyone—insured or not. That keeps the cost of uncompensated care down and lets the hospital stay in business.

This is not something I have just dreamed up. Repeated studies over the past decade have showed a consistent relationship between the number of uninsured in an area and the quality of care available for all residents there.

The Tea Party Doesn’t Want Compromise; It Wants Surrender

Supreme Court Hears Arguments On Constitutionality Of Health Care Law

Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, explains why the Tea Party caucus is immune to compromise:

They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to [Paranoid Style of American Politics author Richard] Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil.

McKay Coppins makes related points:

From its genesis in 2009, the Tea Party movement has been fueled by the rhetoric of revolution. True believers attend rallies unironically dressed in colonial garb.

Their early organizers preached earnestly from Saul Alinsky’s left-wing activist handbook Rules For Radicals — a book that advises just the sort of procedural disruption they’ve imposed this week. And while Nevada Senate candidate Sharon Angle outraged mainstream political observers when she suggested people may start looking for “Second Amendment remedies” to the country’s problems, one recent survey showed that nearly half of Republicans believe armed insurrection might be necessary “in the next few years.”

Data points like those have long been Democrats’ bread and butter as they work to cast the Tea Party as “extreme.” But they also show just how extreme conservatives consider America’s current peril to be. To believe an armed revolution could realistically be on the horizon is to live with the genuine suspicion that your government could, at any point, be overtaken by tyranny. In that context, some temporary furloughs seem like a small price to pay.

Kilgore adds:

71% [of Tea Party conservatives] think Obama is “destroying the country.” Wow. So is it any great surprise that these same people, and the House members who identify with them, are willing to go to dangerous lengths to mess up Obama’s signature policy achievement and force a significant change in the federal government’s direction? Who cares about the risk of destroying the economy if the destruction of the country itself is the current trajectory?

(Photo: Wearing what she calls ‘war paint,’ Susan Clark of Santa Monica, CA rings a bell while demonstrating against Obamacare outside the U.S. Supreme Court on March 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

How Race Informs The Obamacare Fight

Nancy Folbre digs up an AP survey on racial attitudes taken just before the 2012 election:

28 percent of respondents believed that [Obama’s] policies had made black Americans better off, compared with only 15 percent who believed they had made white Americans better off.  I don’t know of any analysis of the president’s economic stimulus program – or any other policy – purporting to show that blacks benefited more than whites. …

Respondents predisposed to believe that a black president will try to benefit blacks more than whites are likely to view the Affordable Care Act through a racial lens, which helps explain the results of a recent Pew survey showing that almost 91 percent of blacks currently approve of the law, compared with 29 percent of whites.

Relatedly, TNC recently argued that the ACA is likely to benefit African Americans less than other groups:

When President Obama leaves office there will almost certainly be efforts to ascertain the impact of our first black president on the black community. Defenders of the president’s record will likely point to Obamacare as the kind of program that expanded the safety net for everyone but specifically for those in need — a class in which African Americans are overly represented.

I have, of late, been anxious to add an asterisk to this accolade. As I’ve noted before, black people are also disproportionately represented in many of the states which are refusing the Medicaid expansion. Thus the idea that Obama has aided poor black people through a broad race-blind expansion of the social safety net deserves some scrutiny.