Year: 2013

The Words That Don’t Get Written

In an interview, the comic poet Aaron Belz describes how his work as a critic and teacher have improved his poetry:

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they’ve forced me to focus on the structure of ideas. I tend to think of my poems now as being thesis-driven. My poems are also very sentence-oriented, rarely employing fragments or other grammatical curiosities.

That’s not to say the sentences are always logical. In fact, they are often illogical, but illogic is the Mr. Hyde to logic’s Dr. Jekyll. They’re really the same person, just like saying something and not saying something both imply speech in some sense. Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is. I’m sure most teachers do this.

For me, it plays out in my writing, because I’m thinking of all the possibilities of what a sentence or stanza or poem might say, within the context it has established, and then saying only a few of them. Really we’ve only written about .00000000001% of great poems possible to be written.

Too Poor For Subsidies, Too Rich For Medicaid

medicaid_eligibility_by_state

Today the NYT reported on the millions of impoverished Americans who will suffer because they live in states that refused Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion:

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

Paul Waldman created a chart (above) that shows state-by-state Medicaid eligibly:

The bars in red are the states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion, and as you can see, almost all of them are clustered at the lowest end of the eligibility spectrum. That means that the states where the Medicaid expansion would have done the most good for the most people are precisely those states where Republican governors and legislatures have told their poor citizens that they’re out of luck.

Yglesias blames this state of affairs on Supreme Court Justice John Roberts:

A couple of the states that don’t expand Medicaid in 2013 will, I think, change their minds fairly soon. Perhaps right after the 2014 midterms. And in a place like Texas that’s superconservative but much too large for Democrats to ignore, the expansion issue will give the party a shot in the arm and a good issue to talk about. Expansion won’t win right away, but it should win soon enough. But Mississippi? Alabama? There are going to be pockets of the country where poor people continue to lack insurance for quite a long time, all thanks to Roberts and the stubborn intransigence of conservative politicians.

Drum thinks this unfair to Roberts, noting that the “vote against the Medicaid provision was 7-2”:

The basic holding was simple: given our federalist structure, states can’t be forced to help fund new federal programs like Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. They have to be given a genuine choice. If rejecting the program merely means losing the benefits even though your state’s income tax dollars are helping to fund it, that’s a tough choice, but still a real one. Conversely, if you’re threatened with losing not just the funds for the expansion, but your entire existing Medicaid program, it’s not a real choice at all. Nobody could even dream of doing that. In practical terms, you’re being forced to accept the expansion and you’re being forced to pay for it with state dollars.

Washington Does Something Right

Congress has extended the Special Immigrant Visa program. Packer cheers:

This means that the door to immigration hasn’t completely shut on Iraqis who worked with Americans and as a result have no future in their own country. (I wrote about the shameful abandonment of interpreters and others last week.)

With this reprieve, it’s now up to the Obama Administration to determine how many of the remaining seventeen thousand visas, out of an original twenty-five thousand, will be issued. The Afghan visa program is due to expire next September 30th. The record on both has been abysmal up to now, but suddenly, with everything else in Washington gone dark, a light is shining on this injustice.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

The Digital Black Market Goes Dark

silk_road_seized

The founder of the Internet drug marketplace Silk Road has been arrested and the website seized:

According to the indictment, Silk Road was bigger than anyone had suspected: It boasted over $1.6 billion in sales from 2011-2013, which resulted in $80 million in commissions. (Researchers had previously estimated that Silk Road was doing about $22 million in total sales per year.)

Though Silk Road was a massive part of the Bitcoin marketplace, which is now fluctuating wildly, Kristin Salyer thinks the marketplace’s demise could benefit the currency:

Bitcoin no longer needs Silk Road. For one thing, there are other online marketplaces where Bitcoin could be used illegally. Perhaps more important, as Reuters reported yesterday, in the three months ended in June, Bitcoin startups raised almost $12 million from venture capital investors. Bitcoin may still be high-risk, but a customer base of legit startups and fewer drug lords probably bodes well.

Felix Salmon agrees that, if “Silk Road is now shut down and if no one else manages to enter the vacuum caused by its disappearance, then the FBI will at a stroke have managed to remove the single skeeviest aspect of bitcoin, and the main reason why people like Chuck Schumer are so suspicious of it.” However, he still thinks Bitcoin interest will eventually fade regardless:

Bitcoins are a fad, and they’re a fad which will pass, a bit like Beanie Babies. There was no one thing which caused the market in Beanie Babies to implode, it was more that people just moved on to other things. Bitcoin’s the same: newer, shinier virtual currencies will arrive, the techno-utopians will latch onto something else, and eventually the people holding bitcoins will understand that if an asset doesn’t throw off any cashflow, the only way to make money from it is to sell it at a higher price than you bought it. In other words, bitcoin is the ultimate speculative vehicle, one which you might be able to trade in and out of, but one which has no value at all as a buy-and-hold investment. Which is something to bear in mind when you read the next big Bloomberg article on bitcoins as an asset class.

A Safety Net For Starving Artists

That’s one way Alyssa sees Obamacare:

[T]he Affordable Care Act matters to artists–just as it matters to a lot of entrepreneurs–because it makes it easier to take chances and carve out the time that makes it possible to pursue an artistic career. These aren’t folks who are demanding instant success, or a lot of money for their art, or even consistent rather than seasonal or contract employment. Instead, they’re people who want to lower their overall level of risk, and are more than willing to pay to afford to do so.

… If you can buy yourself a safety net, it’s much easier to go out on the road as a musician and accept that your level of income is going to be fairly low, or quit your job to finish writing the novel your publisher has purchased from you and take the chance that it’ll do well enough for you to get the next contract. In other words, the Affordable Care Act is offering artists, musicians, and writers–and a whole lot of other people–an opportunity to be economically mobile. It makes it easier to be brave, and take risks, not just in the art that you’re creating, but in deciding to make art at all.

What Will Fuel The Future GOP?

Waldman ponders national politics after the GOP has learned to live with Obamacare:

The question is, if eventually they have no choice but to accept that the argument over the ACA is settled, what on earth will Republicans do with themselves? Because over the last four years, opposition to Obamacare has taken on such an extraordinary power within the movement that all other issues have paled before it.

Sure, they could revert to the old standbys—Cut taxes! Cut regulations! Strong defense! But those are just positions you can take. Obamacare was a war to be fought. And nothing galvanizes, energizes, and defines us like our wars. That’s particularly true of the zealots who are driving the Republican party and form such a key part of its base. And if they aren’t fighting Obamacare, who will they be?

Kilgore doesn’t accept Waldman’s premise:

I think Waldman is wrong to assume that Republicans will “forget” a lost war or totally concede defeat. Conservatives “lost” on Social Security and Medicare, after all, but that hasn’t kept them from continuing to make rearguard efforts to “reform” or otherwise radically change these programs, as they continue to do today.

Dedicated To The Desperate

In today’s video from After Tiller‘s Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, they explain how the political backgrounds of the doctors are much more diverse than you might think:

Martha and Lana also note how, much like the readers who contributed to our “It’s So Personal” series, the patients who agreed to participate in After Tiller did so in the hope that sharing their ordeal could help others facing the same situation:

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The film is now playing in New York, and will open tomorrow in Los Angeles and Toronto as well, followed by many more cities across the country. Trailer here. Martha and Lana’s previous videos are here.

The GOP Just Took The Pressure Off Iran

Rogin and Lake point out that, with the shutdown underway, the offices that enforce our sanctions on Iran are empty:

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Iran could capitalize on the lack of monitoring and sanctions enforcement to replenish its coffers and advance its nuclear program while no one is looking.

“If the lights are not on, then the Iranians will engage in massive sanctions busting to try to replenish their dwindling foreign exchange reserves,” he said. “If you don’t have the resources to investigate, identify, and designate the tens of billions of dollars of Iranian regime assets, then you’ve extended the economic runway of the Iranian regime and increased the likelihood that they could reach nuclear breakout sooner rather than later.”

Shooting At The Capitol

More updates at the Guardian live-blog. Update: confirmation from Reuters regarding Twitter reports on the fate of the suspect:

A woman suspected of being involved in a car chase across central Washington was shot and killed by police outside the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday, a U.S. official said. The incident, which sparked a lockdown of Congress, began when the woman tried to ram through security barricades outside the White House. The official said a Capitol policeman was injured when the car driven by the suspect crashed outside the Capitol.