Month: November 2013

Readers push back against my very qualified support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act:

Huge fan, and now subscriber. But you’re looking at the ENDA question all wrong. It isn’t about how many successful suits are filed under ENDA or any other hate crime law. The point of a law is not to prove how many “notches on a bedpost” can be achieved; it’s to stop the behavior before it ever occurs. So the next time management wants to do something to a gay employee, they stop, think twice, and the issue … never becomes an issue. Perhaps the employee will never even know it happened. We may never be able to put a number on this, so critics may always be able to say “look, this law is hardly ever used, so there was never a problem!” But for gay employees across the country to be able to sleep a little easier at night, it’s worth it.

The problem is: how can the need for any law therefore be analyzed? If there are no law suits, it works; if there are loads of law suits, it works.  Heads you win; tails you win. And freedom is nitpicked and nitpicked. Here’s a better response:

I volunteer with GLAD Answers, formerly the GLAD Legal Infoline, which provides legal information, assistance, and referrals for LGBTQ and HIV+ people in New England, and also flags cases that GLAD itself might be interested in taking on as impact litigation.  Now, New England is a pretty liberal region, so a lot of people assume there’s no employment discrimination problem here, but we actually get a decent number of calls and emails from people in this situation – last time I saw the numbers, well over a hundred in the previous year.  If you’re interested I can try get some recent numbers.  That’s just the people who contacted GLAD rather than start the legal process themselves or resign themselves and keep quiet/move on.  We get a lot more employment discrimination calls than we do housing or public accommodations discrimination.

If people want to pursue these cases, they generally involve going through a state anti-discrimination agency.  In my state, Massachusetts, the relevant agency is MCAD. According to MCAD’s 2012 (pdf) and 2011 (pdf) annual reports, they had 115 sexual orientation complaints filed with them in 2012 and 130 in 2011.  As 83% (2012) and 84% (2011) of all their complaints were about employment discrimination, it’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the sexual-orientation-based complaints were about employment discrimination. This is in liberal Massachusetts!

These numbers also don’t include discrimination against trans people, as protections for them weren’t passed in Massachusetts until mid-2012.  The plurality of those cases, by the way, end up being settled through MCAD mediation.  This doesn’t mean that the laws aren’t having an effect – if there was no law, MCAD wouldn’t be involved to mediate.

I can’t imagine having to tell callers that what happened to them was perfectly legal, that they have no legal recourse.  We’re fortunate here in New England that all of our states prohibit employment discrimination for sexual orientation, and all but New Hampshire prohibit it for gender identity.  Even though I am skeptical about ENDA’s ability to pass the House right now, I feel very strongly that the fight for it needs to keep going and stay strong (and come on, Gay, Inc over the last few years has been consumed with marriage equality more than anything else).

It’s also worth noting that employment protections for trans and gender non-conforming people are really important, as such a high percentage experience workplace discrimination and harassment – check out the National Transgender Discrimination Survey here.

Another:

A point you could have picked up on, but didn’t: It may be true that 88% of Fortune 500 companies have non-discrimination policies, but they are, increasingly, a smaller proportion of the workforce. As you yourself have found through the new independent Dish, a lot of Americans are going it alone or working for businesses that are much, much smaller. As I understand the numbers, Fortune 500 status is based on revenues, not employee numbers, so you have anomalies like Spectrum Group International, an $8 billion company ranked #331, but with only 190 employees.  There are far more people working for small companies – those with less than $4.8 billion in revenues, the cutoff point this year for Fortune 500 status – who are much  less likely to have employer-sponsored protection. ENDA would help them. Some may still choose to move on rather than fight to work in a hostile environment, but at least then it becomes a choice.

Another:

I have another reason why it is now very important to enact ENDA. It would help with the implementation of same-sex marriage. Given attitudes and personal considerations, many gay people remain closeted or semi-closeted at work.  However, entering into a lawful same-sex marriage would automatically out you to an employer.  This would occur because tax withholding and employer provided health insurance (and some other benefits) are partially dependent on marital status.

This is not a big deal if your employer is supportive or if you have legal protections. With regard to the legal protections and prior to this year, all of the U.S. jurisdictions with same-sex marriage had previously enacted a sexual orientation inclusive employment nondiscrimination law.  That changed with the Windsor case.  Despite not forbidding sexual orientation-based employment discrimination under federal statute, the national government will now recognize a same-sex marriage.  This lack of federal protection is not a huge problem if you and your spouse live and work in any of the 21 states that address this issue through state law.  But if you live in or work  in the other 29 states, you could be forced to out yourself to a hostile employer, without any legal protection, when setting up your withholding or  signing up for insurance.

While this issue might only concern a comparatively small number of married gay couples in the next year or so, it will certainly grow.  Several of the states (e.g. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia) that lack gay inclusive nondiscrimination protections are facing lawsuits to overturn their same-sex marriage bans.  A blanket level of national protection (ENDA) is going to be a major help in successfully implementing same-sex marriage. Otherwise, I fear that we are going to see gay couples getting married in some states only to be fired by their anti-gay employers.

That may well be the case. My own view is that the marriage debate – which got to the core of gay equality and dignity – has shifted attitudes so as to make this bill seem relatively anodyne. But my reader is right that there’s a virtuous cycle in the dynamic between both reforms.

Yesterday’s Dish on the positive case for ENDA here.

Sean Trende puts the coming Christie landslide in perspective:

If Christie matches his current numbers in the RCP Average, he would have the fourth-best showing of any Republican in the state in the post-World War II era. Only Sen. Clifford Case in his 1972 re-election, Dwight Eisenhower in the 1956 presidential re-election, and Gov. Tom Kean Sr. in his 1985 re-election put up better numbers.

He adds that “Chris Christie is easily the most conservative politician elected to statewide office in New Jersey in the past 60 years, and possibly longer”:

The normal Republican blueprint in the Northeast is to run as a center-right candidate on fiscal matters and center-left — if not left — on social issues (remember, Christine Todd Whitman opposed a ban on partial-birth abortions). On fiscal matters, Christie has been pretty hawkish, taking on the state’s teachers’ unions, overseeing cuts in spending and lowering taxes. Even on social issues, he has been fairly conservative, especially by Northeastern standards — he’s pro-life, against gay marriage (though he does support civil unions), and he even cut state funding for Planned Parenthood. This is an unusually conservative overall profile for a successful Republican politician in the region, much less for one of the most successful Republican politicians there in a generation.

Nate Cohn warns that it “would be extremely misguided to assume that conservative Republicans can simply jettison guns and immigration and routinely win blue states”:

But that doesn’t justify discounting Christie, either.

After all, Republicans don’t need to win New Jersey to win the presidency. They mainly need to hold down Democratic margins in areas that aren’t too different from New Jersey, like the well-educated and diverse suburbs around Philadelphia, Washington, Columbus, and Denver. The sheer margin by which Christie is surpassing what’s necessary is consistent with the possibility that even modest changes would be enough for a sufficient number of moderate voters to reconsider a Republican candidate.

There’s a historical precedent: Bill Clinton. He was ostensibly a “New Democrat,” even though he was pro-choice, supported higher taxes, a universal health care system, gun control, and expanded rights for gays in the military. Rather than abandon core elements of the Democratic agenda, Clinton softened the edges on unreformed welfare, crime, middle class taxes, and said abortion should be “rare,” even if it should remain legal.

Today’s “New Republican” might not look very different from Chris Christie.

Jonathan Tobin is skeptical that other Republicans can follow Christie’s example:

It needs to be understood that despite all the talk about Christie’s centrism, much of that has more to do with atmospherics than political principles. New Jersey Democrats have been complaining for years that Christie is actually quite conservative, and they’re right. Far from being the poster child for “No Labels” centrism, Christie has been willing to work with Democrats in Trenton but mostly on his terms. If he has become the bête noire of GOP conservatives it’s been because of his embrace of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy last year and his attacks on House Republicans over their stalling on an aid bill, not because of any heresy on conservative principle. Both on social issues like abortion and Tea Party core interests like reducing the size of government and fighting the power of unions, Christie fits in well with the rest of his party.

He’s gotten away with it not because citizens of the Garden State think he’s a closet liberal but because of the appeal of his personality and governing style. It’s an open question as to whether that brusque approach will play as well on the national stage as it has in New Jersey. But suffice it to say that I doubt a Republican looking to have that success in a different sort of state could use the same playbook. Though pundits will search for one, there’s no point looking for another Christie.

McKay Coppins makes similar points:

In a way, this is the biggest dilemma facing the RNC’s outreach efforts: there’s only one Christie. If the GOP wants to win races with a more racially diverse electorate, it will have to figure out how to sell candidates who don’t have the magnetism of a cult leader and the ideological flexibility of a blue state Republican. What’s more, if the party truly wants to rebrand itself among minority voters, Republicans will need strong, appealing standard-bearers who voters come to associate with the GOP. That’s easier said than done.

(Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty.)

Last week the company launched Day One, a weekly literary journal “dedicated to short fiction from debut writers, English translations of stories from around the world, and poetry.” Todd Wasserman highlights the first issue:

[It] appeared Wednesday with the short story “Sheila” by Rebecca Adams Wring and “Wrought,” a poem by Zach Strait. Each issue will also include a note from the editor introducing the writer and poet, along with bonus content like playlists, interviews with the authors and illustrations.

Day One is Amazon’s latest attempt to become a content creator rather than merely a distributor. The company has also recently launched its own TV programming through Amazon Prime. Over the summer, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos independently purchased The Washington Post for $250 million.

Liz Bury gauges the reaction of the publishing community:

[Literary fiction publisher Simon Prosser] welcomed Amazon’s initiative saying “the more ventures trying to get good writing out there, the better”. … “They seem to have chosen young, hip-looking people for the first edition,” said Neill Denny, who is chief operating officer of Read Petite, an online short fiction and non-fiction subscription service…. “For the young end of the literary market — the smartphone generation — it could work. It would be churlish not to welcome an attempt to build an audience for short literary fiction. It’s a noble aspiration.”

Jacob Kastrenakes notes the peculiarity of the new project, as literary journals “aren’t usually seen as being among the more profitable ventures out there”:

Amazon is initially offering a yearly subscription for $9.99, and though it’ll later be raised up to $19.99, at either price Amazon will be significantly undercutting the cost of most highly regarded literary journals, which largely don’t have the resources Amazon does to allow them to operate at such a low cost.

But while price is a war that Amazon can easily fight and win, quality will be its biggest battle. Because literary journals are publishing different authors every issue, they’re generally regarded by the quality of work that they’re able to bring in — with quality work bringing about further quality work down the road. If Amazon can begin to curate and publish quality content in its journal, it could also help to bolster the company’s own literary publishing imprint, Little A, which so far has just over a dozen novels to its name.

“As if they weren’t already making enough money,” snaps the anti-Amazon Dustin Kurtz:

As to why the company might have decided to start a literary journal, the only thought that comes to me is that it’s either a vanity project for someone, a charm offensive (emphasis on offensive) akin to the company’s grants to various magazines and literary organizations, or, again, they may have been motivated by the towering cliffs of cash this thing will bring them. Really. So much money.

A baffled Tom Cheredar suspects that “for now, all we can really say is that the company is definitely playing a long game.”

Bruce Bartlett begins to see signs of Republicans actually confronting the issues of 2013 – soaring inequality, stagnant wages, and a depressed economy – rather than those of 1980:

On Oct. 28, the Republican governor of Ohio, John R. Kasich, blasted his party for its “war on the poor.” He said that the G.O.P. implicitly believed that “if you’re poor, somehow you are shiftless and lazy.” Against Tea Party opposition, Governor Kasich recently expanded Medicaid in his state under the Affordable Care Act – an act of virtual treason against Tea Party dogma. On Oct. 31, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent think tank in Washington, said the conservative war against the social safety net was “just insane.” He urged his fellow conservatives to “declare peace on the safety net.”

And why, pray, does that peace not extend to the ACA?

(Video: Kasich discussing his Medicaid decision)

A reader writes:

I think it’s only really possible to understand this contretemps if we understand where Eric Alterman is coming from. He’s actually been pretty frank, especially at one appearance at the 92nd Street Y  (summarized here), in saying that he is a person with “dual loyalties” to the US and Israel. In the end, I don’t think Alterman is attacking Blumenthal because he’s a poor writer or a bad journalist, or even because he’s substantively wrong about any material facts. He’s attacking Blumenthal for being disloyal to Israel. If you understand that, then the whole thing makes a lot of sense. But Alterman doesn’t emerge from it looking like a journalist or a serious analyst; rather, he is simply a propagandist, prepared to score points any way he can in the service of the state of Israel.

Go read the transcript my reader refers to and make up your own mind. I was a little gob-smacked – and impressed – by its candor. A sample:

You know, one of the touchiest words you can say when you’re discussing Jews and Israel is the word dual loyalty. It’s sort of one of those words that American Jewish officialdom has ruled out of the discourse. If you say dual loyalty, you’re playing into the hands of anti-semites, because it’s been a consistent trope among anti-Semites that you can’t trust Jews. etc. etc. And I find this very confusing because I was raised dually loyal my whole life. When I went to Hebrew school, the content of my Hebrew school was all about supporting Israel. When my parents who I think are here tonight sent me to Israel when I was 14, on a ZOA [Zionist Organization of America]-sponsored trip… [laughter/backtalk] that was a bad idea, yeah– it was drummed into me that I should do what’s best for Israel…

Now it so happens that because so few people are willing to say this, and there’s certainly good historical reasons for this, I end up being quoted by Walt and Mearsheimer as the only person saying, I am a dual loyal Jew and sometimes I’m going to actually go with Israel, because the United States can take an awful lot of hits and come up standing. Whereas if Israel takes one serious bad hit it could disappear. So there’s going to be some cases where when Israel and the United States conflict I’m going to support what’s best for Israel rather than what I think is best for the United States.

Another reader pushes back hard:

According to you, apropos of the the Alterman-Blumenthal fracas: “And I instinctively recoil from arguments that try to police public debate – as so many reflexively pro-Greater-Israel writers sadly do.”

Yes, ad hominem vilification of writers with whose opinions one disagrees, in an attempt to push their arguments outside the bounds of acceptable debate, is certainly a bad thing.  For example, which blogger was it who reflexively described Alterman’s criticism of Blumenthal’s book as a “smear” – not a criticism, even a harsh (and, presumably, inaccurate) criticism, but a “smear” by “one of the more egregiously nasty writers in America” – even before he read Blumenthal’s actual book?  I’m trying to remember … Now I remember … it was Andrew Sullivan.

It seems that “provocations” are OK, as long as they are hostile to Israel, but criticizing them is impermissible and reprehensible (even if those criticisms happen to be generally accurate–judging from Blumenthal’s own account of the substance and implications of his argument).  OK, I get it.  Thanks for the guidance.

I don’t need to read Blumenthal’s book to take a view of the sneering and nasty tone of Alterman’s diatribe against it, and the imputation of anti-Semitism behind it. As to policing debate, I have been extremely diligent in linking to every post on both sides of it. That’s not policing it. I do have a view on the exchange – which is that Blumenthal painstakingly eviscerates the criticism, and is airing facts that are worth including in the debate on this very sensitive topic.

As for only backing provocations when they attack Israel, I cannot imagine anyone looking at my career or this blog can take that seriously. Really? Race and IQ? Gender and testosterone? Animal welfare? Circumcision? Against hate crime laws for gays? I mean, I have had a career of provocations – all of which were designed to prompt real debate (and of course, I had my share of failures and over-reach along the way.) The idea that I only like provocations when they rattle the Greater Israel lobby is hooey. And, yes, a smear designed to imply that I’m anti-Semitic.

Below is some disturbing footage of the last public guillotining in France, in 1939 (before it was completely abolished in 1977):

A reader writes:

Bringing back the guillotine will never happen, for one reason: the uber-ick factor. I raise and kill my own rabbits for meat, and kill them using cervical dislocation – somewhat similar to the guillotine. I hold the rabbit, pet it, thank it for nourishing me and my family, slip a loop over its neck and yank. The head is dislocated from its spine immediately,  and (in theory!) the rabbit feels nothing.

The problem is that, just like a chicken running around with its head cut off, its lifeless body “runs” for an eternity afterwards. It’s really only about a minute or two, but it can feel like an eternity – its head dangling, and the body flailing. Later, when you’re cutting up the carcass, muscles can still be twitching. That would happen to humans, too. Not as much – our limbs are heavier and harder to move – but some.

Another asks:

Are we really sure that, as Kruzel writes in his post, “quickly severing the head is believed to be one of the quickest, least painful ways to die”?  I remember reading this from a biography of Catherine the Great:

[W]as death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless?  Some believe not.  They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness… Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movements of the eyes, lips, and mouth.  As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pin-prick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action.

Now I don’t know about you, but after reading this section, I’ve had a few dreams where I thought I was the subject of one of these experiments.  Someone’s just cut off my head and then immediately stuck a needle in my face to see if I could feel it and then said, “Nah, he’s fine!  It’s just a twitch!” (In a French accent, no less.)

Another reader:

Yeah, I think when cutting off the head of another human being is the “most humane” form of capital punishment, it may be about time for the U.S. to join the two-thirds of the world that has already abolished the death penalty. I’d love to see the public opinion numbers if the states that still have the death penalty all announce that to respect the rights of the prisoners they’ll be using the guillotine in the future. Public opinion would probably turn faster than any issue ever polled.

It’s already dropping, according to a new Gallup poll from last week. Nicole Flatow looks at related trends:

[A] recent study found that, since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted that moratorium in 1976, the majority of executions have been performed in just 2 percent of U.S. counties. And six states have abolished the penalty in as many years. In 2012, only 80 people were executed nationwide.

All of this lends even more weight to the argument that the punishment is increasingly “unusual” as defined by the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual standard. But it may also explain why half of Americans still think the punishment is imposed fairly. With so many states and counties eliminating the punishment, many simply have little exposure to those cases in which shoddy evidence or discriminatory decision-making lead to arbitrary sentencing.

Andrew Cohen highlights the racial disparities in those put to death. He concludes:

Like all polls, this one gives us little more than a snapshot of current attitudes about a topic that clearly is evolving as a matter of both law and politics. Six states have banned capital punishment since 2006 and lawmakers in several others are contemplating similar measures. And that’s really where these poll numbers ought come into play—as a reminder of how far the conversation has come on capital punishment and how far it still has to go. The numbers may change here or there, the percentages may vary a little, but the truth is that the death penalty in America either needs to be overhauled so that it is fairly and justly applied or it needs to be scrapped altogether as a capricious practice unbecoming a civilized nation of laws.

Erin Fuchs considers reasons why more Americans now oppose the death penalty:

We spoke to death penalty expert Douglas Berman, who attributed the drop in support to three big factors: high-profile exonerations of death row inmates; the disappearance of “tough on crime” attitudes popular in the ’80s and ’90s; and the successful repeal of the death penalty in a number of U.S. states.

On AC360 Later last week, I detailed my own opposition to the death penalty (unembeddable clip here). Jennifer Kirby notes that falling support for capital punishment correlates with the decrease in violent crime. But Allahpundit doesn’t think this explains the drop:

[L]ots of Americans don’t actually know that crime has been dropping over time. A Pew poll published in May of this year provides additional evidence. The number of crimes committed while using a gun has fallen along with the rest of the crime rate, but a clear majority of Americans (56 percent) thinks it’s gone up over the past 20 years. (Only 26 percent knew the truth.) How can support for capital punishment be eroding due to America becoming safer if Americans don’t know that it’s safer?

He’s one of those slimy, oily, back-slapping, money-grubbing pols that creep me out. He doesn’t even have the Clinton charm. And yet he’s ahead:

Republican Ken Cuccinelli goes into today’s gubernatorial election in Virginia expected to lose to Democrat Terry McAullife, a man who almost missed the birth of a child to attend a fundraiser and once downed shots of Puerto Rican rum on morning television. The Most Quoted Man in Washington, University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato, has summed up the election as two people “running against the only people they could beat”—and Cuccinelli, well, couldn’t.

Why?

His answer:

[Cuccinelli] chose the campaign path that offered the most resistance from 21st-century constituencies. For instance, already vulnerable to suggestions he was overly involved in people’s bedroom activities (he’d sent an volunteer to monitor a George Mason University sex fair and said the state should regulate gay sex), he opted to set up a website to advocate for the restoration of the state’s sodomy law, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. And critically, given the extension of the franchise to women just 93 years ago, McAuliffe was able to target Cuccinelli for supporting transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions because Cuccinelli supports transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

Cuccinelli is a reactionary theocon of the Catholic variety, a type gently reprimanded by the current Pope. Par exemple:

My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.

Myra Adams notes the huge gender divide in the Virginia race:

Women are McAuliffe’s key to victory. According to a recent Washington Post poll, there is not just a gender gap but a gender canyon, with McAuliffe trumping Cuccinelli 58 to 34 percent with women voters. Cuccinelli is opposed to abortion and holds traditional views on gay marriage and contraception. The McAuliffe campaign has successfully labeled him as an extremist.

Enten’s analysis of the race:

McAuliffe’s success has largely depended on Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli being even more disliked. Sound familiar? It should, because a very similar battle is going on for the 2014 midterms. Democrats are trying to break a stretch of the White House party losing or winning fewer than 10 seats in the House of Representatives – a stretch that dates back to the civil war. They need to take 17 seats to win back the House.

Right now, Democrats are ahead on the national House ballot by about four points among likely 2014 voters. As in Virginia, it’s all about being less ugly. President Obama’s approval rating is bad, but Republican approval ratings are worse. The fact that voters in Virginia are disobeying the longer term election after the presidential race trend should have national Republicans at least somewhat worried.

Update from a reader:

Here are two things that are very interesting about the VA governor race. The first is that it is very focused. McAuliffe is using his DNC knowledge about microtargetting to his maximum advantage. With me being an immigrant, my wife is the only voter in our household. The only gubernatorial stuff we’ve got in the mail is stuff on women’s rights. Nothing on jobs, nothing on health care – only women’s rights. Cuccinelli has sent us nothing, even though we got plenty of mail from our Republican Delegate. He even showed up at her polling station this morning.

Second, and perhaps more important, McAuliffe has masterfully succeeded to stay focused on the issues, not on his personality – which is a loser for him. And even more interesting, McAuliffe has come out swinging as a true Democrat. Pro-Obamacare. Pro-choice. Pro-gay. Pro-transit. And: pro-compromising – he will likely face a Republican House of Delegates, while the separately-elected lieutenant-governor will break the tie in the Senate.

Normally, Democrats who want to win in Virginia pose as centrists – see Warner and Kaine – to get elected. McAuliffe will entirely win on Obamacare and women’s issues – and sheer disgust of Cuccinelli.

(Photo: Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe passes a campaign flyer to three-year-old Ozzie Springer of Centerville, Virginia, as he greets commuters on Election Day at Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro Station in Fairfax, Virginia. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Let’s go to Kentucky, a deep red state which has nonetheless set up one of the best systems for getting health insurance for the poor. We have heard an awful lot of gripes from those with insurance on the individual market, and those with Cadillac-style plans who have been forced to adjust. But the people we haven’t yet truly seen or heard are those getting affordable insurance for the first time in their lives. Maybe I’m a squish, but this report from the NYT helped put some of the political cock-fighting into perspective:

The woman, a thin 61-year-old who refused to give her name, citing privacy concerns, had come to the public library here to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky’s new online exchange. She had a painful lump on the back of her hand and other health problems that worried her deeply, she said, but had been unable to afford insurance as a home health care worker who earns $9 an hour.

Within a minute, the system checked her information and flashed its conclusion on Ms. Cauley’s laptop: eligible for Medicaid. The woman began to weep with relief. Without insurance, she said as she left, “it’s cheaper to die.”

What price can you put on that? Or on this:

So far, [insurance agent Donald Mucci] has enrolled just a few longtime customers in exchange plans. They include Mrs. Shields, 49, a widow who had been rejected by insurance companies because she has diabetes. She is paying $745 a month for coverage through a program for people with pre-existing conditions, but the program will end in January.

Mrs. Shields, who has an annual income of about $17,000, qualified for a monthly premium subsidy of $232 a month. With Mr. Mucci’s help, she chose a silver-tier plan offered by Anthem that has a $2,450 deductible and a $4,500 out-of-pocket maximum. She will pay a monthly premium of $151 after the subsidy.Mr. Mucci said he would get a commission of $18 from the transaction. Before the health care law, he said, he would typically receive a lot more.

“Is it a win?” he said. “For Judy, it sure is.”

At the core of this technocratic edifice is something quite simple: the lifting of intense anxiety, the restoration of personal dignity, the chance to live better and longer, the opportunity to be free of physical pain. In the end, though I remain skeptical about whether the ACA is the best possible solution to the plight of those in such need, it is the only solution at hand. I want it to work. And I find the brutal attacks on it to be devoid of any true sense of what it feels to be alone and sick and terrified.

(Photo: Affordable Care Act navigator Adrian Madriz (R) speaks with Lourdes Duenas, who is looking for health insurance, during a navigation session put on by the Epilepsy Foundation Florida to help people sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on October 8, 2013 in Miami, Florida. By Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty.)