The Dish

Yglesias sighs:

There’s also a whole bunch of folks who’ve decided that it’d be hilarious to start referring to Rep. Cao as “Mao” because, you see, they’re both responsible for the deaths of millions Asians. Also this. I think the conservative movement is going to continue to struggle in a decreasingly white America.

Jay Newton-Small on why Cao voted for the bill:

by far the most amount of pressure came from Cantor and the White House. Obama pledged to work with Cao on additional financial aid for his district, especially in disaster loan forgiveness, and on help paying for expanded Medicaid services under the bill in the years to come. Cantor also lobbied Cao, meeting with him several times Saturday. Of course, according to Cao, the decision was purely altruistic. “I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people. My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents,” Cao said in his statement.

Marriage equality will benefit not just the gays:

As the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in the District grows louder and more polarized, there are people whose support for the proposal is personal but not often talked about. They are federal workers and professionals, men and women who share little except that their former spouses tried to live as heterosexuals but at some point realized they could not. […]

"It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," [Kimberly] Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!" Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her? "I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not."

These tangibly broken families, these ruptured relationships, these betrayed spouses and confused children: why is it that the anti-equality forces have nothing to say to them?

The latest loveliness from the crackpot fringes of the Christianist right.

Some revealing background:

As an indication of the election’s importance to the United States, [Ambassador Christopher] Hill was seen shuttling back and forth between the offices of various political parties all day Sunday in an effort to pressure them to reach a deal.

“Go upstairs and vote!” he shouted at a pair of slow-moving lawmakers as they climbed a set of stairs to the chamber before the session.

Where is David Lean when you need him?

Reihan wonders whether ethno-centrism, which is a polite way of saying racism, will be the deepest obstacle to Chinese success in the next generation. The fast-aging, gender-imbalanced society needs younger people to keep its economy going, and immigrants are the obvious solution. But culture stands in the way:

China is not terribly hospitable to ethnic outsiders, including members of non-Han minorities native to China. Observers tend to overstate the level of ethnic homogeneity in China, not least because the Han category masks tremendous cultural diversity. "Hanness" is as broad and contingent a category as "whiteness." But as Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong argued in his brilliant 1992 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China, traditional notions about culturally inferior "barbarians" intermingled with Western forms of scientific racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century. The "yellows" were locked in a struggle with their equals, the "whites"–and both were superior to the "blacks," "browns" and "reds." The dislike and distrust of Europeans was always mixed with envy and admiration. The disdain for dark-skinned foreigners, in contrast, was and remains relatively

uncomplicated.

Maoist China railed against Western imperialism, and saw itself as a leader of the global proletariat of Africans and Asians.

Now, as China emerges as an economic and cultural superpower, those notions of Third World solidarity, always skin deep, seem to have vanished. It is thus hard to imagine China welcoming millions of hard-working Nigerians and Bangladeshis with open arms. This could change over the next couple of decades as China's labor shortage grows acute. I wouldn't bet on it.

If China remains culturally closed, the Chinese Century will never come to pass. Instead, the United States–a country that has struggled with race and racism for centuries, and in the process has become more culturally open and resilient–will dominate this century as it did the last.

It can be hard to see developments like the civil rights movement for African-Americans, or the fight for women's or gay equality, as engines of economic growth. But they are; and they remain one of the West's core advantages, unless we too succumb to atavism and xenophobia.

HQ European Command, Stuttgart, Germany, 9 am

Ezra asks of the suddenly conscience-stricken Democrat:

What's the mechanism by which the public option increases the national deficit?

A reader writes:

Like you, I don't like abortion.  And I really don't like federal funding for it.   But the Stupak/Pitts amendment adopted in health reform by the House of Representatives went beyond the status quo of today's abortion landscape. 

The original bill made an important distinction — no federal funds for abortion procedures. Stupak's amendment — "codifying Hyde" in this context — means no federal funds for plans that cover abortions.  It's a critical distinction.  It's one thing when Hyde affected federal funding for Medicare which is mostly for seniors, FEHBP which is a condition of employment, or even Medicaid as 17 states use their own funds for paying for abortions. It's another thing when the bill affects a huge portion of the population and impacts their ability to pick private plans.

Today, taxpayers allow for the deduction of employer-based coverage. More than half of America are covered in plans that cover abortions.

In order to make coverage in the Exchange affordable, credits are paid to the person's choice of plans. The Bishops and opponents of health reform use this consumer-friendly feature of health reform (after all a tax deduction wouldn't help until the year after the policy is purchased) to seek to end abortion coverage in anyone's insurance.

Roughly 85% of people buying in the exchange are expected to receive some amount of affordability credit.  If Stupak becomes law, no person will be able to buy a plan in the Exchange that covers abortion.  It will force millions in the middle class to have their plans be deemed ineligible if they currently include abortion coverage – whether or not they qualify for subsidies.

Few women and even fewer men will sign their family plan up for coverage if it requires a rider.  Or they'll forget that it's available after signing up for a plan years before their daughters are teenagers. As the Bishops and their representatives in Congress told many members of Congress last week, few women use insurance coverage for abortions.  That's probably right.  But that won't help the thousands of women each year whose ethics tell them that they need an abortion for their health, or for their other fetus's health. The agonizing stories you posted earlier this year — many of them were expensive hospital procedures, not clinic-based ones -  are expensive.  And many will be out of pocket if Stupak becomes law.

The base text as amended in the Energy and Commerce Committee prevented federal dollars from paying for abortion procedures beyond a woman's life, or due to rape or incest. The President asked Congress not to allow federal funds for abortions, and the unamended bill did that  by segregating funds. The Catholic Church, and many others, are intimately familiar with this because they routinely receive federal, state, or local funds so long as they don't proselytize.  Basically only private premium dollars could be used.  And because people had choice of a variety of plans in the Exchange, if they didn't want their money going to abortions at all, they could choose another plan.

Many pro-life members of Congress saw the virtues in this and worked to strengthen that concept.  And the Bishops's representatives wrote angry letter after angry letter, screamed at members and staff and refused to come up with meaningful alternatives other than slight variations on their plan to restrict a person's right to pick the plan of their choice.  Instead of trying to seek common ground, they demonized others who sought to keep the status quo intact as much as possible while still supporting health reform.

And when all was said and done, after no less than 10 Bishop's staffers roamed the halls of Congress, claiming to speak for the Lord, they sent to only a small handful of members of Congress a letter blandly talking about some virtues of the health reform, while explaining they couldn't support the bill because they didn't have any experts in the area.

In short, they used leftover goodwill from their 1940s and 1960s efforts to support health reform to convince Members to work with them on abortion — meanwhile, they worked hand in hand with extreme right wing groups like Concerned Women, Family Research Council and National Right to Life.

I hope to God that the Senate has more understanding of the issue.

“I’m glad she’s getting the props — I know I’m not nearly as attractive,”- Mike Huckabee on Sarah Palin.

"Maybe Scientology has some good intentions for its members; many religions and spiritual orientations do, whether you call it a cult or otherwise. But one thing keeps getting clearer and clearer: the draconian culture of celebrity worship and the despotic bureaucracy and culture of fear keeps making Scientology look worse, and worse, and worse," – Foster Kamer.