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Sunday, April 24, 2005
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Why is the Bush administration's Bob Zoellick lowballing the death count in Darfur, the WaPo asks....
[War and Piece]
11:39:54 AM 
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God, Guns, and Gandhi.
My new practice of regularly reading NRO's Corner is paying off in spades. Today, Andrew Stuttaford manages to stop bitching about Cameron Diaz long enough to make this bold assertion: And as, for those 'spiritual' values that Diaz purports to find...
[Ezra Klein]
11:38:15 AM
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Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon nearly complete.
Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon nearly completeBeirut | April 24AP - On Tuesday, Lebanese troops at a base in Rayak, few miles from the Syrian border, will conduct a ceremony to pay tribute to the Syrian Army's role in Lebanon. Afterward, the token Syrian force will leave, and there will not be a single Syrian soldier left in Lebanon.
[The Agonist]
11:30:03 AM
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The Republican Party's God v. Mammon Smackdown.
For years, many of us have wondered how the Republican Party's odd couple assemblage of secular plutocrats and fire-breathing evangelicals could live with each other. Of course, both camps share a common loathing of the left, but when Republicans completely...
[The Left Coaster]
10:20:03 AM
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Worst Post WWII Recovery.
This is part IV of a series — It’s the Economy, Stupid – highlighting what is really happening in the economy. So far, it’s not a pretty picture. We’ve seen how Bush’s policies have in fact started to destroy the middle class of the US. In the first installment, I highlighted that THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS DONE NOTHING to help the middle class. THEY HAVE NOT TALKED ABOUT THE ISSUE OR ADDRESSED IT IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY. The second illustrated how job growth has been anemic and how that has led to no real growth in wages after inflation. The third demonstrated how the cycle of medical costs is leading to a record number of bankruptcies. Finally, today, we’ll notice a really disturbing picture. Corporations are making out like bandits thanks to shrub’s policies. [BOPnews]
10:19:27 AM
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Bill Frist is a liar and a crazy man.
The local TeeVee news had Bill Frist on for a brief interview after Bush's remarks at the hanger on Friday. First of all, the guy is just creepy. I wish I had taped it so you could see for yourself. When he talks he sounds like a crazy street person, and gets a weird, wild-eyed look that is, well, creepy. (...)
[South Knox Bubba]
10:18:45 AM
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A bunch of stuff .
Read Digby: This is another example of the folly of voting for superficial politics. Schwarzenneger is alleged to be a pretty smart guy. I think it was Hollywood hype. He's a hard worker who parlayed his body into a successful Hollywood career. (Many women have done the same before him, and none of them have been called geniuses for doing it.)
Josh has the come-back: The Crybaby option.
In case you missed it, Julian Borger's brief article Rice changed terrorism report: A state department report which showed an increase in terrorism incidents around the world in 2004 was altered to strip it of its pessimistic statistics, it emerged yesterday.
[The Sideshow]
7:11:47 AM
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Jesus Math.
While driving earlier today, I saw the following bumper sticker :
Which means if you want to solve the above formula to determine the value of a single nail, you'd get this :
Then again, it's been about ten years since I've taken any math classes or gone to Sunday school, so I could be wrong about this one.
[The Talent Show]
6:37:04 AM
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OKC Conspiracy Theories.
Atrios is right. This is the kind of f'n lunacy you can only find on Fox News :
On Tuesday's show you heard FOX News' Rita Cosby talking about the quite shocking claims made by a group of victims' families that Iraq was at the bottom of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City.
. . .
The whole thing stinks of Iraq. Ramzi Yousef, an Iraqi agent that was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his associates were allegedly talking to Terry Nichols (search) in 1994 about how to build a fertilizer bomb.
So now the question: So if there is all this evidence, why has the U.S. government ignored it?
. . .
The answer is Tim McVeigh (search) and the U.S. government were each doing their part to hide the real players. Government prosecutors said there was no "John Doe No. 2" even though dozens of people saw him. McVeigh insisted all the way to the grave that he acted alone, when everybody including his lawyer knew he was lying.
If McVeigh were just the grunt — mixing the chemicals, driving the truck, setting the timer, and running off — guilty though he might be, if the bombing was a plot by a foreign government, his lawyer would have had a chance at the sentencing hearing to argue that others were more responsible and McVeigh should not be executed.
The fear that the McVeigh execution might have been an error — and a mistaken execution — could put the federal death penalty itself in jeopardy. The fear of losing the federal death penalty could explain why the U.S. government does not appear to be anxious to act on evidence it has that Iraq may have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. I still find it hard to believe that this X-files horseshit is being peddled by the #1 cable news network. To think that the media has sunk to this level, it's a wonder that we can't just solve our energy problems by hooking up a generator to the corpses of real newsmen who must be spinning in their graves.
To add to this, the "whole thing stinks of Iraq" theory is hilariously at odds with the more prominent conspiracy theory that John Doe #2 is reported Osama Bin Laden1 aide Jose Padilla :
If you ignore the fact that the two pictures above have differently-shaped eyes, noses, cheeks, lips, and chins, the resemblance in uncanny.
Maybe in right-wing loony land, the correlation between the two half-baked conspiracy theories makes sense. After all, if these are the same guys who can't tell the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, can we really expect them to notice through their blood-tinted glasses that all the innuendo and meaningless speculation in the world won't take this stain off the reputation of the militant elements of the extreme right. The reason they're willing to entertain the notion that our current foreign enemies are behind domestic terrorism is because the Oklahoma City bombing represents the violent nadir of anti-government conservatism and stands as a reminder that we should always be weary of extremists at home.
1 : Yes, that is the same Osama Bin Laden who referred to Saddam Hussein as a socialist infidel. [The Talent Show]
6:35:58 AM
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Health of Nations.
For those who haven't been following it, all week Ezra Klein has been following the healthcare systems of other countries and comparing them to our own. So far he's done France, England, Canada, and Germany.1 In today's installment he links to a survey of per capita health spending that shows how bloated an unwieldy our system is. To make the point even more obvious, here's a graph of the survey's findings :
(click on the image for a larger version)
That's right, we spend more than twice as much as most of our friends, yet we cover a much lower percentage of our people and have a higher rates of illness and death for preventable diseases. Something this shameful should be a scandal, yet even acknowledging these obvious facts is considered anti-American in some circles. Like I've said before, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence....
1 : SPOILER ALERT : They all have better healthcare than the United States. [The Talent Show]
6:34:23 AM
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On Fundamentalism.
This posting from Democratic Underground hass an awesome explanation of the differences between fundamentalism and religion :
It seems to me like the thing that really *is* in opposition to the Democratic/liberal/progressive philosophy is not religion, but fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is what happens when you pick one particular set of beliefs and decide that a) they are the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything and b) anyone who doesn't share buy into this belief system is the adversary and must be either converted or destroyed. Fundamentalism is a problem in a heterogeneous community because it's intolerant of difference, and it's a problem in general because it discourages independent thought, enforces ideological rigidity, and leaves its adherents not only unwilling to compromise in the face of necessity but unable to learn and adapt to new information if it contradicts part of their world view.
OK, nothing earthshattering there. Now. Here is the thing.
*Fundamentalism does not necessarily have anything to do with religion.*
You can be a fundamentalist about anything. My brother is a capitalist fundamentalist. He's got no use whatsoever for God, but imply that the ideal of free market competition is a myth that is never realized because capitalists always try to rig the game to their own advantage, and watch the missionary zeal emerge. White supremacists are fundamentalist when it comes to their theories about racial superiority. Not only will they refuse to be swayed by anything other people would consider evidence or logic, but--and this is true for other fundamentalists too--they use their pet theory to explain EVERYTHING. Global warming, Celine Dion, doesn't matter, it's all somehow the fault of people who don't recognize the natural superiority of the white man. Same thing with people who are America supremacists. America is always better than everyone else. No, I don't care how many poor people we have or how bad our economy sucks or how corrupt our political system is or that we're torturing people and everyone's OK with that. America is supreme, it deserves to be supreme, and if you try to tell me otherwise, you must be a traitor, which means that all that shit you were talking about is your fault anyway.
And, and this is my main point, there are fundamentalists on the left too. And folks, you don't want to become fundamentalists, because it will make it impossible for you to know when you're wrong about something or to figure out new strategies for new problems. It's one thing to stick by your principles, and it's another thing to refuse to admit the legitimacy of any other point of view.
One of the big problems with the way things are right now is that because the right wing has been taken over by fundamentalists of all kinds, their extremism is pushing us into a kind of mirror fundamentalism, where we feel we have to be extra-rigid about our own beliefs because they're constantly under attack. While I absolutely believe that it is crucial to present a united front in public, and I also believe that our party leadership has screwed itself and us by NOT being willing to stand up when attacked, I also think it's a mistake to refuse to change just because you don't want to look weak. Cause we know where "stay the course" ends up, don't we. A giant fucking quagmire that's on fire, that's where. We've got plenty of fundamentalists on our side as well who have their own pet "single-cause theory" about why things are so screwed up. Every time somebody tries to tie everything back to corporations or "the media" I get bored. Not that those aren't big areas for concern or anything, it's just that we'd all be better off if we stopped pretending that we're a single battle away from fixing the messes we've found ourselves in.
[The Talent Show]
6:32:27 AM
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Tax Deform.
Once the President's Social Security privatization scheme has its feeding tube unplugged, the next big line item on the agenda will be tax "reform". With all the talk you'lll be hearing about how inefficient the IRS is, how complicated the tax code is, or whiny pleas for "fairness", there should be no mistake about the real agenda. As the GOP has demonstrated with pretty much every tax cut they've ever sponsored, the goal is to screw the poor, rob the rich, and sell the American public on the idea of a flat tax. As the Christian Science Monitor points out, however, the tax code is almost flat now. (via Josh Marshall)
Ever since the introduction of the modern income tax in 1913, US policy has been guided by the notion that the rich should pay a larger of their income in federal taxes, since they arguably owe something extra to a government that protects their greater wealth, and to a society that has helped them prosper.
But a debate has long waged over just where to draw the line, with populists pushing to "soak the rich" and conservatives arguing that a too-progressive tax structure creates a disincentive for the creation of jobs and wealth that benefit the whole nation.
Chalk up President Bush as not just a tax cutter but also a tax flattener. Under Mr. Bush and a Republican Congress, big tax cuts since 2001 have given major tax reductions to those wealthy individuals presumed, up to now, to be able to afford paying a bigger chunk of their income in taxes. By one measure of the federal, state, and local tax burden, just 3.4 percentage points separate the effective tax rate paid by the top 1 percent of earners from the other 99 percent of American households.
But the CSM article only hints at the fact that it hasn't always been this way. Indeed, during the good ol' days that conservatives are so eager to return us to, the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us was a hell of a lot larger than today's 3.4%. Here's a handy chart that shows just how much tax rates have changed from the late 40's through the late 80's (Source):
So when the President starts talking about taxes, let's not forget that he and his rich friends have been getting the taxes cut for the past 50 years. It's our turn now.
[The Talent Show]
6:31:23 AM
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Child Care By the Numbers
A few more facts and figures about child care, culled from the Morgan paper mentioned below (only because I want to jot these stats down somewhere, for future reference; plus, some readers might find them interesting).
In the U.S., only six percent of one- and two-year-olds are in public child care, and 53 percent of three-to-five-year olds. The private sector is growing, thanks to growing paid employment among mothers, but total child-care coverage is less than in Sweden or France.
Parents pay 60 percent of all costs for child-care, as opposed to, on average, 25 percent of the costs of higher education.
Only 21 percent of parents with under-13 children who are below 200 percent of the poverty line receive help with child care costs, from the government or elsewhere.
Social conservatives have often argued against subsidized child care on grounds that it discriminates against stay-at-home mothers.
Between 1973 and 1999, as mothers entered the workforce, government spending on child care increased from $2.8 billion to $12 billion, and the private child care market grew 250 (!!) percent.
The wages for child care and preschool workers are worth between 53 and 66 percent of the wages of all employed women. (In Sweden, it's 1.02 percent for both, in France it's 1.87 percent for preschool teachers.) Less than a third of child care centers offer fully-paid health insurance. Only one-third of workers earned the minimum wage.
Continue reading "Child Care By the Numbers" - Brad [Bradford Plumer]
6:30:18 AM
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The Single-Payer That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Ezra Klein recounts a famous story about some elderly woman telling John Breaux, "Senator, don't you dare let the government get its hands on my Medicare!" Heh. In light of the fact that, you know, seniors love Medicare , the tale highlights just how conditioned Americans have become to demonize public health care. ("How could anything so good possibly be government-run?") So it's easy to come away from the story feeling dejected and hopeless about the prospects for a national health care program in America.
Except... except... perhaps this is actually an opportunity in disguise! If people a) love Medicare and b) don't actually think of it as a government program, then maybe the solution to quality universal health care is simply to expand Medicare . No use fighting the vast propaganda machine that's been dragging single-payer's name through the mud all these years. Just go around the machine! No one will see it coming! Heck, even George W. Bush likes expanding Medicare, so how could you possibly call it socialism ?
Now as it happens, Yale Professor Jacob Hacker has outlined a pretty good proposal for expanding Medicare to cover the uninsured. A small incremental step, yes, but we can all see where this leads down the road. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. As it also happens, I think Hacker's mostly onto something, and his plan is probably the best "baby step" to get from the bizarre hybrid health system we have now to a system of universal coverage. The only downside is that this idea was also more or less known as "Dennis Kucinich's campaign proposal," which means that "moderate" liberals will flip out. (Another blow: Teddy Kennedy likes it. Quelle horreur !) Nevertheless, it's realistic and doable, it's better than the Center for American Progress' plan , and as Ezra's lovable granny points out, Medicare is basically the one public health-care system that no one actually believes is a national health-care system. And that, friends, is half the battle.
More: Nyuk nyuk .
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:28:10 AM
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Papal Doctrine
I wanted to say something really, amazingly clever about the new pope, but I've got nothing. Here, though, from Ed Morrissey, is a bit of philosophy from then-Cardinal Ratzinger: "[Relativism] is letting oneself be 'swept along by every wind of teaching.' [It] looks like the only attitude [acceptable] to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Okay, come on. None of those things are relativism. Likewise, it's not at all the case that people are being "swept along by every wind of teaching." Who? Where? Believe me, I know some fourth-grade teachers who would love to have this little problem.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:25:33 AM
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Onlookers to a Massacre
"Survivors of militia attacks in Darfur have accused African Union forces of doing nothing to stop the bloodshed." That's from Reuters yesterday. To be clear, I don't want to denigrate the AU soldiers—honestly, they're doing far braver work than I will ever do, and they simply don't have the mandate to protect civilians. Battling the janjawid would be a heroic move, but unlawful and possibly dangerous. All the same, this stuff needs to be highlighted because governments all around the world are still clinging on to the fiction that the genocide can be stopped with a few more AU divisions here and there. So once more: peacekeepers, no-fly zones. Post-haste.
MORE: NRO has a fantastic article about Harvard divesting from Chinese oil companies to protest the genocide. I'm usually skeptical of these sorts of moves, but this could possibly—possibly—do something. As I've noted before, China is the one country that can really lean on Khartoum to stop the killing. But diplomatic pressure alone is unlikely to spur China into action, given the country's massive oil interests in Sudan, but a pocketbook appeal could do the trick. If I have anyone readers who are in college right now, this could be a good campaign to start organizing. SinoPec and PetroChina are the two main offenders, though you can find a full list here.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:24:26 AM
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Yay Knowledge!
Michael Levine of the DLC has a modest proposal: let's teach elementary and high school kids more facts about the outside world. Well done! It's hard to imagine that American democracy wouldn't benefit if everyone knew a little bit more about what goes on beyond our borders. Can't imagine that it would lead to any particular policies down the road—increased support for mutilateralism, for instance, or an aversion to war—but hey, knowledge is good. One quibble, though. Levine unearths this shocking fact:
The surveys find that 25 percent of our college-bound high school students cannot name the ocean between California and Asia. Eighty percent do not know that India is the world's largest democracy.
Now it goes without saying that everyone should know what the Pacific Ocean is called. But when I read the second sentence, I realized that in a sense, I didn't "know" India was the world's largest democracy. Oh sure, I knew India was a democracy. And I knew it was the second-largest country. And I knew the largest country wasn't a democracy. But if you had asked me, "Quick, what's the largest democracy in the world?" I would've said the United States without batting an eye. Now that's very embarrassing, but nothing bad would've come of it. I didn't have any wrong ideas about India, or about democracy, or about the world. But I'd be in Levine's 80 percent!
Not that it matters much, though it reminds me I learned a lot of useless composite facts like these in school (Canada and the United States share the world's longest undefended border! Martin van Buren was the 9th president!) that substituted for learning more important, basic things about the way the world is and works.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:21:38 AM
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Jeffords, What Might Have Been...
Before we Republicans speak too ill of Jim Jeffords—no, wait, before we Democrats speak too highly of Jim Jeffords—let's all remember the time he saved the Bush presidency from complete and utter failure. The man could've truly torched the White House in 2001 if he so chose, but sadly, he didn't. Also, reading over the comments in this Daily Kos thread , it's amazing what an unstoppable force Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has become. I don't know nearly enough about Vermont politics, despite having lived right on its border for four years, but it doesn't seem like Vermont itself is so liberal that it's the only state in the union that could possibly support an at-large socialist, one who crosses party lines and wins support from hippies and conservative veterans alike. Surely someone like Sanders could win statewide in New Hampshire or Maine, no?
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:20:16 AM
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Fun With Downturns
Over at TAPPED, Matt Y. makes a pretty good point about privatization, irrational investors, and the stock markets:
[W]hen the market is up, people think to themselves "I wish I owned some stocks" and are inclined to support it. But market peaks are, in reality, the worst possible time to buy stocks. After a crash is when you want to buy. But as the privatization polling shows, large segments of the population don't see it that way.
What this psychological reality means is that even with investment options restricted to just a handful of relatively safe funds, many people are still likely to do a very bad job managing their money by "churning" from one fund to another: Selling low and buying high, in other words, in an endless effort to own whatever's up in any given month even though this is the reverse of a sound investment strategy.
I said "pretty good" only because this sounds like a problem that can be patched up somewhat easily, either through regulation of investments or better financial education. In theory. In practice, though, it's true that many of the whacked-out privatization proposals simmering in the House wouldn't safeguard against this sort of investor irrationalism, and lots of people would, in fact, probably screw themselves over. On the other hand, I doubt Democrats would dare make hay out of the fact that people are morons and likely to do moronic things when given control over their own money. (Note, I'm really contradicting my efficient market musings below. Bear with me, I promise to get all these confusions straightened out by... next week. Promise.)
Anyway, set aside stupidity for now; there's another concern with privatization that I have, roughly along similar lines. It's this: During times of high unemployment—say, a recession—lots of people won't be able to purchase stocks for their private accounts on account of, y'know, not having jobs. But times of high unemployment are also often times when, in theory, the stock market is sluggish, and hence, the best time to buy stocks. Meanwhile, folks who do stay employed during these downturns get deuced too, since wage growth is likely to be slowest when stocks are down. (Hence, they can buy fewer stocks at precisely the best time to buy stocks.) Needless to say, women, minorities, and the poor are usually hit hardest by the ravages of the employment cycle, and hence would get the biggest gut-punch from this effect.
Now, in truth, I don't know how severe this "labor cycle" effect would be—if any economist has talked about this, by all means, link to it in comments. Perhaps there's enough of a lag between downturns in the employment cycle and downturns in the stock cycle that what I'm describing wouldn't come to pass. Or perhaps the effect simply isn't large enough to worry about. But it seems like a problem all the same.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:19:13 AM
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Screw The Uninsured
Paul Krugman's column today, on the "cost-shifting" in U.S. health care, is very thought-provoking, but let's highlight just one part:
Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.
Indeed, I've often wanted to make a clever case for covering the uninsured by arguing that society ends up paying for these costs anyway. Surely all that charity and uncompensated care going on right now is coming out of everyone else's pocketbooks eventually, either through increased government spending or hikes in premiums. And surely the fact that the uninsured can't get preventive care when they need it means that they (or someone else) ends up paying far, far more later on for diseases that could've been headed off early.
Sadly, though, after rooting around for numbers on this, neither of these arguments seems particularly compelling.
First, the uncompensated care issue. This interesting paper by Jack Hadley and John Holohan show that the uninsured receive about $34.5 billion per year in "uncompensated care," i.e. care that they receive but do not pay full price for. Of this amount, the federal and state governments eventually ended up paying for about $30.6 billion. So there's not a huge cost-shift onto those with private insurance policies. "Ah, you say, but if the government pays for the vast majority of uncompensated care anyway, through various subsidies and other weirdness, doesn't it make sense just to spend that money on coverage for the uninsured instead?
Well, not quite. It would cost a good deal more than just shifting that $34.5 billion to cover the uninsured. First of all, Hadley and Holohan have noted elsewhere that the uninsured currently receive about $98.9 billion in health care per year, which includes uncompensated care, out-of-pocket costs, and private or public insurance sources. If all of those uninsured people were to be brought in to existing public insurance programs (Medicaid, etc.), then total health care spending would rise by $34 billion. However, total government health care spending would increase by about $100 billion when all is said and done (even after subtracting the drop in subsidies for "uncompensated care")—in part because many people currently with private insurance would drop what they have and then sneak into the newly expanded government program. So most taxpayers would be paying far, far more for the uninsured than they currently do.
Here's another way to look at it: in 2001 the full-year uninsured received $1,253 in care, about half what privately insured people received ($2484). So from all appearances, and as cynical as this sounds, it's much cheaper to keep fifty million Americans uninsured than to spend a little extra and draw them into the program.
Okay, now the other economic argument for covering the uninsured is that, without insurance and hence, without preventive care, these poor folks—and they mostly are poor—are more likely to develop chronic diseases and whatnot that lead to expensive problems later on. So in the end, we as a society pay more by not insuring these folks early on. This sounds good—intuitively, it seems that it's cheaper to treat hypertension or diabetes earlier, rather than pay for hospitalization costs later. But there are a couple of reasons why this argument may not tell the whole story. One, as Phillip Longman has reported, only about 10 percent of all premature deaths in the last 30 years can be attributed to shortfalls in medical care. This doesn't exactly address my question, but it suggests that medicine plays a very small role in preventing serious illness. (Far more effective would be changes in behavior, like more exercise.)
The other possibility is that more preventive care may catch more "pseudo-diseases," i.e. "disease that would never become apparent to patients during their lifetime without testing." In other words, more care can increase costs by catching, say, benign tumors that would otherwise not be a problem. Finally, some hard research: Studies by RAND and economist Louise Russell showing that preventive care doesn't really lower overall health care costs in the aggregate, and may even increase them.
Okay, so this is a long post, but the brunt of it is: there probably isn't a good economic case to be made for covering the uninsured, although I'm obviously open to hearing one. Certainly there's a moral case to be made, and I think a overridingly powerful one, though I'm not sure how effective that's going to actually bringing change about. As Uwe Reinhardt once noted, the last time we had a budget surplus to spend, Americans chose tax cuts over helping the uninsured; no matter what the polls might say, our actual priorities seem pretty clear.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:15:49 AM
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This sounds about right...
What's the Matter with Ann Coulter?
So I finally got to read Time Magazine's big cover story on Ann Coulter. It's true, the story glosses over many of her faults—a courtesy they would have not afforded, say, Michael Moore. But unlike many liberal bloggers, I'm only slightly concerned that the story fails to depict Coulter as a hate-filled blond fascist. In fact, no, I'm not concerned at all. For one, how many people are going to slog through a 5,000 word story on Coulter unless they already know who Coulter is and have a strong opinion about her? I don't think there are a lot of minds out there to be changed, so the story's effect on the poor defenseless "masses" doesn't seem to be all that pressing an issue to me.
Second, though, I don't consider myself part of the poor defenseless masses, so I found the story interesting, mainly because, already knowing about Coulter's vicious hackishness, I could actually learn something new from the article: namely, that Ann Coulter probably isn't a hate-filled fascist. Really.
So let's try to figure out Ann Coulter.
First, a story. When I was in third grade (living in Japan at the time), the Denver Broncos got crushed by the 49ers in the Superbowl 55-10. Since our teacher was a football fan, we listened to the game in class, and many people cheered when the Broncos got mauled except for one kid who was originally from Denver, Chris Chamberlain. Chris had been hyping the Broncos all week, so at recess, naturally, kids started to taunt him. 55-10! Ha ha! I didn't really understand football, so at first I stayed out of it, but after awhile, it was kind of fun to see him get riled up over the whole thing. So I started in. "John Elway throws like a girl!" I didn't even know who John Elway was, but that was the way the taunts went, so I played along. After awhile, I came up with even more clever and vicious ways to insult the Broncos, pushing it further and further, not because I understood what I was doing, not because I hated the Broncos, but because that was the playground game, and it was a way to join in.
 This, I think, is essentially what Ann Coulter has done with her life. She saw that there was a game of insulting liberals to be played, a way to take sides, and she took it and ran with it. There were already talking points in this little war between two ideologies, and she took them and pushed further, making them even more vicious, not because she entirely understood what she was doing, but because it was a way of joining in. "John Elway throws like a girl!" And the more reaction she got, the more fun she was having, and the more vicious and bitter her insults would become. Having so much fun, in fact, that she doesn't even notice when she crosses the bounds of decency. "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."
One should note that there's a massive difference between Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, and it's not just that the latter has wished for the mass murder of journalists. (Though that part's important, and Digby explained why.) Moore has many faults, but at bottom, he's striving for at least some understanding of the way the world works. There's some shred of intellectual curiosity there. The most interesting thing about Bowling For Columbine was that Moore couldn't quite settle on a conclusion—the movie noted, somewhat uncomfortably, that other countries without strict gun laws don't have nearly as much violence as the United States, so maybe gun control isn't the answer. Now granted, Moore is too blinded by certain liberal dogmas, too in love with clever images and bloviating, and too full of himself, ever to do anything intellectually valuable. (From what I've heard about his brief stint at my magazine, Mother Jones, his ego really is off the wall.) But there's at least a small part of him that's concerned with being right rather than merely winning.
With Coulter, there's no such constraint. Read Slander and it quickly becomes obvious that she has zero curiosity about the way the world works. No, she sees a game being played, thinks she understands the rules of attack, and simply wants to be better at it than anyone else. I believe John Cloud when he writes that Coulter is a very loyal and dedicated friend, and that some of her best friends are liberals. Why shouldn't they be? She knows when she's off-camera and no longer has to play the game. And yes, at times she finds the whole thing very funny, just as I once found vicious Bronco attacks very funny. She can't hate liberals, because frankly, she's too dumb and lacks too much understanding to understand what hatred really entails.
At the end of the Time piece, she talks about being unable to convert her Muslim ex-boyfriend, and then laughs loudly and says, "I was just happy he wasn't killing anyone." This isn't hate. This is grubbing for acceptance. It's genuinely pitiful. What we have, folks, is a clown. A clown who desperately just wants the kids to laugh and like her.
Moreover, I think the lesson of Coulter is a lesson more widely applicable. There are all sorts of partisan hacks writing and talking about politics these days. Why, I myself am one of them! And no one is free from dogma and ideology and a subservience to mindless talking points. No one. But even among the most wretched of hacks, you can generally distinguish between the people who are at least nominally interested in understanding how the world works, and what is actually true, and the people who just don't care, and just want to play a game—whether because it's fun in some odd way, or because it helps them "belong," or because they're too dumb to understand the difference. The latter group is dangerous to civil discourse, period, irrespective of how bloodthirsty its rhetoric really is.
- Brad
[Bradford Plumer]
6:13:03 AM
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"Race to the Bottom": Euro Edition
One of the more depressing aspects of federalism here in the United States is that states tend to compete with each other in a "race to the bottom" on offering various welfare benefits, so as to avoid attracting all sorts of immigrants and other low-income folks who flock to the more generous states. (As I discussed here, research shows that this effect is both real and pretty strong.) Among other things, that explains why converting programs like Medicaid into block grants can be so pernicious, at least if you think health care is a good thing. (If you don't, block-grant to your heart's content!)
Anyway, this is sort of random for 2 am, but I've sometimes wondered if the same thing could start to happen in the EU, as various countries become more and more integrated, and immigration flows become easier and easier. Chistopher Caldwell suggests this might be going on already:
Swedes have lately grown attentive to their neighbors' policies on immigration. They note that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But ever since the Öresund bridge brought Malmö within commuting distance of Copenhagen, it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the anti-immigration Danish People's party--which has never entered government but has thoroughly spooked the other parties of left and right--has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Danes under 25 who marry foreigners no longer have the right to bring their spouses into the country. Many such half-Danish couples now live in Malmö.
Denmark's crackdown has left Swedes wondering what is to stop everyone in the E.U. from coming to the most generous welfare state, even if such worries are couched in human-rights language. Shortly after Denmark passed these laws in 2002, Sweden's Social Democratic integration minister complained that the policies were inhumane. The Danish People's party leader, Pia Kj rsgaard, replied to the Swedes in a newsletter: "If they want to turn Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö into Scandinavian versions of Beirut . . . then that is up to them."
Huh. This paper, meanwhile, which sadly I can't read in full, argues that EU states are definitely acting as if there's a "race to the bottom," because they're all worried about attracting immigrants (especially, ahem, swarthy immigrants) to their generous welfare states, but that there's little empirical evidence that they really need to be doing so. And another Danish economist, Torben Andersen, maintains that "there is nothing... which supports the view that it is impossible to maintain the welfare state when economies integrate," though some rejiggering of the way benefits are financed might be in order. Very interesting!
- Brad [
Bradford Plumer]
6:10:28 AM
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Bolton Pulled by White House from Libya Team. Bolton had to be taken out of the Libya policy chain of command at Tony Blair's insistence, Newsweek reports, for it to succeed. Bolton's supporters cite two meagre successes of his on...
[War and Piece]
6:00:22 AM
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It Is the Passover of the LORD.
And Mark Kleiman preaches the lesson on Dvarim 24:17-18: Avodim hayyinu l'Pharoh b'Mitzrayim: Last week in the faculty Torah study group at UCLA -- which has been fighting its way through Deuteronomy at the rate of about two verses a week for the past decade -- we were examining Deut. 24:17-18: "Thou shalt not pervert the justice due to the stranger, or to the fatherless; nor take the widow's raiment to pledge. But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee thence; therefore I command thee to do this thing." A quick check with a concordance showed that the formula: "Do X, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord redeemed you" occurs five times in Deuteronomy, in each case following a commandment about dealing fairly with the vulnerable......
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]
5:55:56 AM
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We Come To Bury Tom DeLay.
DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card
The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.
DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists.
I think Rove just made the call. Stay tuned for a new GOP majority leader in the House. [Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid]
5:52:52 AM
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Blasphemy Sunday .
Colbert King on Hijacking Christianity . . .: They are not now and never will be the final arbiters of Christian beliefs and values. They warrant as much deference as religious leaders as do members of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched under the cross.
Paul Gaston on . . . Smearing Christian Judges:
What these self-avowed Christians do not acknowledge -- and what the American public seems little aware of -- is that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic. Secular humanism is a bogeyman, a smoke screen obscuring the right-wing Christians' struggle for supremacy.
Frank Rich on A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time:
These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends.
[The Sideshow]
5:49:34 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Michael Mussington.
Last update:
5/1/2005; 4:29:10 AM.
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