Walking While Black

When these sensational stories come out, such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I try hard not to jump to conclusions.  I've seen too many stories change completely once more details come out.  Here in the Boston area, of course, many of us will never forget the Charles Stuart case, in which a Black man reportedly shot a White couple driving through Boston after a birthing class.  The wife was killed, the husband survived, and the police quickly identified a possible shooter.... who turned out to be innocent since the husband actually planned the whole thing as a plot to kill his wife.

A few years ago we had the Duke lacrosse team story, in which the team allegedly raped a stripper they had hired.  Turned out she invented the whole thing, but that wasn't discovered until a lot of Duke guys were terribly slandered.

So I didn't hurry to a conclusion in the Trayvon Martin case.  But now it's been a month, and every detail seems to confirm that George Zimmerman is a murderer.  The "Stand Your Ground" law doesn't seem like much of a defense considering that Zimmerman chased the kid, who was unarmed and doing nothing more than carrying a bag of skittles through the neighborhood.

But I was at a social work conference today listening to the words of Nancy Boyd-Franklin, an African American social worker and mother.  She told of a time when she brought her 12 year old son and some friends to a New Jersey mall, and before leaving them off had an important talk about what to do if the police stopped them in the mall (put your hands up and tell them you don't have a weapon).

Just another reminder to me about how far we still have to go in the US.  It would never occur to me to tell my White children what to do when the police come... let alone a crazy loser with a gun and a vigilante complex.

Five Angry Men

Well, today your hearty blogger is moderately depressed as he hears reports of the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court.  Previous to this week supporters were pretty optimistic, as already some Republican-appointed lower court judges had ruled in favor of the ACA.  And then of course there's the actual legal issue, which was never raised in any way when this was done at the state level in Massachusetts and which was never mentioned as an issue when Republicans were inventing the idea of the Individual Mandate in the 1990s. 

But listening to the questioning of the judges, along with the startlingly incompetent Obama-appointed lawyer arguing for the government, commentators I'm reading are saying that it doesn't look good for the Individual Mandate to pass.

It seems hope is pinned on John Roberts, who is very conservative but who also reportedly values solid decisions with splits other than 5-4.  Certainly one could worry about the perceived legitimacy of the court as a neutral arbiter after Bush vs. Gore.  This is the highest profile case since then, and if it's decided by everyone voting strictly along party lines, people are going to call into question whether the court is really any different from the Congress- just reverse-engineering their legal opinions with partisan-colored glasses.

I'm not optimistic.  Not because of the legal merits of the case- I think it's a slam dunk constitutionally- but because I fear that SCOTUS has become nothing more than a repository for partisan hacks.  Depressing.

UPDATE: Put well here by Jon Chait.

Tales from the Other Side

Sometimes I wander around the Right blogosphere for as long as I can stand it- usually I make it out with only minor flesh wounds and a few dead brain cells.  Today I came across this in the National Review blog, The Corner:

The Only Question About Obamacare That Matters

By Michael Walsh

March 26, 2012 4:07 P.M.

Comments

0

Does anyone — on either side — really think that the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act is about health care?

For if it’s about “health care,” aren’t there a myriad of ways in which the system could be improved without a “comprehensive” top-down solution? At a time of extreme economic dislocation, was there a nationwide clamor to make “health care” the top priority of the new administration?
Or is it really about the exercise of raw governmental power, to teach the citizenry an object lesson about the coming brave new world, one that surely will get even worse once Obama is safely past the shoals of his last election?
To believe in the “good intentions” of the former — as soft-headed conservatives are sometimes wont to do when crediting the hard Left with anything but sheer malevolence toward the country as founded — is to have to pretzel one’s mind around the internal contradictions of the bill itself (it’s a tax! It’s not a tax!) and the way in which it was imposed just a couple of years ago by a one-party Congress that no longer exists, having been rebuked and sent packing by an outraged electorate.
Far easier to believe in the latter — that Obamacare is just the canary in the coal mine of what’s coming next. That, once having established the hammer, the administration will use Obamacare (should the law be found constitutional) as the anvil upon which to smash the Republic once and for all. And the “progressives’s” Long March through the institutions will finally end in the all-powerful centralized government for which they’ve long yearned.
Does the Supreme Court still read the election returns? We’d better hope so.

I want to just leave this without comment, but then again I have to remember that this was on the main blog of one of the most prestigious and serious journals on the Right.  This isn't some loser like me in his spare time, this is presumably a serious political thinker who gets to post at National Review!  People must be buying this stuff! ObamaCare was the least invasive way possible to get close to making health insurance universal in the US.  To paraphrase Churchill, the only thing less invasive that accomplishes the goal is everything else. The ACA was the final big social program the Left has been yearning for in public, out loud, since the 1960s.  To see it as the thin edge of the totalitarian wedge is so paranoid that it really shouldn't even require refutation.  But here it is in National Review! What are these wack jobs in tin foil hats going to say if Obama wins four more years and does what he says he'll do: more of the same center-left incremental change?  I guess they'll just move right along screaming about something else.  Conspiracy theorists can't be satisfied.

Paul Ryan is Brave Anyway

Paul Ryan's latest budget plan, which is basically the same as the plan he put out last year, needs to be praised for one thing at least: he's letting us see his true priorities.

No that it's not loaded with bullshit- it still is.  The most important bullshit is that he plans to balance the budget to a great extent through spending cuts, but doesn't name those cuts specifically.  He also talks about making the tax code more efficient so he can lower rates, which is a good idea and not opposed by Liberals in principle, but does not name any of the loopholes he'll close.  Realistic people understand that one person's loophole is another person's livelihood, and it will take a holy war to end any significant tax breaks.

And of course he wants to end the ObamaCare, which the CBO says will increase the deficit (since it is funded through taxes).  And he wants to cut Medicaid and Medicare severely, making the latter into a voucher program and thereby offloading higher costs onto individual Americans.

So what makes it brave?  Well, through all the ridiculous spin, there is a plan there that makes it clear what the Republican vision for the country is right now.  It's really radical- but that doesn't make it evil.  The Right's vision is pretty simply this: You're on Your Own.  No government sugar daddy is going to pay for your retirement or your medical care, contribute to your college education, protect your food from contamination, fix your roads, subsidize your trains, regulate your banks to try to stop the next crash, etc. etc.  In a 21st Century world, they want to return to a 19th Century government model.

Maybe it'll work great.  I'm hoping we never get to find out.

By the way, it won't balance the budget.  The simplest way to balance the budget is for congress to do nothing, let the Bush tax cuts expire, ignore the Medicare doc fix, and then work on slowing the growth of health care costs.

UPDATE: Here's commentary from Bruce Bartlett, a long-time Republican economist who worked in the Reagan and Poppy Bush White Houses.  He's not too keen on the plan.

Lies

The level of lying by Mitt Romney during this campaign is just breathtaking.  I think his strategy is to so overwhelm us with his lies that we all just accept them as a matter of course, excuse them as "what politicians do", and stop talking about them.  

For readers who are playing for the Republican team and need some evidence, look at this. I don't really feel compelled to go over this stuff again, as it seems to me so evident as to be a waste of time to argue.

I've noted before that my Republican friends, who are generally reasonable people who will always vote for whoever will give them lower taxes but who are uncomfortable with the anti-science, religious fundamentalist side of the party, persist in liking Romney because they assume he's lying about some of his current positions.  Don't worry, he won't really end the separation of church and state like he says.  He wouldn't really refuse to bail out the economy if it comes to another crisis. He won't really destroy any rights that gay people have.  He's a technocrat!

Hey, all this may even be true- we don't know.  Now I've never felt like "character" was a great issue on which to base a vote for a politician, as we can't really know about such things.  But doesn't the constant lying worry anyone just a little?  It's just so brazen it turns my stomach.

The New Third World

Just finished Michael Lewis's latest, a short book about the budget problems in what he calls "the new third world".  There are chapters on Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the US and how each country reacted in its own way to the free money that was flowing everywhere.  In Iceland, ex-fishermen speculated wildly in foreign exchange and real estate markets.  In Greece the government just lost all control of expenses and grew to pay its workers ridiculous salaries that have bankrupted the country.  In Ireland the government was very responsible, but the banks were completely crazy and funded massive development of housing and office buildings in Ireland for which there was clearly no market- and then the government, not understanding how bad it was, guaranteed the debts of the Irish banks, so that German creditors who should have lost their investments got paid, but the Irish government went broke.

In Germany, the people continued to live as they always had, soberly and carefully guarding their money.  But the investment bankers were played for suckers by the bond creators in the US and elsewhere, and were the last rubes still buying Credit Default Swaps when everyone else was selling.  It strikes me (though this isn't really stressed in the book) that German bankers are now holding much of the sovereign debt of countries that may default, especially Greece.  These were in many cases bad investments, and on some level the banks deserve to lose money on them.  But they have the advantage of a very powerful government serving as Collection Agency for them- since Germany basically runs the European Central Bank, they are in charge.  Germany has replaced their military control of the past with economic control in the present.

Finally there is a chapter about the mess in state and especially local governments in the US, with a focus on some cities in California (San Jose, Vallejo).  These cities have given away the store to public sector unions, and have future liabilities that they can't possibly pay- in the case of San Jose they can't pay because the People won't accept tax hikes, and in Vallejo it's more of a Greece situation in which the place is bankrupt.

Depressing stuff.

Government Spending Realities

This chart from Andrew Sullivan blew me away.  I already knew that the current administration and congress hadn't increased spending like the Republicans say- in fairness, a big reason that outlays have been lower is that the Republicans have been putting lots of downward pressure on spending.

But the point remains: Obama has been the most fiscally responsible president in modern times in terms of spending.

So why has the deficit ballooned so much?  Well, for one thing, he inherited an enormous budget deficit.  For another thing, it's tough to cut spending when all the automatic spending is going up during a recession (Unemployment, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc).  But most of all, tax receipts go way down in a big recession, and that's certainly been the case.  On top of that, a big chunk of the stimulus measures has consisted of tax cuts, so receipts are even lower than they would have normally been.  Republicans don't filibuster tax cuts like they do spending hikes.

I guess the Republican rejoinder to this would be that sadly, GW Bush got the tax side right, but betrayed the movement on the spending side.  Of course, Reagan and Bush I had similar spending sprees, so what is here is more of a trend.  It's important to remember that Republicans don't really care about deficits- that's just window dressing for their real goal, which is lower taxes on the wealthy.

Some day they'll get another chance to prove me wrong- maybe even in 2013.  If they win, I really hope they do prove me wrong on that score, because then we can have a debate that's about real things- what are our priorities?  Do we really want lower taxes and lower spending like we say we do?  Instead we're having this fake debate in which Republicans pose as fiscally responsible budgeters in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Israel and American Politics

I just finished Jeremy Ben-Ami's book A New Voice For Israel, which lays out the case for J Street in the American political environment.  I'm toying with the idea of getting more into J Street, as I really agree with Ben-Ami's frustration regarding the "rules" of the Israel policy discussion in the US. 

The American polity's positions on Israel extend from the absolute, unquestioning fetishisizing of the Jewish state among the Republican party, all the way to the strong support without the anti-Arab vitriol, which characterizes the Democrats.  Now I know that in Europe there are real anti-Israel voices that have real power, but there's none of that in the US ouside of the Chomskyite fringes.

As Ben-Ami says, AIPAC and other representatives of the Jewish establishment have done a great job forcing the conversation the way they have- there is just no questioning by either party regarding US support for Israel. 

So it seems to me that the existential problem for single-issue pro-Israel political entities here is that they've already succeeded completely in meeting what should be their goal- to keep US support strong for the benefit of Israel.  But AIPAC and other organizations can't now just pack up and disband, having met their goal.  So it seems that the American Jewish establishment has set out to look for fights, to ensure that not even a wisp of argument that might lead to something that sounds anti-Israel will be tolerated in polite debate in the US.

As Ben-Ami argues, the American Jewish Right doesn't seem to currently support a two state solution in Israel.  I'm not sure that's true, as I still get the sense that the American Jewish establishment at least pays lip service to a two state solution.  Still, it's perfectly acceptable in the US to talk about the hopelessness of negotiating with the Palestinians, and to imply that Israel should just hold on to the West Bank forever.  But when a voice from the Left talks about ending the Occupation or curtailing Jewish settlements in the Territories, the speaker is pilloried as Anti-Semitic.  When a Jew (like me) complains about these things, he's labeled "self-hating".

That frankly pisses me off a lot.  To talk about Israeli mistakes or criticize policies is not anti-Semitic, and it's not even anti-Israel.  I love Israel, and so does Ben-Ami- his grandparents were among those who founded Tel Aviv, and his father was a Jabotinskyist who came to America to raise money for the cause during the early days of the new country.  I can't claim that kind of connection, but I've been to Israel three times, speak a little Hebrew, and feel very strongly about the country's prosperity and survival. 

The worry is that Israel needs to make peace in order to have a long-term future as a Jewish and Democratic state.  Occupation is necessary right now, clearly, as it wouldn't be safe to allow Palestinians dedicated to Israel's destruction to have carte blanche to operate only a few miles from Jerusalem.  But it's not good!  And building Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank is very clearly an impediment to peace.  To say that isn't anti-Israel- it's pro-Israel.  Just because the Palestinians are worse doesn't mean that Israelis are off the hook.

So I'm not all in for J Street right now, but I'm thinking about it.

Prediction for 2012

I might have written this before, but I want to make it easy for my future self to find this, so here it is:

The economy is recovering.  No matter who is elected president, and no matter who controls the congress, the economy will continue to recover in some fashion.  Unemployment will be lower in 2015 than it is today, perhaps much lower.

Whoever is elected (or re-elected) President in 2012 will get the credit for this recovery.  If that person is Mitt Romney, I want to go on record right now for saying that well ahead of time.  Similarly, if President Obama is a two-termer, he'll get more credit than he probably will deserve.

Recoveries always happen eventually.

Follow-up on Radicalism

I've made this challenge before:

I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage. I've never heard an answer.

Last night I was with some conservative friends and I made that challenge in the course of our conversation.  For the first time I heard a kind of answer: the conservatives I was with agreed with each other that it's not exactly that the Democratic party has moved Left so much as that they have failed to acknowledge areas in which liberal dogma has been clearly proven wrong.  Their favorite example was unions- they argued that unions in the public sphere were destroying state and local government budgets, and Democrats were continuing to support them.

On one hand, this answer sort of concedes my argument that only one party is growing more radical, but at this point I don't see any other response to the point- it's just unassailable.

On the other hand, though, it's a legitimate point that begs a response so here it is:

First of all, if I conceded the point that Liberals continue to support unions in the face of all evidence, I could still point out that the Republican party is doing that in practically every area of public policy- Global Warming is accepted by pretty much every reputable science organization but is denied by conservatives.  Republicans continue to throw out tax plans claiming that lower taxes increase revenues, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.  I could go on and on.

But of course I don't concede the point that unions have outlived their usefulness.  It's not true that government workers are getting better benefits than they used to get.  It's just that workers outside of government are getting a lot less, because unions are dying out.  This is related to the "99%" issue- workers in the private sector have less power than they did 30 years ago as more industries have de-unionized, and the result has been that recent wealth gains have virtually all gone to the top 1% of our society.  So I'd frame the problem not as "too much for government workers", but rather as "not enough for private sector workers".

Now the response to that point was that "we can't be competitive" with unions in today's world, with 3rd world workers lining up to work for pennies a day.  But of course there's no competitiveness issue when it comes to government workers- we're not competing against Cambodia when it comes to paying for fire departments.

We can't afford to pay government workers because we have historically low tax rates.  There's an obvious solution to that problem.

Now it still may be true that governments have negotiated too many sweetheart deals with unions.  The solution to that problem isn't to deny workers the right to organize- it's to negotiate better deals, put up with strikes sometimes, etc- it's messy, but workers should have the right to organize in a free society.

Olympia Snowe and the Poor Moderates

So Olympia Snowe has written a self-justifying op-ed about why she is retiring:

Some people were surprised by my conclusion, yet I have spoken on the floor of the Senate for years about the dysfunction and political polarization in the institution. Simply put, the Senate is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Naturally the MSM will eat this up.  There's good stuff on this from Matt Yglesias and Jon Chait that really makes the point. This is Chait:

When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.

Look Olympia Snowe, like other moderate Republicans, had no good options.  Join with Democrats on the Health Care bill, and she would have faced a primary challenge in Maine.  So since the election of Barack Obama she has been unable to demonstrate her moderation because the leadership of the GOP demanded perfect discipline so Democrats wouldn't be able to use her vote as bipartisan cover.

When this happened to Arlen Specter, though, he went a different route.  He took a couple of moderate votes, saw that he was going to get primaried by the radical right, and switched parties.  The fact is that moderate Democrats (not my favorite people, by the way) can survive right now, but moderate Republicans can't- party discipline is too strong.

Olympia Snowe's problem was caused by Republicans, though.  It would be nice if she'd say that.