Reihan Salam says that cranky old white conservative nostalgics aren’t racists they’re just white people who are nostalgic for a whiter, more racist America:
One thing that is undeniably true is that American conservatives are overwhelmingly white in a country that is increasingly less so. As the number of Latinos and Asian-Americans has increased in coastal states like California, New York and New Jersey, many white Americans from these regions have moved inland or to the South. For at least some whites, particularly those over the age of 50, there is a sense that the country they grew up in is fading away, and that Americans with ancestors from Mexico or, as in my case, Bangladesh don’t share their religious, cultural and economic values. These white voters are looking for champions, for people who are unafraid to fight for the America they remember and love. It’s unfair to call this sentiment racist. But it does help explain at least some of our political divide.
This puts me in a mind of House Speaker John Boehner’s explicitly expressed view that the problem with President Obama is was that he and the 111th Congress were “snuffing out the America that I grew up in”.
As I said at the time, on its face it’s difficult to make sense of that. John Boehner was born in 1949. Does he feel nostalgic for the higher marginal tax rates of the America he grew up in? For the much larger labor union share of the workforce? The threat of global nuclear war? It’s difficult for me to evade the conclusion that on an emotional level, conservative nostalgics like Boehner are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men. In Boehner’s defense, I often hear white male progressives express nostalgia for the lost America of the 1950s and 1960s and think to myself “a black person or a woman wouldn’t put it like that.” But progressive nostalgics do at least have the high-tax, union-dominated economy and egalitarian income distribution as the things they like. But from a non-bigoted conservative point of view, what is there really to miss about the America John Boehner grew up it? The tax rates were high, but at least they didn’t let Jews into the country club?
By: Matthew Yglesias, ThinkProgress, August 19, 2011
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August 19, 2011
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With the Battle of Wisconsin reaching a temporary lull after the recent recall elections, attention is shifting to another midwestern state, where opponents of recently enacted union-bashing legislation have far exceeded the threshold of petitions needed to get a referendum repealing the measure on a November ballot.
With polls consistently showing Ohio voters favoring the repeal initiative (by 50-39 in a new PPP poll, and by larger margins in earlier polls), Gov. John Kasich and Republican legislative leaders are suddenly asking for meetings to seek a compromise on Senate Bill 5, which was enacted in March on a party-line vote.
Kasich hurried to sign the bill soon after it passed in order to force opponents to seek a referendum this year rather than in the higher-turnout 2012 presidential cycle.
But now Republicans are seeking to head off the referendum, or (since SB 5 opponents have made it clear that total repeal of the bill is a precondition to talks about how it might be replaced with compromise legislation) more likely, trying to strengthen their hand in the referendum fight by appearing reasonable. It’s a little late for that.
So the referendum fight is fully on, and as November approaches, you can expect the kind of national labor/progressive coalition that mobilized for the Wisconsin recalls to focus on Ohio.
By: Democratic Strategist Staff, August 19, 2011
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As my Philadelphia Phillies idled through a two-hour rain delay Thursday night, I curled up with some light reading: a Texas Review of Law & Politics article by the legal team, led by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, that’s challenging the new healthcare individual mandate in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
It’s fascinating stuff.
Cuccinelli and co. follow a long trail from the 18th century British jurist William Blackstone to the Dred Scott case to the New Deal to the present day. The conservative team, at first, makes a tight, prudential case against the Obamacare mandate that I, in my nonprofessional capacity, happen to favor.
In their words:
No existing case needs to be overruled and no existing doctrine needs to be curtailed or expanded for Virginia to prevail on the merits. Nor does Virginia remotely suggest that the United States lacks the power to erect a system of national healthcare. Virginia expressly pled that Congress has the authority to act under the taxing and spending powers as it did with respect to Social Security and Medicare, but that Congress in this instance lacked the political capital and will to do so. No challenge has been mounted by Virginia to the vast sweep and scope of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Instead, only the mandate and penalty were challenged because the claimed power is tantamount to a national police power inasmuch as it lacks principled limits.
In plainer, get-to-the-point English: We grant you the social safety net established under the “Roosevelt Settlement.” We recognize Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. We even grant that this power could conceivably deliver universal healthcare. But for Pete’s sake, don’t try to include “inactivity”—that is, not buying a health insurance plan on the private market—under its purview.
Because, once you regulate the act of doing nothing, what’s left to regulate?
Er, nothing.
Thus, does the state’s power to tax and police become theoretically unlimited?
But, later in the body of the piece, Team Cuccinelli begins to play other, more presently familiar cards. Glenn Beck fans will recognize the faces in the rogue’s gallery: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, progressive philosopher John Dewey, and others who, this argument goes, created the post-New Deal legal and philosophical edifice.
Wouldn’t you know it, this welfare-state stuff constitutes a violation of natural law—which, ipso facto, means economic laissez-faire—and a lurch into moral chaos. Echoing the newly popular Hayek, Cuccinelli’s article asserts the primacy of economic rights while characterizing as relativistic the not-exclusively-liberal jurisprudential argument that personhood and dignity precede the marketplace. (Last I checked, I’ve never seen an unborn baby sign a contract.)
Come conclusion time, the piece sounds eerily like it’s not merely advocating the curtailment of an otherwise defensible attempt to advance the national interest, but rather like a full-throated libertarian manifesto:
The Progressive Meliorists had argued that they should be accorded constitutional space in which to make a social experiment, agreeing in turn to be judged by the results. The New Dealers carried the experiment forward. Seventy years later, results are in suggesting that the experiment is living beyond its means. The statist heirs to the experiment say that it cannot and must not be curtailed, so now they claim this new power.
Social Security and Medicare—an experiment! Just a temporary, 70-year blip on the radar!
So, in 46 pages, we proceed from modest and reasonable to deeply crazy.
It behooves us to ask, what’s Cuccinelli’s endgame?
I think we’ve seen this movie before.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, August 18, 2011
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Affordable Care Act, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Consumers, Democrats, GOP, Government, Health Care, Health Reform, Human Rights, Ideologues, Ideology, Individual Mandate, Medicare, Politics, President Obama, Public, Regulations, Republicans, Right Wing, Social Security, States, Taxes, Teaparty | Courts, Glen Beck, Inactivity, Ken Cuccinelli, Lawsuits, Libertarians, National Healthcare, New Deal, ObamaCare, Personhood, Taxation, U. S. Appeals Court, Universal Healthcare, Virginia |
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry formally launched his presidential campaign last weekend, apparently hoping to upstage those competitors who were slugging it out in the Iowa Straw Poll. The event was won by Michele Bachmann, whose core supporters come from the same Religious Right-Tea Party crowd expected to be Perry’s base. He may have just made it official, but in fact Perry has already been running hard. A week before his announcement, he solidified the devotion of Religious Right leaders and activists with a defiantly sectarian prayer rally sponsored by some of the country’s most extreme promoters of religious and anti-gay bigotry. His financial backers began hitting up donors a while ago.
Perry is hoping to take advantage of a relative lack of enthusiasm for the current Republican field and its erstwhile front-runners. His potential to upset the field is reflected in the fact that he was polling in the double-digits before even entering the race, drawing far more support than candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum who have seemingly been running for years. Ed Kilgore at The New Republic wrote recently that Perry has become “the unity candidate of the GOP” because he “seems to perfectly embody the Republican zeitgeist of the moment, appealing equally to the GOP’s Tea Party, Christian Right, and establishment factions while exemplifying the militant anti-Obama attitude that holds it all together.” Perry does indeed draw support from both establishment and far-right Republicans: last year, prizes offered by his election campaign included lunch with GOP strategist Karl Rove and a spiritual tour of the U.S. Capitol with right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton.
The Religious Right
Perry’s love affair with even the most extreme elements of the Religious Right is a long-term relationship that started years before the recent prayer rally. Over the years, Perry has persistently backed the efforts of Religious Right activists on the Texas school board to use the textbook selection process to impose right-wing religious and political ideology on science and history textbooks. He has shown little respect for the separation of church and state and has worked to further restrict access to abortion in the state.
His re-election campaigns have relied heavily on church-based organizing and networks of far-right evangelical pastors mobilized by the likes of self-described “Christocrat” Rick Scarborough. According to the Texas Freedom Network, Between May 2005 and October 2008 the Texas Restoration Project held eight pastors’ policy briefings. Part of Perry’s invitation to the October 2008 event said:
While Congress occupies its time trying to legislate defeat in Iraq, we hope you will attend a Pastors Policy Briefing that will equip you to walk point in the war of values and ideas.
Rediscovering God in America — Austin is intended to remind us that excuses are not the proper strategy when facing evil and confronting enemies. Instead, we must rally godly people and seek God’s provision for the resources, the courage, and the strength necessary to win and, ultimately, glorify Him.
In 2009, he participated in a closed-door session with Texas pastors sponsored by the U.S. Pastor Council, and hosted a state prayer breakfast that featured Gary Bauer as the keynote speaker. And last year, he was visited by a group of pastors associated with the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, who told him that God had chosen him for bigger things; they were among the leaders of last weekend’s “Response.”
The Response itself was called by Perry but sponsored and paid for by the American Family Association, which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its pattern or spreading false and denigrating information about gay people, and which promotes some of the ugliest bigotry spewed on the nation’s airwaves. Among the extremist co-sponsors and speakers at The Response were dominionist Mike Bickle, who has said that Oprah is a harbinger of the anti-Christ, and pseudo-historian David Barton, who claims that Jesus opposed progressive taxes, the minimum wage, and collective bargaining by unions.
The Tea Party Right
Perry also seamlessly blends the Tea Party’s anti-Washington fervor with the Religious Right’s Christian-nation vision. Last year, at an event sponsored by the Texas Eagle Forum, Perry said the November 2010 elections were “a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation.” Said Perry, “That’s the question: Who do you worship? Do you believe in the primacy of unrestrained federal government? Or do you worship the God of the universe, placing our trust in him?”
If it seems remarkable and contradictory that Perry would seek the presidency so soon after speculating on the benefits of seceding from the union “if Washington continues to thumb its nose at the American people,” it is no less contradictory than Perry promoting his anti-Washington book, “Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” while repeatedly requesting federal emergency assistance to fight wildfires that have raged in Texas this year.
The Economic Right
Perry is almost certain to make jobs — and his claims that Texas’ low-tax, low-regulation, low-wage environment would be good for what ails America — a centerpiece of his campaign. In fact he has been publicly praying about regulations that he says stifle business and jobs. That vision will almost certainly make Perry popular among the corporate funders that are increasingly funneling money into Republican campaigns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that corporations have the same rights as citizens to influence elections.
Perry’s economic policies may be good for corporate profits, but they aren’t much of an economic model for the rest of us. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wroteearlier this year:
Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.
Debt owed by the state of Texas has doubled during Perry’s tenure as governor; the state’s per-capita debt is worse than California’s. And this year, Texas lawmakers wrestled with a budget shortfall that Associated Press called “one of the worst in the nation.” Perry’s budget relied heavily on federal stimulus funds to plug a massive 2010 budget deficit. The budget finally passed this year cut some $4 billion out of state support for public education and is expected to result in tens of thousands of teacher layoffs.
Meanwhile, Texas ranks at or near the bottom of many indicators of individual and community health. It is worst in the country in the percentage of children with health insurance and pregnant women receiving early prenatal care. It has the highest percentage of workers earning at or below the minimum wage. It has the lowest percentage of adults with a high school diploma. It is worst for known carcinogens released into the air and among the worst for toxic pollution overall.
The Right Online
Perry has sometimes adopted the Sarah Palin approach to media. According to the conservative Daily Caller, Perry declined to meet with newspaper editorial boards during his primary race against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, but “went out of his way to make himself available to conservative bloggers.” The Caller‘s Matt Lewis predicts that “a large percentage of conservative bloggers for sites like RedState.com” will “jump on the Perry bandwagon.”
Perry the Prevaricator
Perry statements have received no fewer than seven “pants on fire” ratings from Politifact Texas; he earned those awards for repeated false statements about his policies and his political opponents. Of 67 Perry statements reviewed by Politifact, 14 were declared false in addition to the seven “pants on fire” lies — while another 10 were rated “mostly false.” Only 17 were considered true (10) or mostly true (7), with 19 called “half true.”
Perry and the Republican Party
If Rick Perry does indeed become the Republican “unity candidate,” that will be further evidence that the GOP has become the party of, by, and for the far right — a party that has abandoned any credible claim to representing the economic interests or constitutional values embraced by most Americans.
By: Michael B. Keegan; President, People For the American Way, Published in Huff Post Politics, August 17, 2011
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What would your health insurance cover if you got pregnant? How much could you expect to pay out of pocket if you needed treatment for diabetes? How do your plan’s benefits compare with another company’s?
Starting as soon as March, consumers could have a better handle on such questions, under new rules aimed at decoding the fine print of health insurance plans.
Regulations proposed by the Obama administration on Wednesday would require all private health insurance plans to provide current and prospective customers a brief, standardized summary of policy costs and benefits.
To make it easier for consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons between plans, the summary will also include a breakdown estimating the expenses covered under three common scenarios: having a baby, treating breast cancer and managing diabetes.
Officials likened the new summary to the “Nutrition Facts” label required for packaged foods.
“If you’ve ever had trouble understanding your choices for health insurance coverage . . . this is for you,” Donald Berwick, a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at a news conference announcing the proposal.
“Instead of trying to decipher dozens of pages of dense text to just guess how a plan will cover your care, now it will be clearly stated in plain English. . . . If an insurer’s plan offers subpar coverage in some area, they won’t be able to hide that in dozens of pages of text. They have to come right out and say it.”
Industry representatives said complying could prove onerous for insurers. “Since most large employers customize the benefit packages they provide to their employees, some health plans could be required to create tens of thousands of different versions of this new document — which would add administrative costs without meaningfully helping employees,” Robert Zirkelbach, press secretary for the industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement.
Insurance shoppers would also have to keep in mind that their actual premiums could change after they finalized their application, particularly in the case of plans for individuals, which can continue to adjust benefits based on detailed analysis of members’ health history over the next three years. (After 2014, the health-care law will essentially limit insurers to considering only three questions about applicants: how old they are, where they live and whether they smoke.)
The regulation, which is subject to a 60-day public-comment period, essentially fleshes out details of a mandate established by the the health-care law. But it also clarifies a question that the law left somewhat ambiguous: How soon into the application process can shoppers get the summary from insurers?
The regulations would require insurers to provide the summary on request, rather than waiting until someone applies for a policy or pays an application fee, a position that drew praise from consumer advocates.
“If consumers are really going to be able to compare their options, they should be able to easily get this form for any plan that they would like to consider,” said Lynn Quincy, senior health policy analyst for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.
In addition to supplying the summary on demand, insurers would have to automatically provide it before a consumer’s enrollment, as well as 30 days before renewal of their health coverage. Plans must also notify members of any significant changes to their terms of coverage at least 60 days before the alterations take effect.
The summary form, which can be sent by e-mail, must be no longer than four double-sided pages printed in 12-point type. In addition to listing a plan’s overall premiums, co-pays and co-insurance amounts, it must include charts specifying the out-of-pocket costs for a range of specific services. A copy can be viewed at www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/labels08172011b.pdf.
By: N. C. Aizenman, The Washington Post, August 17, 2011
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Affordable Care Act, Consumers, Corporations, Government, Health Care, Health Reform, HMO's, Insurance Companies, Pre-Existing Conditions, President Obama, Public, Regulations | America's Health Insurance Plans, Breast Cancer, Diabetes, Donald Berwick, Employees, Employers, Health Insurance, Health Plans, Insurance Premiums, Insurers, Out Of Pocket Expenses, Pregnancy, Private Health Insurance |
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