“The Real Enemies Of Christmas”: Sham “War On Christmas” Overlooks Holiday’s History
Probably seeking more TV appearances and speaking gigs, Sarah Palin has decided to enter the overcrowded “War on Christmas” market sector with a new book. Like all the other screeds on the subject, Palin’s version — Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas – takes up arms against a cast of alleged scoundrels frequently denounced by conservative talking heads.
Is Palin sick of the commercialization that has wrenched the season from its roots? Is she tired of Christmas sales that start before Thanksgiving? Has she had it with the bickering over parking spaces and shoving to get the most popular toy that inevitably accompany shopping at this time of year?
Ah, not so much. As Palin tells it, the gravest threats to the seriousness of the season are atheists who sue over public displays of the creche and shopkeepers who call out “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Just like every other right-wing talking head who comes out swinging at this time of year, she sees the problem as Americans who believe in the First Amendment, who speak to Allah when they pray, who understand the difference between public spaces and religious ones.
Her diatribe is not only ridiculously overwrought and paranoid, but it’s also redundant. Hasn’t Bill O’Reilly thoroughly covered this ground?
Still, we’re bound to be subjected to a month-long outcry over school calendars that mention “winter holidays” instead of “Christmas,” so it’s worth repeating the many ways in which Palin and her compatriots are wrong. Let’s start with history.
For the most part, the earliest American Christians did not celebrate Christmas at all. They didn’t believe celebrations were appropriate. The Puritans were a dour bunch who rebelled against the traditional Christmas festivities that had marked the season in 17th-century England: caroling, eating, drinking, carousing.
The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed any celebrations of Christmas, fining those who dared show any hint of merry-making. That likely would have included the errant greeting of “Merry Christmas!” (Increase Mather, the Billy Graham of his day, had a point about the December 25 anniversary, which he noted coincided with a pagan Roman celebration. Historians doubt that Jesus was actually born on that date.)
But the far bigger flaw in the “War on Christmas” arguments lies in a fundamental misreading of the U.S. Constitution and its traditions. Palin and her ilk claim to be faithful readers of the founding document, but their view of it — like their interpretation of the Bible — is narrow, limited and eccentric.
The United States was not created as a “Christian” nation. In fact, the Founding Fathers were acutely aware of Europe’s bloody and destabilizing religious wars, and they sought to create a nation that would thrive as a pluralistic republic, allowing all citizens to worship as they chose. That is explicit in a treaty unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 and aimed at ending piracy along the Barbary coast. One of its articles begins, “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion …”
Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” was a believer, but not of the sort that Palin would recognize. While he had great respect for Jesus’ moral teachings, for example, he did not believe in Christ’s divinity.
Jefferson might be surprised by the religious pluralism of the nation he helped to birth, but his wisdom has held up well through the centuries. Government does not endorse any religious view, so public school teachers should not lead public prayers. (Let me also clear up a common misunderstanding: Students are free to pray on their own in public schools, and many do.) Government buildings should not include any Christian inscriptions unless they include those of other religions. Churches, mosques and synagogues, however, are free to display what they like, and they do.
I know many committed Christians who struggle to keep sacred the meaning of the season. But they don’t do that by railing against what they hear clerks say to patrons in the malls. They try to stay out of the malls.
When the “war” focuses on the real enemies of Christmas — endless commercialization and mindless consumerism — I’ll enlist.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 23, 2013
“Obscuring The Bigger Picture”: The Republican Tempest Over The Affordable Care Act Diverts Attention From Three Large Truths
Having failed to defeat the Affordable Care Act in Congress, to beat it back in the last election, to repeal it despite more than eighty votes in the House, to stop it in the federal courts, to get enough votes in the Supreme Court to overrule it, and to gut it with outright extortion (closing the government and threatening to default on the nation’s debts unless it was repealed), Republicans are now down to their last ploy.
They are hell-bent on destroying the Affordable Care Act in Americans’ minds.
A document circulating among House Republicans (reported by the New York Times) instructs them to repeat the following themes and stories continuously: “Because of Obamacare, I Lost My Insurance.” “Obamacare Increases Health Care Costs.” “The Exchanges May Not Be Secure, Putting Personal Information at Risk.”
Every Republican in Washington has been programmed to use the word “disaster” whenever mentioning the Act, always refer to it as Obamacare, and demand its repeal.
Republican wordsmiths know they can count on Fox News and right-wing yell radio to amplify and intensify all of this in continuous loops of elaboration and outrage, repeated so often as to infect peoples’ minds like purulent pustules.
The idea is to make the Act so detestable it becomes the fearsome centerpiece of the midterm elections of 2014 — putting enough Democrats on the defensive they join in seeking its repeal or at least in amending it in ways that gut it (such as allowing insurers to sell whatever policies they want as long as they want, or delaying it further).
Admittedly, the President provided Republicans ammunition by botching the Act’s roll-out. Why wasn’t HealthCare.gov up and running smoothly October 1? Partly because the Administration didn’t anticipate that almost every Republican governor would refuse to set up a state exchange, thereby loading even more responsibility on an already over-worked and underfunded Department of Health and Human Services.
Why didn’t Obama’s advisors anticipate that some policies would be cancelled (after all, the Act sets higher standards than many policies offered) and therefore his “you can keep their old insurance” promise would become a target? Likely because they knew all policies were “grandfathered” for a year, didn’t anticipate how many insurers would cancel right away, and understood that only 5 percent of policyholders received insurance independent of an employer anyway.
But there’s really no good excuse. The White House should have anticipated the Republican attack machine.
The real problem is now. The President and other Democrats aren’t meeting the Republican barrage with three larger truths that show the pettiness of the attack:
The wreck of private insurance. Ours has been the only healthcare system in the world designed to avoid sick people. For-profit insurers have spent billions finding and marketing their policies to healthy people – young adults, people at low risk of expensive diseases, groups of professionals – while rejecting people with preexisting conditions, otherwise debilitated, or at high risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. And have routinely dropped coverage of policy holders who become seriously sick or disabled. What else would you expect from corporations seeking to maximize profits?
But the social consequences have been devastating. We have ended up with the most expensive healthcare system in the world (finding and marketing to healthy people is expensive, corporate executives are expensive, profits adequate to satisfy shareholders are expensive), combined with the worst health outcomes of all rich countries — highest rates of infant mortality, shortest life spans, largest portions of populations never seeing a doctor and receiving no preventive care, most expensive uses of emergency rooms.
We could not and cannot continue with this travesty of a healthcare system.
The Affordable Care Act is a modest solution. It still relies on private insurers — merely setting minimum standards and “exchanges” where customers can compare policies, requiring insurers to take people with preexisting conditions and not abandon those who get seriously sick, and helping low-income people afford coverage.
A single-payer system would have been preferable. Most other rich countries do it this way. It could have been grafted on to Social Security and Medicare, paid for through payroll taxes, expanded to lower-income families through Medicaid. It would have been simple and efficient. (It’s no coincidence that the Act’s Medicaid expansion has been easy and rapid in states that chose to accept it.)
But Republicans were dead set against this. They wouldn’t even abide a “public option” to buy into something resembling Medicare. In the end, they wouldn’t even go along with the Affordable Care Act, which was based on Republican ideas in the first place. (From Richard Nixon’s healthcare plan through the musings of the Heritage Foundation, Republicans for years urged that everything be kept in the hands of private insurers but the government set minimum standards, create state-based insurance exchanges, and require everyone to sign up).
The moral imperative. Even a clunky compromise like the ACA between a national system of health insurance and a for-profit insurance market depends, fundamentally, on a social compact in which those who are healthier and richer are willing to help those who are sicker and poorer. Such a social compact defines a society.
The other day I heard a young man say he’d rather pay a penalty than buy health insurance under the Act because, in his words, “why should I pay for the sick and the old?” The answer is he has a responsibility to do so, as a member the same society they inhabit.
The Act also depends on richer people paying higher taxes to finance health insurance for lower-income people. Starting this year, a healthcare surtax of 3.8 percent is applied to capital gains and dividend income of individuals earning more than $200,000 and a nine-tenths of 1 percent healthcare tax to wages over $200,000 or couples over $250,000. Together, the two taxes will raise an estimated $317.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Here again, the justification is plain: We are becoming a vastly unequal society in which most of the economic gains are going to the top. It’s only just that those with higher incomes bear some responsibility for maintaining the health of Americans who are less fortunate.
This is a profoundly moral argument about who we are and what we owe each other as Americans. But Democrats have failed to make it, perhaps because they’re reluctant to admit that the Act involves any redistribution at all.
Redistribution has become so unfashionable it’s easier to say everyone comes out ahead. And everyone does come out ahead in the long term: Even the best-off will gain from a healthier and more productive workforce, and will save money from preventive care that reduces the number of destitute people using emergency rooms when they become seriously ill.
But there would be no reason to reform and extend health insurance to begin with if we did not have moral obligations to one another as members of the same society.
The initial problems with the website and the President’s ill-advised remark about everyone being able to keep their old policies are real. But they’re trifling compared to the wreckage of the current system, the modest but important step toward reform embodied in the Act, and the moral imperative at the core of the Act and of our society.
The Republicans have created a tempest out of trivialities. It is incumbent on Democrats — from the President on down — to show Americans the larger picture, and do so again and again.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, November 22, 2013
“About Those Canceled Plans”: When “Victims” Become Beneficiaries
When pressed for specifics, the Affordable Care Act’s detractors tend to focus on two main areas of concern: the website and the cancelation notices. The website is obviously important and administration officials are doing what they can. Maybe it’ll be fixed quickly, maybe it won’t – we’ll find out soon enough.
But the cancelation notices are a different kind of concern. As we’ve discussed, we’re talking about a very small percentage of the population that has coverage through the individual, non-group market and are now finding that their plans are being scrapped. When the House Republican “playbook” looks for people saying, “Because of Obamacare, I lost my insurance,” these are the folks they’re talking about.
But the story about these “victims” of reform is coming into sharper focus all the time.
Only a small sliver of the Americans who buy their own health insurance plans and may be seeing them canceled under Obamacare will pay higher premiums, according to an analysis released Thursday.
More than seven in 10 Americans who purchase health plans directly will get subsidies to help pay for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to the report by Families USA, a Washington-based organization that supports the health care reform law.
“It is important to keep a perspective about the small portion of the population that might be adversely affected,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. “That number is a tiny fraction of the 65 million non-elderly people with pre-existing health conditions who will gain new protections through the Affordable Care Act. It is also a small fraction of the tens of millions of uninsured Americans who can also get help.”
Let’s put this another way. A tiny percentage of consumers will receive cancelation notices, and of them, more than 70% will get new, more secure coverage that ends up costing them less.
They’re not, in other words, victims. They’re beneficiaries.
In fairness, many of them won’t know this for a while because they can’t yet go to healthcare.gov and see how much they’ll benefit, but we’re talking about the health care system itself – for all the talk about the cancelations, by a 2-to-1 margin, these folks are going to be better off, including receiving subsidies through the Affordable Care Act.
In reference to the remaining folks who’ll pay more, Pollack told the Huffington Post, “That’s approximately 1.5 million people, and that’s not trivial and I don’t in any way suggest that we shouldn’t be concerned about that group. But … the number of people at risk of this becoming a problem is considerably smaller than the tens of millions of people who are going to get substantial help.”
And here’s the larger question: if the evidence had pointed in the other direction, and 71% of these folks were poised to pay more, not less, would the story have gotten more attention? Would the coverage be dominated by “More bad news for Obamacare”?
This week, after years in which Obamacare critics said the law would fail to control costs, we saw remarkable evidence that the law is succeeding in controlling costs. Didn’t hear much about that? Neither did I.
I’m starting to get the sense that there’s an approved narrative – the Affordable Care Act is failing and is in deep trouble – and developments that point in the opposite direction are filtered out, while developments that reinforce the thesis are trumpeted.
The debate is often confusing enough, but this isn’t helping.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 22, 2013
“High On Their Own Supply”: Republicans Marching Into One Well-Prepared Crossfire After Another
Jonathan Strong, writing at National Review Online, explains that the Republicans are wary of doing anything that might distract people from their campaign against the Affordable Care Act. Therefore, Mitch McConnell doesn’t intend to engage in any high-profile retaliatory procedural actions in the Senate. That’s fine with me, but it calls to mind McConnell’s immediate response to the invocation of the Nuclear Option. He took to the Senate floor and declared not that Harry Reid had just done something historical or significant or even abominable, but that Reid was merely trying to distract people from ObamaCare.
I thought that was the oddest response in the world. I expected fire and brimstone and steaming wrath and promises of vengeance, or even impeachment. And I got a mild complaint about Reid trying to change the narrative.
This makes me think that the Republicans are truly on another one of their Moby Dick adventures, like Whitewater, like the White House Travel Office, like Vince Foster, like l’affaire Lewinsky, like Saddam’s WMD, like Fast and Furious, like Solyndra, like the New Black Panther Party, like Benghazi, and like the most recent government shutdown. More than anything, it reminds me of when they convinced themselves not that the presidential polling numbers could be oversampling blacks, but that they were oversampling blacks. It’s like their theory that systematically trying to make it harder for blacks to vote would result in reduced black turnout rather than a black community more determined than ever to cast their ballots.
It’s some variation of stupidity and delusion, with a little evil sprinkled into the mix. And this really is the only area where I find the Republicans unpredictable. I know what they won’t agree to, which makes it easy to offer it to them without fear that they will accept it. “Have some Chained CPI, boys, really, all we need in return is some revenue.”
What I have trouble predicting is their next obsession, and how absurdly far they will take it. These people are still talking about Benghazi. As long as I’ve watched them, I still have to admit that I didn’t see that coming.
Still, their greatest weakness is their predictability. They do not know how to adapt to changing circumstances, nor how to trim their sails when it would be to their advantage. As a result, they march into one well-prepared crossfire after another.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 23, 2013
“It’s Not All Doom And Gloom On Obamacare”: Just A Matter Of Time Before Republicans Start Criticizing Something New
Condemning the Affordable Care Act and its problem-plagued rollout is easy, but when the White House insists things are getting better, that’s not just spin. Brett Norman reports this afternoon:
Tech surge czar Jeff Zients said that HealthCare.gov will be able to handle 50,000 users at a time by the end of this month – up from 25,000 now, thanks to hardware additions and software additions the team is putting in this weekend and next week.
He said that will enable the site to handle 800,000 people a day – “a conservative estimate,” he said in a conference call with reporters.
It’s important to note that handling increased traffic, while clearly important, is not the resolution to all of the website’s troubles. Accurately connecting consumers to insurers and providing reliable data on subsidies is just as important, and to date, these are areas with which healthcare.gov has also struggled.
That said, Zients told reporters all of these issues are being addressed, and the increased website capacity should – should – keep the larger enrollment system on track towards its 2014 goals.
Indeed, even before Zients’s media briefing, Sarah Kliff highlighted reports of a “November surge” in enrollments.
By the end of October, the federal government had counted 106,000 people enrolled into private coverage through the new health insurance marketplaces, a small percentage of the projected half-million sign-ups.
By mid-November, though, with the 14 state-based marketplaces reporting fresh data, that number had just about doubled to more than 200,000…. State officials say they are seeing an uptick in sign-ups this month. California, which has had about 80,000 sign-ups, is now reporting about 2,000 enrollments per day. New York and Washington reported double-digit enrollment numbers as of this week.
Kaiser Family Foundation President Drew Altman told Kliff, “It’s not all doom and gloom.”
Reports from several states where officials want the system to work are reporting impressive numbers for the first half of November. California, in particular, appears to be leading the way – and given that the Golden State is the nation’s largest, that’s good news for the overall totals.
The law’s proponents shouldn’t be Pollyannaish about any of this, and we have not reached the point at which the system can fairly be described as “adequate.” It’s just not there yet.
But the administration can credibly say they’re putting out the fires; they’re making steady progress; and they’ve moving closer to their goals. The panic is subsiding. The recent chatter that “Obamacare” is going to destroy the president, Democrats, the health care system, and the idea of progressive governance on a conceptual level hasn’t quite gone away, but it’s looking increasingly silly.
And while I’m reluctant to look too far ahead with so much uncertainty still surrounding the system’s functionality, I can’t help but wonder about what the political world’s conversation will look like if, in the near future, healthcare.gov is working as it should, enrollment is strong, costs are contained, millions are gaining coverage they previously lacked, and millions more enjoy health care security that previously didn’t exist.
I have a very strong hunch we would, under this scenario, see very few headlines that say “Obama fixes problems, brings health care security to nation.” Rather, folks would just move past the hysteria of the last month, start criticizing something new, and Republicans could return to saying, “Now, about Benghazi….”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 22, 2013
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