“Tramp Stamps, Racism And ‘Icky’ Pronouns: 8 New Life Tips From “Bell Curve” Author Charles Murray
Weeks after Rep. Paul Ryan was slammed for citing his writing, “The Bell Curve” author Charles Murray is out today with a new book: “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’t of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life.”
Murray, whom Ryan cited as a source demonstrating “this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “White Nationalist,” addresses his new book to readers who are “in or near your twenties,” “intelligent,” “ambitious,” and “want to become excellent at something.”
He is most famous for co-authoring “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book (in the author’s’ words) “about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America’s future.” Describing what they called “the cognitive differences between races,” Murray and co-author Richard Hernstein wrote that “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.” They also claimed, “There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.” (They describe “a dysgenic effect” as “a downward shift in the ability distribution.”)
Murray was supposed to conduct an interview with Salon (having agreed to it last week), but abruptly dropped out hours beforehand. In the interview’s place, here are some of his new book’s eight most memorable life tips:
On Tattoos: “As for tattoos, it does no good to remind curmudgeons that tattoos have been around for millennia. Yes, we will agree, tattoos have been common – first among savage tribes and then, more recently, among the lowest classes of Western societies. In America, tattoos have until the last few decades been the unambiguous badge of the proletariat or worse – an association still acknowledged in the phrase tramp stamp.”
On Pronouns: “The feminist revolution has tied writers into knots when it comes to the third-person singular pronoun. Using the masculine pronoun as the default has been proscribed. Some male writers get around this problem by defaulting to the feminine singular pronoun, which I think is icky.” Instead, “Unless there is an obvious reason not to, use the gender of the author or, in a cowritten text, the gender of the principal author. It’s the perfect solution.”
“More People Have Health Insurance”: Another Day, Another Sign That Obamacare Is Working
It’s impossible to say how big an impact the Affordable Care Act is having on the uninsured. But it’s getting impossible to deny that it’s having an impact at all.
The latest evidence comes from the Gallup organization, which surveys respondents about insurance status. According to Gallup, the percentage of adults without health insurance has been falling since the middle of last year. Now, Gallup says, it’s down to 15.6 percent. That’s the lowest rate that Gallup has recorded since late 2008.
These tracking surveys on the uninsured are far from precise. Among other things, people answering these surveys aren’t always sure of their own insurance status. Nobody should treat them as gospel.
But Gallup also found the most dramatic change in insurance status among low-income and minority populations, which would be consistent with implementation of a law that has its most dramatic impact on people with the least money. It’s also consistent with three other pieces of information
- Health Reform Monitoring Survey. In this survey, conducted by the Urban Institute and supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the rate of uninsurance among non-elderly adults fell from 17.6 percent in the first quarter of 2013 to 15.2 percent in the first quarter of 2014.
- The Rand Corporation. According to reporting by Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times, unpublished research from Rand suggests that the percentage of uninsured Americans fell from 20.9 in late 2013 to 16.6 percent in early 2014.
- Department of Health and Human Services. Late last week, HHS announced that enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP was 3 million higher than it had been in late 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 13 million Americans will get health insurance because of Obamacare. Gallup’s numbers would correspond to a significantly smaller decline, although the numbers depend on what you choose as a starting point. Then again, Gallup’s numbers don’t account for the end of open enrollment—when, by all accounts, large numbers of people rushed to sign up for coverage. They also don’t account for a full year of enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, since people can sign up for those programs all year long.
In short, it seems pretty clear that, because of Obamacare, more people have health insurance. And, yes, that accounts for people who lost existing coverage because insurers cancelled old policies. The question is how big a difference the law is making. And it’s going to be a while before anybody knows.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, April, 7, 2014
“Showing Its True Colors”: The GOP’s Case For Scrapping Democracy
When I wrote a recent column describing the GOP’s new voting laws as a “war on democracy,” I expected a sharp response from the Right. What I thought I’d hear were variations on the following: “No, Republicans aren’t at war with democracy. We’re just trying to fight voter fraud and make sure elections are held fairly and uniformly within states. And that’s a goal that enhances democracy.”
Not only is this how the issue is usually discussed by Republican politicians; it’s also the way nearly every political dispute in the United States over the past century has been framed — as a clash between different camps over which one can claim the mantle of “democracy” for itself. People will routinely assert that some other group, party, or position is anti-democratic in its aims and ideals. But no group, party, or position comes right out and explicitly denounces democracy in its own name.
At least until recently.
Allow me to quote a representative email written in response to my column: “I just read your piece on the GOP changes to voting laws. It’s complete garbage! Americans who have no skin in the game should not be voting! The way things have evolved in the last 200 years is nothing short of disgusting! People who don’t offer anything tangible to the country are given as much say as people who pay 400k in taxes per year? Ridiculous! How did we regress so far?”
An anti-democratic outlier? Five years ago, I would have thought so. But now I’m not so sure.
This was the week, of course, when the Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority knocked down limits on aggregate contributions to federal political campaigns, opening the door for the rich to exercise even more influence on the political system than they already do. It was also the week when Rep. Paul Ryan unveiled his latest budget proposal, which would gut food stamps and other aid to the poor. And as I wrote about the other day, this is a political season that has seen the Republican Party working to make it harder for poor people and members of minority groups to vote.
Then there was venture capitalist Tom Perkins suggesting a couple of months ago that only taxpayers should be permitted to vote — and that those who pay more in taxes should be given more votes to cast in elections. And that came less than two years after Mitt Romney was caught kissing up to wealthy GOP donors by denigrating the “moochers” who make up 47 percent of the country’s population.
Ladies and gentlemen, that many data points make a pattern. We seem to be living in an era in which the Republican Party is turning against democracy in an increasingly explicit and undeniable way.
Within the context of the nation’s recent political history, this is a shocking prospect. We’re used to a constant evolution in the direction of ever-more democracy. At the time of the country’s founding, the franchise was limited to white male property owners. Then the property qualification was eliminated. Then the vote was extended (de jure) to black men. Then to women. Then to all blacks (de facto), with most of the remaining obstacles to the exercise of voting rights by minorities and the poor removed by the mid-1960s.
What growing numbers of Republicans appear to want is a reversal of this trend — a reform of the political system to exclude large numbers of Americans from having a say in politics while augmenting and enhancing the electoral power of the rich.
This might be unprecedented in American history, but it’s certainly not unthinkable. Despite our fondness for describing ourselves as a democracy, the American system is already far from being wholly democratic. A pure democracy would pick leaders by lot, indiscriminately assigning citizens to political office for fixed terms according to chance. This year your Aunt Bess might be president. Next year it could be a 19-year-old mechanic from Omaha. And so on, haphazardly hopscotching through the population at random.
The institution of elections introduces an element of hierarchy into the system, since it presumes that some people are more capable than others of exercising political rule and that voters can recognize this quality when they see it.
What the GOP appears to be inching toward is a rejection of the democratic presumption that all American citizens should have a say in making that determination. Interestingly, the anti-democratic argument doesn’t seem to be arising directly or primarily from a concern about the quality of the people’s political choices — a perennial and nontrivial objection to democratic forms of government going all the way back to Plato.
Instead, Republicans and their wealthy donor base appear, above all else, to be up in arms about the lack of deference shown to the rich, with the implication being that those at the top of the economic pyramid deserve greater public honors (and power) than they currently enjoy. (That certainly seems to be the subtext of this rather self-pitying Wall Street Journal op-ed by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.)
Aristotle would have recognized this line of argument instantly. It is the classic case for political rule of the few. Aristotle would also have been unsurprised to learn that those making this claim use their wealth as evidence of personal virtue or excellence that entitles them to honor and deference.
What the ancient philosopher could not have anticipated is the role that free-market ideology would play in convincing nonwealthy members of the Republican Party that the self-enriching activity of entrepreneurs (“job creators”) self-evidently demonstrates their public-spiritedness and worthiness to wield political power without challenge.
Politicians of both parties are fond of saying that whatever election looms before us is the most important in recent memory. But if Republicans continue to stand against democracy itself, the hype, for once, will be true — and for a long time to come.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 4, 2014
“A Wishy-Washy Wonk”: Paul Ryan, Still A Total Jerk
Remind me not to get in a foxhole with Paul Ryan. At the first sign of trouble, he’ll pack up his gunny sack and head for base camp, running into the latrine to hide.
Or so I conclude from the budget he released this week. Remember how last year Ryan was reinventing himself as the true friend of “the poors,” as we ironically say in liberal blogland? Aside from being stunned that all those skewed polls turned out to be exactly on the money and he and Mitt Romney lost, he was also, we were told, chagrined and maddened that he came away from the 2012 campaign with a reputation as a pitiless Randian with a hole where his heart used to be.
So he set out last year to prove us all wrong. He hired a disaffected ex-Democratic wonk as his top social-policy guy. He was getting the great press you’d expect out of Politico, which loves Republicans Who Confound Liberals (“The new Paul Ryan,” last December 10; “Is Paul Ryan the GOP’s Next Jack Kemp?”, December 12; someone was asleep at the wheel on December 11 I guess). America would soon see the revealed truth: Government keeps poor people poor, bleeds them of the pluck and spunk needed to liberate oneself from the dependent-American community. St. Paul would save them.
Then came the CPAC conference a month ago, and he tells one little story, about the kid who didn’t want a free lunch, just a normal brown bag like the other kids, and he gets it wrong, and the real and true version of the story doesn’t remotely prove the point he wants it to prove in his retelling, and he gets hammered over it for days, and boom, he throws in the poverty towel. To blazes with those poors. Kicking them was pretty fun after all.
I jest, of course, with my chronology. But the budget he put out this week is nothing to laugh at. Or maybe on reflection it is something to laugh at. Why in the world does it exist, and what good do he and his fellow House Republicans think it’s going to do them?
In case you haven’t heard the basic skinny, it’s a budget that’s very pre-new Paul Ryan, characterized by the two features that have chiefly characterized all Ryan budgets: meanness and dishonesty. Meanness starts with the $5.1 trillion in cuts to domestic discretionary spending programs over 10 years, with steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and—
No, wait. Let’s stop here and mull this food stamp cut. As you probably know, in last year’s farm bill negotiations, House Republicans proposed a $40 billion cut to food stamps. By the time the House and Senate agreed to a farm bill last month, that was whittled down to $8.7 billion over 10 years. That’s a small cut in percentage terms (about 1 percent). But even it takes $90 a month away from 850,000 poor families. Ryan’s proposed food stamps cut? $125 billion. More than 14 times the size of the already controversial current cut. As St. Paul sayeth, we rejoice in our sufferings.
Beyond that it’s the usual Dickensian gruel. Federal programs block-granted, which always means far less money and almost always means that governors can spend the money on some more rewarding and more agreeably ZIP-coded constituency if they want to. Huge education cuts. Big cuts to Pell Grants. Oh, and here’s a nice touch—college students would start being charged interest on their loans while still in college, so that now, on top of everything else, the Republican Party is getting into the usury business.
Now don’t think I’ve forgotten the dishonesty part. Obamacare, as you might recall from the aforementioned campaign, cuts $716 billion in payments to hospitals and such. You remember—Romney and Ryan pounded on Obama about that $716 billion. You’re killing the oldsters, and so on.
Well, Ryan’s budget would repeal Obamacare. And yet, it pockets that same roughly $700 billion in Medicare cuts as savings, and, as Sahil Kapur noted for TPM, it “uses the savings to meet its fiscal targets.” How dandy is that? Hate Obamacare hate Obamacare hate Obamacare hate Obamacare…Oh, but I’ll pocket that $700 billion, Barack, thanks, great idea!
I haven’t even mentioned the plan’s biggest political weakness, which is Ryan’s return, yes, to Medicare, to quasi-privatizing it for people under 55. Democrats, until this week wholly on the defensive, have now been handed a huge sledgehammer. The 7.1 million Obamacare enrollees takes the heat off health care for the time being and allows for a topic change. And so here comes Ryan, the very day after Obamacare enrollment closed, offering that topic.
Why? Why is he re-introducing the idea of tampering with Medicare in an election year? In fact, why even release a document such as this? And why, having released it, force all your members to vote on it within the next week or so, which Ryan and Eric Cantor vow will happen? As Greg Sargent pointed out Wednesday, eight House Republicans in six different states are going to have to vote for this Medicare- and Medicaid-killing budget (old people understand that “Medicaid” means “nursing home care”).
And, depending on how you rate these things, there are around 25 House Republicans who could conceivably lose to Democrats this November. Why force them to vote for this? Or maybe if you’re John Boehner you don’t force them to. You let them vote no. But then you lose! Then what a laughing stock you are! But you’ll probably get 218 votes one way or another. So fine—you’ve forced some people in vulnerable positions to vote aye, but hey, you’ve won the vote. Then what? Then nothing. Harry Reid’s Senate will not even take it up. So it’s all symbolism.
And this is the symbol the GOP wants to present? The party that destroys federal education programs, Medicaid, food stamps, and (in the future) Medicare? I suppose they think it’ll rev up their base. Will it really? This is the fifth Ryan budget by my count. They’ve all said in essence the same thing, and they’ve all gone the same place: nowhere.
I’d like to know, sort of, what’s actually in Paul Ryan’s head and heart. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. What matters with him, as with any politician, is what he puts on paper. And here we have it. If this is trying to help the poor, then what Putin is doing in Russia is pro-gay. At least we won’t have to read any more “Paul Ryan loves poor people” stories. So long, St. Paul.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 3, 2014
“BobbyCare”: Jindal’s Generic Obamacare Alternative
If congressional Republicans need a fresh excuse to delay settling on an Obamacare “replacement” plan, Bobby Jindal’s given them one by throwing another plan into the mix. But on further examination, the Genius’ proposal is sort of the ultimate Generic Conservative Plan, complete with a Generic Conservative label, the Freedom and Empowerment Plan. It was released by Jindal’s pocket “think tank,” America Next.
Is there any hoary conservative health policy pet rock this plan omits? I don’t see any on a quick examination. You got your interstate insurance sales. You got “tort reform.” You got new incentives for setting up Health Savings Accounts. You got state-run high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions. You got a shift in the tax code from deductions for employer-sponsored health insurance to individually purchased health insurance. There’s a Medicaid block grant, and for extra measure, borrowed from the Ryan Budget, there’s Medicare converted to a premium support system for private insurance instead of single-payer government-supplied insurance.
There are a couple of wrinkles that stand out. Unlike, say, John McCain’s 2008 health care proposal, which BobbyCare resembles, Jindal would deploy not tax credits for insurance purposes but a new standard deduction. Wouldn’t that be regressive in its impact? No problem, says Jindal: po’ folks with little use for a tax deduction could share the state-run high-risk pools designed for those with preexisting conditions, providing an appropriately fenced-off health insurance ghetto for the poor and the sick (I’m sure that would fare really well in the federal and state appropriations processes).
Jindal’s plan is also a little vague about the transition to voucherized Medicare, though he suggests traditional Medicare should include a cap on “catastrophic” health expenses, presumably to reduce reliance on Medigap policies.
One provision isn’t vague at all:
[R]epeal of Obamacare will remove the law’s anti-conscience mandates, and the funding of plans that cover abortions. But true health reform should go further, instituting conscience protections for businesses and medical providers, as well as a permanent ban on federal funding of abortions, consistent with the Hyde Amendment protections passed by Congress every year since 1976.
BobbyCare is the work of a genius only if hunting and collecting past proposals is a brilliant endeavor (indeed, he seems concerned to take credit for Medicare as Premium Support away from Ryan by noting the 1999 commission he chaired proposed something similar). It will probably undercut support for more novel and politically feasible Republican proposals like the Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan. But no matter: the Legend of Bobby Jindal, Boy Genius, will get another layer of thin varnish.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 2, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 