“Those Lazy Inner-City White Folks”: The Terrible Tyranny Of Federal Assistance
Unlike Rick Perry, Paul Ryan is a master of subtlety in his double-talk on the future of the New Deal/Great Society legacy under Republican governance. Conservative activists may understand that his budget proposals for turning Medicare into a defined-contribution premium support program, or for block-granting Medicaid, represent way stations to a return to the glorious days before 1933. But the out-front rhetoric is always about “saving” Medicare and “reforming” Medicaid. Similarly, Ryan has invested heavily in concern-trolling poor people by suggesting that their “moral fiber” and prospects for upward mobility are being threatened by the tyranny of federally subsidized food, health care, and income support. That all these crocodile tears happen to coincide with the policy predilections of conservatives who view poor people as looters and constitution-destroyers (following the explicit views of Ryan’s muse Ayn Rand) is just a coincidence, it seems.
But even Ryan screws up now and then, and he’s furiously back-peddling from comments made in the friendly confines of Bill Bennett’s radio show about the non-existent work ethic of “inner-city” men. Gee, wonder who he could be talking about? Lauren Victoria Burke asked him about that, and he was just stunned anyone could think it was a racial dog-whistle:
When I asked Ryan if he’d like to “revise and extend his remarks on black men” as he left he House floor after last votes on Wednesday he said, “it was taken out of context — it was, that was — out of left field — out of context.”
“This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” Ryan added as we spoke in an elevator. He also indicated that it was Bennett that raised the initial issue over the course of a lengthy discussion.
“It was a long talk and he asked about the culture and I just went off of that,” Ryan said. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever,” he repeated.
This sort of assertion, backed up when necessary by the claim that the questioner is “playing the race card,” is common enough on the Right that Ryan will probably get away with it unscathed. And that’s a shame: it would be instructive and entertaining to force him to produce some examples of inner-city white folks suffering from the terrible tyranny of federal assistance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 13, 2014
“Why Does The National Media Get Texas So Wrong?”: Ultra-Conservative Candidates Aren’t Fading Away
Tuesday, as Texas primary voters headed to the polls, Politico published an article titled, “The Texas tea party’s best days may be behind it.” Below the headline were photographs of Governor Rick Perry, the state’s junior U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, and Congressman Steve Stockman, who had decided to wage a last-minute, barely visible campaign again Texas’s senior U.S. senator, John Cornyn. The article focused on the Cornyn-Stockman race, and it mentioned a congressional primary in which incumbent Pete Sessions faced a Tea Party challenge from Katrina Pierson.
To anyone familiar with Texas politics, the article was baffling. It made no mention of the state’s most-watched (and most important) GOP primary, the race for the lieutenant governor nomination, and it made only a passing reference to the attorney general race, even though both contests featured bloody fights between so-called “establishment” and Tea Party candidates. The state’s hardest-right election force, the Empower Texans political action committee, also didn’t figure anywhere in the story.
Even after results poured in showing that for the most part Texas remains a dangerous place to skate too near the center, The New York Times headlined its recap with “Texas GOP beats back challengers from the right.” The Times reported that “conservatives inspired by Senator Ted Cruz largely failed to topple mainstream incumbents”—largely because Stockman and Pierson lost.
From these write-ups, you would never guess the significance of incumbent Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst’s poor showing. Dewhurst, whose U.S. Senate dreams were toppled by Ted Cruz in 2012, managed only 28 percent, while his challenger, the pro-life, pro-Tea Party state Senator Dan Patrick, hit 44 percent. The two will run off May 27 but things don’t look great for Dewhurst. The lieutenant governor, who occupies the state’s most powerful office, has personal wealth that can provide whatever funds he needs, but Patrick’s fan base is larger—in addition to being a state senator, he’s a talk-radio personality in the state.
Results shook out similarly in the attorney general’s race, where Tea Party-backed state Senator Ken Paxton got the most votes and will run off against state Representative Dan Branch. You’d also have no idea that veteran state Senator John Carona, one of only a few moderates left in the Texas senate, had fallen to a Tea Party challenger, as did a handful of state representatives. Stockman may have garnered the most national attention, but he was never a serious contender. He ran a haphazard campaign that received little support from the state’s strong Tea Party network, despite his extreme rhetoric.
So how did Politico and the Times miss the big picture? Texas is complicated because there’s no binary opposition between “establishment” candidates and those affiliated with the Tea Party. Should we define “establishment” as Speaker of the House Joe Straus, who has himself a relatively moderate record but has presided over one of the state’s most conservative legislatures? Outside Tea Party groups have tried to topple Straus, yet he also commands support from Tea Party-backed state representatives. Or is the “establishment” closer to Governor Rick Perry, the state’s longest-serving governor, who gave one of the first major speeches at a Tea Party rally in 2009? Or is it David Dewhurst, who hung tight to Perry’s message, passed extreme measures, but then watched his political dreams crumble as Cruz rose to power by accusing Dewhurst of being a moderate?
There’s no clear leader of the Texas right. Cruz may be the current face of the Tea Party movement, but he’s busy gumming up the gears in Washington; when it comes to state politics, particularly in a dominant party with several different factions, there’s a lot more to consider than just Cruz’s endorsement. Ever since his “oops” moment while running for president, Perry’s iron fist has been slackening back home. And Empower Texans, the state PAC that frequently bullied elected officials with threats of a primary challenge, managed to annoy too many incumbents and is now facing ethical charges.
Incumbency is the least helpful method for judging whether someone is Tea Party or establishment. This is the Tea Party’s third election cycle. The candidates of 2010 are now veteran lawmakers, and many moderate Republicans have peeled off over the last four years. Plus, a number of prominent party members currently affiliated with the Tea Party predated the movement anyway. Arguing that the right is getting beat back because incumbents largely escaped unscathed misses the whole point. Many incumbents are Tea Party already.
In the attorney general’s race, for instance, three candidates ran. Ken Paxton, a state senator who, as a House member, challenged Straus for the speakership and earned plenty of Tea Party accolades, got the most votes and will run off against Dan Branch. Branch is a state representative from Dallas’s wealthiest suburb, and he’s been a loyal Straus lieutenant. That’s relatively straightforward until you throw Barry Smitherman in the mix. Smitherman came in last, but during the campaign he may have won the award for most extreme comments, including his promise for a “conservative crusade.” So is his loss a loss for the Tea Party? Don’t tell that to Paxton.
The Tea Party isn’t monolithic and it sure as hell isn’t represented solely by national fundraising groups like FreedomWorks or figures like Ted Cruz. There are rural Tea Partiers and suburban ones who are bound to have different views on issues like public schools or water policy. There are stylistic differences and substantive differences, from those who are more libertarian to those who are more business-oriented, and of course the social conservatives. They all hate President Obama, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to look just like Ted Cruz.
The “movement” may no longer be the powerhouse it was in 2010, and certainly its splintering means there’s no central “Tea Party voice.” But Tuesday night’s results don’t show the ultra-conservative candidates fading away. Maybe by the May runoffs, the national media will see that too.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 5, 2014
“Show Me The Medicaid Money”: Buckle Up Republicans, Obamacare Is Here To Stay
Somewhat quietly, Obamacare enrollment hit 4 million this week. Now, it’s certainly true—as critics have noted—that enrollees aren’t the same thing as people who will continue to stay with their plan for a full year. If an enrollee encounters an unexpected expense of replacing a head gasket or something like that, he might skip a payment. But even so, 4 million’s a more-than-respectable number.
Also rather quietly this week, a new tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed support for repeal of Obamacare down to 31 percent. As Jay Bookman noted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, overall the poll wasn’t something the president would exactly brag about, but it did represent noticeable change, especially among independents, 57 percent of whom now support the law.
That 31 percent number made me sit up straight for one reason. The percent of Americans who identify themselves as conservative is, lately, about 38 percent, says Gallup. So 31 percent is getting down there. And consider this: As of mid-December 2013, the percentage of Americans who favored repeal was 52.3 percent in a Real Clear Politics average of numerous polls. The Affordable Care Act may not be as popular as Twelve Years a Slave, but it’s not The Lone Ranger anymore either.
I would think there’s a direct correlation between these two sets of facts, no? The more people go to the web site and see that they can get insurance at a decent price (in most cases), the more they tell their co-workers and neighbors that doing so wasn’t the horror show they expected. The more people learn about some of the law’s benefits, the more opposition to it softens.
There are still a few more things the American people need to learn about the law, though, and it’s up to the Democrats to tell them, and I’m going to bang on about this until I see some action. As I wrote Wednesday, Governor Rick Perry has said no to $9 billion in free money. Texas is the largest state in the union that hasn’t accepted the Medicaid expansion money, so that’s the biggest figure, but the figures are significant in relation to the population and budget in every single state.
These figures are from a Commonwealth Foundation report from three months ago. Florida is saying no to $9.6 billion, Georgia to $4.9 billion, North Carolina to $5.7 billion. Wisconsin is passing on $1.75 billion, Virginia on $2.15 billion, and Pennsylvania on $5.5 billion (although Pennsylvania is considering the opt-in). And this report’s figure for Texas is actually $9.6 billion.
You know how states clamor for federal highway money? Well, as Commonwealth points out, in every one of these cases, the Medicaid money is more—at least double, typically, and sometimes far more—than what these states get in highway money. And yet they say they don’t want it. They say that over time, they’re going to be on the hook for vast expenditures they can’t afford, or they fret publicly that Washington might change the formula. They’re both bogus arguments.
The federal government is paying 100 percent of states’ expansion costs through 2016 and no less than 90 percent thereafter on a permanent basis. It’s a sweet deal. But okay, what about that (up to) 10 percent that states are going to have to start paying? Ten percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but in dollar terms, isn’t that real money?
The answer is, not really, in most cases. This gets complicated and involves a category of spending by the states for something called “uncompensated care,” which is just what it sounds like—health care provided for free to poor people. State and local governments typically pitch in now on uncompensated care. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains in a 2012 report: “The Medicaid expansion will reduce state and local government costs for uncompensated care and other services they provide to the uninsured, which will offset at least some—and in a number of states, possibly all or more than all—of the modest increase in state Medicaid costs.” Overall, the health-care consulting firm The Lewin Group estimates a minimal increase in states’ spending obligations, around 1 or 2 percent, depending on the state.
As for the argument that some GOP governors make that they fear Washington might change the formula…well, that’s straight from Orwell or Kafka. That is: Barack Obama isn’t going to change any formula. President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be changing any formula. A Democratically controlled Congress won’t be changing any formulas. Only Republican presidents and congresses would do that. In other words, these Republican governors are saying—yeah, the deal looks fine now, but my party might take over, and then I’d be really screwed!
The ACA is here to stay. It’s not going to be struck down. It’s not going to be repealed. That would require a Republican president and 60 GOP senators and a solid GOP House majority, and the odds are strongly against the emergence of such a confluence. It’s going to exist. And inevitably, it’s going to grow. And more and more people are going to get used to it and learn to live with it. And over time, the people in states like Texas and Georgia and Wisconsin are going to see that people in nearby states that took the money are in fact pretty happy with their situations.
It’s only a matter of time before these resistant governors and state legislatures start caving. Democrats have it in their power to help hasten that timetable by making this an issue. They have to have the courage not to wilt or get the vapors whenever a right-winger invokes the evil gummint or the hated Kenyan. Democrats say they’ve waited decades for this moment. Well, it’s here. Now’s not the time to run away from the fight.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 28, 2014
“Texas Strikes Again”: Whatever Happens In Texas Has A Way Of Coming Back And Biting The Rest Of The Nation In The Butt
Election season in Texas! They’re voting right now in the primaries. And I know you are interested because whatever happens in Texas has a way of coming back and biting the rest of the nation.
For instance, Gov. Rick Perry is retiring and threatening to run for president. (He’s been to Israel!) So is Senator Ted Cruz. And now, in answer to the great national outcry for more candidates named George Bush, Texas Republicans appear ready to nominate George Prescott Bush for land commissioner.
“My friends and family call me George P, so feel free to call me P,” the 37-year-old energy consultant and son of Jeb told CNN. This was one of his more expansive interviews during a campaign that has mainly involved driving around the state in a bus while keeping as far away from reporters as humanly possible. P’s genius for avoiding the media is so profound that, in a primal moan of despair, The Austin American-Statesman endorsed his primary opponent, a businessman who advocates barring children of illegal immigrants from public schools.
Texans really love elections. Well, not the voting part — turnout is generally abysmal. But they have a ton of elective offices — land commissioner, agriculture commissioner, state school board. (There are a couple of conservative-versus-crazy Republican school board primaries, and the results may influence a pending war over requiring social studies students to learn how Moses impacted the founding fathers.)
Also, it’s really easy to get on the ballot. There are 12 Republicans running to replace Representative Steve Stockman, who is in a field of seven Republicans running against Senator John Cornyn. You may remember that Stockman is the one whose campaign office was condemned by the fire marshal. We suspect Cornyn will survive. In an editorial endorsing the incumbent, The Dallas Morning News wearily listed the other alternatives, including a businessman who “told this editorial board that ranchers should be allowed to shoot on sight anyone illegally crossing the border on to their land, referred to such people as ‘wetbacks,’ and called the president a ‘socialist son of a bitch.’ ”
Well, it’s not boring. And on the positive front, experts in Texas say there’s absolutely no chance that the guy who legally changed his name to SECEDE is going to win a nomination for governor.
The primary voting culminates on March 4, after which there will be run-offs in May for the races in which no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote. Conventional wisdom holds that by March 5 the world will know that the race to succeed Rick Perry will pit Democrat Wendy Davis against Republican Greg Abbott.
Abbott, the current attorney general, recently made national headlines when he appeared at a rally with Ted Nugent, the right-wing rocker who once referred to President Obama as a “subhuman mongrel.” Nugent, whose last hit record is older than Beyoncé, has recreated himself as a celebrity ranter. Mostly, he rants about gun rights, which is as difficult in Texas as taking a strong stand in favor of oxygen. But his vow to be either “dead or in jail” if Obama was re-elected earned him a visit from the Secret Service. One of his more printable references to Hillary Clinton was “two-bit whore for Fidel Castro.”
Abbott told The Houston Chronicle that he was unaware of what Nugent “may have said or done in his background.” Since Nugent is as impossible to ignore in Texas politics as the heat, this may have been a fib. Otherwise, Abbott is an attorney general with an astonishing lack of interest in the world around him.
What we are seeing here is a microcosm of the national political scene. Texas Republicans are terrified of two things — the angry white, mostly male Republican far right and the state’s huge population of young Hispanics. Nugent is a sop to the first. George P. Bush, whose mother is Mexican-American, is a Hail Mary pass thrown in the general direction of the second.
Although Texans as a group are not particularly crazy when it comes to the immigration issue, the Tea Party folk have been pushing it hard. Dan Patrick, a state senator who’s currently one of the leading candidates for lieutenant governor, has been campaigning against the “illegal invasion,” which he once claimed was threatening Texas with “Third World diseases” like “tuberculosis, malaria, polio and leprosy.” (Patrick, an equal opportunity offender, also once boycotted the opening prayer in the Senate because it was being delivered by a Texas cleric who happened to be a Muslim.)
Immigrant-bashing is a shortcut to a runoff in a Republican primary. Meanwhile, it’s a continuing offense to the voter base of the 2020s. What do you do?
P! We have seen the future, and it’s running for land commissioner.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 21, 2014
“Texas, Where Crazy Gets Elected”: There’s Crazy, And Then There’s Texas Crazy
So what happens in Texas when the Republican gubernatorial candidate invites Ted Nugent to the state to campaign for him not long after the Motor City Motormouth has called the President of the United States a “subhuman mongrel,” not to mention a “Communist” and a “gangster”? Would you believe, as Maxwell Smart used to say, that the candidate increases his lead? Well that’s what has happened. There’s crazy, and then there’s Texas crazy.
In a poll that came out Monday, conducted as the Nugent controversy was brewing, Republican Greg Abbott leads Democrat Wendy Davis by 11 points, which Politico notes is up from six points in a poll last year. Now there are surely other reasons for this little surgette, but it certainly shows that Abbott’s decision to keep company with Nugent did him no harm at all in the state.
You think that’s bad, get a load of this, from the same poll. The candidate leading the Democratic field for the right to seek John Cornyn’s Senate seat is a woman named Kesha Rogers. Two of her top ideas? Impeach Barack Obama and repeal the Affordable Care Act. Yes, you read it right. She’s the leading Democrat. She’s also a La Rouchie, a fact that far from hiding she seems intent to rub in the other candidates’ faces: I can ramble on about crazy worldwide banking conspiracies all I want, she seems to be saying, but as long as I want to impeach Obama and repeal Obamacare, you can’t touch me! There’s crazy, and there’s Texas crazy.
This would all be merely amusing, but there’s another side to Texas crazy. Let’s get serious now for a few paragraphs.
If you read me often enough, you know that one of my themes is that the Democrats, with enough money, creativity, and guts, ought to be able to turn Obamacare into a positive. Millions of people across the country, especially in the states that opted in and accepted the Medicaid money, have insurance now and the peace of mind about themselves and their children that comes with it. Besides which, have you noticed that all the Republican hoo-ha about these alleged horror stories never holds up on examination? Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column on this topic Monday. Literally every high-profile Obamacare-nightmare story retailed by one of these yoyos turns out, once reporters start poking around, not to be at all as advertised. So we have a party that loathes the ACA and its effects and many millions of dollars to go find its victims, and so far it hasn’t really turned up one.
Now—back to Texas. Two recent briefing papers from academics affiliated with the excellent Scholars’ Strategy Network shed considerable light on what Obamacare could be doing for Texas, if only its politicians would permit it.
Texas—hold on to your ten-gallon hat, because this is a shocker—leads the country in the percentage of its people who are uninsured; a gaudy 24.6 percent. Nearly 37 percent of Hispanics are without coverage, as are 22 percent of African Americans, and 23 percent of women. That’s a small army of people who would benefit from the state having accepted the federal Medicaid money and set up an exchange. But Texas’s leaders from Rick Perry on down are having none of it.
In one paper, Jessica Sharac, Peter Shin, and Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University cite a recent study noting that “if Texas had agreed to expand Medicaid, more than two million uninsured people would likely have gained health insurance.” In another, Ling Zhu and Markie McBrayer of the University of Houston compare how poor people are faring so far in Texas and California, the latter of course being among the states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion. They write: “More than 2.2 million Californians were added to that state’s expanded Medicaid program by the end of January, compared to just over 80,000 Texans who signed up after realizing they were already eligible for the existing state Medicaid program.”
Together, the papers (they’re very short, you should go read them) paint the picture you’d expect. Our two largest states, one working to insure its people and the other doing everything in its power to prevent that. And remember—Texas could be doing this at very minimal cost. Washington is paying full freight on the expansion until 2016, and then a slightly declining share, but still, 90 percent every year after 2019. It’s almost free. And Texas ain’t playin’. Indeed Perry turned down (cue Dr. Evil) nine billion dollars.
So now let’s circle back to the governor’s race. Of course, Abbott opened his campaign last fall pounding Davis on Obamacare, thundering that she’d open the door to this iniquity. Davis has been talking a lot about Ted Nugent, but she’s had rather little to say on the subject of Perry refusing, and Abbott vowing to continue to refuse, $9 billion.
Would all those uninsured Latinos and blacks and women be energized to come out and vote for the candidate who dared to make a big issue of this? I admit it’s hard to say. But Davis is a long shot anyway. Nothing against her—Jesus himself could come back and run as a Democrat in that state, and rather than pull that Democratic lever for Him, most Texans would just wonder when the Redeemer went socialist on them (answer: he always was!).
Of course it would be risky. Of course she’d drop in the polls for a while. But she’d still have nearly eight months to explain to people that $9 billion is real money, that all this is happening anyway whether Texas Republicans like it or not, and since it is happening well by cracky she’s not going to leave millions of Texans not getting what their counterparts in other states are getting. As it is, those people have no one really fighting for them. That’s Texas crazy, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 26, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 