Author Archives: Sheila

THAT Explains It….

I’ve never been able to understand the hysteria of Obamacare’s opponents.

I certainly “get” political disputes, policy disagreements, differing approaches to economic analysis…but the mean-spiritedness, the over-the-top vitriol, the consistent lies about what the law does and how it works, and the ongoing contrived legal attacks motivated solely by a desire to deny poorer Americans access to medical care have astonished me.

From whence the paranoia?

A recent story at Talking Points Memo may provide an answer.

In case the situation with the latest Obamacare lawsuit, King v. Burwell, wasn’t surreal enough, along comes the anti-Obamacare lawyer Michael Carvin, and some of his, um, more colorful ideas about why the Affordable Care Act is bad law. Trying to contrast the ACA with the constitution, Carvin characterized the ACA as “a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities.”

It’s startling to see an Obamacare opponent so bluntly characterize efforts to destroy the law as a way to preserve white male privilege in this way, much less taking it so far as to suggest the privileges of dead white men count for more than the needs of living women and people of color. But it shouldn’t be. The race- and-gender-based opposition to the ACA has been baked into the fight against it from the beginning, when the bill was very nearly derailed by opponents claiming that it would somehow override federal bans on funding abortion.

Since then, though rarely with as much directness as Carvin, the conservative fight against Obamacare has been about needling the gender- and race-based resentments of the conservative base in an effort to demonize Democratic efforts to create universal health care.

….

Social science, as Paul Waldman showed in the Washington Post last May, bears this out: Attitudes about race and about the ACA are tightly interwoven. Research has shown that negative attitudes about black people increase hostility to health care reform, that opinions about health care reform polarized by racial attitudes after Obama’s election, and that nativist attitudes predicted hostility to health care reform. Research has found that white people with high racial resentment, regardless of their opinion on Obama, view health care reform as a giveaway to lazy black people. You can see why people don’t say these things out loud in public, but the eyebrow-wriggling and hinting has been strong throughout this debate.

The gender-baiting, in contrast, has been way more explicit. Ever since the HHS announced that contraception would be covered as co-pay-free preventive service, conservative media has gleefully portrayed the ACA as a program to give hot young sluts an opportunity to screw on the public dime, an argument that managed to get this narrow provision all the way to the Supreme Court. Never mind that young women with private insurance are no more on the public dime than any other people who have private health insurance. The idea that sexy young things are having fun without you but making you pay for it has been just too provocative for conservative pundits to let facts get in the way.

I’d love to reject this thesis, but its explanatory power is too persuasive.

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While We Remain Uninformed….

Yesterday’s blog addressed our abysmal lack of real journalism, especially at the local level.

As an astute Facebook commenter noted, “the legislature is in session, Israel is days away from an election, ISIS continues to murder homosexuals by throwing them off roofs, a huge report about Ferguson MO using African Americans as ATMs was released, the Affordable Care Act is awaiting a verdict, the 50th Anniversary of Selma just passed, and a US Senator is about to be indicted,”–and the lead story in the Indianapolis Star was “Stink-free Super Bowl has Southsiders asking: What about us?” Other “news” addressed by the Star concerned middle school basketball game brawls, IU basketball, Reggie Wayne, an exhibit at the Historical Society, a Daylight Savings Time story, a Pacers story, and a “review” of the Mercedes C300.

And while our local media ignores the statehouse in order to focus on trivia and infotainment, state lawmakers are busy undermining our right to vote.

Senate Bill 466 would discourage students from registering to vote in the counties where they reside, study, raise children, worship and consider themselves part of the community. It also prevents disabled Hoosier voters from allowing caregivers to assist with their absentee application.

Senate Bill 535 creates an unnecessary extra step for those voting by mail by requiring a voter registration number from the state or local clerk’s office to apply for an absentee ballot. This additional burden creates an unfunded mandate for local governments that will wind up costing our state $1.3 million annually to administer.

House Bill 1008 eliminates straight ticket voting, which will lead to longer voting times for Hoosiers, fewer choices and longer lines at the polls. In 2012 and 2014, knowledgeable voters cast more than 1.5 million straight ticket ballots. Those who wanted to vote on individual races were still able to do so.

The only reason I know about these efforts is because Trent Deckard, co-director of the Indiana Election Commission, sent out an email alert. To the best of my knowledge, no “news” reporter–either newspaper or electronic–has seen fit to bring these efforts to make voting more difficult to the public’s attention.

Fans of irony might note that Indiana lawmakers are mounting this assault on the right to vote on the 50-year anniversary of the march on Selma.

Some things, evidently, never change.

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Oh Those Pesky Fact-Checkers…

As the practice of traditional journalism has slowly evaporated, a few websites have tried to fill the “gatekeeper” gap–fact-checking assertions, and verifying or debunking the urban legends and memes that travel so quickly in our connected, social media age.

We have Snopes.com and Factcheck.org and Politifact.com–all of which are helpful, if ultimately inadequate, resources for those of us who want to check the “facts” in crazy Uncle Ray’s latest email before forwarding it on to other unsuspecting folks.

The more mendacious members of our political class are less than enthusiastic about these resources. I recently stumbled across this description of Ted Cruz’ reaction to Politifact.

In fact, Ted Cruz has an absolutely abysmal record on Politifact for telling the truth. Out of the 36 comments they’ve fact-checked on Cruz, an astonishing 67 percent of them have been rated as “Mostly False” all the way down to “Pants on Fire.” And out of all 36 of those comments, only one has been rated as “True.” That lone statement was one he made where he was trying to fear-monger about government regulations being so bad that they regulate toilet seats.

Yes, the only 100% true statement Ted Cruz has made out of the 36 that have been fact-checked by Politifact was about toilet seats.

Politifact also recently fact-checked a bit on the Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart ran a too-fast-to-read stream he identified as 50 recent lies from Fox News. If you are interested in slowing down the stream, in order to see what it was that Fox said and the results of Politifact’s research, click on the link. If you don’t have time, I’ll just tell you that (surprise!) all 50 of the Fox assertions ranged from “false” to “pants on fire.”

Whatever the hell Fox is, it isn’t “news.” It isn’t even legitimate commentary.

The problem is, we’re losing real news. We have propaganda outlets like Fox, and we have pathetic remnants of traditional journalism like the Star, ignoring the watchdog function in favor of “reporting” focused upon sports and where to buy craft beer.

Without real reporters doing real journalism, our elected officials make deals in the dark, and politicians–and propaganda outlets– feel free to lie.

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Pogo Was Right

The long-discontinued cartoon Pogo was famous for one particular insight that Pogo– an amiable, philosophical opossum–shared with his friend Albert the Alligator: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

No kidding.

Is the American public ill-served by a media that has abandoned journalism for propaganda and celebrity? Whose fault is that?

Who clicks on the links about missing blonds in Aruba or Kim Kardashian’s latest selfies while ignoring well-sourced, comprehensive news reports? Who tunes in to talk radio and Faux News in order to have urban legends repeated and prejudices reinforced? America’s media is a business; it responds to the market and gives us what we demonstrably want–entertainment, not credible, verifiable information.

Are the interests of voters and citizens alike ignored by the squabbling fools in Congress? Who elected them?

And whose apathy will re-elect most of them, even after ongoing demonstrations of their inability to compromise, negotiate or do the public’s business. Even after it becomes embarrassingly clear that many of them have zero understanding of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold. Even after it becomes abundantly clear that they are doing the bidding of their donors rather than concerning themselves with the interests of their constituents.

Yep. We have met the enemy, and it is most definitely us.

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Cheney, Putin and Bibi

I was pondering a post about Netanyahu’s speech and its rapturous reception by the chickenhawks in Congress, but Fred Kaplan at Slate beat me to it:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress on Tuesday was a disturbing spectacle: shallow, evasive, short on logic, and long on cynicism.

The Israeli prime minister pretended to criticize the specific deal that the United States and five other nations are currently negotiating with Iran, but it’s clear from his words that he opposes any deal that falls short of Iran’s total disarmament and regime change. He pretended merely to push for a “better deal,” but he actually was agitating for war….

It’s worth noting, for now, that Netanyahu has been consistently wrong on this whole issue. He denounced the interim accord, signed a year ago, as a fraud that wildly favored the Iranians and that the Iranians would soon violate anyway; in fact, it’s been remarkably effective at freezing Iran’s nuclear activities, while freeing up a small fraction of its sanctioned funds. For the past 15 years, he’s been warning that Iran could or would go nuclear in the next year—and yet, here he still stands, in a Middle East where the only nation with nuclear weapons is his own.

I agree with Kaplan–and with the sober analysts (including, importantly, military leaders in Israel) who have warned that this Bibi/Boehner bit of political theater not only undermines the longstanding partnership between the U.S. and Israel, but misrepresents the threat posed by Iran.

But what Kaplan and others haven’t addressed is even more disturbing: the Republican worldview–prominently on display during Bibi’s speech–that celebrates impetuous saber-rattling, prefers armchair “warriors” (let’s you and him fight) to thoughtful diplomats, and approaches all potential conflicts through a lens with only two categories: good guys or “evil doers.” It’s a worldview that valorizes strongmen like Putin, war criminals like Cheney and  shallow, self-righteous “leaders” like Netanyahu.

It’s a worldview that prefers the simplicity of the bumper-sticker to the messy complexity of the real world. It’s childish– and it’s incredibly dangerous.

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