Florida Man And Other Strange Political Cases

The question for our age may just be: What is WRONG with these people? What is it about science, tolerance, and ordinary common sense that sets them off?

What has set me off today is a Paul Krugman column about “Florida man” Ron DeSantis’ most recent departure from rationality. As Krugman explains:

It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.

Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.

And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?

Evidently Florida isn’t part of that free country.

DeSantis has now signed a bill that bans the production or sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. Evidently, other Red states are considering similar legislation. Evidently also, the fact that a a lab-grown meat industry doesn’t yet exist is irrelevant. As Krugman notes, Florida’s law is a “perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.”

I am so old I remember when Republicans and conservatives championed limited government. A government that can tell you what you can and cannot eat–that can tell private enterprises what they can and cannot produce or sell– is pretty much the antithesis of limited. Today, when Republican candidates talk about “freedom,” they rather clearly mean “freedom to live a life in accordance with what we decree is proper.” Today’s GOP wants to define and constrain your life choices from reproduction to food consumption.

Krugman tells us that, ridiculous as it sounds, meat consumption has been caught up in the culture wars.

You saw this coming years ago if you were following the most trenchant source of social observation in our times: episodes of “The Simpsons.” Way back in 1995, Lisa Simpson, having decided to become a vegetarian, was forced to sit through a classroom video titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom.”

It seems that eating– or claiming to eat– lots of meat “has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.”

Krugman attributes MAGA’s meat obsession to acceptance of various conspiracy theories, climate denialism, and the growing belief of GOP hardliners that “politics is a form of live-action role play.” We the People aren’t a polity; we’re an audience.

I have another theory. We live in the age of insanity. And it isn’t only MAGA, although that movement is surely the poster child for lunacy. Here’s a recent story from The Independent. The headline says it all: “RFK Jr says a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.”

Anti-vaccine activist turned independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has revealed that a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

According to The New York Times, Mr Kennedy made the bizarre admission during a deposition held as part of his 2012 divorce proceeding.

That worm explains a lot. At a minimum, this admission sheds some additional light on the recent endorsement of President Biden by the remainder of the Kennedy family.

Americans today are being subjected to performative politics in which a cast of wacko characters whose antics–however entertaining–are utterly divorced from the actual work of governing. Florida Man DeSantis pontificates about the dangers of “wokism” (which he evidently defines as anything that offends him); RFK spouts anti-science, anti-vaccine lunacies; Trump claims victimhood/persecution whenever things don’t go his way; Marjorie Taylor Green sees Jewish Space Lasers.

If this was a sit-com, it would be way too over-the-top.

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The Election And Sally Bowles

Last weekend, my husband and I joined a group of supporters and staff of Indianapolis’ Cabaret Theater on a weekend trip to New York. It was the first time we’d participated in these annual outings to Broadway to enjoy musical theater. This year, the entire group had tickets to the revival of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.” Participants could choose from a wide variety of other shows as well, but the Cabaret revival was the common denominator.

Most Americans are familiar with previous iterations of Cabaret, but I will readily admit that this particular production had a new and concerning resonance for me.

It had been at least eight years since my husband and I had been in Manhattan, and several things seemed different on this particular trip. On a personal note, I was struck–and impressed–by how much cleaner Midtown was, and how kind and helpful people were. My husband has mobility issues that require the use of a mobility scooter, and doormen, restaurant personnel, theater ushers–even people on the streets– were unfailingly solicitous and helpful. These are not, I will note, adjectives I might have used to describe such folks on past visits.

As we braved the crowds on the streets in the theater district, it also occurred to me that the faces I encountered were the faces that upset and enrage the predominantly rural folks who make up the bulk of the MAGA movement. Native or tourist, the people we passed reflected a cosmopolitan universe: young people with purple hair on bikes or scooters, Black, brown and White men and women talking on their phones, women with hijabs, Hasidic men with fur hats… the wildly diverse America that MAGA does not want to recognize.

What really made an impression on me, however, was the performance of Cabaret. The music and staging of this particular revival were exceptional, but what really gave me chills were the similarities between Germany just before the Nazis assumed power and the United States poised on the brink of November’s election.

Let me be clear: I’m not referring to the cruelty of the Nazi assault on Jewish Germans, although it was heartbreaking to see the naiveté of the Jewish character, Herr Schultz, who insisted that “this will all blow over. After all, I am as German as they are.” Those of us who know what came later are aware of the prevalence of the sad belief of so many German Jews that it “couldn’t happen” in such a civilized, culturally-advanced country.

No, the character who summed up the nature of the real threat–then and now–was Sally Bowles, who insisted to her lover Cliff that “politics has nothing to do with us.”

Sally wasn’t the only character to dismiss so-called “political differences” as irrelevant to the lives people live. The young operative who had befriended Sally’s lover was astonished when the swastika on his armband made Cliff recoil (after all, that’s just politics, and we’re friends). But it was Sally’s utter incomprehension about why national politics should matter to her at all–why the events consuming Berlin should cause her to rethink a return to performing at the Kit Kat Club–that forced me to consider the millions of Americans who simply go about their daily lives without paying any attention to the national news or the daily revelations about the plans being made for a second Trump term.

It’s a political truth that most Americans pay little or no attention to national political campaigns until after Labor Day. (Until the expenditure of truly obscene amounts of money on electronic ads in the primaries, primary elections were low-key events interesting mostly to party insiders.)

That disengagement from politics may have been harmless when America’s two major political parties shared a basic understanding of their responsibilities–when their disputes were primarily about how to go about achieving broadly agreed-upon goals. But–just as in the Germany of Cabaret’s time–that is no longer the case. MAGA Republicans, aka Christian Nationalists, want to utterly transform what it means to be an American, just as Hitler’s Nazis wanted to redefine what it meant to be a German.

We’ve seen this play before. We know how it comes out–and how many innocent people were sacrificed to its madness.

I have repeatedly posted about the importance of turnout in the upcoming election. Unless the millions of Americans who are America’s version of Sally Bowles wake up to the fact that their lives and the lives of their children will be irreparably altered if Trump and his ilk win, America in 2024 will repeat the tragedy of 1929-30 Germany.

It could happen here.

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Drug Affordability

Most older Americans–make that “most Americans who are paying attention”–know that this country doesn’t have a healthcare system. As a former student put it, we have a healthcare industry. And we pay through the nose for it. A superficial google search will turn up mountains of data confirming the fact that healthcare costs in the United States vastly exceed those of other advanced countries, while giving us a “system” that ranks somewhere between 35th and 37th in the world.

I encountered the data that really made me aware of the insanity of market-driven healtcare several years ago, when I served on a committee organized by a medical-school friend. At the time, seventy percent of all healthcare costs were paid by governments at the local, state and federal levels. Not just Medicare and Medicaid, but through various other programs, and especially through the obligations of government-as-employer of teachers, police and fire personnel, etc. etc.

What really made an impression on me was data showing that those payments by government would be sufficient to pay for all medical care in a national system that eliminated health insurers’ marketing costs, claims processing, overhead and profit. 

I’m a big fan of markets in areas where they work. Healthcare isn’t one of those areas. You don’t go “shopping” or comparing prices when you’re having a heart attack.

The Affordable Care Act was a good first step in delivering healthcare to Americans who’d been priced out of the market. It also gave added freedom to those whose medical issues had locked them into their jobs, thanks our insistence on tying coverage to employment. Drug costs, however, remained far higher than in other countries, thanks to the lobbying clout of “big Pharma,” despite the fact that the federal government is the major funder of research and development.

Reducing those costs is among the many under-appreciated accomplishments of the  Biden Administration. As the Washington Post reported, “Monumental changes to prescription drug prices for seniors are coming.”

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, one of President Biden’s signature achievements, prescription drugs are set to become substantially more affordable for seniors. Yet many Americans seem unaware of just how monumental these changes will be.

The article listed “six things to look for.” The first of those included eye-popping savings for both individual Americans and the government.

For the first time in history, Medicare can now negotiate directly with manufacturers. For the initial round of negotiations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chose 10 drugs that treat common health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.
 
Each of these medications costs consumers in the United States three to eight times what people pay in other countries. In 2022, Medicare paid an eye-popping $46.4 billion for them. The impact to consumers is equally staggering. As CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told me, “Some of these drugs are thousands of dollars per year for people who depend on them to live.”

It will take some time for negotiated prices to take effect. Assuming the federal government prevails in the lawsuits filed by pharmaceutical companies, CMS expects lower prices to be in place in 2026.
But that’s only the beginning. Fifteen more drugs will be selected for 2027 and then 20 per year from 2029 and thereafter. The lower prices are projected to save the federal government $100 billion over the next several years. Crucially, this means that the negotiations won’t just benefit people who are on these specific medications; the savings are passed along, indirectly, to everyone on Medicare.

Other changes, thanks to the Biden Administration, will include a cap of $2000 per year on out-of-pocket Medicare spending, and significantly lower costs for insulin. Other changes include an income-based subsidy for the most vulnerable Medicare enrollees, making all adult vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention free for everyone with Medicare Part D, and requiring drug companies to pay a rebate to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation. 

There has been very little media attention to these hard-won changes, presumably because skill at the actual business of governing is less sexy than wall-to-wall coverage of threats to desperate immigrants and hush-money payments to porn stars. 

In her “Letters from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson often compares the autocratic and corrupt self-interest of Trump and the MAGA movement to the Biden Administration’s focus on making life better for average Americans.

Reducing the cost of lifesaving prescription drugs– rather than limiting women’s reproductive liberties and forbidding medical providers to assist trans children– is a perfect example of the wildly different priorities of today’s Democratic Party and the Republican MAGA cult.

In November, vote accordingly.

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Too Good Not To Steal

Mo Hosseini describes himself as a Palestinian American who is tired of stupid people. I hadn’t heard of him, but one of my sons sent me “50 Completely True Things” he had published in Medium. The 50 Things addressed the war in Gaza, and the list was so good–so compelling–it practically demanded widespread sharing.

Both my son and I were particularly partial to #39, but the entire list, with the possible exception of #50, was dead-on accurate–cutting through the bias and handwringing and pomposity that has dominated the punditry.

So–with attribution and gratitude (and apologies to anyone offended by some of the language) I’m sharing all 50.

FACT No. 1.
Some Jews are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 2.
Some Muslims are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 3.
Some Christians are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 4.
Some Arabs are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 5.
Some Americans are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 6.
Some Israelis are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 7.
Some Palestinians are shitty and awful people.
 
FACT No. 8.
Not all Jews are Israelis.
 
FACT No. 9.
Not all Israelis are Jews.
 
FACT No. 10.
Not all Jews are white.
 
FACT No. 11.
Not all Israelis are white.
 
FACT No. 12.
Not all Muslims are Arabs.
 
FACT No. 13.
Not all Arabs are Muslim.
 
FACT No. 14.
Not all Palestinians are Muslim.
 
FACT No. 15.
Not all Arabs are Palestinian.
 
FACT No. 16.
Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
 
FACT No. 17.
Texans are not Arizonans.
 
FACT No. 18.
Germans are not Dutch.
 
FACT No. 19.
Palestinians are not Jordanians.
 
FACT No. 20.
Egyptians are not Palestinians.
 
FACT No. 21.
Where you are born does not actually determine anything about you.
 
FACT No. 22.
Your passport is not your political beliefs.
 
FACT No. 23.
Your government is not your morality.
 
FACT No. 24.
Not all Jews like the Israeli government.
 
FACT No. 25.
Not all Israelis like the Israeli government.
 
FACT No. 26.
Not all Palestinians like the Palestinian government.
 
FACT No. 27.
Israeli governments have committed acts of terror and violence against the Palestinian people.
 
FACT No. 28.
Palestinian organizations have committed acts of terror and violence against the Israeli people.
 
FACT No. 29.
US leaders do things that I do not agree with (e.g., 2016–2020)
 
FACT No. 30.
Israeli leaders do things that Israelis do not agree with.
 
FACT No. 31.
Palestinian leaders do things that Palestinians do not agree with.
 
FACT No. 32.
What happened to the Israeli civilians on 10/7 is fucking awful, and Hamas has earned every fucking thing that the Israeli military throws at them.
 
FACT No. 33.
What is happening in Gaza to civilians is fucking awful, and not the smartest thing for Israel to do, and some aspects of Israeli military activity may be war crimes, and it doesn’t have to be genocide for it to be tragic.
 
FACT No. 34.
You can advocate for Palestine without being a racist, antisemitic piece of shit.
 
FACT No. 35.
You can advocate for Israel without being a racist, anti-Arab piece of shit.
 
FACT No. 36.
People like to have sex with each other, and they sometimes procreate with people outside their tribes.
 
FACT No. 37.
No one in the Levant is indigenous. Every fucking empire in history has fucked their way through the Levant. There is no pure indigeneity. And let’s be honest: the entire planet has been colonized by hominids from the Great Rift Valley.
 
FACT No. 38.
Palestinians and Israelis share paternal Bronze-Age DNA. Yes, even Ashkenazi Jews.
 
FACT No. 39.
Stop with the fucking history lessons about what the Israelites did, or what the Ottomans did, or what the British did, or whatever. IT IS FUCKING IMMATERIAL. There is a pile of dog shit in the living room. Instead of arguing about whose dog took the bigger shit in the living room, maybe focus on how we clean up the dog shit, and maybe we keep the dogs outside.
 
FACT No. 40.
Any people have a right to group together and self-identify as whatever-the-fuck-they-want-to-self-identify as. When they get large enough as a group, those people have the right to self-determination and self-respect and a state where they can control their own destinies.
 
FACT No. 41.
Whether you like the idea or not, the Israeli state exists. It will also continue to exist until the ISRAELI people decide they don’t want it to exist. Your opinion on this matter (if you are not Israeli) is fucking immaterial.
 
FACT No. 42.
Whether you like the idea or not, a Palestinian state will exist at some point, and it will continue to exist until the PALESTINIAN people decide they don’t want it to exist. Your opinion on this matter (if you are not Palestinian) is fucking immaterial.
 
FACT No. 43.
You cannot bomb a people into true submission — the Blitz did not ‘soften’ British morale.
 
FACT No. 44.
You cannot fight a war and kill a people’s desire for safety, freedom, and self-determination. You can stifle it. You can try to ignore it, but one way or another, you will have to deal with it. This is as true for my Israeli friends as it is for my Palestinian ones.
 
FACT No. 45.
The solution to the Middle East conflict will not be found on Threads, or TikTok, or in the streets of any city that isn’t within a 2-hour car ride from downtown Jerusalem.
 
FACT No. 46.
If you want to be an ally to Palestinians, please feel free to continue to advocate for peace, security, and self-determination, but do it without dehumanizing or stereotyping Israelis and Jews.
 
FACT No. 47.
If you want to be an ally to Israelis, please feel free to continue to advocate for peace, security, and self-determination, but do it without dehumanizing or stereotyping Palestinians and Muslims, and Arabs.
 
FACT No. 48.
If you just want to advocate for peace, try to be a voice for reason, and don’t inflame or over-simplify an already chaotic, complicated, and deeply emotional issue. Help people find common ground and help bring the temperature down. You can be moral and stand up for what you believe in without being an asshole.
 
FACT No. 49.
Yes, an amazing one-state liberal democracy where Palestinian boys & girls could fuck Israeli boys & girls & make cute babies, & everybody spoke Hebrew & Arabic & we all agreed that hummus and falafel are delicious and Palestinian and sufganiyot are delicious and Israeli would be awesome. But this wonderful future has about as much chance of happening in the near term as this 5’8″ 53-year-old Palestinian has being a starter for the Golden State Warriors. A two-state solution is the only workable one.
 
FACT No. 50.
Hummus is Palestinian. I am immovable on this.
Don’t fucking @ me
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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HCR Connects The Dots

One of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters clarified–in a way I’d not seen elsewhere–the stakes of our upcoming election. She began by reporting on a recent interview in which Bill Barr, who headed the Department of Justice under Trump, acknowledged Trump’s volatility and unstable behavior, but then indicated his intent to vote for him.

When the interviewer asked him why he planned to vote for someone he knew had tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power–someone incapable of achieving his own policies, who lies repeatedly, and faces multiple criminal charges–Barr responded, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Just wow.

Later, Richardson shared a speech Barr had delivered that illuminates that otherwise incomprehensible response. The speech was a defense of the so-called “unitary executive” theory (a “president as king” theory, the origin of which has been attributed to Samuel Alito.)

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.

That is the unbridgeable gulf we face. The over-riding question Americans will face in November is whether the United States will continue to be the secular democratic republic bequeathed to us by the nation’s founders, or a Christian Nationalist theocracy.

As Richardson noted, a number of pundits have shared a recent, blistering diatribe by George Stephanopolis, focusing on the numerous other differences between the upcoming election and previous contests.

“Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

Stephanopolis’ passionate summation was absolutely correct–but it was also incomplete. What he neglected to add was that those who are prepared to ignore all of it–prepared to cast a ballot for this wretched joke of a man– are motivated by an underlying philosophy utterly incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Christian Nationalism–not to be confused with genuine Christianity–often cloaked in legal jargon about a “unitary executive” and MAGA slogans about putting America First–is at the root of Trump support. MAGA Republicans are all about remaking America into their version of a “Christian Nation,” and we are just now beginning to see that movement for the racist, misogynist, utterly regressive effort it is.

This is no time to debate the merits of this or that policy. We can argue policy later. In November, we need to prevent MAGA Christian Nationalists from turning America into the country of Bob Barr’s wet dreams.

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