Politics Trumps Both Compassion and Common Sense

Apparently, common sense is fairly uncommon, and compassion is just a word in the dictionary.

The Dallas News recently reported that Texas’ refusal to expand Medicaid and participate in the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) will cause individual health insurance premiums to rise a whopping 9.3%.

The Texas Observer reports that Texas will not only leave 100 billion dollars “on the table,” but the decision will cause a raise in local property taxes. (The burden of emergency medical care generally falls on property taxpayers in Texas–just as it does in Indiana. When people take Mike Pence’s advice and get their “access to care” through the Emergency Room, property taxpayers pay for that unnecessarily-expensive care. )

Fiscal stupidity is one thing. Essentially telling poor people to f**k off is another.

Nearly 7 million adults ages 19 to 64 would qualify for Medicaid in the 25 states that have not voted to expand it, according to an Urban Institute report. Those 7 million people won’t get Medicaid and they won’t get federal help to buy health insurance.

The refusal to expand Medicaid won’t “defund” the Affordable Care Act, or change any of its provisions. The only “message” it will send to Washington is “we’ll show you–we’ll hurt ourselves!”

The bottom line: Rick Perry, Mike Pence and other Republican governors care more about obstructing Obama than about the health of their economies or their citizens.

That’s politics these days. And it’s not only stupid, it’s despicable.

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Excuse Me While I Hit Myself Repeatedly with a Hammer….

A recent post at Maddowblog began with the following observation:

Since so much of the public has no idea what the debt ceiling is, what default is, what bond markets are, or what the full faith and credit of the United States means, polling on the subject just doesn’t tell us much.

The post went on to describe a different sort of poll that proved the point; it asked about the debt ceiling, but phrased the same question two different ways. When asked simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, respondents were pretty evenly split. The second version asked whether Congress should prevent the government from borrowing money in order to pay its debts;  73% of those responding to the question when it was posed that way said such a step would seriously harm the economy, and opposed it. Only 22% approved.

The American people aren’t stupid. When the question is asked using language citizens understand, they resoundingly offer the right answer. The lesson of this–and multiple other examples–is twofold: (1) the public is generally unfamiliar with the language of its own government, with many equating “raising the debt ceiling” with incurring new debt; and (2) polls that politicians reference to “prove” that the American public is on their side of an issue tend to be worthless and/or deceptive.

Thanks to their own extremism and lack of elementary economic knowledge, the Tea Party zealots who have captured one of America’s major parties and the House of Representatives are poised to do substantial damage to the people they have been elected to represent.

Pundits from both Left and Right (even Karl Rove!) predict that the government crisis they are determined to precipitate will create a backlash that can only hurt the GOP, but those warnings are falling on deaf ears. As a friend of mine used to say, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

The broad, sane middle of the American public will need to batten down the hatches and prepare for a totally unnecessary period of fiscal and economic misery–brought to us by people motivated by one and only one “principle”–ensuring that thirty million Americans currently without health insurance don’t get access to healthcare.

And to make sure they don’t, they’re willing to plunge the country into another recession.

Excuse me while I go hit myself some more with that hammer….

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Sunday Sermon

I was reading a paper sent to me by a member of our Center’s National Advisory Board, and was struck by the following paragraph:

Democratic modes of association are not given by nature; on this the historical record could not be clearer. Rather, they are built, and much of the construction work is done by people who share an understanding of what kind of polity they are trying to create. These people are not born grasping the difficult political principles of limited government, civil rights and liberties, toleration and equality before the law. These are social, moral and cognitive achievements.

Those “social, moral and cognitive achievements” are missing from the zealots who are currently holding Congress–and the American government–hostage.

We ordinary Americans will bear the brunt of their absence.

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When You Turn Over a Rock….

You never know what will slither out when you turn over a rock. This time, I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry….

There is a website called “Christwire: Conservative Values for an Unsaved World.” A friend sent it and at first, I thought it was a more realistic version of Betty Bowers: America’s Best Christian; then I decided it was for real. Further checking was needed to convince me that it really was intended to be satirical.

This gem is titled “14 Outrageous Secrets a Homosexual Will Not Tell You,” and it begins with a dark introduction about corrupt legislators and “activist” judges. It then lets its readers into the details of the satanic “homosexual world.” (You can see why I thought it was real; I’ve seen very similar material from self-professed Christian sources.)

For example, did you know that gay men bleach their anuses? That the primary reason gay men join gyms is for mutual masturbation? That homosexual activity in the animal kingdom is not, as reported, a natural occurrence, but has been deliberately introduced into the animal population by gay trainers? That gay bars are just like Muslim terror cells?That Glee is a sinister plot to recruit children into “the homosexual lifestyle”?

These fevered imaginings sound very much like the bizarre fantasies conjured up by terrified–or titallated– good “Christians” we’ve all encountered.

There’s evidently something about the human psyche that needs to attribute horrific practices to people who are in some way different, that demands the utter dehumanizing of those who are in some way “other.”  Mere disapproval is presumably insufficient.

It’s the long history of that phenomenon that made this particular takeoff so believable.

Christians used to accuse Jews of killing Christian children and using their blood to make matzohs. Southerners used to swap stories of “endowed” black men “having their way” with the delicate flowers of Southern femininity. More recently, right-wing zealots mutter about the “terrorist cells” disguised as Mosques. These are real accusations–not satirical ones.

Here in Indiana, as the effort to place a ban on same-sex marriage in the Indiana Constitution heats up, I’m afraid we can expect genuine–and outrageous–efforts to paint our GLBT friends and neighbors as alien and forbidding. Because after all, why would they want to get married if they weren’t plotting the destruction of Western Civilization As We’ve Known It?

They couldn’t possibly just want to enter into socially-sanctioned relationships with someone they love, buy a house and file joint tax returns.

Hate must come from a very twisted place; it encourages beliefs that are so outlandish, so uncomfortably close to satire, that it can be extremely difficult to tell which is which.

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Eric Miller and Micah Clark started citing Christwire’s “research.”

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Abandon Hope….

Every time I tell myself that Americans have gone through nutty and mean-spirited periods before, and we’ll come through this one, I encounter something that dashes my all-too-fragile hopes.

This time, it was a link sent by a colleague who is equally depressed at the seeming inability of our lawmakers to respond appropriately to facts and evidence.

According to new research by Yale Law Professor Dan Kanan, we’re pretty much doomed.

Okay, that isn’t really the title of his paper. The title is: “Motivated Numerancy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but it might as well be “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Live Here.” Kahan measured the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly, and he found that partisanship can undermine even the most basic reasoning skills.

Even people who are normally very good at math, for example, can totally “flunk” a problem they would ordinarily be able to solve, because the correct answer would contradict their political beliefs.

This research is further confirmation of work done by another researcher, Brendan Nyhan, who teaches at Dartmouth. He’s the one who reached the conclusion that facts don’t matter to people who are deeply invested in an ideology; when people believe something that isn’t so, giving them facts that correct their error just makes them cling more strongly to their original belief.

Death panels, anyone?

Denial, as my grandfather used to say, isn’t just a river in Egypt.

It does appear that this unfortunate aspect of the way the human brain works is limited to beliefs in which we are emotionally invested. You think if we put valium in the drinking water, and everybody chilled out a bit, we could improve policymaking?

Just a thought….

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