E.D. Kain wrote for Balloon Juice from 2010-12.

E.D. Kain

Andrew Breitbart says he’ll take a drug test after his anti-OWS rant goes viral

by E.D. Kain| February 13, 20121:39 pm| 177 Comments

This post is in: Assholes

Looks like Breitbart’s little anti-Occupy Wall Street rant has more people than just me questioning his use of illicit substances – though I just wondered if he had a drinking problem.

Seems the Big Hollywood blogger-in-chief is on the defensive, if his Twitter feed says anything about it:

Notice the deflection here – as though David Brock just screamed at a bunch of protesters and had to be dragged off by security. It’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to Breitbart.

Two thoughts: First, it’s easy to beat a drug test, especially if you’re doing something like cocaine or speed – the sort of drugs that might make someone lose their head at an OWS protest. Stimulants leave the bloodstream quickly, and with a little preparation you could easily beat the test. If it’s booze, of course, this is all a moot point.

Second, who cares if he was high when he flipped out on the protesters? It’s almost more understandable if he was. If he has a substance abuse problem, I might sympathize with him a little bit. Addicts need help, not scorn.

But if this was the angry rant of a sober man? That’s much more troubling. That says something about Breitbart as a human being, deep down – about his anger and instability as a person without the use of drugs.

(cross-posted)

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Every sperm is sacred

by E.D. Kain| February 10, 201211:18 am| 289 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012

Now that death panels are a thing of the distant past, the real threat to liberty in this country is apparently the pill, something that we’ve had for over half a century and that a majority of us thought was a fairly settled debate. Of course, since the right is adamantly opposed to providing life-saving universal access to healthcare we instead get yet another front in the culture wars.

Now the administration has changed course in the right direction on the contraception mandate:

Today, the White House did the right thing for women, public health and human rights. Despite deep concerns, including my own, based on what transpired in the past under health reform, the White House has decided on a plan to address the birth control mandate that will enable women to get contraceptive coverage directly through their insurance plans without having to buy a rider or a second plan, and without having to negotiate with or through religious entities or administrations that are hostile to primary reproductive health care, including but not limited to contraception.

Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide contraceptive coverage. Administration officials stated that a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

This is the right move. A smart, effective way to get past the objections on the right. And it pushes us one tiny step closer to shedding employer coverage altogether.

Even before the changed policy, public opinion was squarely behind the administration:

A solid 56 percent majority of voters support the decision to require health plans to cover prescription birth control with no additional out-of-pocket fees, while only 37 percent are opposed. It’s particularly noteworthy that pivotal independent voters support this benefit by a 55/36 margin; in fact, a majority of voters in every racial, age, and religious category that we track express support. In particular, a 53 percent majority of Catholic voters, who were oversampled as part of this poll, favor the benefit, including fully 62 percent of Catholics who identify themselves as independents.

It will be interesting to see how Republicans respond to this latest move by the president. The reason it’s an issue at all is simple: just as the economy starts to heat up Republicans panic and pick a fight over something bound to whip up the fervor of the angriest of culture warriors: no death panels this time, no, this time it’s contraception. But actually that’s not quite right either. That’s just a code word for abortion.

Of course, we’re not talking about a mandate to cover abortions, we’re talking about a mandate to cover birth control. Some people on the fringe of this debate equate the two, but a huge majority of Americans disagree. A majority of Catholics disagree, for that matter.

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I think of the Affordable Care Act as the wrong law at the right time. Or the right law at the wrong time. I can’t quite decide. Either way, it’s a vast improvement over the status quo, and yet doubles down on one thing that I can’t stand about our healthcare system: employer-provided coverage. The problem with American healthcare isn’t too much government, it’s too many middle-men, and third-party coverage is the most glaring middle man of all.

The exchanges built into the new law are another story, mirroring systems in place in Germany and Switzerland. Germany is the economic powerhouse of Europe, and Switzerland is about as close to a libertarian paradise as anywhere on earth. Our healthcare law should, over time, push us toward something quite similar. Cries of socialism are particularly vapid given the countries in question.

The difference between here and everywhere else in the world is that in America everything revolves around the culture wars.

I don’t think the Republican party actually cares one bit about birth control. They’re just using the issue to obstruct the ACA at every turn. It’s silly, childish, and manipulative. That social conservatives don’t feel entirely burned and jaded by the GOP’s cynical politicization of their issues is telling. Social conservatives made a deal with the devil when they decided to use majority-rules democracy to further their goals, and now the piper must be paid. Diminishing returns on diminishing demographics.

I fully support the right for women (and everyone, for that matter) to have full, unfettered access to healthcare and birth control and preventative medicine. These things will save us money and make the country safer and more prosperous. A woman’s right to have control over her own body is sacrosanct as far as my conception of liberty is concerned. And women who don’t want to use contraception don’t have to. Nobody is forcing them to do anything.

The fact that employer’s provide insurance to their employees is profoundly stupid, an accident of history, a huge part of why we’re in the straits we’re in when it comes to our badly mangled healthcare system. This latest move by the president actually puts a dent in this system – it’s a victory both for women’s rights and crafting a smarter, more efficient, and more fair system of healthcare.

(cross-posted)

Why conservatives can’t do pop culture very well

by E.D. Kain| February 9, 20121:13 pm| 298 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Yes, somebody actually painted this. And no, I don’t think it’s satire. You have to sort of love the rooster, though. He’s as free as a bird now.

The question is: where’s Waldo?

You see this is why conservatives are failing when it comes to waging the culture war in the arts, and why they at once turn to political means rather than cultural means to wage that war. It’s also why we see so many conservatives devolve into self-victimization.

Conservatives have a hard time making conservative films or television shows – though occasionally you’ll find a show like 24 which espouses some conservative ideas about war and national security. I think the success of 24 was in weaving some conservative ideals into a show that focuses mostly on the action.

You rarely hear conservative music outside of Nashville. Country is one of the few successes at transposing conservative culture war politics into pop culture.

We do see plenty of sexism and other illiberal views in our mainstream pop culture, of course. See Alyssa Rosenberg’s deconstruction of the Superbowl ads for one example.

But for some reason, conservative attempts at pop culture simply don’t pan out for the most part. So we get complaints about liberal media or liberal Hollywood or whatever. But it’s not liberal Hollywood’s fault that conservatives can’t do art. (Nor is it entirely obvious that Hollywood is liberal, but that’s another story for another time.)

And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.

Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.

And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.

(cross-posted)

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What Obama’s Up Against

by E.D. Kain| February 9, 201210:53 am| 167 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012

Not-Romney is one candidate with two heads, one of which is very large.

Nate Silver thinksthe GOP primary is going to be a long, protracted race, noting that it bears a “resemblance to something like the 1984 Democratic contest or the 1976 Republican race.” Mondale won in 1984, and Ford beat Reagan in 1976, but both primaries were close calls, and neither Mondale nor Ford inspired their respective parties.

Still, I’m not sure either one had as abysmal an outlook as presumed front-runner Mitt Romney does in this race:

Meanwhile, the two not-Romney candidates – Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – are nipping at Romney’s heels making sure that neither one has any real chance at stealing the nomination.

And of course Ron Paul has his base of support which will likely neither grow nor dwindle in the coming months.

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What Obama’s Up AgainstPost + Comments (167)

Now, it’s almost not even worth talking about anyone in the Republican field except Romney – the race is still his to lose as far as I’m concerned. All that Santorum’s win Tuesday achieved was to further split the not-Romney vote. That doesn’t hurt Romney – if anything it helps him. So long as both Gingrich and Santorum keep winning primaries, neither is likely to drop out. And Romney is flush with cash, a well-organized campaign, and the support of the Republican Establishment. He may not have the adoration of the now all-but-defunct Tea Party, but that hardly matters.

Romney’s real problem is President Obama.

Rest assured, the president will be well-armed with Super PAC money, campaign contributions, and a well organized network of volunteers both online and in the trenches. As the economy starts to warm up, Romney’s key selling points begin to wither. The private sector businessman routine won’t resonate if unemployment is falling, at least not with moderates and independents. He can’t really drum up culture war issues, either, given his Mormonism and his history as a moderate on social issues. And his extremism in the primary will hurt him with independents in the general, as will the negativity of his rivals, none of whom are likely to stop throwing punches any time soon.

If Ron Paul goes third party, this will almost certainly hurt Romney more than Obama.

So it’s no wonder Obama seems happy these days. The Republicans, for all their bizarre hatred of the president, have failed to field even one candidate that has a chance at unseating him, and the lack of enthusiasm among GOP voters stands in stark contrast to the 2010 mid-terms and the Rise of the Tea Party. It’s hard to imagine that this will change much in the general, though Romney could, theoretically, pick a Palinesque VP to help grind up some red meat and inspire the uninspired base.

Meanwhile, for pundits and bloggers and late-night talk show hosts, and all the political junkies out there, at least we should be in for an entertaining ride.

(cross-posted)

The case for democracy

by E.D. Kain| October 1, 201110:58 am| 259 Comments

This post is in: Politics

One thing libertarians talk about a lot is coercion. If you really peel back libertarian philosophy that word looms just about as large as “liberty” or “freedom”. Coercion can take a bunch of different shapes. Taxes are coercion. Democracy is coercion. Unions are coercion. Anything that represents the will of the collective over the will of the individual is coercion.

Theoretically, the ideal libertarian society would have no democracy at all. That’s the only way to prevent collective decision making. So in order to actually craft Libertopia, democracy is out. Ideally not even a representative democratic republic would remain.

Michael Lind recently wrote a piece on libertarian hostility to democracy and at the time I felt as though something were missing from the otherwise excellent article. I believe that many libertarians sincerely do believe in liberty. Yet for all that, the antipathy to democracy – which goes well beyond Hayek’s preferred “liberal dictatorship” – reveals the fundamental internal conflict within libertarianism: in order for it to exist as a model for society, democracy must be snuffed out through coercion.

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The case for democracyPost + Comments (259)

We see it in the economy already: workplace democracy is dying. Our political system is already rigged against democracy, between the filibuster and the Electoral College. For libertarians, the less democracy the better. One reason the right-fusionism has worked so well for so long is that Republicans are hard at work to make that happen.

I enjoyed Jim Henley’s explanation of his own departure from libertarianism, years ago when the notion of privatized Social Security really sunk in; for me it is simply this: I don’t want to live in Libertopia. And while libertarians may say they don’t want to live in my welfare state either, at least I can say “Then go vote against it.” In Libertopia no such option would exist. That doesn’t smell like freedom to me.

As much as I admire the convergence of civil libertarians from progressive and libertarian circles, ultimately I see that alliance as stillborn in any meaningful electoral sense. It is an “intellectual indulgence” which is fine. On some issues progressives and libertarians are aligned, no doubt. The war on drugs, the police state, mass incarceration, gay rights.

But at the ballot box?

Progressives who are bothered by the civil liberty record of this president should probably work to change the Democratic party and the culture that drives Democrats to the center rather than spend their votes trying to elect Ron Paul, if only because the top-down route is bound to backfire. There’s a strong case for working outside of politics to change politics. Working with civil society, with unions, with activists to push policy from the ground up. Sinking the Obama presidency on the pipe dream of a left-libertarian united front doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t just strengthen the Republicans, it strengthens centrist Democrats.

And in a two-party system like ours, you work with the coalition you’ve got and you work to change that coalition for the better. That usually doesn’t happen from the top-down. It happens in the weeds.

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So long and thanks for all the fisks

by E.D. Kain| April 29, 20117:09 pm| 190 Comments

This post is in: Going Galt

This will be my last post at Balloon Juice. I want to thank John for inviting me to write here. It’s been quite a ride. Lately, however, I have begun to find that I am simply spread too thin. I need to spend more time reading and thinking and taking my time. Less arguing, more meditating.

In any case, I’ve learned a lot blogging here and arguing with everyone and having my ideas put to the test. I hope some of you will come continue the conversation elsewhere, either at The League or at American Times or on Twitter.

Cheers.

So long and thanks for all the fisksPost + Comments (190)

Why Obama Waited

by E.D. Kain| April 27, 20114:59 pm| 218 Comments

This post is in: The Wingularity

The answer to the many questions surrounding why Obama waited so long to release his birth certificate is simple.

In 2008, Obama met with Donald Trump in a secret closed-doors beer summit. There, they hatched a scheme. Knowing that there is a large segment of the American people that is still deeply racist, and that said racism would not emerge blatantly when confronted with the first black president, Obama and his good friend The Donald began crafting a long-con. At the first whiff of birtherism, Obama released most – but not all – of the relevant documentation of his birth in Hawaii, throwing the ~~racists~~ birthers a bone to chew on for the next couple of years. The plan was in motion.

The long-form birth certificate remained under lock and key in Hawaii. As the years went by, the usual suspects on the right trotted out one crazy conspiracy after another. Obama ignored them. Trump waited patiently while drawing as much attention to himself as possible.

Then, in 2011, Trump played his, er, Trump card, launching a wild-eyed conspiratorial presidential bid based almost solely on the birther question. Polls showed that Trump’s popularity was rising, and almost overnight he was polling at first place. A clear front-runner had emerged, and the crux of his campaign was the missing long-form birth certificate. Trump beat that drum as loudly as possible, even sending private eyes to Hawaii to track the runaway birth certificate down. And people loved him for it.

Birtherism, it appeared, had taken over a larger segment of America than anyone had expected. Despite rumors of its death, racism in America was still very much alive and kicking. And now it had its avatar.

Now it was Obama’s move. At the height of Trump’s popularity he released the final, definitive document: the long-form birth certificate – knowing full well that it would do nothing to placate the birthers. However, with so much momentum now behind Trump and a large segment of the Republican base rallied around the cause, there was little the GOP could do to recover and run anything like a legitimate challenge to the president in 2012. The threat of an independent bid by Trump – who could easily self-finance such an effort – was too great.

Obama effectively steered national attention back to the rightwing fringe – a fringe, mind you, that is also the largest voting bloc on the right. He also ensured that his good friend Trump was the one spear-heading the movement.

This effectively torpedoed Republican chances of a victory, and ensured Obama a second term, where he went on to do many great things, including finally realize Trump’s dream of universal healthcare for all. And everyone lived happily ever after. Well, almost everyone. Racism, it turned out, was still not over in America, even though a black man had been re-elected president. And Obama had to endure four more years of one of the most thankless jobs on earth. And Trump?

Well, Trump lost his reality shows on NBC but that hasn’t stopped him from finding a way into the spotlight. With his gig on Fox, Trump ruthlessly parodies rightwingers from within the heart of the propaganda machine itself.

Why Obama WaitedPost + Comments (218)

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Not all heroes wear capes.

T R E 4 5 O N

I really should read my own blog.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The next time the wall wtreet journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

We still have time to mess this up!

“Squeaker” McCarthy

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

The revolution will be supervised.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Andrew Breitbart says he’ll take a drug test after his anti-OWS rant goes viral

Every sperm is sacred

Why conservatives can’t do pop culture very well

What Obama’s Up Against

The case for democracy

So long and thanks for all the fisks

Why Obama Waited