Laughter is good!
I am pretty sure Mr. Toles is correct.
So… what’s for breakfast at your house?
Putting A Face on HCReform
Via Bruce Maiman at Examiner.com:
During a Tuesday rally on health-care reform outside the office of Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy in Columbus, opponents of the effort berated Robert Letcher, who suffers with Parkinson’s disease. He was holding up a homemade sign that read, “Got Parkinson’s? I Do and You Might. Thanks for helping!”
[…] Turns out 60-year-old Robert Lechter was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s 15 years ago. He has two Master’s Degrees and a PhD from Cornell. He taught at the University of Michigan and worked as a nuclear engineer.__
Lechter was able to have a $150,000 surgery thanks to Medicare and the Cleveland Clinic. It has greatly increased his quality of life. He attended the event in Columbus because he believes in giving back and thinks everyone should have access to affordable health insurance and quality health care.
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Maiman continues:
We say we don’t trust the government, we don’t trust the political class, we don’t trust our community institutions. Mostly, we don’t seem to trust each other. The comment that struck me in the video clip was, “I’ll decide when to give you money.”
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It’s all about me.
[…] Do you think we’re suffering a lack of unity and is that lack of unity underscored by this debate over health care?
P-S: Mary Jo Kilroy is a freshman Democrat who won by a slim margin in this swing district in 2008. She’s considered vulnerable in this year’s midterm. She’s decided to vote yes for the final health care overhaul.
(Teabagger video at the link, if you haven’t seen it yet. Hat tip to commentor PeakVT — thanks!)
R.I.P. Howard Zinn
From his hometown paper:
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.
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“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
I hope Professor Zinn’s ghost haunts President Obama’s final SOTU preparation, because Zinn’s brand of populism is exactly what we need now.
At approximately 3:00: “Obama will not fulfill that potential for change unless he is enveloped by a social movement which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough that he fill his abstract phrases about ‘change’ — that he fill them with some real, solid content.”
Yes, We Can (Read Before the SOTU)
I finally got around to reading my dead-trees copy of James Fallows’ “How America Can Rise Again“, the cover story in the Jan/Feb. Atlantic. It’s an excellent article, which deserves to be read in its entirety — especially since the online version actually makes use of all those intertoobz goodies, like embedded video and links to the books and websites discussed in the article itself.
That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.
The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation…
Monday Morning Open Thread (Glimmers of Hope Edition)
In his latest NYT column, Paul Krugman (may he abide in shrillness forever) is so confident we’ll get some kind of health care reform that he’s willing to speculate on how it will be received:
[T]he experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears.Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program…
[R]eform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.
As a proud Massachusetts resident by choice, I can attest it would be hard to get 79% of my fellow Massholes to come out in favor of sunshine and/or kittens. This is good news for Nancy Pelosi!
Monday Morning Open Thread (Glimmers of Hope Edition)Post + Comments (110)
Open Thread: Lagging Lexicon Indicators
WordPress still won’t let me change so much as a misplaced comma in the Lexicon. Actually, WordPress is only allowing me to read the site about 60% of the time this week, just in case anybody thought the secondary front-pagers got some kind of special access. Either the Red State Trike Farce Strike Force is being unusually modest, or John Cole should never have paid the NRO support team to upgrade Balloon Juice.
Here are some entries that will be added to the BJ Lex someday, I hope, along with DougJ’s latest, Wingerati…
27 Percenters – Those Americans who will predictably vote against their own best interests. In his seminal post on the Crazification Factor, John Rogers used the 2004 Obama/Keyes senate race as a measure: “Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.” Or, as commenter Davis X. Machina phrased it:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
Banana Republicans – The modern Robber Barons; individuals who dedicate their political efforts to turning America into an oligarchy where they assume they will be the rulers. Erik D. Prince, founder and sole owner of private military company Blackwater (now Xe), may be the foremost exemplar of the breed.
Bobbleheads – Derogatory nickname for television talkshow hosts and the pundits who use them — empty novelty items nodding in uniform approval of “their team”. See also Media Village Idiots.
Keats was wrong
I once asked my friend who’s a higher-up at a hedge fund if he thought that markets were rational. He told me “No one in the financial world believes that markets are rational.” It’s always been surprising to me that professional economists do. Krugman (h/t Atrios):
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.
I’ll spare you the details of my theory that many economists like the idea of high-powered math because they’re failed mathematicians, partly because you might find it offensive and partly because it doesn’t fully explain the problem here. Our society, especially its elites, has some weird fixation with the idea that we’re the best of all possible societies. Our markets work perfectly, we have the best healthcare in the world, and soon history will end as the rest of the world emulates our perfect societal system.
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop. The point here is that it’s hardly surprising that the same people who believe American society is the ideal final state for civilization would also have childlike naivete about how well markets work. Economists are especially disposed to believe all this crap because they’re paid so well. When you’re paid 300K a year to spin fantasies, it’s pretty easy to believe that you live in a perfect world and that your beautiful fantasies are the truth.