Balloon Juice - The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts Archives

Fight the real enemy

by DougJ| February 21, 201211:28 am| 190 Comments

This post is in: Fucked-up-edness, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

After reading ABL’s post on the new front in the Global War Against Women and Zandar’s post on the sad-sack establishment pearl-clutching over the Evil of leaking a few documents from a right-wing propaganda outfit, I feel compelled to come out with something that’s been on my mind for a while: I view the American right in more or less exactly the same way that the American right views (or viewed, they probably have new Hitlers by now) “the Islamofascists”.

I don’t mean everyone on the right here. I don’t mean Mitt Romney but I do mean Rick Santorum. I don’t mean Kathleen Parker but I do mean Charles Krauthammer. I don’t mean Matt Welch but I do mean Charles Murray.

In my professional opinion, a certain segment of the right hates us for our freedoms, and would round all of us up and send us to re-education camps (or worse), given the chance. And, yes, the way the right views the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts as the nation’s fifth columnists, I view tote-baggers as the left’s fifth columnists.

I’m not suggesting that the left adopt the tactics the American right favors in its struggles — no bombing, no torture, no wire-tapping, please. But leaking a few documents from the Heartland Institute? ‘Bagger, please.

Fight the real enemyPost + Comments (190)

54 million, estimated

by Kay| February 17, 20128:58 am| 67 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

Yesterday, certain religious leaders and Republicans gathered in Congress to plan how to best to destroy those portions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that regulate employee health plans offered by large businesses as part of employee compensation packages. Employee pay, in other words.

Just to be clear, because there seems to be some confusion, certain religious leaders and Republicans are demanding a broad waiver for all large businesses, and without regulation of large businesses, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care is effectively gutted.

“One of the fundamental purposes of the Affordable Care Act was making sure all health insurance plans cover basic services. The Blunt amendment would do away with that,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. “A business could deny coverage for cervical cancer screening for unmarried employees, out of opposition to premarital sex.”

No opposing witnesses were allowed, which left a full day for certain religious leaders and Republicans to congratulate each other on their piety, charity and generosity, uninterrupted by anyone from out here in the cheap seats who might upset, challenge or otherwise fail to show the absolute fawning deference which we have foolishly allowed them to become accustomed to, and, naturally, they now demand.

Because we’re apparently a little tougher than Republicans or certain religious leaders, and we don’t require careful protection from an opposing view, I read Blunt’s defense of the new law he and the religious leaders drafted and are sponsoring, and here’s his suggestion to those of us who may lose health insurance coverage as a result of their law:

Blunt’s office also took issue with claims that his amendment could be used by any employer to deny coverage of specific items. The fact sheet argues that the amendment “does nothing to force the health insurance company to offer that plan; it simply ensures that Americans are guaranteed the same rights” that they had before Obama’s health-care plan became law. “Federal courts are well equipped to identify spurious claims” by employers who falsely claim “conscience rights” to deny coverage, he says.

He suggests that workers who are denied coverage take their claim to a federal court, so that’s helpful, and I appreciate that advice. In case you’re wondering, Blunt’s defense means that everything lawyers are saying about Blunt’s new law is, well, TRUE. Employers could deny any coverage, and employees would then petition a federal court and demand that their current employer show proof that he or she actually has a religious or moral objection to health insurance coverage. Accusing your employer of lying about their moral convictions or religion may be problematic for your average employee, sure, but Blunt and certain religious leaders think you’re up to the challenge, and they say go for it. See you in court, suckers!

I don’t expect we’ll hear much on the reality for the peons on cost sharing and the PPACA now that Republicans and certain religious leaders have made this all about them, so here goes:

The Affordable Care Act requires many insurance plans (so-called ‘non-grandfathered’ plans) to provide coverage for and eliminate cost-sharing on certain recommended preventive health services, for policies renewing on or after September 23, 2010.[1] Based primarily on guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, this includes services such as colonoscopy screening for colon cancer, Pap smears and mammograms for women, well-child visits, flu shots for all children and adults, and many more.[2] While some plans already covered these services, millions of Americans were previously in health plans that did not. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Employer Health Benefits Survey in 2011, 31% of all workers were covered by plans that expanded their list of covered preventive services due to the Affordable Care Act.[3] The most recent data from the Census Bureau show that 173 million Americans ages 0 to 64 currently have private coverage.[4] Putting these facts together, we estimate that approximately 54 million Americans received expanded coverage of at least some preventive services due to the Affordable Care Act in 2011.[5] Using national survey data on children and adults with private insurance, we next estimated how those 54 million people are distributed across states, and across age, race, and ethnic groups. We examined the following age/gender groups, and provide here a sample of the services they are now eligible for without any cost-sharing. Note that this is not an exhaustive list of covered services and is only meant to highlight several examples.
• Children (0-17): Coverage includes regular pediatrician visits, vision and hearing screening, developmental assessments, immunizations, and screening and counseling to address obesity and help children maintain a healthy weight.
• Women (18-64): Coverage includes cancer screening such as pap smears for those ages 21 to 64, mammograms for those ages 50 to 64, and colonoscopy for those 50 to 64; recommended immunizations such as HPV vaccination for women ages 19 to 26, flu shots for all adults, and meningococcal and pneumococcal vaccinations for high-risk adults; healthy diet counseling and obesity screening; cholesterol and blood pressure screening; screening for sexually-transmitted infections and HIV; depression screening; and tobacco-use counseling. Starting in August 2012, additional preventive services specific to women, such as screening for gestational diabetes and contraception, will be covered by new health plans with no cost sharing.
• Men (18-64): Coverage includes recommended immunizations such as flu shots for all adults and meningococcal and pneumococcal vaccinations for high-risk adults; cancer screening including colonoscopy for adults 50 to 64; healthy diet counseling and obesity screening; cholesterol and blood pressure screening; screening for HIV; depression screening; and tobacco-use counseling.

54 million people now stand to benefit from no cost sharing for preventive services under the PPACA. Just keep that in mind when you’re listening to the same rotating cast of 150 people “debate” whether regulation of large businesses under the PPACA is necessary, or whether workers really deserve these protections.

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Rules for traditionalists

by Kay| February 12, 20124:13 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Education, Election 2012, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

I’m reading Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, not because Alinsky is our co-pilot at Balloon Juice and not because Newt Gingrinch doesn’t want anyone to read the book, but because the title has the word “rules” in it. There are rules for that? Great. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I love the book. There’s a reason Newt Gingrich doesn’t want us reading it.

I’m helping our statehouse candidate with his campaign finance filing, so I went to campaign school yesterday in that same spirit. It’s easier to take instruction than make it up as we go along. The Ohio Democratic Party puts on campaign school and it’s for Democrats who are first-time candidates running for state or local office. I got there late and left early because I didn’t account for time lost due to an oddly Cleveland-specific snowstorm on the way in, and then I didn’t want to get trapped there for the weekend on the other end, but it was really very helpful. They had a good turnout. There were about a hundred people there, and that’s in a snowstorm at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning.

I learned about the “vote deficit number”, which involves averaging the Democratic vote total over three (losing) races and subtracting that number from 52% of the average total vote in those same elections. That’s the vote deficit the Democratic candidate will have to make up in conservative districts or areas in any particular race. Ours is very, very high, I’ll just admit that up front. We’re drowning in deficit.

I also learned about the Rule Of Halves, which we have observed here locally, except we call it the 50% Rule, so, it turns out, we already knew it. This rule dictates that if one invites 100 people to an event or political gathering, 50 people will show up.

We had an impromptu presentation from a union member who is running, and that was about rules too, although he called his rules “protocol”. He said if the candidates are unfamiliar with labor endorsements or donations, they have to learn the protocol, which involves contacting the labor council first, filling out the candidate questionnaire (ALL OF IT!) and then using that first labor endorsement to get in the door for any additional labor endorsements they are seeking. I don’t think John (the candidate) is going to have any problem with labor protocol, because he’s a member of a labor union, but Dear Leader Saul Alinsky writes that people don’t understand things that are beyond their own experience intuitively or magically, and one shouldn’t assume that they do, so I’m glad the union member stood up.

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The Evil That Men Do

by Tom Levenson| January 28, 20122:04 pm| 96 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Fables Of The Reconstruction, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

Charles Murray is pimping a new book, alas. TBogg and Roy have already taken a couple of whacks at the most risible bits of his latest attempt to promote the natural order of things.

It’s hard to see this one making much of a splash, outside the usual quarters. In it, Murray looks specifically at pale America, and he argues that white folks here divide along class lines. That’s a phenomenon he sees separating the effete, smart, rich folks living in enclaves unclear on the concept of real Amerigeist (See! Ha! You knew I was one of those, didn’t you!), and the Nascar loving, not-so-smart, Applebee eating (truly — see the two posts linked above), meth sucking (I made that up) folks who don’t have passports that let them into Prospect Park or SoMa.

Leaving aside that David Brooks already botched this one, albeit in more facile prose, Murray’s key move is to declare that whatever else may construct class in America, it ain’t income, or more precisely, income inequality.

Which is of course what this always outcome-oriented writer needs to say.

His public-intellectual career, vapid though it may seem anywhere actual rigor is demanded,* turns on finding some kind of essentialist reason to preserve current social hierarchies and racial privilege. Here, abandoning a genetic tack, he can be seen to perform one of David Brooks patented’ double backflips, to land on what he claims are deeply rooted differences in culture.

The cleverness there is that such arguments evoke the kinds of responses most likely to be palatable to his and our overlords. Or, in the words of one reviewer — a more famous man than Murray, yet equally certain of assumptions not in evidence — the authoritative prescription for the Republic runs like this:

What the country needs is not an even larger federal government but a kind of civic Great Awakening–a return to the republic’s original foundations of family, vocation, community, and faith.

That’s from Niall Ferguson, whose review captures the bad faith that runs through Murray’s enterprise — really, one of the original that runs through the whole right-wing culturedammerung.

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Giving Up on Hitting a Moving Target

by $8 blue check mistermix| December 3, 20117:30 am| 93 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

The latest Fox News bullshit meme is that Democrats are giving up on white middle-class voters, which as Steve Benen explains, of course they aren’t. The origin of this was a piece by Tom Edsal that pointed out that white, non-college-grad males are leaving the Democratic Party and are hard to persuade.

As Benen and others point out, white lower-middle class males are not a monolithic block, and plenty of them can separate rhetoric from the economic realities of their situation. No Democrat has been trying to replace Medicare with a voucher or invest their Social Security in the stock market, and lots of lower-middle class white males know that. But what about the others — those who will vote for Republican against their economic interests to further some other ill-defined interest? What even motivates these voters?

A social theorist, or a think tank researcher, would have a number of explanations centering around tribalism, false consciousness and perhaps a wee bit of racism. I don’t have any of those credentials, so I’ve got no theories, but I do get the distinct impression that chasing after any group of voters whose main motivation is essentially irrational is a pointless exercise if there’s any alternative. And, for 2012, the alternative is clear: play the anti-immigrant rhetoric from the last hundred debates on an endless loop on any TV channel that reaches a Hispanic neighborhood. That’s got to be a far better way to spend campaign cash than an effort to cozy up to “NASCAR dads” by proving that Obama is the kind of guy they’d want to have a beer with. Trying to associate the Democratic brand with some ill-defined tribal signifiers is a hell of a lot harder than convincing Hispanics that they would be second-class citizens in a Gingrich or Romney administration. The former involves chasing down a shimmering mirage that’s always a few miles further in the distance. The latter just requires articulating a simple, easily demonstrated fact.

(Image from Buffalopundit)

Giving Up on Hitting a Moving TargetPost + Comments (93)

A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad bar

by DougJ| November 1, 20118:04 pm| 69 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

Everyone’s been egging me on to tackle Bobo’s latest. I’ll summarize: the librul arts types who are protesting Wall Street excess should instead focus their anger on all the Red State monosyllabic young bucks going back for seconds and thirds at the Applebee’s salad bar.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.
[….] [T]he fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

Dean Baker (via) points out that the college/non-college socioeconomic divide began around 1980 and has not widened much recently (Bobo conveniently quotes stats from 1979), but my point is a different one: what the fuck are OWS supporters like me supposed to do about people whose diets and parenting techniques Bobo dislikes? Go lecture them on his behalf?

Bobo — if I’m reading him right — says that the problem is that there’s too many non-college-educated fly-over country people and that they’re not eating right or raising their kids right. Isn’t this a natural place for government to expand access to education, health-care, and programs like Head Start? And isn’t it reasonable to ask that the wealthiest Americans, who surely make a lot of their money off these oh-so-tragically dumb, fat, poorly raised fucks, help foot the bill for it?

Also too, I can no longer understand who the real heroes and villains are for conservatives anymore. I gave up long ago with foreign policy, I can’t tell who’s Hitler and who’s a brave Churchillian protector of freedom, but I thought I knew a hawk from a handsaw within the confines of Our Republic. I can’t tell anymore. I know that college graduates from “blue states” are lazy, trustafarian slime, but now I know that non-college graduates from “red states” are fat, lazy, chain-smoking slime. Maybe this isn’t so complicated, maybe in Real Murka, a college degree makes you good, in the decadent enclaves on the coasts, it makes you bad.

I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that though.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad barPost + Comments (69)

Occupy Defiance

by Kay| October 28, 20113:39 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Free Markets Solve Everything, Kochsuckers, The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

I went out to a county political event last night and saw my friend Dolores. She told me that she was involved in an Occupy group in a city east of here, so I went out there to see how it was going. Defiance is the name of the city. You can read about that name here.

General Wayne surveyed the land and declared to General Scott, “I defy the English, Indians, and all the devils of hell to take it.”

I saw this sign on the way into the small city:

Dolores wasn’t there, but I met these people when I arrived:

This is their statement:

Occupy Defiance is a group dedicated to eliminating corporate and financial influence on our government and to promoting positive community action at a grassroots level.

I did my usual disclosure, where I showed them Balloon Juice on my phone and told them I’d be posting pictures. I don’t want to get anyone fired. They were really welcoming and willing to talk.

They got a permit to set up in the location pictured, which is a grassy area right in front of the county courthouse. They had invited two state senators to speak with them, both Republicans (it’s a conservative area). One was a no-show and they didn’t know if the second was coming. He was scheduled at 3:30.

The two negative things they had heard was one outraged citizen complaint that they are located close to a veterans memorial and a local business owner who came out of his store to tell them to “get a job”. Most of them have jobs. Like a lot of lower-wage workers, they don’t have a regular, predictable work schedule.

It’s amusing that there are people in this country who still cling stubbornly to the belief that everyone who works has a forty-hour 9 to 5 job, with weekends off. That hasn’t been true for a very long time.

One of the main complaints I hear from lower wage service workers is that they don’t know from one month to the next when they’re working, because their schedules change constantly. That makes it very difficult to have a less than chaotic family or personal life outside work, let alone scheduling time for a movement, like these folks are doing. Of course lower-tier workers aren’t compensated for erratic or impossible-to-predict work schedules the way Paul Ryan’s makers are. They’re not makers, they’re takers, and they have to take whatever random 32 hours in a 7 day period they’re given by the makers.

Maybe the “get a job” guy thinks all those people he sees working Sundays and nights (when he’s off) are volunteers.

Occupy DefiancePost + Comments (43)

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a fraudulent bond!

Their freedom requires your slavery.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

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

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

White supremacy is terrorism.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Books are my comfort food!

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.