Mandating and Incentivizing Health Care

(((The logic of mandates and penalties in health insurance; it's really hilarious to be lectured on how the penalties actually have to mean something by industry representatives with actuaries who probably do those very calculations for every move these companies make.)))

Blue Cross/Blue Shield representative on Morning Edition this morning sounding all sternly maternal, pointing out that a mandate has to be a mandate, and if there's no penalty for not buying into the health care system, people will find it much more reasonable to pay some small fine than to pay what it takes to buy insurance.

Wait, you're saying small fines for breaking the laws, not abiding by guidelines, missing certain kinds of targets, and so on, those fines can be worth paying when you stand to pay less overall -- or even, let's say, make lots more money -- by going ahead and doing what you're not supposed to do?

Shocking. It's as if the private sector has thought about this before. And, well, it's like they've all become . . . socialists! Obama wins!

Bridge Metaphor to Nowhere

((("Bridge to nowhere;" auto industry bail-out; Washington "pork" spending; tiresome spin masquerading as cleverness.)))

Am I really the only one who is sick to death of hearing spin-meisters on TV calling the auto industry loan the "bridge loan to nowhere"? How about "bridge loan to stabilized unemployment"? Or "bridge loan to an economy not in the tank"?

Never mind whether the loan is a good idea. Never mind if it's throwing good money after bad. Can someone please just stop the insanity of the metaphor slicer-dicer to nowhere (with Scandinavian snowball earrings yours to keep if you can stop it right now)? Or clean up this metaphorical spill with the sham-wow of political discourse?

Please?

It's not Torture if You're not at Guantanamo

(((Those destroyed CIA videotapes of waterboarding; how they're not covered by the judge's order not to destroy evidence because the victims--yeah, I said it--weren't at Guantanamo Bay)))

According to CNN:

The Bush administration argued Friday that the CIA's destruction of videotapes that showed the interrogations of two al Qaeda suspects did not violate a court order because the suspects were not at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [ . . . ]

Joseph Hunt, an administration attorney, said the men in the videos were held at secret locations and did not fall under the category of those who were "now at" Guantanamo in Cuba.

"It is inconceivable that the destruction of the tapes could have violated the order," Hunt told the judge.

Okay, it's the judge's bad. They like to blame everything on those activist judges, don't they?

And yet . . . it is also a clear demonstration of bad faith on the part of the administration to even make this argument, never mind to have destroyed the evidence in the first place. Could it be any clearer that they will do precisely everything they think they can get away with?

The Truth Embedded in the Lie

And no, I don't mean Bush comparing Iraq to Vietnam. I mean in "fiction":

Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84. [ . . . ]

"None of it happened, and yet every word of it is true," she once said of her fiction. "It's truth embedded in the lie." [ . . . ]

Born Grace Goodside in New York in 1922, she was one of three children of Russian Jews. Her family spoke English, Russian and Yiddish, but politics proved the universal language. Her parents had opposed the czar in Russia and were supporters of the New Deal. The bitterest neighborhood feuds were not among drug dealers, but between Trotskyites and Stalinists.

"I thought being Jewish meant you were a Socialist," Paley said. "Everyone on my block was a Socialist or a Communist. ... People would have serious, insane arguments, and it was nice. It makes you think the rest of the world is pretty bland."

Some of us would say that the Bible contains a lot of truth embedded in the lie. None of it ever happened, but a lot of it is true in some important way, even if it's not every word, or if it's true in some way that we wish it weren't. Because there are other kinds of truth than "factual" or "historical" truth. The Bible isn't a newspaper or a science or history textbook. But it is about order and justice, and a lot of it ain't pretty, and is even downright morally contemptible. But there's terrifying truth in a lot of that, as well.

I want to say something about her thinking that being Jewish meant being a Socialist, because I think there's a certain plausibility in that. Not that there aren't millennarian or apocalyptic strains of both Judaism and Marxism (see "Christianity," for example), but in general, both tend to be about achieving real justice in this life rather than the next. And when MLK said he had seen the promised land, he didn't mean heaven.

RIP Grace Paley. I hope I'm learning the right things from you.

tags technorati : Grace Paley, Religion, Bible, Fiction, Poetry

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Godwin's Law May Apply

In which case, we could just send all copies of the book straight to /dev/null.

The illustrious Jonah Goldberg is "boldly" publishing an expose on the fascist left. It turns out, in a politically risky and "startling new perspective," that the real Nazis are not US conservatives, but US liberals, including FDR, who, ironically, was trying to get the US into a war with Hitler long before it was politically possible. Perhaps that was just because there can, as it were, be only one. Surely this is a dangerous position for Goldberg to espouse publicly, which is why we should all admire his courage, and his, er, ingenuity.

The publisher's page on the book boasts:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Yes, that's exactly what American political discourse needs more of: cheers and jeers. Thanks to the editors of the National Review for their contribution to rational conversation, which these days takes the form of mutual name-calling. Apparently, an early working title for the book was, Nunh-Uh! You are!

Great, we're all Nazis. Can we move on, now?

tags technorati : Liberal Fascism Fascism Jonah Goldberg Nazis