The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: Health of the Republic

  • 16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie

    Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act?

    They made it up.

    Really.  It came from nowhere.  In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all.  There’s a really nice dissection of this ludicrous claim over at factcheck.org.  Basically, the number was invented based on a bad estimate, inflated through dubious assumptions, and then just hand-waved into fact.

    Just remember, the next time someone quotes to you some scary scary provision of the ACA: There’s a non-negligible chance that they are lying or repeating a lie.

  • Quote of the Day

    From a comment on Political Animal, in a thread about a brick-thrower who wants to “end socialism and the government takeover”, and has time to do so because he’s receiving disability checks from the government.  In describing the futility of explaining this contradiction to the brick-thrower, a commenter pointed out,

    You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

    And that is the actual greatest threat to the Republic today: The noisy whiners who don’t know anything factual and are proud of it.  How does an Enlightenment democracy function, when one side denies the value of both logic and evidence?

  • Health care reform passes

    So, against all expectation, the Democratic Party managed to hang together and finally pass the comprehensive health care bill.

    As a lifelong Democrat, I am flabbergasted. I was certain they’d find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and fumble on the proverbial one-yard line. I’m glad to be disappointed, but this long, ugly process has exposed disturbing trends in this nation. It’s still possible that this will be the high-water mark of a great republic.

    Though their target is incorrect, the Tea Partiers ironically have a point: the Republic does face a crisis. It’s not driven by phantasmical jackbooted insurance inspectors breaking into homes and dragging Grandma off to mythical death panels. It stems from the unholy matrimony among a slick ideological establishment; sensationalist, irresponsible, and manipulative 24 hour “news” media; and an angry, incoherent, willfully-ignorant populace. Though these people claim to revere the Founders, they in fact stand opposed to the core of Enlightenment democracy that was bequeathed to us: an informed and educated citizenry engaged in reasoned debate — with passion, to be sure, but never abandoning reason and never so cocksure as to assume that opponents must be enemies.

    Considering that the Tea Partiers have labeled rule by majority vote “tyranny”, it’s hard to see how anything resembling the United States of America could survive their rage.  Their unifying feature is anger and it will burn everything it can reach.  And the Republican Party stands on the sideline and feeds it, a mixture of cynical arsonist and maniacal six-year-old.

    How can a deliberative legislature — how can a functioning democracy — endure when one side has abandoned argument and evidence?  When one side decides that anything their opponents say must be untrue?  If one side locks itself in its own fantasy world and declares invalid any source that might challenge its funhouse-mirror self-reality?

  • David Brooks is disingenuous, delusional, or an idiot

    Today, David Brooks had a column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.  It’s pretty much a standard Brooks piece, bemoaning the lack of civility in Washington today.  It is wrong on its facts and wrong on its interpretations and laughably wrong on its understanding of politics.

    • Ezra Klein takes it down analytically.
    • Jonathan Chait takes it apart with the devastating mockery it so richly deserves.

    The health care debate has revealed not only how dysfunctional our national politics is.  It’s exposed how vapid and worthless the self-appointed pundits and intelligentsia have become.

    (I also have to say how taken aback I am at how nakedly the professional punditry is willing to scoff at such a radical principle as “rule by simple majority”, which Brooks derides in no uncertain terms.  Isn’t rule of the majority more or less what we mean by democracy?)

  • Texas approves explicitly conservative curriculum

    The writing was on the wall for a while, but Texas just approved a revision to its history curriculum.  It has an explicit conservative bent — I mean, literally, students are to learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

    Because it is such a large market and has a very central purchasing authority, Texas carries a lot of weight with textbook publishers, meaning that students of many states will receive textbooks crafted to meet the Texas requirements.  (California is an even larger market but is not buying new books for a long while due to its ongoing slow meltdown.)

    Am I worried?  Less than might be expected by people who know me.  Why?  Because I’m a teacher.  I have learned that the easiest way to cause students to reject any piece of knowledge is to proclaim it loudly in a textbook.  Especially with an increasingly distrustful and tech-savvy student population, attempts to ram down an official line on anything seem likely to fail.

  • Our (Even More) Broken Senate

    News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state.  With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote.  So the Senate is even more broken.  The danger is that this will accelerate our move towards government by other means, including increased use of recess appointments.

    Oh, and what the heck is a hold?  David Waldeman explains.

    Also: a pretty funny reimagining of the note that Shelby must have given Harry Reid and the President.

  • A well-deserved smack-down on trials of terrorists

    Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists.  I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life and not that we are afraid the city would be attacked.  (As if Al Qaeda needs another reason…)

    But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”.  How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that?  Note that it’s not even that the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security.  So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself.  It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:

    We are stronger than that.

    We are smarter than that.

    We are better than that.

  • We Are All Californians Now

    This is the day.
    This is the moment that some clever historian — not the first to consider this sweep of time, but rather someone turning over the leaves looking for a more subtle causation — will draw a slash on the timeline of history and write: Here began the fall of the American republic.

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  • The Democratic playbook

    in convenient cartoon form.

    by Tom Toles
    by Tom Toles

    I got this via Ezra Klein’s fantastic blog, but apparently it’s by Tom Toles.

  • My congressional lobbying

    I haven’t really gotten involved in haranguing my elected representatives before, but the possibility of health care reform is so tantalizingly close — and the apparent drift of the Democratic so-called “leadership” is so grindingly predictable and frustrating — that I’ve felt compelled to contact my representative several times.  Below the fold is the email I’ve sent.

    UPDATE: I claim no particular credit, but according to Talking Points Memo, Rep. Holt has in fact come out in support of (what I feel to be) the correct option, passing the Senate bill.  (I am indifferent as to whether it needs to be done straight up or with amendments via reconciliation.)

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