On the Eve of The Supreme Court Decision

While we await the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, the New Yorker appears with an article by Ezra Klein, "Unpopular Mandate,"  which expands understanding: It begins by summarizing the history of how this law came into existence, and ends with a study of belief systems. 

As for the history of this law, it, oddly enough, originated in ideas which had their gestation in Republican think tank, The Heritage Foundation, in 1989, the idea of a mandate to buy something appealing to conservative thinkers and it was served up as an alternative to what conservatives really feared, the single payer. Years later, Democrats, realizing they could never get a single payer (read government) system like Medicare-for-all through the narrowly divided Congress, picked up this idea. Democrats like Ron Wyden managed to get some Republicans to support the principle and through various iterations it emerged as a compromise from the Democrats. 

But, of course, when the Republicans saw a Democratic success gathering force, they reacted in a great panicked howl and the day after the law passed, Republicans launched their lawsuits to bring it down.  All the authorities said there was absolutely no way this law, this mandate,  could be unconstitutional--all the authorities but the unschooled ignoramuses like Mad Dog, who knows very little, but he does know one big thing--This Supreme Court will always vote for those in power and against those trying to disrupt the status quo. 

Klein ends by reviewing a set of studies in which people who identified themselves as either very liberal or very conservative were presented with two sets of proposals for a welfare policy, one which proposed  more generous welfare benefits than have ever been enacted, but it was labeled as emanating from a very conservative Republican source; the other was a proposal for a meager, scaled back program,  labeled as embraced by Democrats. 


Intriguingly, the conservative readers embraced the generous ultra welfare program, presumably because the label "Republican program" over rode the effect of the actual content of the program. The readers really did not care about the specific content, all they cared about was the "reference group" or, I would argue, they started with the idea of where they wanted to go, and they circled back to that no matter what the "facts" of the program were. (The liberals did the same thing, choosing the decimated program for the poor because it was labeled the Democratic alternative.)


This is sort of the "Only Nixon Could Go to China" syndrome. Well, if Nixon says it's okay to make nice with the Chinese, it must be. We can trust him on this. He's the ultimate cold warrior. If Kennedy had tried to do this, or Clinton, or certainly Obama, well then, it would have been treason.

And that is clearly the way the five member majority of the Supreme Court functions: It considers the source and circles back to where it wants to be. The details, the substance, all principle is over ridden by the ultimate goal--in the case of the court, to thwart the liberal, the Democrat and to support the conservative.

By this reading, had this very same law had been presented to the Court as a Republican  law, challenged by the Democrats, Antonin Scalia would have risen up in righteous indignation over the attack, asking why the Democrats objected to the operation of a market place solution in a capitalist society?

If this election were about something really substantive, for my money, it would be about electing a Democratic president with enough of a Democratic majority in both houses, to push through a reform of the Supreme Court, with three new justices and only the most recent 9 being able to vote on new cases.  Remember the Constitution does not specify how many justices, and no amendment would be necessary.


I would love to see Obama re elected, but truth be told, if he is not given a Congress to support him it would be like pushing the man out of the plane without a parachute--there's no way he can bring you anything if you don't provide him with the means. He'll just wind up flattened on the ground.

It Don't Bother Me

There is a wonderful song which ends a wonderful movie called "Nashville," directed by Robert Altman.  A waif, who has been trying to sing a song through the entire movie, but never gets the stage, or when she does, it's at a motor speedway and her voice is drowned out, finally gets to belt out her song, "It don't bother me." And what she sings is, "You may say, I'm not free, but it don't bother me."
And you realize, having watched the film, having watched the forces of wealth and power, having watched the cynical manipulation of public opinion by the upper 1%, by the smarmy, by the unctuous, by the winners, you realize how un free all those strivers in the seething hoi polloi, all those dreamers, who think they will hit it big some day, who believe they will make it, you realize, it don't bother them to not be free.
My father was very disappointed visiting Spain when Franco was still in power, looking about at all the cafe life on the streets and seeing all the ostensibly happy people living in this dictatorship. "They were all so...happy."   It didn't bother them they were not "free." They could not complain in public about their government. 
So what? 
Are we really any more in control of our society than those Spaniards?
Or, more to the point, are we any more in control of our individual fates in the Live Free or Die state than those Spaniards?
Big money is in control. The Supreme Court is determined to keep it that way. Congress is bought and paid for. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity like it that way. 
Why should you or I care?
Maybe Barack Obama, much as I love him, or the idea of him, is really just another Jimmy Carter--a decent man, but not a strong leader. And maybe, worse yet, his followers really are effete, weak kneed, insufficiently aroused or insufficiently arousable, nice people but, in the end, losers. 
And maybe the future does not belong to losers. Maybe it belongs to the one percenters.
Maybe that's cosmic justice. The way America is supposed to work. Those who want wealth and power go after it,  and the rest of us are content to live our lives without it, because, well, it don't bother me.

As Wisconsin Goes...

During a players' strike against the National Football League, my father remarked, "I'm all for the workers, but these guys are not workers." By which he meant, they were millionaires squabbling with billionaires.


Some of the same lack of sympathy was apparent in Wisconsin, and I hear it right here in New Hampshire. People quote newspaper stories about the lavish pensions retiring police officers in Boston get. They complain about the heavy burden on town budgets for pensions for retired police and firemen. They point out these men and women are getting these pensions at age 50 and going out and getting other jobs. They became police at age 20, retired at 50 and never went to college. 


These same citizens complain about public school teachers who are burnt out, recycling lessons for years, incompetent and destructive to children, and these  public employees in schools cannot be fired because of union contracts. And that particularly burns because non union citizens live with the knowledge that they themselves go to work every day and are just one back talk away, one angry outburst away from being escorted off the premises, carrying  all their stuff in a cardboard box,  escorted by security. The average citizen is non unionized, especially in New Hampshire, and lives at the pleasure not of some royal monarch but at the pleasure of some financial monarch.


And so the average citizen resents the protected job and the security of the unionized public employee. He resents the union worker who works for a non public, private employer, too, because money from the Koch brothers has been used to "educate" him that unions are what have made General Motors unable to compete with Toyota and Volkswagen.  


So unions are bad for the country, and bad for the economy  and only good for the few unionized workers. The sweet deals they've negotiated for themselves show how greedy these workers are. The workers don't deserve these good things. Somehow, the owners and managers and bosses, who also benefit from the profits of the company are not seen to be greedy or to be benefiting unjustly.


The average citizen resents the power the government has over him, but he accepts the power the financial monarchs have over him.  If his boss fires his coworker, well, we all know we have to please the boss. Doesn't matter if the firing was fair or made sense or not. That's the way it is.


You really have to hand it to the Republicans: They have "educated" American citizens to internalize the point of view of the bosses, and to believe what is good for the bosses, and what is bad for the worker is good for the nation. 


Take your hat off to them.  (Just the way you do for the Queen.)

Fearless Leader: Obama and Gay Marriage

Either Barack Obama is a lot smarter than I am or he really does not want to be re elected. 
Not that I disagree with him about gay marriage, but you have to say, "What was he thinking?"
I suppose you might think, well, he was never going to get the vote of any ardent bible thumper anyway.  But he was never going to lose the gay vote, because they have nowhere else to go, if a gay is voting on gay issues.
How many truly "independent" voters there are out there? I do not know.  But there must be some who would have maybe voted for Obama, but now will not because they are offended by the idea of gay marriage. They are offended by the two men, who are standing on the sidelines of the soccer game watching their eight year old daughter playing soccer. They are embarrassed when their own eight year old daughter ask them, "Who are those two men?" And they have to say, "Those are Jennifer's fathers." They do not want to have to accept that family as having any right to exist. It's not actually a problem for the children, who can accept whatever they are told, who are not locked into beliefs yet. The problem is with the squirmy parents.
This is one of those emotional-all-thinking-stops-and-just-emotions-reign things.
When you get people relaxed, in a bar, talking about marriage, the average person is more reasonable about the whole idea of marriage. But when you put people in a group, like at church, they lose all rationality.
For my part, that word marriage is nothing sacred. It is applied to relationships which are so varied and so different from one another the only thing you can say is it has only legal meaning.
How many people really believe a man and woman are chosen for each other by God?
How many people really believe in those vows to be sexually faithful, to stand by your spouse in sickness and in health? Some people do both, but probably the majority do not and that word marriage is an empty promise. 
Men shuck their aging wives for trophy wives. Women have babies and lie about who the father really is. Divorce ends most marriages. 
Really, that sacred institution is anything but.
But humankind cannot stand too much reality.
We get very nasty when you force us to face the fact that a cherished illusion is bunk.
There are magazines about weddings and brides and girls still dream about finding "Mr. Right."
For my money, I'd get the government out of the business of gay marriage because I'd get it out of the business of all marriage. You want a church wedding? Fine. Have a beautiful day. But don't ask the government to sanctify it and don't allow those words,  "By the power invested in me by the state of New Hampshire, I now pronounce you man and wife." 
Yuck!
Marriage ought to be what it is: A contract. Go to city hall and get officially registered and married, heterosexual, homosexual, intra species, whatever.  If you want to marry a frog, fine. But the practical, financial, health insurance, visiting rights aspects can be spelled out in law for any couple who wants to sign on for that contract.
Problem is, I'm unelectable for saying such things. So is President Obama.

Taking Out Osama Bin Laden 

"Oh, I could have hit that one out. That was easy. Anyone could have hit that one out."

Strip Searches and the Republican Soul

E.L. Doctorow, writing in today's Sunday New York Times traces the decline of America,  the slide of this great country from something unique to a nation like so many others. 

But the coup de grace , as he tells the tale, is the decision by the US Supreme Court to protect the nation's jailers from the threat of weapons being smuggled into jails by all those girl jay walkers, those ladies who rolled through stop signs, or the men who were simply arrested for  DWB (Driving While Black) or even RWB (Riding While Black.)

From this day forward, there ought to be no public appearance by any candidate for office, or by any office holder, without that person being asked, directly and immediately: "Do you agree with the strip search decision?"  and then, if the answer is no, or if the answer is a dodge, "Will you work to pass legislation to limit strip searches?"

You might also ask, "What evidence are you aware of which suggests that strip searches protect jailers from hidden weapons? What are the statistics of how many weapons have ever been found by this procedure over the past 10 years?"

The fact is, the heart and soul of the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh, has dismissed even the Abu Ghraib stripping of prisoner as just "the boys letting off steam," and "no worse than a Skull and Bones" initiation rite. But that's just Mr. Limbaugh's fetid imagination at work again.

The fact is, this is what the Republican heart and soul is all about: The case was about a powerless man who was wronged by those in power, the police and the prison authorities, and the Republicans on the court, and all the Republicans across the land are determined to protect those poor, sensitive, vulnerable jailers, who have guns, from the sixteen year old girl who has just been dragged in in plastic handcuffs.

We have to ask everyone who wants to hold office, Republican and Democrat alike, where they stand on this.

Finally, The Democrats Throw a Punch

Osama is dead and General Motors is alive. If Romney had been President, exactly the opposite would be true.
  --Joe Biden


Okay, finally, a little ditty short enough and punchy enough to appeal to Joe Sixpack.
Now if we can just get one or two a week until November, the Democrats may stand half a chance.