Rachel Maddow Explains

I think she and Elizabeth Warren are my heroes.

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I remember watching this lecture by Elizabeth Warren several years ago. Prescient, no?

Oh What Shall We Do About the Deficit?

Here is an article that I think puts the issue in very clear terms.

Talking about the deficit is a way of cutting morality out of the discussion. Waste! Mismanagement! Incompetence! Unaccountable earmarks! These things are noise. The actual questions are: is money to be spent on people who do not have money? And where is that money going to come from?

It seems clear that what we have decided is that the money should go to the top.  Maybe you've seen these graphics (via Hullabaloo):

If this seems OK, all right then, I guess there's nothing to talk about.

Our Current (and Former) Political Climate

I first saw this on Times and Seasons, one of my favorite Mormon blogs:

Las Vegas

John and I didn't find an open flight to Las Vegas for his conference, so we drove--it was a lot of fun to be together and only took a couple of hours more than flying would have. Or less. He was presenting with Stacy and Cat (above, on the right) on using writing in wilderness experiences. They did a good job, if trying to give too much information in a one hour forum. I liked the whole conference, which was full of skinny, weathered 'experiential educators' from the US and Canada--and I guess from other places too--John met a woman from El Salvadore--who talked about sustainability and environmental ethics. It sort of overlapped teaching, therapy, and wilderness.

Joe B's daughter Zina was there too, with a friend from Wasatch Academy. We went out to eat and wandered around a bit--below, the waterfall inside the Venetian.

Cat took a photo of John and me in front of the waterfall at the Wynn:

Here's a picture specifically for Brett (and Ethan):

My favorite of the hotel/casinos is the Venetian, with its fake sky and fake canals:

The next night after everybody else had gone home, we walked two miles south along the Strip and had the Caesar's Palace buffet:

We saw the water show at the Bellagio, and their gorgeous botanical exhibit inside, and saw the volcano erupt at the Mirage, and caught the end of the pirate show at Treasure Island, which has inexplicably changed its name (like KFC) to "TI."

But outside our window, abandoned construction, great dead hulks of darkness at night:

Yesterday before we headed back home we had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory with Jordan from England 2007. It was great to see him, even though we missed Rose.

Las Vegas is just incredibly, deliberately tacky. White trash on steroids. It’s so offensive that it’s beyond comprehension—I’m stunned into silence. The polished bronze backsides of 8 or 10 dancing girls outside the front door of our hotel/casino, and people taking photos (usually of the women in their party) posing with them, for example. Why, as a woman, would you want to pose with a bunch of ladies’ butts? Is it funny or what? But I was strongly tempted to take a photo of them too, it was so obviously meant to be photographed. My feeling as an American or Westerner around the foreign tourists, is like having a dirty-minded, rich, half-drunk, out-of-control elderly relative present at a reception. “Oh my gosh, somebody put Aunt LV in the bedroom before she insults the Prime Minister. Not the bedroom where the grandkids are sleeping!” (because who knows what she’d do to them). On the other hand, the foreign tourists wouldn’t be in Las Vegas if they weren’t hoping to see her do something crazy.

There’s a lot of construction just north of the Riviera and across the street—gigantic buildings in various stages, but with no one working on them. The cranes are idle and nobody is around. It’s kind of creepy. There’s a place like that on State Street in Orem, where the exposed beams, half covered with tattered wallboard, whistle in the wind. (More or less). Ah the elections. (The end of a lightning swift neuronal pathway: stopped construction > bad economy > Wall Street sharks > Dems and Repubs both in their pockets > elect anybody it will be the same.) Do I really believe that? I voted (Democratic) this Tuesday, for Dems who in Utah County would have been indistinguishable from the Republicans. Not that a Democrat would ever win in Utah County.

To end on a happier note: Chris has loaded his entire CD "Fire in a Snowstorm" online, here. Sweet.

For Those Confused About Libertarianism

from The New Yorker.

Another Explanation of Our Current Economy

So here's the latest info on the relationship between congress and the financial sector.

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Health Care Reform: An Analogy

...brought to you bipartisanshiply from xkcd. The embedded comment says, "I always believe the truth lies halfway between the most extreme claims."

Plenty of Blame to Go Round

Sometimes I wonder if I don't like people's political opinions solely because they write so well [extreme examples here: feminist and libertarian--beware of random bad language]. Matt Taibbi, writer for Rolling Stone and a sort of left-libertarian critic, seems to me to have a handle on the housing bubble in his latest blog post:

...what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

And...

My own personal feeling is that our recent bubbles weren’t much different than pyramid scams and lotteries; they’re the handiwork of an essentially regressive and deeply cynical political organization that systematically hoovers up taxes and investment money mainly from middle-class suckers, where it eventually gets eaten in short-term cashouts and mostly blown on sports cars and tropical vacations and eye jobs for the trophy wives of Wall Street executives. Crackonomics: take literally all the spare money from four square city blocks and turn it into one tricked-out Escalade.

....To me all of these people were equally guilty of making bad decisions to benefit themselves in the here and now at the expense of the whole in the future. When it comes to bubbles, It Takes a Village, and blaming the whole mess on the “socialist” aims of a pair of government agencies seems off base — particularly since the Randian protocapitalists running the banks benefited every bit as much from this socialism as actual homeowners, and perhaps even more, when one considers that homeowners get foreclosed upon, while bonuses are forever.

What do you think?

Protecting Insurance Companies

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

I don't quite dare post this on my psych blog,
since it's listed on several insurance companies' web sites.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Death Panel Advisors - watch more funny videos

(found on Ezra Klein's blog)

Why It's Important Not to Give Up

As I commented on Dave's immigration blog:

It's so discouraging to see the administration abandoning the public option. I have begun to mistrust the words "stakeholders" as much as I now mistrust "family values"--it means something different than what appears on the surface. At this point, "stakeholders" as it applies to health care reform, means "the companies who have made an obscene amount of money over past decades and want to put off true reform for at least another decade of obscene profits." It's also very disheartening to put one's faith in a a party and politicians, and discover (as one suspected all along) that they really are bought and paid for by industry lobbyists.

And as Dave reproved me:

who is this lurker? :) thanks for commenting! you should know as well as anyone the machinations of the insurance companies, fighting them as you do and having uninsured and underinsured children with children of their own.

i realized tho that the party isn't very good, but i think obama is trying to move things forward. he can't do it on his own, tho--we have to make the change ourselves, we have to be the change we want to see. no one else is going to do it for us.

Why I Love Dan Froomkin and the Washington Post Was An Idiot for Firing Him

Let's be blunt. The public option -- emphasis on the word "option" -- is a way to hold the insurance companies accountable should they (entirely unexpectedly, of course) fail to live up to their promises, ignore the rules, and keep doing things the way they have for the past several decades....

The public option is a grave threat to the regime of obscene profit-making that has left the health care industry with plenty of cash to now throw in reform's way. The growing "opposition" to the public plan is a direct result of that money. This is -- remember -- exactly how money works in Washington. It buys congressmen. It buys message. It generates publicity. It even makes presidents flinch....

Are you really confident, for instance, that the insurance industry will work hard to control health care costs? Our health insurance chieftains have been talking about that for decades. But rather than do it, they seem perfectly happy taking a big cut of an ever-bigger pie -- and focusing their cost-cutting energies on denying coverage to people when they need it. This seems to work for them. Changing the rules under which they operate may have some modest impact on their behavior, but not nearly as much as will looking over their shoulders and seeing a government-run program bending the cost curve, lowering rates, and improving service.

The presence of an alternative -- a choice -- is critical. It's also about as American as apple pie. The insurance companies themselves understand this very well. The industry-backed PR firms that are bankrolling and inciting ostensibly "grassroots" protests understand this. That's why they encourage talking points about a "government takeover" of health care, rather than anything based in reality.

Dan Froomkin

Amen.

Interestingly, I have not met one actual health care provider who does not believe that single payer, universal health care is the economical, sensible, eventually inevitable, and moral way to go. I could talk about the frustrating hours every month that I spend dealing with insurance companies. I could talk about hidden deductibles in the thousands of dollars, premiums that cost 50% of a family's income, people trapped in jobs solely for the health benefits, treatment decisions made by insurance demands rather than by the needs of my patients. But worst of all are those who get no health care because they have no coverage.

I understand that Medicare recipients are afraid that if others are cared for, they will lose their own fragile health security. I blame the insurance and drug companies for fanning those fears. If we lose this battle, those companies will be able to rake in the profits for another decade or so--exactly analogous to the tobacco companies fighting regulation through years and decades while they sucked up every last possible drop of money.

Bill Moyers on the Health Insurance Industry

You suspect these things, and then you find out that they're true. Single payer, universal health care is insanely overdue in this country, but the vested interests who buy Congress will keep it from happening for several more decades. John and Chris and I have good coverage. Our adult kids, not so much. Must be that they're lazy, reckless, and irresponsible, right? Or the free market would take care of them.

Back to Politics...

...after our relaxing break in the UK.

This one, via favorite feminist site Shakesville, is for the Birthers (for those who have been out of the loop for even longer than I have, Birthers are people who refuse to believe that Obama is a US citizen):


Actually, of course, it's just an excuse to post another song by The Boss.

The Iowa Decision

From Feminist Mormon Housewives, a post about the Church's involvement in the same sex marriage controversy that reflects an earlier post on my blog:

Being gay in the Church is like being a woman in the Church. Let me recognize, however, that gays have had it far, far worse than women. The psychological and spiritual damage inflicted upon gay members by the Church’s highest (and lowest) leadership is unforgiveable.

But these attitudes are thankfully, though grudgingly, changing. Instead of being told they are broken and corrupt for their evil thoughts and behavior, gays are told that ”the Church” accepts you and loves you. But. Don’t even THINK about establishing a committed, loving relationship with a partner. Don’t even THINK about having a partner! The Church may love you, but unless you can sit quietly in your pew and pretend to be just like the rest of us normal people, well, there’s no real place for you here.

Likewise, women are told that ”the Church” loves and accepts women. But don’t even THINK about stepping outside of your prescribed role of being a nurturing mother (or mother-like figure) who upholds, but does not hold, the priesthood. If you do, then you’ll be smothered in sweet platitudes about equal partnership and how much we treasure our women, and don’t you want to experience the joy of eternal families (that may or may not include you sharing your husband with other wives)?

The post also includes a very interesting thread with many perspectives represented.

Apocalyptic Fears

I'm listening to Pres. Monson in the other room saying, "Fear not, be of good cheer," as I read Kevin Drum's comment on the right's (e.g., Mormon Glen Beck) recent apocalyptic tone:

But there is something different about their tone these days, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there's an inchoate quality to their fears that's new. In the past they were fighting against specific things: communism, hippies, Bill Clinton, Islamists, abortion, etc. But communism is dead, the hippies are grown up, Clinton is off doing good works in Africa, al-Qaeda is pretty quiet, and it's pretty obvious that the culture wars have been lost. They're doing their best to slot Obama into the old Clinton/Gore role, but he just doesn't fit and the media isn't playing along the way they did in the 90s. So they're stuck. Who, exactly, is their enemy these days?

I'm not sure they know themselves. But maybe that makes it worse. A nuclear-armed USSR may be scary, but at least it's something you can identify. These days that's a lot harder. Like a horror movie where you're surrounded on all sides by something you can never quite make out, I guess it seems to them like there's something horrible going on, but it's something so insidious that they're only allowed to catch occasional foggy glimpses of it. Budget deficits? Healthcare reform? Top marginal tax rates going back to 39.6%? Negotiations with Iran? Those aren't things that normally stir the blood. But what if they're really just stalking horses for something far more malign?

In comments: Mark Twain said, "What people don't know, they suspect." And another take on it, also from comments:

...I respectfully disagree from where I sit. The ranting I heard from John Bircher-types growing up in Idaho in the 1970s sounded pretty much the same as what we are hearing from AM radio and Faux News today. They didn't like the "Soviets" back then, but they were just as agitated over illegal immigrants, Arabs, European weakness, the UN and "world government" as they are now. "Soviets" and "the welfare state" have mostly dropped off the list of existential threats to the Union (though there are still lots of dark references to the "Russians," which is what they usually called them anyway), and gay marriage has been added to the list, but the tenor remains pretty much the same as it has for a long time. The biggest difference I see is that before Limbaugh became nationally syndicated in in the late 80s/early 90s, there were only a few oddball cranks with a national platform for this bile (e.g. Paul Harvey). Limbaugh's appearance on the national scene was a big change, and there has been a profusion of imitators since then that have turned up the volume a lot. But the music is pretty much the same.

And, I think the economic mess is more scary than the economy has been for a long time. It is very scary, and the Obama administration is downplaying how bad it is, for the good reason that economic hysteria creates its own apocalyptic outcomes. I realize that the right disowned the GWB administration as soon as their incompetence at everything including getting votes became undeniable, but it is interesting to see how quickly the economy is now the fault of Obama and the Dems. Nothing rational about it, except for the ones cynically stirring the pot in a bid for a return to power. Too bad they've got no better ideas than inflaming populist hysteria. That sort of anger is not always easily directed, however. It seems to me that with the mandate of such anger, despite his centrist leanings, the still-incredibly popular Obama could just as easily shrug and say, "well, the Establishment solutions are obviously not working, we need to go to nationalization," or to whatever other leftist solution presents itself.

I wouldn't argue with a turn to the left.

If you're interested in politics...

...a critique and discussion of the conservative critique of the progressive utopian agenda, from one of my favorite sites (thanks to Dave for pointing out the blog to me). I especially like this description of the slippery slope. Of course I always knew us nanny-staters would be first ones up against the wall:

As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/ progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/ progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.

Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/ progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following:

Intellectuals cook up some abstract, scientistic, rationalistic System. Blinded by the light of Enlightenment hubris, they conclude that a very great transformation of society can be happily effected in relatively short order. A political revolution shall ascend atop some alleged social science breakthrough which, we are assured, is a sold extension of more fundamental advances in the natural sciences. Mostly, the engine of change is the force of changed minds themselves. First, some activist elite manages to get their heads on straight. Then the people will eventually be dragged (if necessary) into the light. It’s Politics of Meaning as the Rule of Reason. The job of government is to understand what the right values are, and make sure those values permeate the lives of the (potentially false-consciousness afflicted) masses. For their own good.

The elite summon the New Man onto the stage of history, by cramming ‘enlightened’ values down the throat of the Old Man. Which never works. And that’s if he’s lucky. (If he is unlucky, his head has been cut off.)

Reagan Worship

I have always been bemused at the idea that Ronald Reagan was one of our greatest presidents. I lived through that era, and remember a very different reality than that promulgated now by our right wing friends. Here is a review of Reagan and the Eighties that seems a lot more accurate to my memories.

Accomplishments of the Current Administration part 2

Randy Newman (January 2007):

Accomplishments of the Current Administration

Blogger Jon Smith makes a gratuitously snarky summary of the achievements of the Bush years:

In the three years and a half years since Hurricane Katrina not a single American city has been destroyed or partially destroyed....

Although the excesses of the Clinton administration's failed economic policies finally caught up with us in October 2008, in the seven years before this economic downturn the economy was doing really well. Not every President can boast of seven years of prosperity. What's more, even since October there have been no Great Depressions, which means President Bush has given us eight completely depressionless years....

Meanwhile, because of easy credit during the Bush years, more people had the opportunity to buy the homes of their dreams and live in them for a few years before they had to give them back....

Although some presidents can claim that they did not lose a war during their administrations, not many presidents can claim that they did not lose two wars.... Quibblers might say that he didn't actually win either conflict outright or that Afghanistan would be in better shape if we had kept more troops there and not invaded Iraq or offer all sorts of other coulda shoulda woulda arguments but the fact is that we didn't lose any wars and Bush deserves credit for that.

And more. Of all the "Bush Legacy" columns out there this last little while, I think this is the best.