Horrible Human Being of the Week

Sheriff John Cooke of Weld County, Colorado, wants more thirty-round clips in his county even though they're now banned in the state.

Sheriff John Cooke: I'm in law enforcement, and I want my citizens heavily armed.

The state of law enforcement in Colorado:

Colorado’s package of gun laws, enacted this year after mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., has been hailed as a victory by advocates of gun control. But if Sheriff Cooke and a majority of the other county sheriffs in Colorado offer any indication, the new laws — which mandate background checks for private gun transfers and outlaw magazines over 15 rounds — may prove nearly irrelevant across much of the state’s rural regions.

Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.

Another Newtown or Aurora in Colorado? God forbid the shooter uses a thirty-round magazine in Colorado or, worse yet for Sheriff John, in Weld County. Of course, that's assuming he cares.

This is Colorado:

This is Colorado on guns:

Income Inequality Is Main Drag on Stagnant Economy -- and Economic Policy

Paul Krugman points to the key problem with income inequality, and it's not just that it crippled the middle class as it dealt with stagnant wages in the 2000s through excessive borrowing as Americans tried to maintain a  lifestyle they thought was their birthright. No, it's more insidious than that:

In the years before the crisis, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of financial deregulation — a consensus justified by neither theory nor history. When crisis struck, there was a rush to rescue the banks. But as soon as that was done, a new consensus emerged, one that involved turning away from job creation and focusing on the alleged threat from budget deficits.

What do the pre- and postcrisis consensuses have in common? Both were economically destructive: Deregulation helped make the crisis possible, and the premature turn to fiscal austerity has done more than anything else to hobble recovery. Both consensuses, however, corresponded to the interests and prejudices of an economic elite whose political influence had surged along with its wealth.

That political influence of the wealthy is hard to counter.

Some point to Barack Obama's recent speech declaring income inequality "the defining challenge of our age" as a serious tack leftward by the president. As always, that remains to be seen. But if we as a country want to make true progress as a democratic society -- some say it's already too late -- then we must roll back the tremendous gains by the ridiculously wealthy at the expense of the buying power of what used to be the engine of our economy: our formerly powerful middle class.

Income inequality is indeed a defining challenge of our age, but it's not the defining challenge. That is women's rights, and that includes a global perspective. But for our own national interests, income inequality is a overwhelming negative force, and one to be reckoned with but soon.

Funny Stuff (No, Not in a Political Sense, Actual Funny Stuff)

Courtesy my son and Drew at Toothpaste For Dinner:

Saturday Night Music: Billy Bragg

Saw this guy, Billy Bragg, sing this on a PBS special called "Americana." Words by Woody Guthrie, never put to music until Billy Bragg did it. Pretty special:

Happy Saturday.

Checked around and found the album that this song came from, "Mermaid Avenue," which is collaborative effort with Wilco -- even Natalie Merchant gets involved. Reveiwers at Amazon really rave about it.

Always Something There to Remind You: Republicans Don't Care About Deficits

Just as the wonderful musings of Krugman, Klein, and Chait guided us to a final understanding that Republicans were never interested in healthcare reform and have proven it not just during the Obama Derangement Syndrome years but all the way back to the early Clinton years, it's helpful to keep in mind that those same Republicans don't really care about deficits.

A really good look at deficits tell us a pretty clear story:

In the above graph, it's clear -- as everyone has known for years -- that Saint Ronnie blew up the national debt, Bush I kept it growing, and Bush II took over where Reagan and Dad left off. Obama inherited deficits and didn't grow them. In fact, they've been falling as the economy has improved.

Reagan grew the national debt with defense spending and tax cuts. Bush I maintained the Reagan Era policies until he agreed to raise taxes. Ba-bye, Bush I. Clinton went further, lowered defense spending and raised taxes again. Ba-bye deficits. Bush II raised defense spending and really cut taxes. Welcome back, deficits.

As a side note, Bush II also grew the deficit with Medicare Part D, which, while not being as costly as it originally looked to be, is actually a giveaway to the drug companies because it prohibited negotiating for lower prices. Who locks in higher prices? The supposed free-market party?

Side side note: When the Democrats had total control of both houses of Congress and the White House in 2009-2010, they didn't alter Medicare Part D to allow negotiated prices. Go figure.

Back to the graphs. Here's one that looks at per capita change in national debt:

There you have it.

Why, then, are the Republicans always raging about deficits but never doing anything when they're in charge? It's because they never cared about deficits. Remember Cheney's famous "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" remark? No, the current Republican Party only puts up deficits as a prop for attacking social safety-net programs.

They want to kill off the New Deal and the Great Society. Death to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

They haven't done it yet. And also don't forget: The Republican Party hates Obamacare because it might succeed. And if it does, it solves a bit of the Medicare long-term funding problem and also locks in Medicaid expansion, which will be hard to unwind if it's the mechanism for actually solving the uninsured problem.

Why Do Republicans Hate Their Own Ideas on Healthcare?

Seriously, Eric, think about. If Obamacare turns out
well, we just claim it was a GOP idea. Win-win!

I've answered this question numerous times on a number of issues, but it all comes down to this: Republicans despise the poor. Any actual healthcare plan they could support would probably somehow help the unfortunate, and that's a bridge too far.

And now that a budget deal -- regardless of how it hurts the poor and the unemployed, by the way -- has been crafted, yes, in bipartisan fashion, and now that Obamacare seems to be working, or at least on its way to being acknowledged as settled law, the GOP is having a harder and harder time finding ways to attack it.

Almost on cue, a number of leading minds in the progressive camp, like Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, and Johnathan Chait, have started to analyze the continuing Republican attacks on Obamacare. It's almost like trying to find some intentional message in the twitching of a still-warm corpse.

And they find it! I largely agree with their views, and they're fascinating.

Klein starts by being puzzled that the continuing attacks on Obamacare are aimed at the parts of the law the GOP can truly claim as their own ideas. Then he goes one by one through the items the GOP continue to attack.

Klein points to high deductibles, which are actually a crucial component of Health Savings Accounts, long a GOP favorite. The idea there is that you can easily afford a plan with high deductibles as long as you have saved money in an HSA for that rainy day when you get catastrophically sick.

Another GOP idea Klein points to is limited networks. Again, they were crucial to early Republican ideas. Every GOP plan in the past featured insurance exchanges, meant to let the market solve costs through competition. A natural result of that competition for lower-cost plans would be offering less without reducing available quality of care. Narrowing doctor and hospital choice would do that.

There are two contrasting reasons, according to Klein that the Republicans are blasting their own ideas: They're the ones that are the most unpopular among Americans! There are all sorts of progressive components in the law -- no caps on lifetime expenses, no refusal of insurance because of pre-existing conditions, no plan on any level can have huge coverage gaps you don't know about until you get sick or hurt, keeping your kids on your own plan until they're 26. These are the wildly popular parts of Obamacare.

Paul Krugman reads Klein and comes up with a different perspective, one closer to my view.

And here’s the thing: Republicans don’t want to help the unfortunate. They’ll propound health-care ideas that will, they claim, help those with preexisting conditions and so on — but those aren’t really proposals, they’re diversionary tactics designed to stall real health reform. Chait finds Newt Gingrich more or less explicitly admitting this.

Hence the rage of the right. Here they were, with a whole raft of ideas they could throw out, like chaff thrown out to confuse enemy radar, to divert and confuse any attempt to actually provide insurance to the uninsured. And those dastardly Democrats have gone ahead and actually incorporated those ideas into real reform.

Once you realize this, you also realize that people who warn that by opposing Obamacare Republicans are undermining their own proposals are missing the point. Yes, the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare looks a lot like Obamacare — but Ryan comes to Medicare not to save it, but to bury it, so the question of whether his plan could work is irrelevant.

That rings bells with me. And the Jonathan Chait article that Krugman references takes this idea that the Republicans were never really serious in their claims to have ideas or were in favor of reforming our healthcare system and gives a name to it:

The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”

I take the name of this principle from the emblematic example, the Heritage Foundation’s health-care plan, which formed the primary intellectual basis for conservative opposition to Democratic health-care plans. In 1993, Republican minority leader Bob Dole supported a version of it to demonstrate that Republicans did not endorse the status quo, until Democrats, facing the demise of their own plan, tried to bring up Dole’s plan, at which point Dole renounced his own plan.

During a Republican presidential debate two years ago, while Newt Gingrich assailed Mitt Romney for having previously supported an Obama-like health-care plan, fellow Republicans noted that Gingrich had done the same thing. Facing a threat to his own ideological bona fides, Gingrich issued this memorable defense for his long-renounced history of support for the individual mandate: “It's now clear that the mandate, I think, is clearly unconstitutional. But, it started as a conservative effort to stop HillaryCare in the 1990s.”

This may be the most incisive expression of conservative health-care thinking ever uttered. In the first sentence, Gingrich asserts that the individual mandate is now clearly unconstitutional, even though its constitutionality was deemed not even remotely questionable before. And in the next breath, he casually admits that he had supported the plan as a mere tactic to stop Clinton. Of course he didn’t really want to implement it!

The Heritage Uncertainty Principle could likewise be seen at work throughout Obamacare’s torturous legislative path to enactment. Republicans had all kinds of health-care ideas they wanted to discuss. Oh, the ideas they had. Republican senators like Olympia Snowe and Charles Grassley flitted tantalizingly out of reach for months, always willing to keep talking, but never able to identify concrete terms that might win their vote. Ron Wyden convened a large, bipartisan group of senators happily discussing an alternative health-care plan to Obama’s, except that, when pressed, the Republican co-sponsors admitted that they didn’t really want to vote for the actual plan. They just liked the idea of a bipartisan plan that wasn’t Obama’s. Any attempt to turn these ideas into an actual law would cause them to disappear instantly.

Good stuff. It reminds me of vaporware, which Wikipedia describes as "a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially cancelled." A current example: Apple television sets, which were announced in 2007 but so far, nothing. Hmm.

So "repeal and replace?" Just so much vaporware.

Interlude (boy, could we use one): Mickleson's Flop Shot

My Achilles' Heel in golf is my sucky chip shots. I bought a new lob wedge to learn how to improve my game. Result? Not!

Maybe if I watch Phil Mickleson long enough I'll get better. At least I'm a leftie, too.

I betcha John Boehner can't do that! Of course, neither can I (yet).

Bonus. Here's Phil's DVD on his short game. He's the master!

Bonus 2. Just found this great 56-second video on the chip shot. Wow!