Blame game

When my oldest son was in 4th grade, he had a teacher who spoke to the class exclusively in Words to Live By. I don’t know that she really did this. He said she did and we developed a sort of running joke about it, so he may have been exaggerating to amuse his mother. One of the things she said to her students (allegedly) when they were upset about one thing or another was “we don’t play the blame game here.”

In my experience, kids have a real basic sense of fairness and rough justice, in other words, they’re all about apportioning blame. They’re blamers. She effectively shut down 90% of what they natter on about with her ban on blaming. He’d complain: “They did do it (whatever “it” was). Why can’t we blame them?” Why indeed! Good question. Now of course I’d tell him “both sides do it, that’s why” but this was before that.

I read Angry Black Lady’s post on fear of losing health insurance and some of the comments and the whole thing made me really mad, so I’m ready to play the blame game.

Because I think libertarians aren’t hearing nearly enough condemnation for their central role in the radical turn Right at the Supreme Court, I think it’s time to point fingers in that direction:

When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.
Professor Barnett, who watched Monday from the spectator seats, was not the first to raise the constitutional critique of the health law, but more than any other legal academic, he is associated with it.
“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”

If we’re apportioning blame (and we are! we will!) and 50 million people end up being denied the access to health insurance or Medicaid that was promised when this law passed Congress, I think libertarians and conservatives should share in responsibility for that situation.

I’m not that fond of slippery slope arguments, but libertarians live by them. Really, libertarianism is basically one big slippery slope argument, as far as I can tell. Slippery slopes can run both ways, so
I’d like to call particular attention to this rather alarming facet of Professor Bartlett’s “intellectual project”:

Professor Barnett’s work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws — a position that concerns his liberal critics.
Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the “big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people,” and that his political philosophy is “much more radical” than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not “threaten the foundation of the New Deal.” But, he allowed, it would be “a huge symbolic victory for limited government.”

Yeah, well, Professor Barnett, you’re a big slippery-sloper, what with the broccoli and all, so I’m sure you’ll sympathize with “liberal concerns” on the Commerce Clause. No one predicted we’d be hearing an argument you created out of “whole cloth” coming out of the mouths of one of the justices, either, and we did. Your “fringe” idea out of “academia” may have just gone mainstream, so I wouldn’t be running around making broad assurances about the “foundation of the New Deal” if I were you.

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Some of Us are Terrified that SCOTUS Will Strike Down ‘Obamacare’

Read this article:

Thirty-three days ago, my 22-year-old daughter had an eight-hour open heart surgery at one of the top cardiac care facilities in the world. On my employer’s health insurance.

Thank you, President Obama.

Her Pandora’s Box of problems began opening in September 2010. She worked full time, went to college part time. She was doing all the “get ahead” go-go-go moves conservatives love to laud—paying taxes, working, going to school—all the while keeping her regular cardiology check-ups. With a heart pumping in reverse, a pacemaker, strong beta-blockers, an internal cardio-defibrillator, and a terrific cardiologist specializing in adults with congenital heart defects, she was able to function at a level that made her indistinguishable on the surface from any other young adult.

But then a cascade began, a not uncommon one with her correction. Tachycardia, fibrillation, fatigue, dizziness. Treadmill tests, catheterizations, ablations, electo-physiological studies. A couple of months were spent trying to pin down what turned out to be two separate issues. Months and months ensued of failed mild interventions, further diagnostics, tweaks, all trying to avoid a risky open heart surgery that would remove all the device leads that had become embedded over the years in her heart wall tissue and her mitral valve, obstructing flow and triggering heart rhythms in excess of 250 beats per minute. Multiple firings of her ICD left her shaky and weak with one foot planted in the land of PTSD.

While she was insured as an adult through work, it was not an ideal plan for someone with her condition—high deductibles, high co-pays, high out-of-pocket on a salary set right at living wage. Her employer hires lots of young, healthy adults and for those workers, it serves. For my daughter, not so much. Until Obamacare, it was the best she could do. My employer, on the other hand, had a great insurance plan. The moment adult children under 26 became eligible, I moved her onto my insurance, and with zest and thankful prayers, I paid the extra premium. Just in time, as it turns out, for the downward spiral of hospitalizations.

You want to know what it’s like to hear your daughter is at high risk for something called sudden cardiac death syndrome? No, you don’t. Really.

Now send that article to everyone you know.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: American Select

Because it’s never a bad time to point out what a horrible idea Americans Elect is, here’s Gail Collins on “the worst new trend of the political season“:

...Perhaps you have not yet focused on Americans Elect. It’s a new-generation political movement that aims to rise above the petty forces of partisan bickering and choose a presidential candidate, along with a running mate from a different party, at an online convention in June. As a reward, the winning team will receive a presidential ballot line in every state, along with some very cool online technology with which to run their campaign. It’s similar to “Project Runway” except for the most-powerful-job-on-the-globe part…

[T]he whole Americans Elect concept is delusional, in a deeply flattering way: We the people are good and pure, and if only we were allowed to just pick the best person, everything else would fall into place. And, of course, the best person cannot be the choice of one of the parties, since the parties are … the problem.

Getting a presidential ballot line in 50 states is really, really difficult. To do so, Americans Elect has already collected nearly 2.5 million signatures around the country, using the deeply American tactic of paying people to do it.

The source of the money is a little murky. Some names have been made public. Some haven’t. Byrd says that’s not a problem because “the candidates don’t know who the donors are and the donors don’t know who the candidate is going to be.”

If the Americans Elect candidate does make a big splash in November, we will have discovered yet another part of the presidential elections process that loopy billionaires could purchase out of their petty cash. Tired of financing right-wing contenders for the Republican nomination? Buy your own ballot line…

The thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme. You can try to fix that by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.

Otherwise, no Web site in the world will cure what ails us.

Apart from the political shenanigans of people with more money than sense, what’s on this evening’s agenda?

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Bully For You, America

Reasonoid Nick Gillespie takes to the WSJ to let America know there’s no such thing as a bullying crisis in schools and neighborhoods as he rips into the new film “Bully”.

Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.

Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today’s rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like “The Hunger Games” but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where “Lord of the Flies” meets “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” presided over by Voldemort.

Stop whining.  Life is Darwinian.  Deal with it, you little ferrets.

When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of “Bully” say that “over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year,” and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).

The most common bullying behaviors reported include being “made fun of, called names, or insulted” (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the “subject of rumors” (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being “pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,” and 6% reported being “threatened with harm.” Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.

Everything’s fine.  You know, except for the kids driven to suicide for being gay or fat or different or getting shot for walking down the street with an iced tea and a bag of candy, that is.  Jesus launch the helicarrier.  It’s funny how these guys believe in the free market so much until it comes to the flash mobs actually getting called on ruining a kid’s life, but I guess that’s just culling the weak, right?

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The Rock Biter Theory Of Health Care Reform Legislation

“So,” they said.  “We don’t think SCOTUS will repeal the entire health care reform law, or gut the law and effectively end it, because that would put all the pressure on the GOP to replace it with something.  There would be a hole in one-sixth of the US economy.  They’d have do something about it.”

And as anyone who is familiar with The Neverending Story can tell you, the GOP is all about embracing the Nothing as far as health care reform (and with it, government itself).  As the Rock Biter said when asked what was destroying his peoples’ lands and what was left as a result:

A hole would be something. No, it was…Nothing.

Steve Benen points out that the GOP is perfectly okay with the HCR Nothing taking over. Repeal and Replace is now just Repeal and The Nothing.

When the debate over health care reform got underway in earnest in 2009, Frank Luntz and other GOP pollsters/strategists warned the party that Americans expected improvements to the dysfunctional system, and Republicans couldn’t simply say “no” to everything.

Three years later, that’s effectively where the party has ended up: wanting to go back to the mess “Obamacare” is cleaning up.

But what about McConnell’s main idea? It’s one of the GOP’s favorite talking points: we don’t need real reform; we just need to let consumers buy across state lines. President Obama and the Affordable Care Act allow this, but set minimum standards that states must abide by. McConnell and his party want to go further, removing, or at least severely weakening, those standards.

This is generally called the “race to the bottom.” Under McConnell’s vision, state policymakers would tell insurers that if they were to set up shop in their state the rules would be written in the industry’s favor. The industry would go with the state that offered the sweetest deal—which is to say, the most lax oversight with the fewest restrictions—and before long, it would be consumers’ only choice. Why? Because every insurer would move to that state, leaving Americans with no other coverage to buy.

That’s exactly what happened with the credit card industry, and it’s a model to be avoided, not followed.

But tossing us all into The Nothing is what the GOP wants. They “want to give the power to the states” because it’s FREEDOM and junk, and instead we’ll get the same awful abuses that the credit card industry has been perpetrating on consumers for years, only far worse because this time it will involve health insurance and health care itself. The cheapest, meanest policies that cover the least in health care and have massive deductibles will be the only ones left for the vast majority of Americans and the insurance industry will pocket the difference.  Can’t afford it?  There’s Nothing you can do about it.  Keen observers will note that the Nothing applies to any social government functions:  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and retirement, environmental protections, education, food safety, financial products, everything.  You can’t provide it yourself because you can’t afford it?  You get Nothing.

So no, I don’t believe for a second that the GOP will have to replace HCR with something. That would be something, after all. What they want is Nothing.

[UPDATE]  And the folks that are expecting single payer to rise from the ashes should HCR get mauled?  With a GOP House?  No.  the rocks must be delicious in your world, but single payer ain’t happening until there’s a seismic shift in the red/blue ratio.  Unless you think this particular SCOTUS is going to rewrite the universe and declare that Congress has to pass a single payer law, in which case the rocks are delicious in your world and they’re made of 100% unicorn poop.

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CONTEST: Drift Giveaway, Thread Two

UPDATE: You guys are dedicated! Since my desktop won’t let me read threads that go over 500 comments, I’m going to shut down the first Giveaway thread and re-number all comments on this one to start at # 441.

DO NOT re-enter if you’ve already got a comment in the first thread; you’ve still got exactly the same chance of winning as anyone on this new thread. It’s just another FYWP artifact…

Thanks to the generosity of Crown Publishing, I have a signed hardback of Dr. Maddow’s new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power for some fortunate member of the BJ commentor community.

Your comment here will be your entry. Only one entry per commentor, please, because if you post more than one I’ll have to eliminate you from the pool. Doesn’t have to be a “good” comment—Pick me or Mine or Yes is fine, if you’re not feeling inspired. Newbies welcome (although, as per usual, if you haven’t commented here before WordPress will hold your comment for ‘moderation’ until one of the frontpagers approves it, so do NOT disqualify yourself with a string of why?why?why! follow-ups).

Around 7:30pm EDT Tuesday evening, I’ll use a random-number generator, and the person whose comment matches that random number wins the book.

Any questions, you can either put them in your ONE comment, or email me at AnneLaurie @ verizon.net (click on my name in the ‘Contact’ list to the right for a direct link).

Good luck, and—GO!

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CONTEST: Rachel Maddow’s Drift Giveaway

Thanks to the generosity of Crown Publishing, I have a signed hardback of Dr. Maddow’s new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power for some fortunate member of the BJ commentor community.

Your comment here will be your entry. Only one entry per commentor, please, because if you post more than one I’ll have to eliminate you from the pool. Doesn’t have to be a “good” comment—Pick me or Mine or Yes is fine, if you’re not feeling inspired. Newbies welcome (although, as per usual, if you haven’t commented here before WordPress will hold your comment for ‘moderation’ until one of the frontpagers approves it, so do NOT disqualify yourself with a string of why?why?why! follow-ups).

Around this time tomorrow evening, Tuesday, I’ll use a random-number generator, and the person whose comment matches that random number wins the book.

Any questions, you can either put them in your ONE comment, or email me at AnneLaurie @ verizon.net (click on my name in the ‘Contact’ list to the right for a direct link).

Good luck, and—GO!

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REPOST: Rachel Maddow’s Drift Giveaway

As I said last night, thanks to Crown Publishing’s generosity, I have a signed hardback copy of Rachel’s book waiting for a lucky Balloon Juice reader.

I’ve updated the giveaway parameters slightly, at the suggestion of commentor Warren Terra and some others: WordPress willing, I’ll put up a third post this evening shortly after 7pm EDT, titled “CONTEST: Drift Giveaway“. Everybody who’s interested gets one entry, one comment. (Duplicate comments will get you eliminated.) The contest will stay open until Tuesday evening, so everyone should have a chance to enter. Then I’ll use a random number generator (my technical advisor, aka the Spousal Unit, has one he wrote for FRP gaming) to pick the number of the winning comment. (And many thanks to Cole and the website builder for rebuilding the comment-number function so you don’t have to trust my hand-counting!)

Looking forward to this evening…

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Rachel Maddow Has A Book to Sell!

... Which, needless to say, she explains far more competently in the video than I could hope to. Even better news, for fans of Dr. Maddow: Crown Publishing not only sent me a copy of DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power, I’ve got a signed hardback copy to give away to one of you lucky readers. Haven’t finished reading my copy yet, but so far it’s both brisk and informative—as anyone who’s listened to Maddow would expect.

So, the Contest: I’ll be re-posting this entry tomorrow, for people who go to bed early or don’t read Balloon Juice on the weekends. Then, between 7pm and 8pm EDT, WordPress willing, I’ll put up a post labelled “CONTEST: Rachel Maddow’s Drift”. The writer of Comment #[redacted] on that post wins the book… and the rest of you can place your pre-orders in time for Tuesday’s release.

While this isn’t optimal for BJ’s overseas readers, it’s the least unfair method I can come up with to give as many people as possible a chance at winning. Any suggestions, please leave me a comment below!

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Open Thread: “It Was the Shortest Walk I Ever Had”

Kudos to President Obama for choosing an ‘unpredicted’ World Bank nominee that’s got all the right people excited:

... In 2003, [Kim] won a MacArthur genius grant. In 2004, he was named director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, where he ran the “3×5” campaign, which sought to put three million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries on antiretroviral drugs by 2005 (it ended up taking till 2007). In 2006, he was on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009, he became president of Dartmouth College.

“At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep throwing your body at a problem, which is what I’ve always done,” he told the New York Times. “You realize that one person can’t do that much. So what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do.” ...

Now there’s a quote for our times. (Also too, thanks Kay for keeping us updated on this.)

And while everyone’s taking a moment from discussing Hunger Games to look beyond our borders, in celebration of the wonderous interconnectedness that is the Internets, I’m going to lift Felix Salmon’s excerpted story from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s TED talk:

From 1967 to ’70, Nigeria fought a war: the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old… We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I’m sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it. In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn’t look like it was going to work.

Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was able … who was giving … looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back, burning, and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in? I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine, what I learned was the chloroquine, then gave her some, it must have been a re-hydration, and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then, they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy that my sister was alive. Today, she’s 41 years old, a mother of three, and she’s a physician saving other lives.

Yeah, there’s worse predicaments than “I wept because I had no iPad, until I met a man who had no wireless access.”

So, now that I’ve spoiled everyone’s good mood… what’s on the agenda for the weekend?

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Faith vs. Reason: Stand Your Ground/Violent Crime Edition

Last night the PBS News Hour program held a roundtable on the Trayvon Martin murder.  Ta-Nehisi Coates was on, as were Reihan Salem and Donna Britt.  So was Dennis Baxley, the Florida state representative who co-authored the Stand Your Ground law under whose cloak George Zimmerman stalked and gunned down the 17 year old Martin.

Baxley said—and appeared to mean—the right things about Martin’s death, that it was a tragedy, and that nothing in the law he helped enact should be interpreted to authorize someone to pursue, confront and shoot another.  But Baxley rejected the notion that the law itself might have contributed to the catastrophe, arguing instead that it is a force for good, a way, in his words, a law intended “to empower law abiding citizens to stop violent things from happening.”

What’s more, said Baxley, the law has done just that:

Since ‘05 to 2012 we have seen a reduction in violent crime in Florida.  And what I’ve learned from it is that if you empower to stop bad things from happening they will and they do and they have.

Except, of course, those bad things that happen because people are able to claim that a “feeling” of danger constitutes authorization to use deadly force more or less at will.

But snark aside, what of the claim about crime rates in Florida.

Here, I’ll take a cue from Rachel Maddow, and say that Dennis Baxler is lying. More »

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Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

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They’ve Always Been Banking On Failure

A lot of rightful facepalming has been made over GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s odiously awful budget proposal adding some 50 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and basically handing over trillions to the one percent, but in addition to all that the GOP would end up obliterating Dodd-Frank and leaving us with the same “oversight” we had in 2007 when the financial meltdown came barreling through our lives.  Suzy Khimm over at Ezra Klein’s Kaplan Nerd Farm details the carnage:

The Ryan budget, however, would actually repeal the FDIC’s new resolution authority, arguing that it would have the opposite effect of what’s intended by allowing bank regulators “to access taxpayer dollars in order to bail out the creditors of large, ‘systemically significant’ financial institutions.” By doing so, Ryan says he would “end the regime now enshrined into law that paves the way for future bailouts.”

His blueprint doesn’t go into much further detail to explain why this is the case. But other critics of Dodd-Frank have argued that it could enable the FDIC to take control of failing firms and rely on taxpayer funds to keep the systemically important parts running through a government-run “bridge” financial company. That’s likely why Ryan believes the cost of the new resolution authority could far exceed the Congressional Budget Office’s $26 billion estimate.

While outside analysts across the political spectrum have shared Ryan’s concerns that Dodd-Frank doesn’t do enough to stop Too Big to Fail, their specific worry is often quite different than Ryan’s: they’re worried that bank regulators have too little authority, not too much, to quickly take down failing firms. It’s unclear, for example, how swiftly and forcefully the FDIC would use the new rules to liquidate a highly troubled, systemically important firm.

Repealing that authority as Ryan proposes eliminates a new government channel for intervention, but it wouldn’t explicitly prohibit future bailouts, which could become more likely if systemically risky banks aren’t wound down in an orderly fashion.

Of course they would be, that’s the point.  Banks are profitable now only because they got trillions in mulligans from the Bushies (and FOX News has done a terrific job of lying to the American people, convincing them that President Obama bailed out the banks, not Bush and Hank Paulson, and conflating the Obama stimulus with the Bush bank bailout on purpose.)  Here’s the thing: I know everyone says that Ryan’s budget proposal is just empty posturing that has no effect on the actual budget, but if there’s a GOP Senate to go along with the House in 2013, these proposals will end up on the President’s desk.

Let’s not pretend that the GOP getting into actual power will moderate the Ryan Plan.  This is their plan for America’s future, where the rising tide lifts all yachts and drowns the rest of us who can’t tread water.  And speaking of the Kaplan Nerd Farm, when Ezra Klein says things like this:

Today, the Republican Party is in a different place, and my theory is that it’s because they’ve committed themselves to a set of fiscal priorities — lower taxes, higher defense spending, no entitlement changes for 210 years, and lower deficits — that can only be reconciled through draconian cuts to programs for the poor.

The result is that when Republican politicians stop speaking for themselves and begin speaking for their party, their fiscal proposals have to reflect those priorities, and so they end up cutting deep into programs for the poor, even though that may not be their personal preference. But that is, of course, just speculation.

I have to have a good, long laugh, because the dude has it so backwards it’s actually funny.  Draconian cuts to the poor at the expense to give more to the rich was exactly what the Republican party has been engineering since 1980.  We’re just in the endgame now.  They didn’t “accidentally leave themselves no other choice” any more than any other fanatical group of nutjobs have throughout history.  The cuts have been the point all along, knucklehead.  Like I said, let’s stop pretending that a series of unfortunate and non-preventable accidents led the GOP to this sad fate.  This is deliberate, it has been deliberate, they believe this stuff period, and we have to recognize that first thing.

[UPDATE:]  Oh, and for the folks still convinced that none of this is deliberate and that the Ryan Budget will quietly die in the House because it’s an election year, well that’s not happening either.

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Mittamorphosis? Metamorphomitt? Metamittomorph?

Nothing can compare to the  superpowers of one Willard “Metamorphomitt” Romney, The Man Who Will Be Anything.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom was asked if he’s concerned that Romney may alienate general election voters with some of the hard-right positions he’s taken during the primary to appeal to conservatives. Fehrnstrom brushed this concern off:

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.

FEHRNSTROM: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

Plastic Man’s got nothing on Metamorphomitt.  Granted, they both have their own jets and a couple of minions, but Mitt has better hair.

And yes, Ferhrnstrom really does think GOP voters are this incredibly stupid, because GOP voters are pretty much incredibly stupid.  Guess what?  Those votes still count (especially since the GOP is doing everything they can to disenfranchise everyone else.)  Why waste time assuming they’re not going fall into line when the only thing that matters is BEAT OBAMA?  Not Romney may be winning the GOP primaries (Not Romney beat Romney last night in Illinois 53-47) but when Romney morphs into Not Obama later this year, yeah, it’s a new ball game.  Fehrnstrom knows this.  Village knows this.  GOP voters know this.

Nothing shocking here.

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Someone could do something

I saw mistermix’s post on the DOJ coming into Florida, but I don’t want to let Florida lawmakers and politicians off the hook. “Stand your ground” seems to be some radical new conservative legal interpretation of self-defense. Apparently the lock-step drones in the Florida legislature and governor’s office felt threatened by NRA lobbyists so rather than standing their ground they allowed NRA lobbyists to write yet another law:

You can’t say we weren’t warned.
Back in 2005, opponents of Florida’s first-of-its-kind “stand your ground” law said it wouldn’t be long before we’d see shootouts in the streets — all in the name of self-defense.
Prodded by their NRA masters, lawmakers waved off those predictions as exaggerations. Then they overwhelmingly passed a bill that took the “castle doctrine” to infinity and beyond. The “castle doctrine” used to mean you could use deadly force if someone attacked you in your home. “Stand your ground” not only absolved the homeowner of any obligation to retreat, it extended that concept outside the home
Gov. Jeb Bush couldn’t sign the bill fast enough.
Seven years later, those warnings so casually dismissed by Bush and the Legislature are taking shape.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin is dead, and Central Florida is the focus of an international spectacle, quite possibly a result of Florida’s politicians deciding to become the 21st century’s Wild West.
Unfortunately, Trayvon may not be the only victim.
I haven’t heard of any fatal disputes over the grocery check-out line, but in 2010 an unarmed man was shot and killed at a park near Tampa in a dispute over skateboarding rules. The victim’s 10-year-old daughter watched her father die. A judge is currently considering whether the shooter merely stood his ground.
In 2008, a 15-year-old boy was killed during a shootout between two gangs in Tallahassee. Nobody was held accountable for the crime because a judge, citing the law, dismissed the charges.
And in January, a former Broward County sheriff’s deputy shot and wounded a homeless man inside a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop in Miami Lakes. He said the man was threatening him and his family. Police said charges were unlikely in that case as well.
In fact, the number of justifiable homicides has significantly increased since the law went into effect, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
From 2000 to 2005, an average of 13 killings by private citizens were deemed justified each year. Between 2006 and 2010 that average increased to 36 killings per year. The highest was in 2009 at 45.
It makes the Brady Campaign’s ads against this law back in 2005 almost seem prophetic. The campaign handed out leaflets and posted billboards warning Florida tourists to avoid fights and to “keep their hands in plain sight” if they wind up in a disagreement.
Sound advice, given the number of cases where “stand your ground” prevails.
Not that any of this mattered to lawmakers seven years ago when I was covering this story in Tallahassee. At the behest of the all-powerful National Rifle Association, they decided law-abiding people were facing criminal prosecution for nothing more than defending themselves or their families.
Turns out the NRA’s best examples of these unjust cases were ones in which the charges were eventually dropped. I’d call those examples of the system working, not a chronic injustice that needed to be repaired through legislation.
NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer wouldn’t comment about the Trayvon Martin case when I talked to her Monday. I don’t blame her. There is no good way for gun proponents to spin the death of an unarmed teenager.
Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican who sponsored the original bill, said the law is still “good public policy” but questioned whether it should apply to Zimmerman.
“I think the fact that he was in pursuit does greatly compromise his argument” of self-defense, Baxley said.

Baxley apparently doesn’t understand the law he promoted and voted for, and why would he? He didn’t draft it:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush recently signed Senate Bill 436, which expands and clarifies Floridians’ self-defense rights against violent attackers. The bill was the creation of former NRA President Marion Hammer, who is also head of Unified Sportsmen of Florida, the state’s major pro-gun group. The NRA has announced that it plans to take SB 436 national, and urge other states to adopt similar measures.

There’s going to be a lot of hand-wringing over Trayvon Martin’s killing, another fake-debate, but Florida lawmakers could buck the NRA tomorrow and repeal this law. Jeb Bush could come out against the law he signed. He’s a media darling. He’d get a huge platform. The truth is, “someone” outside the US Department of Justice could do “something”. The truth is, if they don’t do anything at all at the state level in Florida in response to this, it’s because they don’t want to.

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