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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, July 02, 2009

OK, So I'm Probably Missing Something Here... 

...but I really - no, seriously, REALLY - don't think that the idea of assessing fines of "more than $1,000" to people who don't choose to have medical insurance is a very good idea. Don't misunderstand; I think everybody should have medical insurance, but that thought leads me to the idea of 'single payer' rather than 'slap a fine on your shiney butt for not having insurance'...

Like I said, however, I may be missing something here...

I will confess that my Central Idaho upbringing has tinged my liberal viewpoint with a certain libertarian coloration, which isn't all that surprising given the cultural insistence where I grew up that you simply didn't mess in other people's lives. To me, the ideal of progressive beliefs is founded in the principle that people should be left alone to make their own decisions. That's the basis if my support for same-sex unions, a woman's right to control those most personal decisions about the fate of her body, and a whole host of other issues. That long-held philosophy is couched in personal choice and responsibility writ large, in a way that on reflection looks disturbingly a lot more like the old-school conservative/libertarian mindset that surrounded me in my formative years than the strange, controlling place that the modern brand of Republic/Fascist conservatism has tried to take us...

I'm still trying to work through all of this, but I realize that the idea of requiring individuals to have medical insurance was one of Obama's campaign planks. I didn't agree with that idea at the time (there's that Idaho thing cropping up). I don't agree now with the idea of penalties for those who don't have medical insurance; and I would really hope that somebody could come up with a better example of why this is "A Good Thing" than a comparison to state-mandated auto insurance....

That comparison simply doesn't work. State-mandated minimum auto insurance requirements are generally limited to liability coverage for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that somebody else will have recourse to monetary recovery if I screw up while behind the wheel and cause harm to them in the subsequent accident. Mandated auto insurance is all about protecting you from me, even though I am paying for it. Mandated medical insurance is all about...well, I suppose its about protecting me from me...or from the world...or from my decades-long failure to wash my hands before eating lunch, or from some other bad health thing that might be facing me...

Mandated auto insurance is all about fault and recovery; Obama's campaign thoughts and this particular bill appear to be about forcing people to sign up for a health care choice or pay a fine for the consequences of not having made that choice. At this first glance, that looks like the exact opposite of anything actually resembling either a 'single payer' system or a 'pubic option' insofar as those medical coverage choices are understood. More to the point, the whole idea that American citizens will be fined for failing to sign up for some specific medical insurance plan will provide fuel for just about any 'Socialist/Communist/Fascist "control your life"' commercial that Republicans could ever dream of running in next year's Congressional elections. Selecting health care options - or actually choosing not to have a health care option for reasons having nothing to do with affordability - is a supremely personal choice, and mandating punishment for not having made a selection is not going to sell well in a lot of places...

But I'm probably missing something here. It's happened before...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Happiest Man In The World 

...I have to confess that I'm not all that excited tonight about the final victory of Al Franken in the Minnesota US Senatorial race, mostly because I don't have any particular faith that a "filibuster-proof Democratic majority" will ever manifest itself in any meaningful legislation. There are too many United States Senators in the Democratic caucus who hold their seats only because they straddle the philosophical lines on all sorts of issues and will step away from any sense of Democratic unity if the outcome exposes them to reelection risk by a carefully constructed Republican challenge targeting the centrist or center right voters in their states. It's not about what polls suggest that voters believe in and support (those results usually come down on the Democratic side of the line); it's about framing and narrative and media coverage, which far too many Democrats continually demonstrate that they haven't figured out yet...

But never mind that. None of it is the Big News tonight. The Big News tonight is that we can, in this one brief glimmering moment, point directly to the Happiest Man In The World. It's not Al Franken, by the way; no, the Happiest Man In The World is Minnesota Governor Tim "Bridge Inspection? What Bridge Inspection?" Pawlenty. Think about it; not that long ago Governor Pawlenty was having to deal with the failure of the Republican National Convention as a democratic process and of his own callous misunderstanding of the importance of infrastructure inspection as something that state funding should support. Today, however, all of that stuff has been swept down the memory hole and he is rolling into the Independence Day weekend having spent the last fortnight watching one of his most viable challengers for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination plummet from the heights like a piece of space junk...

Beyond that, he has been able to sit in some quiet corner of his expansive executive office reading the new Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin. All by itself, this occasionally unflattering story is an Oppo Research goldmine for both Pawlenty's people and Democrats, if the need were to arise somewhere down the road. If you are the sort that naturally sees yourself looking just right standing up there on that hammered-together falsework in front of the White House on a frosty late January noontime next to Chief Justice John Roberts in 2013, anything that makes another of your most likely competitors look like a long night trapped in a closet with rabid wharf rats is - as Martha would say - "a good thing"...

Even beyond all of that, just this afternoon Pawlenty was able to sit quietly over in the Lurkers' Corner while Norm Coleman threw him a lifeline the size of a coastal old-growth Douglas fir by finally conceding to Al Franken. This saved Pawlenty from the personal pain of deciding whether to adhere to his mandated responsibility of issuing an election certificate on the heals of the Minnesota Supreme Court decision or to saddle up with the right-wing outriders that are the Republican base and wait for some alleged Federal Court intervention. He really was in a bind here: do the Right Thing subsequent to the Minnesota Supreme Court decision and be vilified by the True Believers who wanted to fight this battle to the death at the Federal level, or find some wiggle room and tack to a Middle Way that would clearly abandon the True Believers but earn the respect of enough voters in the amorphous "middle" to make up for that perceived 'abandonment' when it was time for the deal to go down the next time people stepped behind the curtain to vote for a presidential nominee...

It was a Good Day for Al Franken, but it has been a GREAT DAY - and a great couple of weeks - for Tim Pawlenty. He truly should be the Happiest Man In The World right now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:11 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 29, 2009

The Shamwow Guy Moves In 

...poor Billy Mays isn't even in the ground yet and here comes the Shamwow guy (apparently "Vince" is his name) pushing some chopping device on my late-night version of Hardball...

It's bad enough that Mays has been snatched away from us at the very moment that his ESPN 360 commercials suggested the degree to which he had broken through to the cultural mainstream. But now we have this strange creature who hunches around and leans into the camera like some 21st Century reimagining of Marty Feldman's "Eyegore" from Young Frankenstein and apparently threatens to be some sort of heir-apparent. This is a programming outrage of which MSNBC should be embarrassed (especially on a night when it has alleged White House Correspondent Chuck Todd hosting a talking head political opinion show)...

OK...so the Shamwow guy popping up on my screen tonight is not all that much an outrage, but the timing here on the Left Coast feels a bit tacky, and it seems to be a more interesting thing to talk about than how the utterly predictable judicial activism by the five conservative SCOTUS members in creating new affirmative action law out of whole cloth is some sort of repudiation of the 2nd Circuit Court decision to which Sonia Sotomayor was a party, even though she is nominated to replace David Souter, who supported her Appeals Court decision in Ricci v DeStefano...

It's been a long day and I just don't have the patience for that sort of idiocy tonight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:25 PM 0 comments

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