Why Johnny Can't Blink

But for the time being, the administration has blinked.

Oh, noes!  They've never done that before!  Well, hardly ever.  Well, usually.  Only politically naive professional leftists would have expected the President to do anything else.

Also from The Atlantic today, Republicans are indignant that Democrats are concern-trolling them, which the Republicans would never do, especially now that the party is "down-and-out" and the Democrats are "triumphant." A lot of conspiracy-theory mongering in there too, which is amusing when you consider how respectable politicians and pundits despise conspiracy theories floated by their opponents.  I guess there just isn't enough going on right now for people really to worry about.

Free Advice, Five Cents (The Doctor Is In)

At first I wasn't sure I was reading this sign correctly, it was so obviously and blatantly off the mark.  But it does seem that the person brandishing it is an Obama devotee, who supports the Affordable Care Act because she believes that it provides "free HEALTHCARE."  It doesn't do anything of the kind, in fact.  It doesn't actually provide any kind of healthcare, since it is about health insurance.  As such, the law has its virtues, but it's far from fixing the mess our health care system is in.

Even more ironic, Obama himself is opposed to free healthcare and to its advocates, who he thinks want to turn America into communist Canuckistan.  People who advocated a single-payer system, also known as Medicare for All, were shut out of the Congressional debate; a "public option" for people who couldn't afford commercial insurance was one of the first provisions Obama ditched during negotiations.  What sick bastard would want to provide free healthcare?  Certainly not Obama.

It also seems to me that "free healthcare" isn't a great slogan in the first place.  Nothing is free, and certainly not health care, which is more expensive in the US than in most of the developed world.  A state-run health care system like Britain's would be cheaper, more effective, and more efficient, but it wouldn't be free.  The question is, or ought to be, how people are going to pay for it.  The Right loves to harp on this point, and throwing "free" around simply plays into their hands by giving them an easy diversion from the real issues.  Of course they're right about the cluelessness of liberals, but that doesn't mean they're any smarter.

Meritocracy in Action, Episode 5487

Yesterday I wrote that "people who make large amounts of money in business or finance often think, and are thought by some, to know how the government should be run, or even just the economy.  Aside from the huge business and fiscal disasters over which such people have presided, their public statements since the re-election of Barack Obama should have disabused most people that they're not even qualified to decide their own salaries: they routinely think they're worth a lot more than they are."

New examples keep turning up.  The other day, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey made headlines when he claimed that the Affordable Care Act was "like fascism," marking himself out as a blustering fool.  So of course he quickly attempted to rewrite the record, digging himself in even deeper, as public figures from Todd Akin to Barack Obama usually do when they try to make it all better.

Mackey conceded that the word "fascist" wasn't the most felicitous choice: "it's got so much baggage attached to it ... Of course, I was just using the standard dictionary definition."  It's hard to see how the ACA fits with the dictionary definition of fascism; maybe Mackey took "Obamacare" literally and thought that Obama just wrote the law himself and signed it without going through Congress?  There are all kinds of objections that have been made by rational people to the ACA, but it is not an example of a strong autocratic government led by a dictatorial leader, etc.

"We no longer have free-enterprise capitalism in health care," he said. "The government is directing it. So we need a new word for it."

Mackey defined it later on HuffPost Live. "I think I'm going to use the phrase government-controlled health care. That's where we're evolving to right now," he said.

 Of course this is raving, pure and simple.  Arguably we haven't had "free-enterprise capitalism" in health care since the insurance companies took it over a few decades ago.  Almost no doctors are independent small-business owners anymore, as many were when I was a kid; most now work for the HMOs.  Corporate capitalism is not free-enterprise capitalism, and the American health care system is not 'directed' by the government, it's directed by giant corporate entities.  Which, as been pointed out at tiresome length in the past few years, is why our health care system is so wasteful, inefficient, and overpriced, with poorer outcomes than other industrialized nations.

The very limited regulation of the insurance companies mandated by the ACA isn't "government-controlled healthcare", anymore than food inspection is "government-controlled food production."  If you're going to talk about government 'direction' of health care in the US, you could talk about state licensing of medical practitioners, or federal oversight of drug safety, or Medicare.  I think most Americans would agree that if Medicare is fascism, fascism isn't so bad after all, and we could use a good deal more of it.

Of course our neighbor to the north has what Mackey would probably also call "government-controlled healthcare", but few would call Canada fascist because of it.  England's National Health Service goes even further in that direction, but again, it isn't fascist.  (Mackey previously compared the ACA to socialism in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed, according to the HuffPost article I've linked here.  But you can't blame a man for evolving; he was so much younger and less mature then.)  Most developed countries have government involvement in the health care system to keep costs down and manage outcomes, for that matter.  Our corporate-controlled system is the main reason why Americans' health is so much worse than citizens of other First World countries.  And don't forget, President Obama and his core supporters find it hilarious or outrageous that anyone should think Canada's system might be a good example for us.

Richard Dawkins has railed against clergy and theologians being allowed to participate in public discussions.  They couldn't be any worse, and often aren't, than our corporate elites.  Which doesn't mean I want business types to be silenced; better they should be allowed to remind us, as often as necessary, how dumb they really are.

Trying to Pull Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

So the Supreme Court left most of the Affordable Care Act standing, to the fury of the Far Right and the glee of the Near Right. I don't have any links, but Avedon Carol also noticed that until the decision was actually announced, it seemed that most Democrats, like most Republicans, took for granted that the law would be overturned: "I told Jay Ackroyd and David Dayen that I'd be very surprised if the Roberts court struck down the mandate. I gotta say that because it seemed like everywhere else, everyone was all ready for the Supremes to kill it." This article quotes several people from both parties who predicted that the ACA wouldn't even pass, but it's a postmortem from two years ago and has no bearing on last week's Supreme Court ruling; it is of interest, though, as a reminder that even some politicians who supported the bill seemed not to believe in its viability.

I had no real expectation of the outcome myself, so I watched the hullaballoo with a jaundiced eye. Liberal bloggers and Facebookers went wild with celebration, because for them politics is no more than a spectator sport, and all they care about is rooting for the winning team. It is of course utterly vital that their team, the right team by definition, be the winner, so that they can reward themselves by strutting and hooting and pumping their arms and imagining the other team's face being rubbed in the dirt, but they are much less informed than sports fans are about the actual working of the sport.

But that comparison is probably unfair to sports fans. Noam Chomsky likes to tell how,

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

Two main themes recurred as the Obama cult netroots crowed over their victory: one was the stoopidity of the Republicans who said that they would move to Canada because of this ruling. They ignored the fact of real socialist healthcare in the People's Republic of Canuckistan, of course, but such threats, like the threat to Go Galt, are almost always meaningless anyway -- like the Democrats who vowed to move to Canada if Bush won in 2000 and 2004. Canada collaborated shamelessly with Bush, so what's the point?

The other big story was CNN and Fox News's misreporting, in their eagerness to be firsties, of the Supreme Court's decision as overturning instead of mostly upholding Romneycare. (As FAIR pointed out, this was far from the first, or most serious, time the corporate media has got things wrong in the first flush of a scoop.) The Obama fans hooted and pumped their arms and rubbed the Rethugs' faces in the dirt: Only a stoopid stoopid, and probably fat, would get their news from Fox or CNN!

Maybe so. Someone stoopid like this:

President Obama himself initially thought he had lost the healthcare vote because he was watching CNN.

The news channels wrongly reported that the individual mandate - the key part of the law - had been killed off.

The President had been watching on a TV in the White House and appeared calm as he tried to absorb the grim news about his signature piece of legislation.

But moments later White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler came in giving the thumbs up - because she had her facts straight.

I gleefully posted this story to my own Facebook wall, and linked to it in comments on other people's postings about the networks' gaffe. Nobody much was interested, and of course it was mean of me to harsh other people's buzz. One old friend from high school, a law professor with a background in statistics, was sympathetic: "Yep, when you have to rely on the media.... Of course, Chief Justice Roberts appears to have structured the opinion that way, intentionally. He needn't have done that." True, it's ridiculous to expect people to read past the first page of a Supreme Court decision, as Stephen Colbert declared sarcastically -- who ever heard of such a thing? As for relying on the media, the President is the one person in America who shouldn't need to rely on the media in such matters: even if he can't afford to have a messenger bring him a copy personally, couldn't someone at the Court e-mail him a PDF? Obama has been critical of the media in the past ("If everyone just turned off your CNN, your Fox, your ... TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there instead of being in this echo chamber, where the topic is constantly politics"), so his reliance on it here is even funnier.

My friend also remarked, "I don't know which media source Obama was following, but I think they all got it wrong first, and then corrected." I pointed out that Obama's media source was CNN, in the excerpt I quoted; I forgot to mention that "they" (the corporate media, I presume) did not "all" get it wrong first -- that must have been her apologetic invention. She responded: "Weird--would not have been my first choice. And why only one source?" Her own "first choice" would have been the New York Times, to judge from previous conversations I've had with her. (The Times is not a very reliable source either, but to each her own.)

This same friend and I had a couple of heated conversations over Facebook last weekend, on the media and on science. In both cases she lamented that people in this country aren't taught "critical thinking." I can agree with that, but training in critical thinking will be of little use if you don't use it. With doctorates in statistics and law and a strong background in computer science, my friend is probably smarter, and certainly better educated, than I am; but when it comes to politics she leaves her critical thinking on standby. She even protested, when I pressed her on the bias inherent in reporting the news from the viewpoint of the investor class, that she's busy and doesn't have time to investigate everything. Any Creationist Tea Party Republican could probably say the same, but my friend wouldn't see that as an excuse for them. You don't have to be I. F. Stone to broaden the range of your news input usefully: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting puts out less material in a week than any given issue of the daily Times, and it's a good starting place.

The Democrats' expectation of defeat over Romneycare also reminded me of something Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote a couple of years ago after an Obama press conference:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does.

This time he didn't; but there's always next time.

Long Briefs 3: ObamaDoesn'tCare

Closely related to the Supreme Court's ruling on strip searches is its consideration of the Affordable Care Act. It's been entertaining, though entirely predictable, to watch supporters of Obama and the ACA fulminating against activist courts disregarding the Will of the People as Republicans have solemnly affirmed the salutary and necessary role the Supreme Court plays as a defender of liberty. This is a reversal of their usual positions, of course, but only to be expected since neither side has any principles, only partisanship.

It didn't help the Democrats when the President put his foot into it and squished it around. At a press conference last week he declared, "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Bear in mind that Obama's fans love to point out that he's a Constitutional scholar! He's so smart! He knows his stuff better than the stoopid Tea Party! So it's hard to understand how a Constitutional scholar could say something so amazingly stupid. Damage control ensued, especially when a 5th District federal appeals judge in Texas ordered a lawyer arguing another health insurance case to submit "a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail, in reference to those statements, what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review." Attorney General Eric Holder complied, essentially conceding that judicial review is neither unprecedented nor extraordinary.

I'm not concerned that Obama is trying to interfere with or even threaten the Supreme Court, as many of his partisan critics have claimed. My objection is that he was wrong, and since he can hardly be accused of ignorance about the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court, he was either lying or stupid. (Or both -- I am not bound by your narrow Western binaries.) As the Washington Post reported,

But the White House was forced to defend the assertion that overturning the health-care law would be unprecedented. According to the Congressional Research Service, the court through 2010 had ruled 165 times that laws passed by Congress were unconstitutional.

Obama himself agreed with some of those decisions, including 2008’s Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled 5-4 that the Military Commissions Act’s suspension of the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo Bay detainees was unconstitutional.

And Wednesday, the administration was in court in Boston explaining why it thinks the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, although it was passed by bipartisan majorities and signed by a Democratic president.

Damage control ensued, of course. Obama's press secretary Jay "Carney said Obama was 'referring to the fact that it would be unprecedented in the modern era of the Supreme Court, since the New Deal era, for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation' on a 'matter of national economic importance' — not that it would be unprecedented for the court to rule that a law was unconstitutional. 'That’s what the Supreme Court is there to do,' Carney said."

That may very well be what the Great Communicator and eloquent Not-Bush orator President Obama meant; but it's not what he said. (Not surprisingly, his apologists have followed the party line and ignored what he said in favor of his excuses.) What he said was so wrong-headed that even his Harvard mentor Lawrence Tribe called him out on it.

“Presidents should generally refrain from commenting on pending cases during the process of judicial deliberation,” said Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a close Obama ally. “Even if such comments won’t affect the justices a bit, they can contribute to an atmosphere of public cynicism that I know this president laments.”

Since we ordinary middle-class Americans can only sit at home while our Shield Against the Cossacks is watching out for our interests in the Oval Office, it's especially worrisome (and it contributes to that "atmosphere of public cynicism") that our advocate is so bad at his job. From his inability (or disinclination) to bargain effectively with the Republicans on his stimulus program, allowing them to put in counterproductive tax cuts, to caving in (or selling out) to the health insurance industry on the public option, to reassuring Wall Street bankers that he was on their side against the public that wanted their heads on a pike, to putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block during the budget negotiations, to ... well, this little incident, President Obama has made many of us feel less safe against Republican depredations.