I’m having an exchange with a left-wing opponent of the Health Care Reform bill (aka Obamacare) here on BlueOregon. But for some reason, BlueOregon won’t let me post. So I’m posting my response here instead.

Barry Deutsch apparently is another of those low-information supporters so common in the NW who repeat superficial talking points about the bill that depend on glossing over the facts.

I wish you wouldn’t get insulting; I don’t think it adds anything to the discussion. When your arguments are solid, there’s no need for personal attacks.

Obama today said this bill is not about health care reform, it’s about protecting the insurance companies from disruption.

I frankly doubt this is true. Do you have a link to Obama saying this?

And we know that’s true because the CBO said this bill will leave over 23 million non-elderly uninsured.

It’s true, this bill “only” insures 32 million. The remaining 23 million are people who will choose to pay the mandate penalty rather than buy insurance. But at least if these uninsured have a critical need for insurance, they’ll then be able to buy into the system — under the status quo, people who can be insured but choose not to, are turned down by the private insurance companies if they find themselves urgently needing medical care.

The only thing that would cover 100% of Americans is single-payer. But single-payer is not going to happen in the US in a single step, anytime in the next two or three decades, and maybe not ever.

If you’re saying that no health care reform that fails to cover 100% of the uninsured is ever acceptable, then you’re saying we can never have health care reform, ever. You’re saying that the 32 million this bill would cover should remain uncovered, forever.

Those who end up with private insurance — the specific benefits are not specified in the bill, by the way

“Specific” benefits? No. But the general scope of insurance under the health exchanges is defined in the bill; all such private insurance must include, at a minimum:

(A) Ambulatory patient services.
(B) Emergency services.
(C) Hospitalization.
(D) Maternity and newborn care.
(E) Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment.
(F) Prescription drugs.
(G) Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices.
(H) Laboratory services.
(I) Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management.
(J) Pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

That’s a direct quote from the Senate bill; you can find it here (pdf file), on page 105.

Note that under the law, all members of Congress and their staffs would have to buy their insurance from the same health exchanges. Do you really think that Congress would pass a law requiring Congress and their staffs to buy lousy insurance?

Under this bill, 32 million currently uninsured people, would be able to buy insurance the same way Harry Reid does. That’s not a bad thing.

As many don’t accept Medicare and various private insurance plans right now.

The large majority of doctors do accept Medicare, actually. And HCR increases Medicaid reimbursement rates, so presumably that will increase the percentage of doctors who take new Medicaid patients.

That said, let’s say that only about 55% of doctors will take new Medicaid patients, and 75% new Medicare patients. If I’m someone who’s broke and can’t afford to see a doctor, I’m far better off if this bill passes and I can get on Medicaid — which means that about half of all doctors will see me — than I am if this bill fails, and I remain too broke to see a doctor at all.

Are you saying that the only acceptable law is one that will force doctors to accept all patients and all insurance plans, against their will? Do you have any realistic plan for passing such a law over the opposition of the AMA? (The AMA is a far more powerful lobby than the private insurance lobby).

Health Care Reform is a good bill, but it’s not a bill that solves every imaginable problem with the health care system under the sun. You can go on forever saying that this bill doesn’t make everything perfect. But we’re still better off passing this bill and then trying to get more in the future, than we are if this bill fails and we’re starting out again with nothing.

Medicare didn’t make everything perfect, either. But it was a vast improvement over the status quo before Medicare, and for that reason it’s good that Medicare passed. The same is true of Health Care Reform.

And for the next four years waiting is exactly what we will boing and people will continue to be die because they are uninsured. [....] We could instead be putting pressure on Congress….

Four years is better than 15 years, which is about how long it has taken, historically, for Congress to try again after each health care failure.

The Democrats have an unsustainable majority in Congress; it’s guaranteed that they will be losing seats this November. If this is the best health care reform the Democrats can do when they have large majorities, what makes you think they’ll be able to pass a much better, more comprehensive overhaul with a smaller majority?

Or do you think the Republicans are going to pass something better when they’re in the majority?

There will be no next chance anytime in the next four years. “Pure” lefties like you have been “pressuring congress” for my entire life; have you delivered universal care yet?

The real world legislative process is messy and full of compromise. A compromised health care bill isn’t perfect; it doesn’t deliver all its benefits until 2014 (although some benefits would happen right away), it doesn’t cover 100% the way single payer would, it doesn’t force doctors to accept patients they don’t want to accept, and it doesn’t eliminate big corporations that make profits from health care.

But the perfect, pure health care plan — achieved in a single step, rather than through gradual improvements and compromised — is much worse than that, because it will never exist outside of your imagination. I’d rather have health care — even if imperfect — than have what you’d offer me, which is a chance to remain pure and die prematurely for lack of health care.

Taken from Balloon Juice comments:

Whether or not you live in their districts, call the following Congresspeople (who are either undecided or are progressives who are considering opposing the legislation) and ask them to vote in favor of health care reform so that we can finally begin fixing our broken health care system.

Zack Space – Ohio (Zanesville, Dover, Chillicothe) – (202) 225-6265

Marcy Kaptur – Ohio (Toledo) – (202) 225-4146

Bill Foster – Illinois (Batavia, Dixon, Geneseo) – (202) 225-2976

Kathy Dahlkemper – Pennsylvania (Erie) – (202) 225-5406

Chris Carney – Pennsylvania (Clarks Summit, Shamokin, Williamsport) – (202) 225-3731

Melissa Bean – Illinois (Schaumburg) – (202) 225-3711

Steve Driehaus – Ohio (Cincinnati) – (202) 225-2216

Jim Matheson – Utah (South Salt Lake, St. George, Price) – (202) 225-3011

Stephen Lynch – Massachusetts (Brockton, Boston) – 202-225-8273

Peter DeFazio – Oregon (Eugene, Roseburg, Coos Bay) – 202.225.6416

Michael Arcuri – New York (Utica, Auburn, Cortland) – (202)225-3665

Rick Boucher – Virginia (Abingdon, Pulaski, Big Stone Gap) – 202-225-3861

Henry Cuellar – Texas (San Antonia, Laredo, Rio Grande City) – 202-225-1640

John Tanner – Tennessee (Union City, Jackson, Millington) – 202-225-4714

Glenn Nye – Virginia (Virginia Beach, Accomac) – (202) 225-4215

Brian Baird – Washington (Vancouver, Olympia) – (202) 225-3536

Dan Lipinski – Illinois (LaGrange, Oak Lawn, Chicago’s southwest side) – (202) 225 – 5701

Joe Donnelly – Indiana (South Bend, LaPorte, Michigan City, Kokomo) – (202) 225-3915

Marion Barry – Arkansas (Jonesboro, Cabot, Mountain Home) – (202) 225-4076

Harry Teague – New Mexico (Hobbs, Las Cruces, Socorro, Los Lunas, Roswell) – (202) 225-2365

Jerry Costello – Illinois (Carbondale, Belleville, E. St. Louis, Granite City, Chester) – (202) 225-5661

John Barrow – Georgia (Savannah, Augusta, Vidalia, Milledgeville, Sandersville) – (202) 225-2823

Nick Rahall – West Virginia (Beckley, Bluefield, Huntington, Logan) – (202) 225-3452

Solomon Ortiz – Texas (Corpus Christi, Brownsville) – (202) 225-7742

* * *

Here’s the fax I sent to DeFazio:

Dear Representative DeFazio,

I’m writing to urge you to do everything you can to improve the Health Care Reform bill at this late stage. I’m happy to read that you’re negotiating hard with Speaker Pelosi to make this bill fairer to Oregonians. That’s excellent. You rock, dude!

But after negotiations are over — even if you don’t get nothing — vote for it.

This is a matter of life and death for people who — unlike you — don’t have jobs with great health coverage. You owe it to them to swallow a bad deal, and if necessary swallow your principles, and vote for this bill.

Best wishes,

Barry Deutsch

The CBO has released their analysis of the Senate HCR bill combined with the “sidecar” reconciliation bill. You can read the CBO analysis here (pdf file), but the most important numbers are:

Reduce deficits: $138 billion in the first ten years. ($1.2 trillion in the second decade, although that’s not a precise number at all, just an estimate).
Costs: $940 billion in the first ten years.
Money spent making private insurance more affordable (with subsidies): $466 billion in ten years.
Money spent expanding Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP): $434 billion in ten years.
Money spent on small employer credit (making it more affordable for small employers to offer health insurance to their employees): $40 billion in ten years.

Currently uninsured Americans who will be insured: 32 million. (And the remaining uninsured people will in effect be getting low-cost catastrophic health care insurance, in exchange for the penalty they pay.)

So where does the money come from? $17 billion (over ten years) from people who refuse to buy insurance paying a penalty; $52 billion (over ten years) from businesses who choose to pay a penalty rather than provide coverage for employees; $32 billion (over ten years) from the “excise tax” on the most expensive insurance plans; I-can’t-find-the-number-but-it’ll-be-tens-of-billions-over-a-decade from extending the payroll tax to some currently untaxed income; and nearly 500 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid.

Democrats are also claiming that the bill “extends Medicare’s solvency by at least 9 years.” As far as I can judge, that’s not true; the savings are being spent on Health Care Reform, not on extending Medicare’s solvency. (This is the “double-counting” that Representative Ryan - and the CBO - have been talking about.)

It’s going to be a very close vote in the House (although Kucinich, surprisingly, is now going to vote for the bill).

So this bill will raise some taxes, and finds a lot of savings in current Medicare and Medicaid programs. In return, it extends health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, makes Medicaid and CHIP available to millions of currently non-covered Americans, and heavily regulates what insurance companies can do (so that abusive crap like this stops happening).

If you support this bill, please call your representative in the House and let them know.

Gonzo: I’m going to Bombay, India, to become a movie star!
Fozzie Bear: You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star. You go where we’re going: Hollywood!
Gonzo: Sure, if you want to do it the easy way!

–The Muppet Movie¹

On twitter last month (I think it was last month; I find twitter-time difficult to reconcile with meatworld time), my friend Kip had an argument about art, effort, and transparency. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway; no doubt that’s all been filtered through my own biases.

Many — most — cartoonists and writers work hard to make their storytelling as transparent and effortless for the reader as they can. This is where “transparency” comes in: the prose (or cartooning) is a clear glass through which the reader observes the story. The clearer the glass, the better.

But what about people who make stained glass windows?

The folks Kip was arguing with — also friends of mine — argued that making readers work hard is pretentious bullshit. Kip agreed, I think, that clarity can be a virtue, but that a creator could reasonably decide to focus on other virtues as well.

There was an elephant in the room, which I can’t recall if anyone mentioned: Kip is the author of City of Roses, a wonderful, web-serialized urban fantasy novel. Kip’s writing emphasizes character, mood, freedom for Kip to explore his own considerable quirkiness, subjective perceptions, and setting. But transparent prose really isn’t what Kip’s about. Kip’s prose could, I think, fairly be described as stained glass. Here, for example, is Kip’s self-described “elevator pitch” for City of Roses:

Violence; violence, and power, in the context of yet somebody else walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear the noise all that crockery will make. —But! Also: genderfuck, hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, the City of Portland, Spenser, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional bit of swordplay.

On the one hand, as a reader I gravitate towards clear-as-glass writers (for many years Anne Tyler was my favorite novelist; nowadays I might say Connie Willis.). If I can’t effortlessly understand the prose in a novel, there’s a good chance I’ll put it down.

But (otherhandwise), sometimes what you work for is more rewarding than what’s offered on a platter. There are cartoonists and writers you slow down for; you have to be attentive. It takes a lot more effort to read Dave McKean’s Cages than to read Y: The Last Man. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading Y — a funny adventure with cliffhanger endings like clockwork at the end of every chapter — but if you read it at all, you’re appreciating it as much as you ever will. Putting more effort than that into reading it won’t bring any reward and is probably missing the point. In contrast, Cages is a thicker, richer and more nourishing meal. More like a bunch of meals, because it’s worth going back and rereading a bunch of times. If you pay attention, it’ll be worth it, because there’s so much there.

I’ve reread episodes of City of Roses a bunch of times. I’d highly recommend it (first chapter starts here). But it’s not “relax, turn your brain off, and be entertained” urban fantasy. It’s very rewarding, but readers have to put in a bit of work and pay attention. Which means — like Gonzo becoming a movie star — it’s going to have a hard time finding the readership it deserves.

Of course, writing this has made me think of my own work, which falls very much on the “transparent” side of the divide. But, to tell you the truth, I sometimes feel guilty about that. My favorite comics often aren’t as transparent, or as easy reading, as my own comics tend to be. For now, I’m enjoying what I’m doing too much to change it; but someday I hope to experiment with making some stained glass.

1. Bombay seems like an odd choice for this joke. Wasn’t there a sizable movie industry in Bombay in the 1970s? Or am I confused? (back)

Post what you want, when you want it. It’s anarchy!

1. I liked this post by John Corvino at the Indie Gay Forum, categorizing the “that’s not the definition of marriage” argument against equal marriage rights into four categories.
2. Howard Stern on Gabourey Sidibe: hard facts
3. Ron Unz at The American Conservative (obviously a liberal hippie think tank) debunks claims of “an illegal alien crime wave.”
4. Crack cocaine sentencing disparity will soon be “One-Fifth As Racist As It Used To Be“
5. Nathan Newman argues that progressives actually got some significant policy wins in Obama’s first year.
6. Cell phones, Facebook, and the war on loneliness
7. Democrats Who Oppose Student Loan Reform Love Banks More Than They Care About Students

* * *

Alas, there’s going to be an outage for a few hours on Sunday while the server undergoes updates.

For me, this was the most exciting news all week. The Magnes Zionist describes the scene:

Around five thousand demonstrators protested the eviction of Arab families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and the settlement there of rightwing Jewish extremists. It was the largest Sheikh Jarrah protest and the largest joint Israeli-Palestinian protest so far.

The protest was composed of an interesting mix – Jewish leftwing activists, mostly (but not entirely) young; the Zionist left Meretz-Peace Now crowd, mostly (and entirely) old; Israeli Palestinian activists, and representatives of the evicted families. There were Israeli singers and a Palestinian hip-hop group from Shuafat. Many of the speeches were given in Arabic, both Jerusalem colloquial and standard, and judging from the crowd, more of the younger Israeli Jewish activists understood the speeches than the older generation. The “drummers” and the clowns were there in full force – these are activists who play the drum and dress up as clowns in an attempt both to lighten up the protest, and to drive home the point of non-violent protest.

Sara Benninga’s speech at the protest, “There is a New Left in Town,” is well worth reading in whole (it’s not very long). But here’s a bit of it:

[The New Left] is a partnership between Palestinians, who understand the occupation will not be defeated by missiles and bombs, and Israelis, who understand that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle.

The new Left joins hands with Palestinians in a cloud of tear gas at Bil’in and gets beaten up together with them by settlers at the South Hebron Mountain.

This Left stands by refugees and labor migrants in Tel Aviv and fights against the Wisconsin Plan.

The new Left is us — all of us!

Everyone who came here tonight. Everyone who dared cross the imaginary line between West and East Jerusalem, despite the threats and intimidation.

We are all the new Left that is emerging in Israel and Palestine.

We are not fighting for a peace agreement. We are fighting for justice. But we believe that injustice is the main obstacle to peace.

More: The website of the Sheikh Jarrah protesters is here.

Rabbi Brian attended the protest and reports: 5,000 Protest in Sheikh Jarah

News accounts: the JPost story, Haaretz, and Al Jazeera.

Some photos on Flickr.

I already posted part of this page in progress, but I haven’t posted the whole page before, and now you get to see it with Jake’s colors. Enjoy!

(Click on the image for a bigger size).

And at last, Obama commits to something. My bet is that he wouldn’t be saying this if he didn’t think that there’s an excellent chance the Democrats can pass health care reform soon. The big hurdle is getting enough Democrats¹ in the House to vote for the bill the Senate already voted for; after that, all that’s left is to make some small fixes through reconciliation.

I’ve put the entire speech after the break (it’s not long). So what do folks think?

My view is that this is a long, long way from what I’d really like, which is a French-style health care system. But that wasn’t an option on the table. Neither was “Medicare for all,” aka single-payer health care, which is what most of the lefties I know want.

But even though it’s not what we want, it’s a large improvement over the status quo. It would set up systems that could “bend the cost curve” down; it would get a hell of a lot more people covered; and it would make it possible for nearly all Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions, to get health insurance coverage.

So if the Democrats do pass this plan, that will do a lot to make them seem other than worthless. On the other hand, if the Democrats don’t manage to pass health care reform, then I barely see any point in supporting them at all. It’ll be time to rejoin the Green Party, I guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I say “Democrats” because it’s clear that not one Republican will vote for the bill. (back)

Have at it!

I finished drawing the “Hereville” graphic novel this weekend, and Jake finished colors. That doesn’t mean I’m all done — there’s still a significant amount of work to do (title page, back cover art, fixes requested by the publisher, etc) — but still: YAY! I’m very happy to have gotten the principle art done, and I’m pretty pleased with the book as a whole.

Below: All 139 pages of the graphic novel, plus the front cover. It might be a tad hard to read at this size, though… the larger sized version will be in bookstores in November.

Everyone once in a while I read a news report about long-lost siblings (sometimes twins) who meet for the first time as adults and discover astonishing similarities — they both love languages, they both like wearing denim skirts, and so forth. I always find those stories a bit creepy, frankly. It’s not that I deny that DNA has any effect on our personalities and tastes; but those stories often make it sound as if DNA determines absolutely everything.

So this story, traumatic as it was for the participants, cheered me up a bit:

Keeley Hall, from Perth, Western Australia, and Elizabeth Howard, from Cambridge, had been among the first to register with UK Donor Link, a Government-funded database set up in 2004.

They had been told that their DNA was one of the organisation’s first ‘matches’: they were half-sisters. Overjoyed, they told of the many resemblances between them – their similar eyes and hair, their shared love of languages – and how they already felt like sisters.

But The Mail on Sunday can now reveal that the two women are almost certainly not related at all. In a terrible and distressing mistake, UKDL brought two entirely unrelated women together and told them they were sisters.

DNA matching, the article explains, is a science of probabilities, not certainties. (I wonder how many wrongful convictions have been based on DNA?) Both of the women have since been put in contact with other women who are — really really for sure this time — their biological sisters.

Hat tip: Marriage Debate.

Well, I know what I’ll be listening to as I draw tomorrow. Use this thread to meet all your Health Care Policy Discussion posting needs.

I think these paragraphs from Newsweek explain why it’s unlikely that the big health care summit will lead to a bill that both parties will vote for:

Writing in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Gerald Seib made an observation about tomorrow’s health-care summit that I think is critical to understanding the proceedings. “The first is that the most basic predicate for success in any negotiation—that both sides, at the outset, think reaching an agreement is preferable to failing to reach an agreement—doesn’t exist here,” he wrote. In negotiation parlance, they call that a BATNA: the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. To figure out how your opponents will act, you need to understand the outcome they envision if the negotiation fails—that is, at what point can they happily walk away. The Democrats’ BATNA is that they continue along the path they’ve been heading: have the House pass the Senate bill and make fixes like those the White House offered on Monday through the budget-reconciliation process in the Senate, where they will need only 51 votes.

The Republican BATNA is that health-care reform fails. The summit doesn’t sway any of their members or any of those Democrats who have been hedging their bets, and the bill just limps toward death. More important, it’s not clear that they’d prefer a negotiated outcome to their BATNA. If they successfully negotiate for the inclusion of some of their signature items—say, for example, medical-malpractice reform—they might feel compelled to vote in favor of reform. That hands the president and his congressional allies an enormous win and undermines their yearlong project of attacking Democratic reform initiatives. They can’t vote for what they’ve spent months calling a “government takeover of health care” and then continue promoting their “Obama is a crazy liberal” narrative. No agreement would seem their preferred outcome. This is not a good-faith negotiation.

This seems like a good moment for me to reprint this old strip. With luck, maybe the strip will be obsolete in a few years. It could happen!

Ron suggested another open thread, and his wish is, as always, my demand. Post whatever you like here, discuss what you want, give yourself a little hug. Self-link love is like skiing down a cool Alpine slope. Swoosh! Swoosh!

I’ll start by linking to one of my favorite websites: Shorpy. Shorpy is an amazing internet archive of historic U.S. photos, and if you click through they have really big photos!

That’s a photo from Michigan around 1890. Which is neat. My favorites are the ones where you can really see the faces, though, like this 1920s cooking class:

Click through to see the posts on Shorpy (where you can click through for the large images).

UPDATE FROM MANDOLIN:

Thanks for the post, Ampersand! I wanted to add to it, though, because this is a big first for Alas–not only is one of its bloggers nominated for the Nebula Award, but two of it’s bloggers are.

Big, enormous, joyous congratulations to N. K. Jemisin, who posts here via Angry Black Woman as Nojojojo, on being nominated in the short story category for her tale, “Non-Zero Probabilities!”

* * *

Rachel Swirsky’s story A Memory of Wind, published by Tor.com, has been nominated for the Nebula award for best Novelette!

For those of you unfamiliar with the field, let me explain that the Nebulas are A Very Big Deal. The Nebula Award is one of science fiction and fantasy’s two biggest honors; whereas the other award, the Hugo, is based on fan votes, the Nebula nominations and awards are voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Rachel Swirsky is, of course, better known to “Alas” readers as Mandolin. Congratulations, Mandolin! The world is noticing what a fucking great writer you are, and that’s awesome.

In comments at Tor, Mandolin said this about “A Memory of Wind”:

…this story is based, of course, on the old stories about the Trojan war. All we really know about Iphigenia is her death. The old stories imagine her as incidental. Who she was, what she thought and said and did and felt, didn’t really matter to those writers. They were interested in how her father felt about killing her.

…Iphigenia’s death is the beginning (of my impulse to write) and the end (of almost everything we know about her from traditional sources). But I wanted to imagine her as more than just her death, to create a middle for her story.

Incidentally, word on the street is that a second novelette by Mandolin, “Eros, Philia, Agape,” came very close to also being nominated for a Nebula this year. Again with the awesome.

Posted with the kind permission of Keith Knight; visit Keith’s website for many more cartoons.

Just relocating some comments from another thread….

When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

–Hesiod, ~ 800 BC

In the good old days, every man’s son, born in wedlock, was brought up not in the chamber of some hireling nurse, but in his mother’s lap, and at her knee. And that mother could have no higher praise than that she managed the house and gave herself to her children…

Nowadays… our children are handed over at their birth to some little Greek serving maid, with a male slave, who may be anyone, to help her.. it is from the foolish tittle-tattle of such persons that the children receive their first impressions, while their minds are still pliant and unformed… And the parents themselves make no effort to train their little ones in goodness and self-control; they grow up in an atmosphere or laxity and pertness, in which they come gradually to lose all sense of shame, and respect both for themselves and for other people.

–Tacitus, ~100 AD

Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:

…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.

If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.

Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum (last quoted on this blog in 2004):

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.

(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)

For a more straightforward response to Michele Obama’s campaign, I’d recommend Kate Harding’s article on Salon, and Paul Campos’ article in the New Republic.

Wish I had time to post some links or something — but maybe you could do it for me. Post whatever you like in the comments. Self-link love is most welcome.

Oh, and check out the gallery of goat photos at Damn Cool Pics. The one I’ve put in below isn’t even the best (or most unbelievable looking) one.

A discussion in comments, combined with waking up early and having some time to pass before Kevin picks me up to go to work, led me to read up a bit on California’s budget.

The most useful graphic comes from the San Jose Mercury News.

So the largest chunks of California’s budget woes are the justice system, the health care system, and a tax cut.

Another big chunk — not included in the Mercury’s graphic — is that the recession has lowered both sales tax and income tax revenues, as people earn and spend less. California has, both through elected officials and through voter initiatives, made major cuts in the relatively recession-proof taxes (car taxes, property taxes). Meanwhile, increases in people needing aid means that spending rises in a recession. As a result, California’s budget is hit harder by a recession than most states.

The article accompanying the graphic is very worth reading.

For more background on how this situation came to pass, I’d recommend reading this blog synopsis of a presentation by Professor Scott Frisch. The blog also links to Professor Frisch’s powerpoint slides, which are worth browsing through.

From the Mercury article:

So looking at the past five years, where did that “extra” $10.2 billion of state spending above the rate of inflation and population growth go? The Mercury News found:

# The state prison system received the biggest share, about $4.1 billion of it. Corrections spending has increased fivefold since 1994. At $13 billion last year, it now exceeds spending on higher education. Tough laws and voter-approved ballot measures have increased the prison population 82 percent over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, former Gov. Gray Davis gave the powerful prison guards union a 30 percent raise from 2003 to 2008, increasing payroll costs.

# Public health spending — mostly Medi-Cal, the state program for the poor — received $2.9 billion above the rate of inflation and population growth. Part of that spike is due to an aging population; part is rising national health care costs. But state lawmakers also expanded Medi-Cal eligibility among children and low-income women a decade ago, increasing caseloads.

# Schwarzenegger’s first act as governor, signing an executive order to cut the vehicle license fee by two-thirds, blew a large hole in the state budget. It saved the average motorist about $200 a year but would have devastated the cities and counties that had been receiving the money. So Schwarzenegger agreed to repay them every year with state funds. That promise now costs the state $6 billion a year, or $2 billion more than the rate of inflation and population growth since early 2003.

Most Democrats in California would agree to balancing this mess with a combination of service cuts and tax increases. Unfortunately, proposition 13 requires two-thirds of the legislature to agree before ever raising taxes, and the Republican minority will not agree to any tax increases at all (although most of them support both spending increases — not all “tough on crime” measures are voter initiatives — and tax cuts).

Look again at Schwarzenegger’s executive order cutting taxes. Schwarzenegger expressly structured this so that no spending cuts would balance his tax cut. This is a textbook example of Republican/conservative fecklessness and irresponsibility — the difficult, grown-up work of paying for tax cuts — either by raising revenues elsewhere, or by making spending cuts — is always deferred.

Which relates to a larger problem: Americans want government services, but they don’t want to pay for them. This basic tendency is made worse in California by the voter initiative system combined with the two-thirds requirement, but it’s a problem throughout the United States.

And our politics makes the problem worse — and this is as true nationally as it is in California.

In California, passing a budget or raising taxes requires a two-thirds majority in both the state’s Assembly and its Senate. That need not pose a problem, at least in theory. The state has labored under that restriction for a long time, and handled it with fair grace. But as the historian Louis Warren argues, the vicious political polarization that’s emerged in modern times has made compromise more difficult.

All of this, however, has been visible for a long time. Polarization isn’t a new story, nor were California’s budget problems and constitutional handicap. Yet the state let its political dysfunctions go unaddressed. Most assumed that the legislature’s bickering would be cast aside in the face of an emergency. But the intransigence of California’s legislators has not softened despite the spiraling unemployment, massive deficits and absence of buoyant growth on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.

That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

If all this is sounding familiar, that’s because it is. Congress doesn’t need a two-thirds majority to get anything done. It needs a three-fifths majority, but that’s not usually available, either. Ever since Newt Gingrich partnered with Bob Dole to retake the Congress atop a successful strategy of relentless and effective obstructionism, Congress has been virtually incapable of doing anything difficult because the minority party will either block it or run against it, or both.

All Mirka’s siblings, plus her father and her stepmother, and Mirka herself. This was fun to draw.

(Click on the image to see a bigger version).