…refer them to this.
It’s quite a list, isn’t it? But the meme goes on, because Big Lies work.
Spambot of the day
Advice-giving bot:
Introducing unsuullied plants at home can be advisable. In the long run, the most visited and the interesting place may be the Camel Tracks.
Then again, it may not be the Camel Tracks.
But did you know that the camel actually originated in North America?
The FBI and the IRS: nothing much to see, move along now
The FBI’s investigation into the IRS scandal has yielded no criminal charges. That’s not so surprising, considering that the bar for criminal behavior is set fairly high.
And that there really wasn’t all that much of an investigation:
Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who has represented about a dozen groups that faced such IRS questioning, said the FBI has yet to contact her clients over the issue. “As far as I can tell, nobody has actually done an investigation. This has been a big, bureaucratic, former-Soviet-Union-type investigation, which means that there was no investigation,” she said. “This is a deplorable abuse of the public trust, but I am not surprised.”
The WSJ has a similar opinion:
The story by Devlin Barrett says that investigators found no political bias but instead merely bureaucratic mismanagement. We’d be willing to credit that conclusion if there were more evidence that anyone did much of an investigation. Congressional probers say FBI director James Comey has refused to provide details about the resources it has devoted to the probe, though such basic information would not interfere with the investigation. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent lawyer who represents several conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, reports that the FBI hasn’t contacted any of her clients. That’s like investigating a burglary without interviewing the burgled.
Obamacare is working!
It’s just that the plan may not have been what most people thought it was. And I’m not even talking about eventual single payer; I’m talking about Obamacare itself.
Jonathan Cohn analyzes the first set of data we’ve received on who has actually signed up for Obamacare on the exchanges. There are way fewer young people (only 24% are between the ages of 18 and 34) than the original stated goal. But, as Cohn correctly points out, it doesn’t matter for the first year or two because the government has guaranteed to insurance companies that they’ll be protected against loss.
So the fact that enrollees are older than expected—and therefore much more likely to make claims and reduce insurance companies’ profit margins—is okay because government will take up the slack. And by “government” we mean, of course, the taxpayer. And by “taxpayer” we mean, of course, predominantly the wealthy, although the middle class will pay as well in many circumstances.
Here’s a list of the taxes that are supposed to fund Obamacare. Will they be adequate to cover the fact that (as Cohn points out), nearly 80% of enrollees so far on the exchanges are getting subsidies? It depends on whether this was approximately the number anticipated, and also on whether the tax revenues actually collected will be as great as had been projected.
The Byzantine nature of Obamacare is reflected in the fact that one of the largest items in the list of Obamacare funding tax sources is the following:
$60.1 Billion [projected amount of revenue]: Tax on Health Insurers: Annual tax on the industry imposed relative to health insurance premiums collected that year. Phases in gradually until 2018. Fully-imposed on firms with $50 million in profits.
So Obamacare giveth to the insurance companies and then it taketh away. And then it giveth back again, in a sort of shell game. A significant amount of the revenue that insurance companies get from Obamacare is from the government subsidizing those who might not otherwise buy insurance, and a significant amount of the money the government gets in order to go about subsidizing those people is from taxes paid by insurance companies, which are then given back to the insurance companies in the form of customer subsidies for low-income policyholders, and then…well, you get the idea.
There are a number of ways that Obamacare could go under despite the government’s stalwart attempt to protect insurance companies from loss and therefore gain their cooperation/collaboration. One is if people decide not to comply with the individual mandate if they become aware that there is no real way to enforce it unless a person is eligible for a tax refund from which it can be deducted. That could change, of course, if the government sees that too many people are defying the mandate. But the legislature would have to pass a law to that effect, and to do that the legislature would have to turn more Democratic, which doesn’t seem likely in 2014. Of course, Obama can probably overcome this problem in his favorite way: by executive order or through government agency, bypassing the legislature altogether and putting more teeth into the collection process.
Another potential problem for Obamacare is the fact that the House is considering a bill to abolish the risk corridor and reinsurance protection for insurance companies: i.e. the bailout. Such a bill could pass in the House, but it’s hard to believe it would have a chance in the Senate, at least not this Senate. But in 2015 there’s a possibility, if things keep going the way they’ve been going. This could potentially destroy Obamacare if insurance companies suffer losses as a result; that’s why insurers are lobbying so mightily against such a bill.
In case you haven’t followed some of these more arcane aspects of Obamacare, here’s how the risk corridor and reinsurance programs are supposed to work:
The bailout provisions of Obamacare are found in Sections 1341 and 1342 of the Affordable Care Act…The first provision bails out insurance companies for costs associated with individual patients when they exceed $45,000. Under this so-called reinsurance program, insurers will be able to push off 80 percent of costs between $45,000 and $250,000 onto a fund financed by a fee of $63 per head on customers of insurance companies and workers covered by self-insuring companies. Given that most of the associated costs will almost certainly be passed on to consumers by insurers, that fee is in effect a tax. And in the event that the fund does not generate revenue sufficient to cover its costs ”” far from an unlikely scenario ”” then taxpayers will be explicitly on the hook. This preemptive bailout was included in the law as a deal-sweetener to induce more insurance companies to participate in the program. It is a good deal for insurers, for whom any opportunity to reassign risk to somebody else is a welcome profit opportunity, but it is a terrible deal for consumers and taxpayers.
The second and potentially even more troubling bailout provision is the one for so-called risk corridors, which asks the insurance company to project their total costs and then picks up most of the difference if losses should exceed those targets. The potential for gaming the system here is obvious and dire, and the potential costs are enormous. Senator Marco Rubio already has introduced a bill to repeal this provision, though it is unlikely to pass. At the very least, Republicans should ensure that the provision, scheduled for sunsetting in 2016, dies on schedule.
The potential costs and risks associated with these provisions are worrisome, and the fact that they are in effect hidden from the public is troubling in and of itself. The complexity of Obamacare is by design: By obscuring the realities of the program, Obamacare’s architects ensured that it would be easier to peddle such untruths as “If you like your insurance, you can keep it” and promises of substantially lower premiums. The reality of Obamacare has shocked Americans, but it has not shocked them enough: Even as the law sends many Americans’ insurance premiums skyrocketing, those higher premiums do not cover the costs associated with the program ”” Americans will be paying on the front end and on the back end as well, with premiums on one side of the equation and bailouts on the other.
If Congress had tried to pass a law simply transferring $1 trillion to insurance companies over the next decade, there would have been energetic resistance to its doing so. The Affordable Care Act amounts to the same transfer, even as it places insurers in the enviable position of having a federal law in place that gives Americans a choice between buying their products and being fined by the federal government.
Unlike the Wall Street bailouts, the insurance bailouts are not a one-time expedient instituted in the face of a crisis: They represent an open-ended claim on taxpayers’ resources and a transfer of risk from private, profit-seeking enterprises onto the government. Together, the provisions represent an important part of the Democrats’ agenda for transforming what we know as insurance companies into semi-public utilities managed by central planners in Washington.
Most Americans do not understand this, and it’s not necessarily because they’re stupid. It’s because the facts have been purposely suppressed. It’s also because the law is complex and requires study, and many people’s eyes glaze over when discussing the finer points of health insurance and funding. And then of course there are a number of people who couldn’t care less, as long as the subsidies go to them.
The public ignores Bridgegate—or does it?
The headline of this article on a post-Bridgegate Pew public opinion poll is “Christie Story Attracts Little Public Interest.” That certainly appears to be true at first glance, when you read that only 18% followed his apology “closely.”
As for its impact:
There also has been little short-term change in opinions about Christie: 60% say their opinion of Christie has not changed in recent days, while 16% now view him less favorably and 6% more favorably.
Although that’s not a lot of swing, it’s still 10%, which in elections can be pretty huge. Read the details and you will learn that most of the negative change was among Democrats and Independents rather than Republicans:
Among Republicans, about as many say their opinion has become more favorable (9%) as less favorable (10%).
More Democrats say their opinion has become less favorable (25%) than more favorable (3%). Among independents, 14% say their opinion of Christie has become less favorable and 6% more favorable.
When the pollsters added those who followed the story somewhat, they got these results:
Republicans are about as likely as Democrats to have followed the Christie story at least fairly closely last week (43% vs. 46%). Like Republicans overall, those who followed the story at least fairly closely are closely divided between those who are more favorable to Christie (18%) and less favorable (17%), with 62% saying their opinion hasn’t changed.
Democrats who closely followed Christie’s apology have come to have sharply less favorable opinions of Christie: 43% say their opinion is now less favorable, 3% more favorable, and half (50%) say their opinion hasn’t changed.
That’s an even greater negative swing among Democrats than in those who paid close attention to his apology.
There’s little question in my mind that Bridgegate has therefore hit its target, although the press and Democratic leaders may have hoped for an even greater negative impact on Christie’s reputation. This story was never about the goal of souring Christie among Republicans, it was about muting his crossover appeal, which is (was?) his biggest strength. And in that sense, mission accomplished.
Rather, first mission accomplished, in terms of tarnishing Christie among Democrats and Independents. There will be a lot more effort where that came from because he’s seen as a dangerous frontrunner.
As for Republicans, they were already not so very keen on Christie, or at least conservatives weren’t. Simply put, many of them already detested and despised him, perhaps far more than most Democrats do. I’m not certain that the left understands the depth of the dislike of Christie among conservatives, but I’ve long thought that it would be a difficult slog for Christie to win the Republican nomination, and to do so the conservative vote against him would have to be split.
There’s another goal of the press’s focus on Bridgegate, and that is distraction. In that, also, the story may have done its job, at least a small amount:
The release of a book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates that criticized the Obama administration drew even less interest than news about Christie. Just 11% followed news about Gates’ book very closely.
However, whether this has much to do with Bridgegate as a competing story or more to do with general public apathy about scandals is unclear, but I vote for the latter. In the years since Obama became president the public has gotten rather scandal-weary, and has become used to shrugging at some very shocking excesses and excusing them by saying they’re over-hyped and unimportant, or that every politician does the same thing. There may even be some spillover into increasing apathy about Republican scandals, too (real or hyped), although the press will probably never stop trying to accentuate Republican offenses and make light of Democratic ones.
Obamacare may be different because it’s up close and personal, and therefore may still be able to rouse the public out of its depressed and apathetic cynicism. I guess we’ll see in due time.
Le Chambon: the village of rescuers
Last night by chance I came across the story of the French village of Le Chambon during WWII. I’d never heard it before, but it’s one of the most fascinating stories of rescuers during the Holocaust.
I’ve written about rescuers several times before, especially here. Different countries had different degrees of cooperation with the Nazi occupation in rounding up their Jews, and as a whole France’s role was a decidedly shameful one. There were individual acts of heroism, to be sure. But Le Chambon was very, very different because the village, as well as the surrounding area, was united in its courage:
From December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (population 5,000) and the villages on the surrounding plateau (population 24,000) provided refuge for an estimated 5,000 people. This number included an estimated 3,000”“3,500 Jews who were fleeing from the Vichy authorities and the Germans.
Led by Pastor André Trocmé of the Reformed Church of France [French Huguenot], his wife Magda, and his assistant, Pastor Edouard Theis, the residents of these villages offered shelter in private homes, in hotels, on farms, and in schools. They forged identification and ration cards for the refugees, and in some cases guided them across the border to neutral Switzerland. These actions of rescue were unusual during the period of the Holocaust insofar as they involved the majority of the population of an entire region.
Pierre Sauvage, one of the saved children, grew up to become a documentary filmmaker. In the 1980s he made a film about Le Chambon entitled “Weapons of the Spirit.” Here’s a small clip:
The attitude of the couple is one that I’ve learned is not unusual among rescuers. They almost always deny heroism or any special sort of behavior at all, and act as though what they did was merely normal. The man in the clip says that at first it was not particularly dangerous to shelter the Jews, but then it became so. He’s referring to the fact that during the last year and a half of the German occupation, the Nazis began to crack down more on the people of Le Chambon, even murdering some of the leaders. But the village never cracked, and never betrayed the Jews whose rescue it had taken on.
It’s fairly clear what was going on with Le Chambon, and what was different about it. As Sauvage put it in an interview with Bill Moyers:
SAUVAGE: …[They were a] singular group of people with a singular history: this Huguenot stock, this memory of their persecution, not only the fact that they had a history of persecution but that they remembered it, that it mattered to them.
…I think on the one hand, there was that sense of identification with somebody else who was persecuted. On the other, there was their particular slant on their Christian faith which both mandated deeds””that was essential””but also involved a certain, special kinship with the Jews.
MOYERS: Through persecution, through…
SAUVAGE: Well, even broader than that. Simply because the Jews, for many of the Christians of the area, were the People of the Book. These were Christians whose sense of roots went that far back that they were comfortable with the Jewish roots of their faith.
Sauvage’s parents ended up emigrating to the US, where he was raised. But in a great irony, they (like a small number of other Holocaust survivors) abandoned their Jewish identity to the point of not even telling their son that they were Jewish. This is what happened, as Sauvage tells it:
MOYERS: You grew up in New York. Did you hear growing up about Le Chambon? Did your parents constantly refer to it, make you mindful of that part of your story?
SAUVAGE: Well, I guess the answer to that is perhaps a big paradox about the making of the film. The answer is no, my parents did not talk much about Le Chambon. Oh, I knew I was born there. But I didn’t know that Le Chambon had mattered in any particular way.
They basically were people who had put the past behind them to the extent of not even allowing me to know that they were Jewish and that I was Jewish.
MOYERS: They didn’t tell you?
SAUVAGE: They did not tell me. Till I was 18.
MOYERS: You were 18? Nothing in the home had indicated this, nothing in the conversation had indicated this, nothing in your own intuition had indicated this?
SAUVAGE: You know when you were raised under a taboo, the power of that taboo is extraordinary. People sometimes can’t believe that I could have not suspected or known. But the truth is I did not. I did not.
It may not be meaningless that the film was not the work of a dutiful child fulfilling his parents’ fondest wishes. It was the work of a rebellious child, laying a claim to a part of the past, indeed to a heritage, indeed to an identity that he had essentially been deprived of.
MOYERS: In what sense, rebellion?
SAUVAGE: Well, the mere fact of becoming Jewish was a rebellion. I was sort of sent forth into the world as a “nothing.” I wasn’t a Christian, I was simply a “nothing.”
That satisfied me for quite a while, by the way. I was a student in Paris and it never bothered me. It took a long time for me to start measuring that that was not a productive way to live your life. I think two major influences–one, my wife, who is Jewish, and who sort of was working on me””a lot.
And the other, actually, was Le Chambon. Because I realized that a lot of what they did came out of their strong sense of self, their intimate knowledge of who they were, of what their history was. And I realized that, well, if they were getting such strength from being who they are, then I had to aspire to be who I was.
So for Sauvage it came full circle—Le Chambon saved his life, and then Le Chambon helped to give him back his Jewish identity.
[NOTE: If you want to learn more about the persecution the Huguenots had historically faced, see this.]
And now for Obamacare and the small businesses
This is news?
The only “news” is why the WaPo has decided to finally report it. I don’t know the answer. Perhaps they’re trying to slip it in and hope no one notices in all the Bridgegate hysteria.
Whatever people read in the paper or don’t read in the paper, though, they will be inclined to notice it if/when it finally starts happening to them, which ought to be before the 2014 election:
When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies.
But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.
While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing ”” right before the midterm elections ”” could be difficult for Democrats who are already fending off Republican attacks about the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.
Ben Sasse…
…who’s running for the Senate from Nebraska, sounds like a good guy to me.
Nebraska born and bred. Harvard undergrad. Ph.D. in history from Yale, his prize-winning doctoral thesis was on populist conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s. Lots of business background. Sense of humor. And last but far from least, a specialist in health care insurance.
Some good quotes from Sasse*:
“Most of us were taught that government exists to provide for the common defense ”” a military and a social-safety net ”” but the actual budgets show that our government has become a big insurance company that also runs a navy.”…
As a college president [his current job], Sasse likes to conduct informal surveys of students. “I ask them what the Republican party stands for,” he says. “Most don’t have a clue. They think Republicans are for rich people and big business. We’ve got to do a better job of conveying our ideas. We need to have an American constitutional, reformation, revival movement.”
Sasse is 41 years old, which seems very very young to me. But that “most of us were taught” quote marks him as a member of an older generation than one would think. I’m not so sure even most 41-year-old were taught such things; maybe in Nebraska they were, but in liberal enclaves they may already have been learning that government exists to do whatever we’d like it to do, if only we could pry the money out of the cold, live (and dead) hands of the rich.
[NOTE*: Pronounced “sass,” not “sassy.”]
A Bridgegate too far
Almost all Bridgegate, almost all the time.
What could be more important?
Edgar Allan Poe had a cottage…
…in the Bronx.*
And it’s still standing, although it’s been relocated a few hundred feet, and a little park built around it.
At the time Poe moved there, the Bronx was not a city. His young wife was dying of tuberculosis, and he’d hoped the move and the country air might help to heal her. Now the cottage’s address is Kingsbridge and Grand Concourse, which if you know the Bronx is certainly a far different place than in Poe’s time. Let’s just say you wouldn’t call it the country.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love””
I and my Annabel Lee””
With a love that the wingé¨d seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea…
Scholars have speculated about the inspiration for the poem “Annabel Lee.” But the leading contender was Poe’s wife Virginia, a cousin of his whom he had married when she was thirteen and who died at twenty-four. Most scholars also think the marriage was not consummated for some years after it had occurred, and perhaps not ever.
[NOTE: *The title of this post comes from the title of this movie.]
Criticizing Christie
One possible problem with this gleeful open-field-day-on-Christie business is that those who come down hard on him open themselves up to the charge of hypocrisy if they haven’t been just as tough or even tougher on Obama for all the outrages committed by his underlings (supposedly without his knowledge).
Christie may be disliked by conservatives even more than he’s disliked by liberals. Conservatives attack him because they feel he’s not really one of them and is actually a betrayer or at the very least a potential betrayer. Liberals kinda sorta like him, I think, but they are eager to destroy him because they believe he’s a frontrunner for the 2016 Republican nomination and a strong presidential candidate to boot. However, conservatives who attack Christie have the advantage of being consistent about criticizing the much worse (and numerous) offenses people have committed under Obama’s watch, knowledge of which Obama has denied. Liberals who attack Christie and defend and/or minimize the Obama administration’s transgressions have no such cover.
So editorials such as this one at Bloomberg News are perniciously hypocritical to the point of ludicrousness. If you want to see how a party apparatchik writes, take a look if you can stomach it.
The trouble is that too many people read that sort of thing and swallow it whole without reflecting on the comparison between Christie and Obama, failing to notice the hypocrisy and inconsistency. The trouble is that not enough people think when they read. The trouble is that propaganda works. The editors at Bloomberg are counting on that.
RIP Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon has died at 85, but you may be forgiven if you’re surprised that he was still alive in the first place. He had been in a coma since a devastating stroke in 2006, and it is easy to imagine that his death was in this case a deliverance.
Sharon was a figure of tremendous controversy, even more than most Israeli leaders, and that’s saying something. He was a towering figure who lived up to the meaning of his name, “lion”:
Sharon was one of Israel’s legendary politicians and military leaders. He played an instrumental role in IDF victories in the Sinai desert in both the 1967 Six Day War and in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. His victories on the battlefield, immortalized by the image of him in an IDF uniform with a white bandage wrapped around his wounded forehead, earned him the title, “Arik, King of Israel.”
He was equally fearless in the political arena, where he was the father of two parties, Likud and Kadima. As defense minister in 1982, he oversaw the Lebanon War before he was ousted from office in 1983 as a result of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre for which the Kahn Commission of Inquiry found him indirectly responsible.
Later, Sharon also began the settlement movement and then pulled back from it, and was responsible for starting to build the security barrier that has helped stem the tide of suicide bombings in Israel.
The Sabra and Shatilla massacre was the event that anti-Sharon forces find to be perhaps the most offensive episode in an altogether-offensive career. Years ago I tried to sort out what actually happened there, and I won’t go into it now except to say the following: no one would be talking about Sabra and Shatilla if there had been no opportunity to blame the Israelis for failing to stop it (that’s where the “indirectly” came in). It would instead have remained one of a long line of dreadful massacres in the bloody and seemingly-endless Lebanese civil war.
I will close with a quote from Sharon that I found in a New Yorker interview that took place some time in the early 2000’s:
The conflict isn’t between us and the Palestinians. The conflict is between us and the Arab world. And the problem at the heart of the conflict is that the Arab world does not recognize the Jews’ inherent right to have a Jewish state in the land where the Jewish people began. This is the main problem. This also applies to Egypt, with which we have a cold peace. It also applies to Jordan, with which we have a very close strategic relationship, but this is a relationship between governments, not between peoples. The problem is not 1967. The problem is the profound nonrecognition by the Arab world of Israel’s birthright. The problem will not be solved by an agreement. It will not be solved by a speech. Anyone who promises that it’s possible to end the conflict within a year or two year or three is mistaken. Anyone who promises peace now is blind to the way things are. Even after the disengagement, we will not be able to rest on our laurels. We will not be able to sit under our fig tree and our vine”¦.
The greatest danger is in signing some document and believing that as a result we will have peace. This is not going to happen”¦Instead, we have to build a process that will enable us to ascertain that indeed a change is taking place in the Arab world. It is necessary to teach all the teachers that Israel is a legitimate entity.
I don’t see any way that could happen. But I agree with Sharon that, until it does, the bitter conflict will continue.