Monthly Archives: March 2012


Is There More to Sen. Snowe’s Resignation Than Congress’s “Crumbling Center”?

Truthout has the story Is There More to Sen. Snowe’s Resignation Than Congress’s “Crumbling Center”?

Snowe’s announcement she will not seek another term in the Senate may have little to do with “civility” or “loss of the center” within contentious politics and more to do with the fact her husband is knee-deep in controversy over an educational for-profit college chain know as Educational Management Corporation or Wall Street ticker (EDMC).

I am sure there must be room for inventing another of Greenberg’s Laws here, but I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

If there isn’t a law in this story can we at least conclude that resigning from Congress because of a “lack of civility” is about as plausible as wanting to “spend more time with your family?”


Reich: Political jujitsu to save health care law

I found the Robert Reich column, Reich: Political jujitsu to save health care law, at SFgate.

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

If this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

So I suppose I ought to withdraw my previous post Conservative Supreme Court Justices Inadvertently Make Case For Health Insurance Mandate before the justices realize that they have shot themselves in the foot.  Now we’re supposed to want them to knock out the mandate so we can get our Medicare for all just as we really wanted.

Reich also notes,

Those who are opposing the law say a requirement that individuals contract with private insurance companies isn’t regulation of interstate commerce. It’s coercion of individuals.

I am still having a hard time figuring out why the Republicans and George Bush could pass a law to require everyone to buy prescription drug coverage from private insurance companies or pay stiffer penalties than those of Obamacare.  That was constitutional but Obamacare is not?
One wonders how the brains of the conservative Justices of the Supreme court have suddenly stopped working.  They ask silly question, pretending not to know the answers when the answers are obvious.  They pretend that this law is unprecedented when just a few years ago  the Congress and George Bush instituted a similar law.
If there is any place where we ought to make English the official language it is in the Supreme Court. They just don’t seem to know the meaning of some simple words like “logical”, “unprecedented”, “What is the difference between eating broccoli and bankrupting the country?”  Maybe that is why they don’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Commentary: Case is not about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie

Commentary: Case is not about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie by Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald does an excellent job of clarifying the issue.

This, then, is what killed Trayvon Martin, the fact that we are so stubbornly convinced of that redundancy that a boy walking home carrying nothing more threatening than Skittles and iced tea can become a source of terror sufficient for a George Zimmerman to stalk him and to kill him.

It doesn’t matter if he wore a hoodie.

It doesn’t matter if he punched Zimmerman.

It doesn’t matter why he was suspended from school.

What matters is that he is unavailable for comment about those things, and always will be. What matters is that none of them changes the essential truth of what this is about.

Though innocent of any crime, Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman. He was sacrificed for all our fears.

When people are armed with lethal weapons and they have stereotypical assumptions about the motives of a certain class of people that they meet, then it is almost inevitable that a situation like this one will occur.  What can we do to lessen the chance that the people who are subject of this type of stereotyping will be needlessly put in danger, and what can we do to lessen the chances that people who hold these stereotypical beliefs will end up taking actions that they will regret for the rest of their lives?


Conservative Supreme Court Justices Inadvertently Make Case For Health Insurance Mandate

McClatchy has the article On Day 2, Supreme Court health care arguments center on mandate.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. presented the case for the Obama administration’s side.

Unconvinced, conservatives pressed Verrilli for what limits might be imposed if Congress were permitted to impose the insurance mandate. Roberts asked about requiring cellphones to call emergency services, Alito asked about mandatory burial insurance, and Scalia asked about compulsory broccoli consumption.

I must admit, that before reading this article, I did wonder the how insurance mandate could be justified under the Constitution in the face of arguments like this.

Verrilli stressed throughout his hour at the lectern that the 40 million uninsured Americans posed what he called “an economic problem” that Congress is empowered to fix.

I then realized that the obvious answer to the conservative judges’ questions is that unlike the health care issue, a cellphone mandate, a burial insurance mandate, or a broccoli mandate would not be an effort to try to solve a national emergency situation that is on track to bankrupt the country if it is not solved.

I looked up the topic of The Constitution is not a suicide pact on WikiPedia.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact” is a phrase in American political and legal discourse. The phrase expresses the belief that constitutional restrictions on governmental power must be balanced against the need for survival of the state and its people. It is most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, as a response to charges that he was violating the United States Constitution by suspending habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Although the phrase echoes statements made by Lincoln, and although versions of the sentiment have been advanced at various times in American history, the precise phrase “suicide pact” was first used by Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago, a 1949 free speech case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The phrase also appears in the same context in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by Justice Arthur Goldberg.

In the face of certain bankruptcy of the Federal Government and the country, surely the Congress is empowered to enact reasonable measures to save the country. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution imagined that the document should be construed as restricting the government from reacting to an existential threat to the country.


Here is my letter to the editor of The Boston Globe that was published on March 29, 2012.

Image of Boston Globe Letter To The Editor

For those with access to The Boston Globe here is the link to my letter to the editor.

In case my letter left any doubts, here is a picture that explains my idea of where the threat of exploding health care costs sits in relation to the boundary of permissible federal regulation without explicit enumeration in the constitution,



Why Won’t They Listen?

The New York Times book review, Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt, is a companion piece to my previous post Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture.

In the book review, William Saletan writes:

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

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Haidt’s faith in moral taste receptors may not survive this scrutiny. Our taste for sanctity or authority, like our taste for sugar, could turn out to be a dangerous relic. But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.

The reviewer very astutely assesses the value of the book and its ideas while also posing some thoughtful questions about those ideas.  I think I may have hinted at some of those questions in my previous post.

Haidt’s insights are not completely new to me. The book How We Decide covers some of the same ground from the psychological side of things.


The following quote from the review of Heidt’s book shows why we need to be thoughtful about the conclusions we draw.

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

What I take from the description of these experiments is that if you first trigger a visceral reaction to a subject, then the reasoning process will be turned to justifying this visceral reaction.  If you can avoid triggering this reaction, then you might be able to reason about a subject in a balanced way.

The terms “hot button issues”, “red meat issues”, “wedge issues” came from an understanding of the human nature of thinking and reasoning.  If you want to elicit a certain response, you need to trigger the visceral reaction that most suits your needs and then you won’t have to even be concerned about the reasoning that will follow.  You must also avoid triggering the visceral reaction that does not suit your needs.

If the Republicans get to introduce a topic with the visceral reaction that suits their needs, then there is little the Democrats can do to use reason to convince people that the Republican position is wrong.

Perhaps, what the Democrats need to do is to bring up the visceral reaction that suits the Democrats’ needs and then start to reason.

An example might be the discussion I had on the web site of the Politico news story, Senate passes JOBS Act, with tweak.  One of the comments on the article was as follows:

Hopefully this time next year America will have it’s ease from the painful lesson of voting in Obama in 2008.

We’ll see business come back stronger and quicker under a new Pro- business President like Romney.

My response was:

But Romney’s activities as a “business man” are the exact cause of much of the trouble this country finds itself in.

Outsourcing jobs

Draining company assets to pay for salaries of vulture capitalists and letting the debt holders try to get their money back in bankruptcy court.

Draining the funds put aside for employee pensions, closing the factories, and leaving workers without jobs or pensions or health care insurance.

How much more of this “pro business” behavior do you think this country can survive?

Perhaps I could have tweaked this response a bit.  The point is to hit the visceral concepts of stealing assets, stealing pensions, stealing jobs, and stealing health benefits.


JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall

Truth Out has the article JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall .

This time it’s the deceptively named “JOBS Act,” introduced by the far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members of both parties. The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a deregulating frenzy. Some of those protections were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which sociopathically unscrupulous business people conducted a hoax that ruined thousands of families and deprived many of their life’s savings.
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Worse, the bill is designed so that even billion-dollar corporations can be considered “startups,” leaving the door open for a dozen Enrons of tomorrow to shaft the unwary. The common-sense protections proposed by Sen. Jeff Merkley were rejected, while the equally rational protections of Sens. Scott Brown and Jack Reed, which were passed, will be fairly easy for clever sharks to swim around. We’ve seen this play before, and it never has a happy ending. That will no longer be required of them, thanks to the “JOBS” Act.

I have been so busy working on my volunteer projects that I have not been following the news as closely as usual.  I never got around to reading Scott Brown’s email that mentioned “crowd funding” also mentioned in this article.

This article does give faint praise to Brown’s contribution to the bill.

I wonder what Elizabeth Warren has to say about this bill.  Maybe I’ll do a little research and find out.  You can always beat me to it.


Here is the relevant section from Scott Brown’s Enewsletter that I had not had a chance to read.

Have you ever wished you were a part-owner of Facebook or Google when they first started? Or, are you an entrepreneur with a great business idea, but you can’t move forward because of the credit crunch?

To make it easier for people to invest in great ideas or start a small business, I’ve introduced a bill (S. 1791) to legalize something called “crowdfunding.” Here’s the background story: Believe it or not, we still live under investment laws that pre-date the first computer, and those laws prevent most people from investing small amounts – say a hundred dollars – in a new startup company or small business. Because of these rules, only the very wealthy are permitted – and can afford – to get through the red tape necessary to fund a new company.

That’s right – it’s nearly impossible for most people to invest one dollar of seed money into someone else’s new business. This makes no sense, especially in the Internet era, where every day we see new ideas, programs and social networks take off. The same technology and culture that has helped assure people that it is safe to buy a product on Ebay or donate to a charity over the internet can be used to help investors make smart decisions about what companies to support. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve hit the road to discuss this and other issues facing our small businesses.

Like so much of Scott Brown’s overblown and naive rhetoric, it is pure hogwash that “it’s nearly impossible for most people to invest one dollar of seed money into someone else’s new business.”  From time immemorial, entrepreneurs have been raising money from family and friends to start new businesses. A Vietnamese friend of mine once explained how his extended family started businesses in this country.  Every one contributed money to an investment fund.  Participants with ideas for businesses would ask to borrow from the fund.  They would be given money to start their business.  They would of course have a plan to pay it back.  They would also get the help of more experienced participants who may have already used this fund to start their own businesses.  I don’t think there were any laws that made it nearly impossible for this collaborative to operate.  I am willing to bet that large numbers of immigrant families have used this technique to bootstrap their way into the middle and upper classes in America, and they have been doing it for centuries. When I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell us bedtime stories about how our family got started in this country.

Since crowd funding has been going on long before Brown introduced his bill, (See Crowd funding on WikiPedia or do a Google search), one has to wonder what is in this bill that suddenly makes possible something that has already been going on for quite a while.

Politico has the story Senate passes JOBS Act, with tweak.

The change comes with an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), which would place additional restrictions on so-called crowdfunding, in which small amounts of money are collected from large groups of people.

Merkley said the crowdfunding portion of the House bill is “simply a pathway to predatory scams.”

Gee, Scott Brown didn’t mention “simply a pathway to predatory scams.” in his newsletter.


Bernanke muted on health of US economy

The Financial Times has the story Bernanke muted on health of US economy.

The story is interesting for what it included:

Mr Bernanke said most unemployment is due to lack of demand rather than structural problems in the labour market, such as workers lacking the right skills, or being stuck in the wrong parts of the country.

and for what it did not include.  There was no mention of high taxes, too much regulation, or the infamous “uncertainty.”  I wonder if the people at Nightly Business Report, which I have stopped watching, read stories like this.  Perhaps their certainty that “uncertainty” is the cause of the problem makes it impossible to realize what it is that Bernanke does not say.  A case of the proverbial “dog that didn’t bark” syndrome?


Sen. Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren and Marisa DeFranco weigh in on health care debate ahead of Supreme Court case

Mass Live has the story Sen. Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren and Marisa DeFranco weigh in on health care debate ahead of Supreme Court case.

I have selected three parts of the positions of the three candidates.  Pick which one you agree with most, then read the article to see who has the position you agree with.

  1. “I campaigned against the President’s health care bill, I voted to repeal it and would vote to repeal it again. We already have health care in Massachusetts and we did it how we wanted to do it. People love the care and coverages that we have but they don’t like the cost. The costs are out of control. The legislature and the governor can fix that and I’m encouraging them to do it.”
  2. “The mandate to buy coverage from the health insurance companies is the crux of the problem. I’m glad we did something on the national level but the Democrats really capitulated on the public option and that was a mistake. They started with the public option as their top marker. It’s classic negotiation 101, you negotiate high to end up at middle or high ground of where you want to end. They should have started with single-payer and they would have ended up with a public option. If the insurance companies are really behind their free market mentality, then operate in a market. And if the government is your competitor and you’re so much better than the government, compete.”
  3. “I think the urgent question now is whether we’re going to be able to hold on to the health care reforms that just passed. There are a lot of people who want to repeal them. I think we need to focus on protecting them and on finding new ways to lower costs, which are still too high.”

The other way to play the game is to guess which candidate has which position, then read the article and score your results.  I am afraid there is no prize for the most right answers.  Or as David Letterman would say, “This is an exhibition, not a contest. No wagering, please.”

Credit goes to BillM for bringing this article to my attention.


President Obama: Trayvon Martin case a ‘tragedy’

The Miami Herald article President Obama: Trayvon Martin case a ‘tragedy’ covers the President’s remarks about this case.

“I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” the president said, adding that he couldn’t help but think about his daughters. “I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.”
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GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney also issued a statement Friday about the case.

“What happened to Trayvon Martin is a tragedy,” Romney said “There needs to be a thorough investigation that reassures the public that justice is carried out with impartiality and integrity.”

Almost anyone could foresee the inevitable consequences of the Florida law.  When you shoot someone, there needs to be an investigation. If the cause were truly self-defense, the justice system is able to dispense proper justice without making it a law that mere suspicion of a person doing you bodily harm is enough to justify shooting that person.

It is not hard to imagine what some people might find suspicious that the rest of us would call normal behavior.  I wonder if a black person walking home from the store could consider a person of another race accosting him with a gun as looking suspicious. If the black person suspected that bodily harm was about to ensue, what right did that Florida law give to him?

By the Florida law, can you shoot someone if you provoke the “suspicious” behavior?  How would the following statement be applied by the police “investigators”? “I slapped him in the face and I suspected that he might kill me.”

When we were living in Texas, the town where we were living passed a law that said the police could arrest you for looking suspicious.  We pointed out to no avail, that a person walking up to a closed business and tugging on the door before realizing the business was closed could look suspicious to the police.  Probably not suspicious if I were white and dressed in a business suit, but definitely suspicious if I were black or I were wearing scruffy clothes.

Eventually the Texas law was declared unconstitutional.