Category: National politics

The wider Implications of Obama’s contraception “compromise”

There’s been a lot of furor over the Obama administration’s implementation of universal health care, specifically the provision by Health and Human Services department regulation that every health insurance plan, without exemption for religious reasons, must include coverage for contraception for employees.

The Catholic Church (and I don’t mean just the bishops) has reacted very strongly against this intrusion on our religious liberty. Some have said that this is just the chickens coming home to roost; that it’s the result of years of backing down from conscience violating laws when the institution, but not individual Catholics, gets an exemption.

And then last week, Obama claimed to offer a compromise—one that didn’t include anyone but his own team in the “negotiations”—that wasn’t really a compromise at all. In fact, Nothing has changed:

 

But the rule HHS finalized on Friday actually put in place nothing like what the president announced. On the contrary, the final rule enacts the very same terms that HHS had announced on January 20th.

But I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Under the President’s plan, the health insurers for Catholic organizations would be required to provide contraception to employees at no cost. But not a word was said about government reimbursement. In fact, it looks to me that what the federal government has done has ordered an industry to provide a product at no cost, with no reimbursement.

What’s next? Doing away with food stamps and ordering grocery stores to provide food to the poor out of their own pocket? Telling local fuel oil providers to give heating oil to customers who can’t afford it? Free college educations for all?

This is essentially nationalization of industry. I’m no constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that this is unconstitutional. Why isn’t the insurance industry howling? Why haven’t they been fighting Obamacare tooth and nail? If this law was really going to reform healthcare in this country and make it less expensive, you’d expect they wouldn’t like that at all. Maybe they aren’t protesting because in the end they know that with the federal government being the bad guy—mandating premiums, limiting treatment options (except where it’s requiring them like this)—they’re going to end up with even fatter profits.

The HHS mandate is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s not really news for any of us who objected to four years of extreme policies from this White House. While I have great hope that come November we’ll have a new president, I think this thinking goes beyond one president and even one party. I have a hard time imagining politicians mustering the will to walk back all the Obama-era excesses. If so, we are on a very bad path indeed.

 

A clue for the kids occupying the streets

Occupy boston

I’m guessing there will be no consequences for the students who miss a big chunk of their semester protesting in the streets.

 

“A lot of us are already in debt and we haven’t graduated yet. A lot of my friends, even though they work 20 hours a week, that is not enough to cover their expenses,” said Rick, a 19-year-old psychology major. “A lot of us can’t even afford to get sick.”

Hey, Rick, join the club. You’re not the first generation of college students who had to go into debt. But here’s the thing: You made a choice to go to college. You knew what the tuition was. You knew you’d have to take loans. But you made a value-judgment weighing the cost versus the benefits. (At least I hope you did and you didn’t go to college because you were aimless and lacking in direction or you just wanted to extend your adolescence.)

You could have taken a job or enlisted, saved up money, gone to school later. 20 hours per week? I know people who worked 40 hours per week or more on top of a full schedule. Sure, there’s isn’t time for partying (or street protests), but for them the hard work and sacrifice will pay off. Or you could have looked for a full-time job and gone part-time at night. It might take you longer to get that degree, but you’d have the satisfaction of knowing you didn’t have to take a handout to get it.

Bottom line, Rick, is that life’s not fair. There will always be somebody with a bigger salary, a better car, a nicer job. So what? Get over it. Stop worrying about what the other guy’s got and start making your own way. Think of anyone you know who’s a success (someone who worked for it, not had it handed to them in an inheritance or they cheated their way into it). I’ll bet they worked hard, didn’t complain too much about what the other had that he didn’t and took advantage of every opportunity. That’s the American dream, baby, not sleeping in a makeshift hobo camp, complete with WiFi and catered smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels for breakfast (from actual news reports).

The thing is most of the rest of America agrees with one key aspect of your protest: We, too, are sick of politicians in bed with corporate executives who get special access to influence and our money. But the difference is that most of us want to fix it with less government, not more. More government, in the form of bailouts and special industry regulations and arcane tax codes, is what got us into this mess.

Hopefully, someday you’ll realize all this, when you have your own family and mortgage and job that occupy your time. When that time comes, let’s have a beer and I’ll show you around the Tea Party rally where you can meet the rest of us. The 99% you so fondly speak of.

Photo by franzudahhh – http://flic.kr/p/asX7pR

Bush’s Shanksville Address

I may not have agreed with many of President George W. Bush’s policies in his eight years in office (although compared to the current occupant of the office, Bush and I have the same mind), but his strength as president was how he handled 9/11 and its aftermath. Each speech, each impromptu remarks, each moment with those affected by the events was always pitch perfect, never merely weepy and emotional, but always evoking the best of America.

The president’s speech in Shanksville, Pa., on Saturday at the Flight 93 memorial are another example of that.

Obama fudges on oil production; snarks at big families

Update: Thanks to a commenter for pointing out an error. I wrote oil production and consumption in terms of “billions” of barrels, not “millions”. However, the underlying ratios were correct as is my point. And the president is still wrong.

The President was at a town hall meeting last week where he received a question about rising gas prices. His answer was full of misdirection on oil production, the causes of gas prices and outright snark at people who find it necessary to buy big vehicles for their big families. It was, in effect, another “bitterly clinging to their guns and religions” moment.

So the questioner asked him what Obama was going to do about high gas prices, and then the President gave him an impromptu supply-and-demand lesson that sounded good, but was—unfortunately and predictably—wrong. He said that a few years ago, when the economy was going great and individuals and industry were buying lots of oil, the high demand drove oil prices up. Then when the global economy tanked and demand dropped, prices dropped. And now that the economy is recovering—he claims—the prices are going up again because demand is up.

For one thing, oil prices are not driven primarily by supply and demand. Oil prices are driven by oil production, which is controlled by the consortium of oil-producing countries known as OPEC.

That sounds like a nice pat lesson from a freshman economics textbook. Unfortunately, it’s completely inadequate. For one thing, oil prices are not driven primarily by supply and demand. Oil prices are driven by oil production, which is controlled by the consortium of oil-producing countries known as OPEC. They decide how much oil will be produced and thus how much we must be willing to pay for it. For another thing, oil prices are also affected by politics, like, say, our little adventure in Libya, attacking Quaddafi on behalf of the al Quaeda rebels seeking to overthrow him.

Rather than higher oil prices being simply an indication of a recovering economy, it’s also an indicator of political turmoil and decisions by a group of non-democratic nations with varying levels of animosity toward the US.

Math is hard

At this point, Obama isn’t done showing what is either appalling ignorance or an appalling cynicism toward the intelligence of his audience.

We have about 2, maybe 3 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves; we use 25 percent of the world’s oil.  So think about it.  Even if we doubled the amount of oil that we produce, we’d still be short by a factor of five.

It seems reasonable at first, but look deeper and you see that he’s comparing apples and oranges. The United States has 2 to 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. That’s a static number. That is not production, or supply, a dynamic number. Our consumption of 25 percent of oil is dynamic. His comparison makes it seem like the US produces a minuscule amount of the world’s oil.

In fact, the the United States is the third-largest producer of oil behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. (We produce 8.3 millions of barrels/day; Russia: 9.8 million bbl/day; Saudia Arabia: 11 million bbl/day.) Meanwhile, our oil consumption is 18 million barrels of oil per day.

If we doubled our oil production, we wouldn’t be short by a factor of five as he claimed. We’d actually break even and be producing all of the oil we need and would no longer be beholden to the OPEC oil cartel.

Consider that. If we doubled our oil production, we wouldn’t be short by a factor of five as he claimed. We’d actually break even and be producing all of the oil we need and would no longer be beholden to the OPEC oil cartel. Is the President lying, is he stupid, or is he cynically banking on a lack of education on the part of his audience?

Bitterly clinging to our gas-guzzlers

But he’s still not done. He then goes on to talk about increasing efficiency in vehicles. He takes to task the people who drive fuel-inefficient SUVs and other large vehicles.

 

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and only getting eight miles a gallon… [inaudible comment from the crowd] … you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many kids you have? [inaudible] Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? [snarky smirk on his face] Then you definitely need a hybrid van then.”

It’s not like big families are out there driving gas-guzzling, giant vehicles because we want them. We drive these vehicles because none of the automakers have been producing vehicles for us over the past 20 years. When I was a kid, families bought station wagons and just piled in as many kids would fit. Now, not only do we need to be belted in, we need massive car seats that ensure that you can’t fit more than 2 kids under 12 into an average sedan. There are essentially no more station wagons and once you get up to five kids, you’re looking at either a full-size van or a full-size SUV.

And in my general experience, number of children is inversely proportional to the amount disposable income available for the purchase of new hybrid vans, if they even made one that seats 10. (Do they?)

It’s just another out of touch pandering moment by Obama. He ends by suggesting that his interlocutor think about a trade-in for his eight-mile-per-gallon gas guzzler. Can we get a trade-in on our ideology-guzzling president instead?

 

Cynical opportunism is the ugly politics here

The immediate (and ongoing) assumption of a political ideology on behalf of Jared Loughner, the killer in Tucson who injured Rep. Giffords and injured and killed other bystanders, not only does a disservice to those who are seeking the real motives behind the killings, but also injures the freedom of political discourse in this country.

By all accounts, Loughner was not motivated by an ideology so much as a psychosis, if his public rantings are any guide, but a rush to judgment by politicians and pundits laid the blame for the deed on the heads of all those right-wing Tea Party Republicans with their “inflammatory” speech and combative imagery during the last election. Never mind that tough talk and war-like comparisons have been a feature of politics for all of human history. After all, it was the 18th-century Karl von Clausewitz who dubbed war as “merely the continuation of policy (i.e. politics) by other means.”

Never mind that political discourse used to be much uglier than it is even now, such as when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Sen Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in 1854 over Sumner’s ridicule of Brooks’ uncle, Sen. Andrew Butler. Even as Butler lay in bed recuperating from a stroke, Sumner was accusing him of having taken “the harlot, slavery” as mistress and then denigrated his home state of South Carolina and the whole of the South as being entirely immoral. Brooks took exception to Sumner’s words and attacked him on the floor of the Senate with his cane.

But this is not what happened in Tucson. Given 72 hours to let the facts come out, the reality is that Giffords was probably targeted because she is a public person who represents the authority of the federal government, which Loughner’s fevered imaginings had rendered a Big Brother-like bogeyman.

Yet the true ugliness of our current climate of politics was on display when so many saw not a tragedy, but an opportunity to score political points by draping the blood-drenched bodies upon the backs of their political opponents.

The true injury to our Republic comes then, not from strong political speech, but from cynical demagoguery. What else can you call it when so many so quickly equate a crazed conspiracy theorist with average middle-class Americans who want their political representatives to be more responsive to voters and their government to be less intrusive in their lives? How can anyone feel free to stand up for the entirely peaceful, yet passionate political beliefs when they must fear being painted with brush of insane violent acts with which they have no connection in reality?

If the political and pundit class wants to change the political climate, perhaps they can start by looking at themselves first.