Tilting at Windmills

About a year ago, David Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., published a letter saying that, because of the onerous requirements of the ACA, he may have to close his business.  Hobby Lobby has over 500 stores in 41 states, and it is very popular here in the center of the country, so naturally it will be missed if they go out.  The problem centers around the ACA's requirement that insurance policies provided by employers must include coverage for emergency birth control.  Hobby Lobby asserts that the birth control methods that will be covered cause abortions (the medical industry refutes that), and that they should be allowed an exemption based on the owner's religious beliefs.  Lower courts have all ruled that as a for-profit company, religious exemptions that would be given to a non-profit religious organization, such as a church, would not apply to them.  The case will be going to the Supreme Court, but a District Court Judge has given them a reprieve while the case is pending.
    Mr. Green's letter makes the rounds on Facebook, and I see it fairly frequently.  Last night it popped up on my newsfeed, posted by an old co-worker who I like to keep in touch with.  In the last few months, she's gotten more into identity politics, and her posts have reflected that.  Sometimes I'll say something about a particular post, but not often.  On this one, though, I had a piece of information that had cast the case in a new light for me, and I felt it was worth sharing.  All along Mr. Green and his supporters have been presenting their point of view as a religious liberty issue.  Yet in 25 of the 41 states they operate in, the state laws require the same coverage for birth control as the ACA.  So why now?  Why this law and not the others?  To me, this says that the case is less about religious liberty than it is about anti-ACA partisan politics.  But that's just my opinion, and I'm less inclined to give you my opinion than I am to tell you about the information I have that led me to my opinion, so that's what I did.
    The only thing was that I wasn't sure I had stated it correctly, so I started hunting for a couple of my sources to make sure of my numbers.  While I was doing that, my computer made that ♫baLUNG♫ sound it makes when someone has responded to something you've posted.  I checked, and one of my friend's friends had had responded with "Ron: that is bs or their lawsuit wouldn't have reached the Supreme Court."  Now, I love a good discussion, and I was pleased that someone was trying to start one, but his comment was only an opinion and no substantiation, so it was a slow start.
    I continued my search for the data I was looking for, and discovered that, yes indeed, my numbers were wrong.  I also snagged a graphic from a youtube video to illustrate part of the info. Then I used all that to correct my original entry, and make the point a bit stronger.  Then I remembered that I had also seen an article in the Journal Record about some plans that Hobby Lobby had for the future, and I had to look that up as well.  In doing so, I found that there were a lot of  other articles on the same theme.  My comment:  "Also, about a month after the above letter came out, May of 2013, The Journal Record reported that HL bought a huge piece of property down by their headquarters in 2012, and had announced that they intended to build some massive warehouses. Subsequent issues reported some other business expansions they were planning."
    His response: "Are they not free to acquire property? What is your point? They are a family owned business, they can do as they please with their assets."  And, of course, he's absolutely right. 
    I conceded, "It could have no relevance. The incongruity of the 'we're closing' and 'we're expanding' messages just struck me as interesting. But of course, they should plan for a positive future."
    He went on: "The "government" has a lot of bearing on whether private companies will be coerced to pay for things they religiously object to, Obozocare being the present topic."  He then changed the subject entirely.  "I would love to see this edict forced on Muslims."
    Only I didn't realize he'd changed the subject.  I thought we were still talking about private companies being coerced to pay for things they religiously objected to, and I thought it was an opening to explain why Hobby Lobby wasn't having much luck in the courts.  So I said, "Or Jehovah's Witnesses. Imagine if your boss was a Jehovah's Witness and he had to provide health care plans that paid for blood transfusions.  Wouldn't that be awful.  Or if he was a Christian Scientist and had to provide a plan that paid for, well, doctors."
    He said, "Don't change the subject."
    Huh what?  "That is the subject."
    "Your buddy is a Muslim and so he excluded them."
    *Sigh*  Okay, so he gets his news from chain emails.  So many places to go with this, but I decided to focus on the exclusion bit. 
    Now, all the fact checking sites have done treatments on this.  Snopes gave it a "false" rating,   Politifact.com gave a Pants-on-fire rating, and Factcheck.org expounded on why it wasn't true.  So it would be easy to just post a link to any of them.  But, when possible, I prefer to go to the original.  I said, "Show me," and posted a link to the online version of the ACA.
    Then he did something that both surprised and pleased me.  He posted a link to the above mentioned Factcheck.org article.  It surprised me because I wasn't expecting him to concede anything, and here he is posting a link to an article that completely refutes what he just said.  It pleased me because he put up something that was more than just an opinion.  But he also decided to close the conversation at that point.  "I don't have time for you fella. Have a blessed life."
    I work nights, as you all know, and it was getting late in the evening and events of the day had prevented me from going to bed.  So I was glancing at the clock and trying to find a way to gracefully bow out of the conversation.  His decision to leave was welcomed, but only because I was getting tired.  "G'nite," I said, then happily went on to other things.

Following the Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby matter on June 30, 2014, the New York Times  published an editorial that I found expressed my point of view perfectly.  I copied it as a blog post here.

Vocabular Economistics

This story came up in my Facebook newsfeed today.  It's a parable involving an economics professor at a local college who has a disagreement with his student's belief that Obama's socialism can equalize America. He decided to conduct an experiment in the class to illustrate "Obama's plan." No evidence is given that such a plan exists; I suppose we are just to assume that it does for the sake of the story.
    His proposal was that all grades in the class would be averaged, and everyone would receive the same grade.  The results were that at the beginning the grades were fairly high, but they got progressively worse and worse as incentive was reduced.  No one was happy with the outcome.  And the moral of the story is that "socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed." 
This is followed by five overly obvious statements that are supposed to be the lessons you should learn from the story, which inspire the educated reader to respond with, "Yeah.  And?"  There's no explanation given as to why this pertains to any of the President's policies, or the policies of anyone in government, at all, or that it has anything to do with current events.  I suppose we're just to assume relevancy for the sake of the story.
    But the biggest problem with the story is simply this: The experiment does not illustrate socialism.  The experiment illustrates communism, which is an entirely different animal.  This is something that any economics professor should know.  So why didn't this one?  I'm guessing it's because the author didn't know much about economics himself.  (Apparently, he doesn't know much about governmental policy, either.  I'm guessing the assumptions above have something to do with identity politics and epistemic closure.)
   If the professor wanted to illustrate socialism using grades, a better way would have been to point out that when they were younger they received their grades through an agent of the state (a teacher), who worked for a government agency (the public school system), which was paid for by the community using taxpayer funds.
   Now, notice that one does not preclude the other.  The teacher could still average the grades while being paid with taxpayer funds, so it is possible to be communist and socialist at the same time.  It's also important to note that there are several different kinds of socialism.  The one I wrote about above is called Democratic Socialism (the taxpayers have a say in how things are done), and it's a normal part of our American culture, coexisting with our capitalistic economy.  But one has to assume that the author of the story has Marxist Socialism in mind.  Paul Krugman gives a pretty good explanation of why Marxist Socialism doesn't work in his book "The Conscience of a Liberal".
    I could go on.  The story shows a fundamental misunderstanding of liberalism, income redistribution, welfare, etc.  At the bottom, you can click on a link to a previous posting, at the end of which are the "outraged comments" from "the left."  There were actually more comments from those who supported the message of the story than not, and few on either side made much sense in real life.  I also noted that "the left" is spoken of as a unified force, equal and opposite to "the right."  If I kept writing, this would eventually turn into a book, and I'm just not ready for that.

Immigration Debate

What's Good for the Goose...

Devil of an argument 

The Economist    Dec 13th 2013, 0:47 by J.F. | OKLAHOMA CITY

THIS week I wrote about a battle over religious monuments in Oklahoma City (great town, by the way—vastly underrated). The short version: in 2009 Oklahoma's legislature passed a bill authorising the placement of a monumental version of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol building. The bill specifically stated that the monument be modelled after one in Texas that the Supreme Court found constitutional in a 2005 case called Van Orden v Perry—a nice shot across the bow from the bill's sponsor, Mike Ritze, in advance of the inevitable constitutional challenge.
That challenge came last year, courtesy of the Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU. They did something very clever: instead of suing in federal court and claiming an Establishment Clause violation, they sued in state court, and asserted that a religious monument on public property violates a section of the Oklahoma constitution, which is far more strongly worded than the federal version. The state constitution says: "No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied,donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such." The case remains in pre-trial litigation; I believe discovery has not yet started. The two sides will likely file for summary judgment early next year (there is no factual dispute to hash out in court), and I don't want to hazard a guess on the outcome.

Yet in addition to the ACLU's challenge, earlier this month the Satanic Temple, a New York-based outfit, said they too would like to donate a monument to be placed on state grounds. The logic is sound: if Oklahoma wants to put privately-donated religious monuments on state grounds, it should not be allowed to prefer one faith to another. Here I will hazard a guess: Oklahoma will not allow a monument to Satan on its statehouse grounds, no matter how "public-friendly", regardless of the Temple's desire to make it "an object of play for young children."
For better or worse, Oklahoma has constitutional backing for both decisions. In Van Orden v Perry, the court ruled that "the Ten Commandments have an undeniable historical meaning", and that "simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause." It also held that the placement of the Ten Commandments matters: you can't put them in classrooms, but putting them on the capitol grounds "is a far more passive use", and therefore acceptable. That was a narrow 5-4 ruling, but Stephen Breyer sided with the majority, and Sandra Day O'Connor, one of the nays, has been replaced by Samuel Alito, who is likely to side with Oklahoma. In rejecting the Satanic Temple's offer, Oklahoma can cite Pleasant Grove v Summum. There the court unanimously ruled in 2008 that just because a municipality displays one religious monument—as it happens, the monument at issue was of the Ten Commandments—does not mean it must display monuments donated by other faiths, such as Summum, or indeed Satanism
Those two cases are about as on point as anyone could hope for. Unfortunately, taken together they render the Establishment Clause utterly hollow. As the much-missed John Paul Stevens notes in his Van Orden dissent, the purpose of Ten Commandments monuments is to proclaim that "[t]his State endorses the divine code of the 'Judeo-Christian' God." Among America's earliest European inhabitants were Christians fleeing religious persecution; thus, any Christian monument could be said to have "an undeniable historical meaning", and so by Van Orden's logic be acceptable. But monuments to Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism? Sorry; Pleasant Grove says we don't have to. This is an end-run around Jefferson's "wall of separation". It simply cannot be what the Founders envisioned or intended. 

Transformation

Salon Saturday, Dec 28, 2013 06:30 AM CST

Why I fled libertarianism — and became a liberal  

I was a Ron Paul delegate back in 2008 -- now I'm a Democrat. Here's my personal tale of disgust and self-discovery    

Edwin Lyngar                                                               

The night before the 2008 Nevada Republican convention, the Ron Paul delegates all met at a Reno high school. Although I’d called myself a libertarian for almost my entire adult life, it was my first exposure to the wider movement.

And boy, was it a circus. Many members of the group were obsessed with the gold standard, the Kennedy assassination and the Fed. Although Libertarians believe government is incompetent, many of them subscribe to the most fringe conspiracy theories imaginable. Airplanes are poisoning America with chemicals (chemtrails) or the moon landings were faked. Nothing was too far out. A great many of them really think that 9-11 was an inside job. Even while basking in the electoral mainstream, the movement was overflowing with obvious hokum.
During the meeting, a Ron Paul staffer, a smart and charismatic young woman, gave a tip to the group for the upcoming convention.
“Dress normal,” she said. “Wear suits, and don’t bring signs or flags. Don’t talk about conspiracy theories. Just fit in.” Her advice was the kind you might hear given to an insane uncle at Thanksgiving.
Then next day, I ran into that same operative at the convention, and I complimented her because Ron Paul delegates were being accepted into the crowd. I added, “We‘re going to win this thing.”
“Bring in the clowns,” she said, and smiled before I lost her in the mass of people.
I will never forget that moment: Bring in the clowns. At the time, I considered myself a thoughtful person, yet I could hardly claim to be one if you judged me by the company I kept. The young lady knew something I had not yet learned: most of our supporters were totally fucking nuts.
I came by my own libertarian sensibilities honestly. I grew up in a mining town that produced gold, silver and copper; but above all, Battle Mountain, Nev. made libertarians. Raised on 40-acre square of brown sage brush and dead earth, we burned our own garbage and fired guns in the back yard.
After leaving my small town upbringing, I learned that libertarians are made for lots of reasons, like reading the bad fiction of Ayn Rand or perhaps the passable writing of Robert Heinlein. In my experience, most seemed to be poor, white and undereducated. They were contortionists, justifying the excesses of the capitalist elite, despite being victims if libertarian politics succeed.
If you think that selfishness and cruelty are fantastic personal traits, you might be a libertarian. In the movement no one will ever call you an asshole, but rather, say you believe in radical individualism.

Yet I don’t want to gloss over the good things about libertarians. They are generally supportive of the gay community, completely behind marijuana legalization and are often against ill-considered foreign wars, but a few good ideas don’t make up for some spectacularly bad ones. Their saving grace is a complete lack of organizational ability, which is why they are always trying to take over the Republican Party, rather than create a party of their own.
The Ron Paul delegates were able to take over the Nevada convention in 2008, howling, screeching and grinding it to a painful halt. I was part of the mob, and once we took over, we were unable to get anything done. The national delegates were appointed in secret later.
The Republican convention didn’t turn me off of libertarians, but I started losing respect for the movement while watching the financial meltdown. Libertarians were (rightly) furious when our government bailed out the banks, but they fought hardest against help for ordinary Americans. They hated unemployment insurance and reduced school lunches. I used to say similar things, but in such a catastrophic recession isn’t the government supposed to help? Isn’t that the lesson of the Great Depression?
Through all the turmoil, the presidential election went ahead. Although I didn’t vote for him, I wept when Barack Obama took the oath of office in early 2009. They were tears of bewilderment, joy, pride and hope, despite the fact that I did everything within my own limited power to keep the moment from ever happening.
From the ashes of the election rose the movement that pushed me from convinced libertarian into bunny-hugging liberal. The Tea Party monster forever tainted the words freedom and libertarian for me. The rise of the Tea Party made me want to puke, and my nausea is now a chronic condition.
There are a lot of libertarians in the Tea Party, but there are also a lot of repugnant, religious nuts and intolerant racists. “Birthers” found a comfy home among 9-11 conspiracy people and other crackpots. After only a few months, I had absolutely no desire to ever be linked to this group of people.
As evidence, I offer the most repugnant example of many complaints. I’ve heard the n-word used in casual conversation from people I would never expect.  Some people might not believe it or think I’m playing the race card, but I’m not. I’ve heard the word more than I care to admit and more often in the run-up to the 2012 election. Perhaps because I’m a big, fat and bald white guy with a mean goatee, racists think I’m on board with them. I am not, and I’m ashamed to admit that my cowardice at confronting this ugliness makes me complicit.
During Obama’s first term, I also went to graduate school for creative writing at progressive college, and I settled into my marriage with my wife, a Canadian and “goddamn liberal.” I can’t point to just one thing that pushed me left, but in Obama’s first term I had a change of heart, moving from a lifelong extreme into the bosom of conventional liberalism.
I began to think about real people, like my neighbors and people less lucky than me. Did I want those people to starve to death? I care about children, even poor ones. I love the National Park system. The best parts of the America I love are our communities. My libertarian friends might call me a fucking commie (they have) or a pussy, but extreme selfishness is just so isolating and cruel. Libertarianism is unnatural, and the size of the federal government is almost irrelevant. The real question is: what does society need and how do we pay for it?
A month before the 2012 election, I changed my party affiliation to Democrat. I am a very late bloomer, that it took me so many decades to develop my own values. I was thirty-nine.
I don’t think regular Americans have any idea just how crazy libertarians can be. The only human corollary I can offer is unquestioning religious fervor, and hell yeah, I used to be a true believer. Libertarians think they own the word “freedom,” but it’s a word that often obfuscates more than enlightens. If you believe the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quote “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,”  then libertarians live in a prison of their own ideology.

Just To Be Clear...

A&E is a television network, not an extension of the government, and this private enterprise decided to suspend an employee who said dumb things to a reporter. But note, Phil Robertson is still free to say whatever he wants to say, to whomever he wants to say it, whenever it suits his fancy. His free-speech rights remain entirely intact.  A&E isn’t censoring anyone; it’s simply distancing itself from a man on their payroll who said offensive things – and since private companies are not required to tolerate bigotry from their employees, the company’s actions are hardly outrageous.

 

The freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to have someone pay you for your speech. And with this in mind, Phil Robertson’s First Amendment rights have not been infringed, by his employer or anyone else. -- Steve Benen
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"...Freedom of Speech: The legal means to say almost anything you want. Meaning that as private citizens, we’re allowed to say nearly anything (with a few exceptions of course) that we want without fear of legal prosecution for it.

Unless I’ve missed something, Mr. Robertson faces no legal ramifications for what he said. That’s what freedom of speech means.

Freedom of speech does not mean we can say anything we want without ramifications for what we say from our peers or employers.

We’re free to be racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic — pretty much anything we want. We can be these things, no matter how ignorant, because that’s what the Constitution gives us the right to be.

But that doesn’t mean within a society we won’t face consequences for those “freedoms.”

The suspension of Phil Robertson is not an attack on Robertson’s right to believe how he wants. It’s a consequence from an employer for him expressing an opinion which A&E feels represents them in a negative light.
When he signed his contract, it almost certainly included a clause that says he’s a representative of A&E and is expected to act accordingly. All public figures, whether they want to be or not, are representatives of something. Be it a company, a brand, a sports team or league – it’s the price that comes along with fame.

So, yes, he was free to say what he said – and now he’s paying the consequences for it.

Just ask Alec Baldwin or Martin Bashir, two gentlemen who were fired (well, Bashir “resigned” but it’s clear he was forced to do so) for expressing their “freedom of speech” rights."  -- Allen Clifton

Superstar

I finally figured it out.
I have, for a while now, and more often in my head than out loud, refered to the relationship that FOX, Tea Partiers, et al have to President Obama as "he's the star of their show."  But the way to expound on that, if ever I should need to, had eluded me.  It came to me as I was driving to work the other night.

Who was the star of "Superman: The Movie" (1978)?

Obviously, Chrisropher Reeve, right?  Someone might say Gene Hackman.  If they give a list it would probably include Margot Kidder.

But who got top billing?

The surprising answer to that question is Marlon Brando.  Marlon Brando?  Seriously?  Was he even in that movie?  Oh,yeah; he played Superman's real father.  Yeah,that guy.  Top billing seriously?  Musta had a good agent.

Despite having top billing, no one who's seen the movie would ever think of him as the star.  Yes, he played an essential character, but no one would judge the quality of the film based on his performance.  He wasn't even part of the ensemble.

I have friends on Facebook on both the right and the left, and it's interesting to me to see how each side views Presidential power.  Those on the right see President Obama using his power for evil.  One of the things that the right gets ridiculed for is their assertion that things are all going wrong in this country because Obama.  No other explanation needed.
(Facebook is reporting that Obama is closing the Vatican Embassy.  A quick Google search revealed that the Embassy is not closing; it is moving to a place with cheaper rent, better security, and it's closer to work. A lot of people and businesses move for the same reasons.  But Google is obviously wrong because, you know, Obama.)
    Meanwhile, those on the left think he's failing to use his power for good.  The President was speaking at an immigration reform rally recently, and was heckled by a student who asked why he didn't use his executive power to change things.  The President had to remind him that he is constrained by both the Constitution and the balance of powers.  There's only so much he can actually do without the consent of Congress.  It's been pointed out before, usually in discussions about gas prices, that he's the president, not the King of the World.
    I read recently that George Bush was asked what surprised him most about being President.  His answer was, "How little power I actually have."  Of course George Bush didn't have to deal with a Congress where a substantial portion of its members had decided to block everything he wanted to do -- not because they were opposed to the policies in question, but because he was George Bush.  When he was President, the filibuster was a tool to give the minority in the Senate a strong voice.  It was not a weapon to oppose and block anything and everything the President might support like it is now, and has been only in the last five years.  As a result of such tactics, President Obama has been effectively marginalized since just after the passage of the ACA in 2010.  As President, he still gets top billing, but he's no longer the star of the show because all of the action is taking place (or not) in Congress.
    So in my opinion, all the railing against Obama for the last few years has been pretty pointless.  Maybe things will change in 2015, but that's still a year away, and anything can happen between now and then.  In the meantime, pay close attention to what's going on in Congress.  They're the real story, and that's where you'll find the real stars of the show.
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