A character in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel Swag devises and swears by “ten rules for success and happiness.” He carries them on his person, scrawled “in blue ink on ten different cocktail napkins from the Club Bouzouki, the Lafayette Bar, Edjo’s, and a place called The Lindell AC.” This budding Dale Carnegie is keen on success and happiness in a very specific context: armed robbery. Is his system foolproof? We wouldn’t have much of a story if it were. We sure as hell wouldn’t have a Leonard novel, with poor choices and their nasty results piling up faster than a Detroit snowfall.
Twenty-five years after Swag’s publication, and perhaps in homage to that book, Leonard offered 10 rules of his own—for writing, that is, not knocking over liquor stores—to the New York Times. Most were standard fare about avoiding adverbs and exclamation points, but the final rule is interesting: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Makes sense, but it also raises the question: Who skips ahead? Most grown-up readers either slog through a book’s slower sections, like the sewer history in Les Misérables, or take their impatience or boredom as a cue to read something else.
Who skips ahead? Kids do.
They do this, I suspect, in two situations. One is when they are tasked with reading a grown-up book that they find utterly unendurable. I recall the anguish with which my high school self read Ethan Frome before having the bright idea that I could still pass the quiz if I just read every third page. (It didn’t work.) The other situation is when kids are reading for plot in a book whose language is not captivating enough to keep their eyes from dancing ahead over tone-deaf dialogue, adverbs proliferating like some invasive species, and long passages of unnecessary description.
You know what I mean: a young adult (YA) novel.
I have no desire to enter the perennial and presumably click-driven debate over whether adults should read YA. Adults should read whatever they want, whether that means YA or Dummies manuals or Tijuana Bibles or even Thomas L. Friedman. But kids are a different story. The literature they are exposed to will influence not only their adult reading habits but their personalities and inner lives. Today’s parents are likely correct to assume that little Jason or Chloe will not be taught to love reading by Ethan Frome. But there is plenty on the spectrum between Edith Wharton and Divergent, and it is going unnoticed.
Crime fiction—noir, detective novels, police procedurals, and madcap adventures in the Carl Hiaasen vein—may be the perfect thing to whet a young person’s appetite for reading. At first glance, it is an odd candidate for this task: Isn’t it violent, frightening, and perhaps even a corrupting influence? Isn’t it laced with profanity and, in some cases, sexually explicit?
Yes, but the same is true of so much of the music, television, film, and even network news that parents are helpless to keep from their children. The same is true, for that matter, of many YA novels with far less literary merit than the best crime writing.
Parents have always fretted about the moral content of what their kids read. Andrew Levy’s Huck Finn’s America (2014) details the 19th-century panic over dime novels about pirates and banditry. David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague (2008) details the furor over horror comic books in the 1950s. However one is inclined to regard the sensitivities of those eras, the fact remains that their scandalous productions are seldom revered as art. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Elmore Leonard have, by contrast, all been enshrined in the Library of America.
These men wrote violent, lurid trash, yet they are now as canonical as Irving, Hawthorne, and Twain. And you can give said trash to your kids without a pang of conscience, knowing that they will encounter in it something of the American literary tradition. That is not, on its own, reason enough to choose crime fiction over either classic literature or YA, and a balanced diet should probably include all of the above. Still, crime fiction combines the best of both the classics and modern YA, while adding some nourishing ingredients of its own.
The best crime writing is excellent prose at the sentence level, and while it may not be up to the standard of a Melville or Twain (what is?), at least it handily surpasses the best-written YA. The classic opening line of James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss (1978), a book Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookshop and the Mysterious Press considers the ne plus ultra of detective stories, was quoted in several of Crumley’s obituaries:
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
Few novelists in the Western canon have written better or more evocative dialogue than George V. Higgins in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970): His grim characters never sound like anyone you know, but you know they must be out there somewhere. At the same time, most crime fiction, like YA, is aggressively, unapologetically plot-driven, with nothing to skip, making it ideal for those with Disney Channel attention spans. And needless to say, the sex and violence that might make crime fiction a tough sell for parents make it anything but for kids, who crave a taste of the forbidden.
Crime fiction presents not only the forbidden but also the merely grown-up. It affords an entrée into the adult world. Its protagonists are not vampires, wizards, or futuristic reality-show contestants but real people with real jobs. Along with private eyes, one finds in the pages of crime literature insurance agents (James M. Cain), process servers and bail bondsmen (Elmore Leonard), profilers and forensic scientists (Thomas Harris), park rangers (Nevada Barr), military policemen (Lee Child), and undercover cops (Matt Burgess). At a time when children are led to believe that they can get rich off an app or a pop single, such exposure to hard, dangerous, selfless work is invaluable.
Crime writing is, by definition, travel writing—and sometimes time-travel writing—as well. The best crime writers mark their territory and then bring it to life. Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy can take you to California; James Crumley to Montana; Elmore Leonard to Detroit; James Lee Burke to Louisiana; Charles Willeford and Carl Hiaasen to Florida; Daniel Woodrell to the Ozarks; Dennis Lehane to Boston; and Richard Price to New York City. Get your kids a library card, and they will know their country and its underbelly—and develop a sense of empathy and curiosity—long before the time comes for a college tour.
By empathy and curiosity, I do not mean gullibility. Crime writers rarely glamorize crime and violence the way television and movies do. They do not present bad guys who are always victims of society and circumstance. Often they fulfill a scared-straight function, showing how one decision born of greed or impatience can send a life into a tailspin of cascading failure. The “ten rules” in Leonard’s Swag are applied selectively, as a teenager would apply them: The thing most likely to go wrong is always brushed aside with a flourish of wishful thinking. This juvenile sense of Teflon untouchability, this inability to know who or what to trust, is what dooms the born loser of a crime novel.
I didn’t read my first crime novel (Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest) until college, where I shared my appreciation for the Continental Op with a friend whose brother worked in private investigation. I wish my teachers had given it to me sooner. It taught me to demand a story from everything that I read. It showed me a moral universe both more ambiguous and more exacting than anything I had hitherto encountered. It taught me that, notwithstanding man’s fallen nature, good and evil are not primitive myths.
If kids today need to be tricked and conned into reading something worthwhile, something as morally instructive and beautifully written as it is entertaining, then these bloody, crazy books ought to enjoy pride of place in every school library in America.
-
No comments on Why your children should read crime fiction
-
An interesting anniversary considering what tomorrow is: Today in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling punishing WBAI radio in New York City for broadcasting George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. (If you click on the link, remember, you’ve been warned.)
Birthdays begin with Fontella Bass:
Damon Harris of the Temptations:
-
From, of all places, Mother Jones:
On Tuesday night, the State Department released some 3,000 pages of emails between Hillary Clinton and her aides during her tenure as secretary of state. The correspondence offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes view of American diplomacy in action, as well as the former first lady’s fashion choices. But some of the more intriguing exchanges involved the media—how her team sought to shape the news, the journalists they considered receptive to their message, and the close degree to which Clinton monitored how she was covered.
Much of this email traffic involved Philippe Reines, a senior advisor and spokesman for Clinton known for his combative exchanges with the press. One email thread that underscored the Clinton team’s focus on message-control came in late May 2009, ahead of a meeting of the Organization of American States. Its member-nations span North and South America and were poised to vote on whether to revoke Cuba’s decades-long suspension from OAS. …
After OAS members voted to revoke Cuba’s suspension, Clinton wrote to her advisers on June 3, 2009: “CNN is reporting this as being done against my wishes. Any way to salvage?”
Reines replied with a lengthy email explaining why the narrative was not as “dire as it seems in the moment.” He noted that President Barack Obama would be delivering a major speech in the Middle East the following day that would “blanket coverage and extinguish the Cuba stuff, so we just need to weather the night.”
He wrote:
we are suffering from two significant tactical problems: 1) you are here and removed 2) our press corps was out of position today and in flight, so the people we worked on all week and the ones likely to skew our way were replaced by reporters not connected to us. The two issues above will be rectified tomorrow in your two interviews – especially Greta who is malleable. We can use that to make a strong case on the principle, and the simple fact Cuba wasn’t in the OAS yesterday, and won’t be tomorrow. Everyday that passes reinforces that point. The time difference to East Coast will help us in moving whatever is said in these interviews tomorrow.
In his email, Reines was referring to an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, which aired the following day. The topic of the OAS meeting did indeed come up:
VAN SUSTEREN: I know you’ve been to Honduras. The OAS, after you left—it looks like Cuba’s going to be invited back in.
CLINTON: No, that wasn’t the outcome.
VAN SUSTEREN: It wasn’t the outcome? What happened?
CLINTON: Well, we were very adamantly opposed to those who wanted to lift the 1962 suspension and leave it at that. That was not acceptable to the United States. That’s, unfortunately, the path that they were on earlier. And we made the case to many countries and found a receptive audience that we could agree to lift something from so long ago that was really part of the cold war, but we had to reaffirm the values and principles of the OAS. We had to explicitly reaffirm democracy and human rights. And then we had to have a process.
So yes, you can lift the suspension, but that’s the beginning, that’s not the end. Then Cuba has to decide whether it wishes to become a member of the OAS. And then the OAS must, according to its practices, purposes and principles, enter into a dialogue with Cuba and make a decision.
So this was the beginning. Unlike what some had hoped, to have a kind of fait accompli, we were able to create a consensus that the majority of countries in the OAS agreed with the United States.
VAN SUSTEREN: So we haven’t been snubbed.
CLINTON: Oh, not at all. In fact, this was a very good example of the kind of diplomatic engagement that we want to be involved with.
Later that year, Reines emailed Clinton a PDF of the “gorgeous cover” of Time magazine, which carried a cover story by Joe Klein on Clinton.
“How does the article compare to the cover???” she replied.
At another point in 2009, Clinton received an email from Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a major fundraiser for her 2008 presidential campaign and a leading PUMA (Party Unity, My Ass) activist who opposed Obama’s nomination that year. Rothschild told Clinton of her recent get-together with Leslie Gelb, the onetime president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran New York Times journalist:
H,
I spent yesterday with Les Gelb on Nantucket. He had lots to say which might be of interest, but I thought the most important thing to tell you is to make sure you are aware of the Parade magazine piece he wants to do about you. He would like to do a day in your life, when you meet with members of Congress and international figures. He wants to show the impact you are having domestically and internationally. He said he would give you a veto over content and looked me in the eye and said, “she will like it”. Maybe you know this, but did not want it to fall between the cracks. Enjoy your vacation and love to all of you.
Xoxo,
LClinton forwarded Rothschild’s email to her staff: “Pls see below and scheduling options requested. Is this a cover story? Does anyone know?”
An aide later replied, “Yes, we’re trying to find a date that works for Les, but he is a little, shall we say picky.”
Clinton responded, “We should create a day–meeting w Webb about Burma, McCain/Lieberman/Graham about Af-Pak, etc. Meeting w Mitchell/Holbrooke etc.” (She was referring to Jim Webb, John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, George Mitchell, and Richard Holbrooke.)
Gelb did indeed get his day-in-life-with-Hillary piece, which ran in Parade on October 25, 2009.
“Our 24 hours together would prove both grueling and inspirational, full of diplomatic pageantry, big meetings with policy brainiacs, small sessions with trusted aides, a stream of time-consuming formal duties, and, of course, phone calls and more phone calls,” Gelb wrote. The day included a meeting with Holbrooke, the late diplomat then serving as the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who described “a practical way to counter Taliban propaganda and enhance America’s image in Pakistan.” George Mitchell also made a cameo in the story: “On a line electronically secured from eavesdroppers, she converses with George Mitchell, the Middle East envoy (twice).”
Gelb concluded his story: “The Secretary, with her unfailing smile, repairs to her office for more calls and reading. It’s hard to read the mind of someone frozen in the public spotlight like Hillary Clinton. She has to be perpetually onstage. But what I think I glimpse beneath the unflagging smile and constant concentration is a very tired person—tense, frustrated, but absolutely determined to make her tenure as Secretary of State a success and to accomplish important things.”
The Founding Fathers did not risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so the media could act as the PR arm of a presidential candidate. Van Susteren should be ashamed of herself. I doubt Gelb, a longtime lefty, is capable of that.
-
“The unusual medium used to create a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI … has upset Roman Catholic leaders in Milwaukee,” reports Mitch Smith of the New York Times. Go figure. They’re not talking about Post-it Notes or chewing gum. Niki Johnson’s portrait of the pope emeritus is fashioned from “17,000 stretched-out condoms in a variety of colors.” It is titled “Eggs Benedict.” …
Johnson says the portrait is “not hate-based,” but rather — in Smith’s paraphrase — “a way to critique Benedict’s views while raising awareness about public health.”
Good luck with that. Archbishop and blogger Jerome Listecki criticized the Milwaukee Art Museum for accepting the piece: “Would they accept art—pick your favorite religious or historical figures—featuring them in various pornographic poses (which has happened in some international publications)?” he asks, alluding to the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo.
This column is interested in the same question, but as regards the New York Times, not the Milwaukee Art Museum. The Times has already answered Listecki’s question in the negative by pointedly refusing to print any of Charlie Hebdo’s controversial cartoons to illustrate stories about January’s Islamic supremacist massacre of Charlie staff. But Smith’s piece is accompanied by a photo of the prophylactic pope portrait.
The Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams and National Review’s Charles Cooke are both critical of the Times’s double standard — but both let the paper off too easy.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet told Adams in January: “Was it hard to deny our readers these images? Absolutely. But we still have standards, and they involve not running offensive material.” He added: “They don’t meet our standards. They are provocative on purpose. They show religious figures in sexual positions. We do not show those.”
It is true that some of the cartoons in question depict “sexual positions” and thus are unsuitable for reproduction in a family newspaper for reasons having nothing to do with religion. But some of them are tame. Why not show the latter? In an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers, Baquet claimed: “To really show what the fuss was about you have to show the most over the top drawings. Otherwise, people won’t really understand the story.”
That answer begs the question somewhat: Even if we accept Baquet’s premise that you can’t “really understand the story” without seeing all the cartoons, it does not follow that seeing some of them brings one no closer to understanding than seeing none of them.
Even so, most of this can be squared with the Times’s treatment of “Eggs Benedict.” It seems implausible to assert that the portrait is unsuitable for a family newspaper: There is nothing offensive about the image of Benedict, as distinct from the medium. And there’s no question the photo helps the reader understand the controversy.
But wait. In a subsequent email to Byers, Baquet added: “[We] obviously don’t expect all to agree. But let’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet. I don’t give a damn about the head of ISIS but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them.”
We have it on good authority that there are also Catholic families in Brooklyn.
Now consider what Phil Corbett, the Times’s associate managing editor for standards, told Adams:
“I don’t think these situations — the Milwaukee artwork and the various Muhammad caricatures — are really equivalent. For one thing, many people might disagree, but museum officials clearly consider this Johnson piece to be a significant artwork.”
“Also, there’s no indication that the primary intent of the portrait is to offend or blaspheme (the artist and the museum both say that it is not intended to offend people but to raise a social question about the fight against AIDS). And finally, the very different reactions bears this out,” he added. “Hundreds of thousands of people protested worldwide, for instance, after the Danish cartoons were published some years ago. While some people might genuinely dislike this Milwaukee work, there doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage.”
So Corbett offers three distinctions: First, that “Eggs Benedict” is “a significant artwork,” while the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are not. De gustibus non disputandum est, but Corbett rather misses the point. The significance of the cartoons lay in their news value, not their aesthetic value — and the Times does purport to be in the news business.
Second, “there’s no indication that the primary intent of the portrait is to offend or blaspheme.” Let’s note that “primary” does all the work in that sentence and that Johnson’s no-offense-intended assurance strains credulity for us. We shall nonetheless assume arguendo that Corbett is correct on this point, to which we’ll return presently.
Corbett’s third distinction concerns the difference in the “level of outrage.” Here his empirical basis seems indisputable, but it’s an odd basis for a news organization’s publication decisions. If hundreds of thousands of Catholics did protest “Eggs Benedict,” would the Times then adopt a policy of concealing it? That would be bizarre, given its greatly enhanced news value.
Which brings us to the example Adams and Cooke miss, one that disproves pretty much every one of Baquet’s and Corbett’s claims about Times standards.
On Jan. 10, three days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Times published this report by David Dunlap:
For the first half of the 20th century, an eight-foot-tall marble statue of the Prophet Muhammad overlooked Madison Square Park from the rooftop of the Appellate Division Courthouse at Madison Avenue and 25th Street.
Sixty years ago, the statue was quietly removed, in an episode that now looks, in light of recent events in Paris, like the model of tact, restraint and diplomacy.
What had spared the sensibilities of Muslim passers-by from 1902 to 1955 was that “Muhammad,” by the Mexican sculptor Charles Albert Lopez, was among nine other lawgivers, including Confucius and Moses. …
“They probably didn’t know he was there,” George T. Campbell, the chief clerk of the Appellate Division, First Department, said in 1955, when the statue was finally removed out of deference to Muslims, to whom depictions of the prophet are an affront.
(For the same reason, The New York Times has chosen not to publish photographs of the statue with this article.)
The statue of Muhammad was certainly not “provocative on purpose” (Baquet) or intended “to offend or blaspheme” (Corbett). The building’s designers would not have erected the statue unless they considered it “a significant artwork” (Corbett). Dunlap’s story was illustrated by a photo of the courthouse statuary as it looks today. How can readers “really understand the story” when the Times won’t “really show what the fuss was about” (Baquet)?
Actually, that last question is based on a false premise. As best we can tell, there was no fuss. “While some people might genuinely dislike this [statue], there doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage” (Corbett).
When it comes to religiously offensive images, it seems clear the Times has at least two separate policies: With respect to Islam, nothing may be published that has the remotest possibility of giving offense. With respect to Christianity, anything goes, at least if it is consistent with the paper’s other standards.
Why? Maybe the motive is ideological (Muslims are “oppressed,” hence due more deference than “dominant” Christians), maybe practical (fear of terrorism). Our guess: a bit of the former, a lot of the latter. Either way, why conceal the policy in a web of falsehood and illogic? What’s the point of a newspaper that doesn’t tell the truth?
-
Today in 1969, Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi created Mountain:
Birthdays today start with Paul Williams of the Temptations:
-
Those who think a Supreme Court decision makes ObamaCare a permanent feature of our lives need to read Robert Laszewski:
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision President Obama said, “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”
Will it be repealed and replaced by Republicans? I doubt it because it is so unlikely that Republicans will score the electoral trifecta Democrats did in 2008 by winning the White House, the House of Representatives, and having a filibuster proof 60 votes in the U.S. Senate and therefore have the power for a complete repeal and replace.
But does that mean Obamacare is “here to stay” as it is? It clearly is not.
Why not?
Here is the answer in just one picture:
… Why is Obamacare still so unpopular?
The most recent Real Clear Politics average of recent Obamacare approval finds 43.6% favoring the law and 51.4% opposing it.
Why have so many more opposed Obamacare than approved it since its inception?
Just look at the picture.
For those eligible for Obamacare, an impressive 76% of those earning between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level have signed up. [Note: the eligible up to 400% of the federal poverty level includes only those eligible for Obamacare’s insurance subsidies and does not include those in or eligible for employer-based plans.]
But after that income level the percentage of those eligible who have signed up drops like a rock.
The proportion of the population that is signing up for Obamacare is concentrated in the very lowest income categories while Obamacare is obviously unattractive to everyone else.
It’s no secret that wealthier consumers who make more than 400% of the federal poverty level, and therefore don’t get an Obamacare subsidy, have seen their individual health insurance rates increase substantially because of the new law and haven’t been happy about it.
So, this picture tells the story. Obamacare is unpopular because only the poorest have literally embraced it by buying it.
Why do they buy it? Because they pay very little in after subsidy premium and they get their deductibles and co-pays substantially reduced to boot.
And who votes? The poor don’t come to the polls in the same numbers as the rest of the population. Even in the 2008 election, with the first African American presidential candidate nominated by a major party on the ballot, only 52% of adults coming from families making less than $20,000 a year voted while 80% of the adults from families making over $100,000 voted.
Obamacare will never be popular, or a great vote getter, unless it meets the needs of other than the poorest.
Despite all of the subsidies, why aren’t the working class and middle-class signing up for it?
Consider this:
- The law requires people who do not have health insurance to buy Obamacare.
- If they do not buy it they are subject to a fine.
- Obamacare subsidies help people who can’t afford it pay for it.
- Obamacare is a monopoly—the only way in America you can buy individual health insurance is to buy an Obamacare compliant plan.
- The only place you can get an insurance subsidy is on the Obamacare exchanges.
- People generally want to have health insurance.
After all of this and two complete open enrollments, only 40% of those who are eligible for Obamacare have signed up—far below the proportion of the market insurers have historically needed to assure a sustainable risk pool.
If this were a private enterprise enjoying these kinds of benefits, and only sold its product to 40% of the market, its CEO would be fired.
Looking at this picture, only 20% of those eligible for Obamacare, who make between 251% and 300% of the poverty level, bought Obamacare. Why?
According to the Kaiser Calculator, a family of four making $60,300 a year (253% of poverty) would still have to pay out premiums of $4,934 a year (8.18% of household income) for the second lowest cost Silver Plan after their Obamacare subsidies. The good news is this is about half the price of an unsubsidized policy.
The bad news is Obamacare would still cost this family $4,934 a year for a policy with an average deductible of almost $2,900. How many families making $60,000 have an extra $4,934 in their budget for a policy that will likely pay them almost nothing?
Apparently, many of these families have concluded that they are better off staying uninsured and paying for their health care costs out-of-pocket.
Of course if someone in the family is really sick even premiums and deductibles this high can be a great deal.
And therein lies the challenge as the administration tries to sign-up enough healthy people to offset the cost of the sick, who will join no matter what the price, and keep premiums affordable.
Why is the Obamacare population sicker and causing so many big 2016 rate increases a year earlier than expected?
Because, the very poor aside, the people who most often see value from Obamacare’s high priced policies and big deductibles are those who know they will use it and take more money out of the system then they will put into it.
That the Obamacare exchange population is a lot sicker than the off-exchange population has been clearly demonstrated by a recent research brief, “Understanding the Exchange Population: A Statistical Snapshot,” from Truven Health Analytics.
Among Truven’s findings was the fact that the on-exchange population had 39% more hospital admissions and 64% more emergency room admissions, have a “significantly higher prevalence of chronic conditions,” is much older, and has a higher use of expensive specialty drugs, than the off-exchange population.
The Truven data also reaffirmed the notion that most exchange participants are the poorest who, unlike everyone else, benefit from substantially reduced deductibles and co-pays because of cost sharing reductions: “For all of the exchange members we found that most (73%) are enrolled in a [cost sharing reduction] plan, and most of these enrollees (44%) are in the Silver plan with an actuarial value of 94% [the most generous of plans].”
Is Obamacare financially sustainable in its present form?
Just look at the picture.
To be financially sustainable Obamacare is going to have to attract a lot more people. This program, with its high after subsidy premiums and huge deductibles, simply isn’t attractive to most consumers—unless a person is really sick. So, far the only people attracted to Obamacare are the poorest—whose premiums and out-of-pocket costs are very attractive.
Is Obamacare politically sustainable as it is?
Supporters have often pointed to surveys that say Obamacare participants are very happy with their policies, including one that found that 86% were happy with their coverage.
Of course they are! Just look at the picture. The majority of people who bought it are poor and therefore have very low premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. Marketing 101 would suggest that these supporters should also ask the 60% of the people who didn’t buy it how they feel about Obamacare.
So far Obamacare is popular among the poor people who disproportionately get the benefits. It is not popular among the people who get far less out of the program, are the taxpayers who have to pay for it, and also are the people who vote the most often.
If the only information you had about Obamacare you got from this picture, would it look to you like Obamacare is both financially and politically sustainable?
The good news is that Obamacare dodged a huge bullet when the Supreme Court upheld its subsidies in 34 states.
The bad news is that it is still Obamacare.
For health insurance reform to be both politically and financially sustainable Obamacare will have to be materially changed and I have no doubt, that when the 2017 rates are known to all of the people going to the polls in late 2016, there will be an undeniable mandate to change it come 2017–no matter who wins the election.
-
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
-
Our political history reveals that too many times people who say they are against infringement of individual rights, what they are really against is that they aren’t in charge to do the infringing. If you say you are against some sort of abuse, and then prosecute the same sort of abuse when you are in the majority, you are a hypocrite.
This is the biggest problem I have with the establishment GOP, they wail against the Democrats doing crappy things and when they get in charge, they just do crappy things of their own…we must avoid the urge that “WE. MUST. DO. SOMETHING!” instead of approaching a response that is well thought out…
But agit8er’s gonna agit8.
I will say that what this ruling does is legalize the hunting of gay marriage opponents. As an example, I offer the process in the New Mexico gay wedding photography case of a few years ago, Willock v. Elaine Photography, LLC – because there is something that never really came to the attention of the public in that case that is revealed in the final order of the New Mexico Human Rights Commission.
The fact of the matter is that while the respondent, Elaine Photography was clear that they did not prefer to photograph gay weddings, the complainant’s (Vanessa Willock) partner, Misti Collinsworth (aka Misty Pascottini) proceeded to attempt to secure the services of Elaine Photography after it was clearly known that they were not interested in the business. Collinsworth did so under the name of Misty Pascottini without identifying that it would be a same-sex ceremony, apparently with the intent to deceive Elaine Photography.
Ms. Willock and Ms. Collinsworth (Pascottini) filed a “public access” discrimination complaint AFTER securing another photographer who successfully photographed the ceremony – and for substantially less than the amount quoted by Elaine Photography.
According to the final order:
“Ms. Willock was shocked, angered and saddened to receive Ms. Elaine Huguenin’s response. Ms. Willock was also fearful, because she considered the opposition to same-sex to be so blatant. Ms. Willock thought that Ms. Elaine Huguenin’s response was an expression of hatred at what Ms. Willock had hoped to be a happy occasion.”
So, other than losing her “joy” over this, she could demonstrate no material harm. She must have had time to recover her joy as the actual ceremony didn’t take place for almost another year.
Elaine Photography and its owners, Jonathan and Elaine Huguenin, were hunted – they were targets of two apparently radical lesbians who engaged in a blatant set-up and apparently were intent on forcing their views on others. There were ample opportunities for them to secure another photographer (which they did) and there was no binding legal agreement between the complainant and the respondent. This case was decided wrongly on the law and says more about political correctness and arbitrary exercise of authority by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission than it does fairness.
After Canada legalized same-sex unions, they set up a national “human rights commission”, the job of which has been to prosecute and persecute “non-approved” beliefs and opinions. Those that aren’t clearly in violation of any law, they tie up in a lengthy and expensive process of defense. As author and columnist Mark Steyn says, “the process the punishment.” Get ready for such a national “human rights commission” in the US.
The point to all of this is this: you can’t trust a government or a judiciary to decide based on principle. Most quasi-judicial bodies like the New Mexico Human Rights Commission are politically motivated and view legislation as nothing less than an opportunity for mischief. This is the kind of crap that has opened Pandora’s Box and ultimately results in less liberty for everybody. There is a reason that the Constitution spells out limited government.
-
America’s first and only sports car, the Corvette, began production today in 1953. Therefore, some Corvette music is in order:
-
Here’s what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator:
We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. … In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century’s most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes.
So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.
Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)
When he was running for president in 2000, Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Senator Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story — except it’s false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court. Al Gore’s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic party in microcosm. The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.
As recently as 2010, the Senate’s president pro tempore was former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.). Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it.
You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.” The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican party were suburban, prosperous New South types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist.
Is it unforgivable that Bill Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history.
What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn’t get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience that “what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. … Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” She was presumably referring to voter-ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support.
Charen didn’t mention the racist history of Lyndon Johnson; MSNBC did:
In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the n—-r bill.” …
Johnson was a man of his time, and bore those flaws as surely as he sought to lead the country past them. For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation. As Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it. Once, Caro writes, the stunt nearly ended with him being beaten with a tire iron.
Nor was it the kind of immature, frat-boy racism that Johnson eventually jettisoned. Even as president, Johnson’s interpersonal relationships with blacks were marred by his prejudice. As longtime Jet correspondent Simeon Booker wrote in his memoir Shocks the Conscience, early in his presidency, Johnson once lectured Booker after he authored a critical article for Jet Magazine, telling Booker he should “thank” Johnson for all he’d done for black people. In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, “when I appoint a n—-r to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a n—-r.”
According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffeur, described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “n—-r” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n—-r, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
Johnson also said to two southern governors (who certainly were not Republicans), “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference… I’ll have them n—-rs voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” That word also figured prominently in the daily language of the sainted Democratic president Harry S. Truman.
Various excuse-mongers claim that, hey, that’s how Southerners talked in those days, and look at what Truman and Johnson did for blacks. That is a pass that no Republican or conservative ever gets.
Roger L. Simon adds:
I am uniquely positioned to say this because I spent most of my life on the Left and was a civil rights worker in the South in my early twenties. I was also, to my everlasting regret, a donor to the Black Panther Party in the seventies.
So I have seen this personally from both sides and my conclusion is inescapable. The Left is far, far worse. They are obsessed with race in a manner that does not allow them to see straight. Further, they project racism onto others continually, exacerbating situations, which in most instances weren’t even there in the first place. From Al Sharpton to Hillary Clinton, they all do it.
Barack Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard. Recently, in reaction to the horrid actions of the deranged, but solitary racist Dylann Root, the president claimed racism is in our DNA.
How could he possibly utter such nonsense and who was he talking about? The majority of Americans are from families that came to this country after slavery existed. Many of those were escaping oppression of their own. In my case my family was fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Many of the members of my family who stayed behind ended up gassed in Auschwitz or exterminated in Treblinka.
Is Obama telling me that racism is in my DNA? What a wretched and insulting statement. If he means that, he should tell it to me face-to-face.
If he does, I will tell him what I think. The racial situation in this country has gotten decidedly worse since he took office. And he is a great deal to blame. Ever since the beer summit it was obvious he was disingenuous and harmful on the subject of race, seeking to stir the pot when it was actually empty or nearly. His claim that if he had had a son he would look like Travyon Martin was ridiculous and self-serving in the extreme. Barack Obama is a product of the fanciest private school in Hawaii and his children go to Sidwell Friends, the fanciest school in D.C. He takes vacations on Oahu and his wife parties in Switzerland. He had as much in common with Trayvon as I do with the queen of Spain.
And speaking of foreign lands, I’ve spent time abroad and speak Spanish and French and if Mr. Obama thinks the U.S. is a racist country, he ought to do a little bit of traveling not on Air Force One. Try sitting at a French dinner table for twenty minutes and listening to the casual conversation if you think America is racist.
The truth is the USA is remarkably un-racist for a country its size. We weren’t always that way, obviously, but we walked the walk and we are now. Or were. The Democrat Party and its assorted media hacks are trying to take us backwards. They suffer from nostalgia for racism for the glorious days when they could assert their moral superiority. Sorry, those days are over. The only way to stop remaining racism is to stop it, not talk about it, impute racism to people who don’t have it and generally do everything possible to divide the American people from themselves.
Let’s assume for a moment that racism reveals itself not by what someone says, but by what someone does. In this state, with few exceptions (two being late state Rep. Polly Williams (D–Milwaukee) and former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist), Democrats opposed Milwaukee school choice, the only way anyone has come up with to get inner-city children out of bad Milwaukee Public Schools. The reason, of course, is that school choice is opposed by the teacher unions, proving where the Democrats’ priorities are, and are not. The same forces spiked the creation of a Madison charter school for black students.
Similarly, Democratic Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett and his police chief, Ed Flynn, refuse to support policies that would reduce crime in high-minority-population areas, such as Saturation Area Patrolling. It is racist to assume that non-whites don’t care about being victims of crime. (Barrett, meanwhile, has not lifted a finger to improve MPS. Had he wanted to, he could ask Gov. Scott Walker to get legislative Republicans to pass a law to give the Milwaukee mayor control over MPS, and the Legislature would pass that law in seconds. Barrett hasn’t, and either isn’t interested or is too afraid to take on the education establishment.)
Blacks have higher unemployment rates than whites. So when Democrats support policies such as ObamaCare and minimum wage increases that make employment more costly for employers, Democrats advocate policies that make things worse for blacks.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that he looked forward “to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That is the only standard worth having.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 