Monthly Archives: June 2012

Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Obamacare

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We were wrong! We were wrong! The title of this website aside, The Wrong Wing had predicted in multiple posts, even as late as this morning, that the Supreme Court would slash down the Affordable Care Act, after all, they had given the middle finger to the American people more than a few times before…

Terrific news from Washington DC today as the United State’s Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional and the thorniest issue, that of the individual mandate, was valid as a federal tax. The news is a huge victory for President Obama but much more importantly, it shifts the fundamental focus of medicine in America from that of treatment to that of care.

obamacare victory

Thank you John Roberts

The Affordable Care Act, as we have often said, is not perfect. Parts of it looked impossible constitutionally considering the current judges’ leans. But it is, however, the step that the nation needs to take to dissolve the profit-oriented interests of people and corporations who are supposed to be providing care. Insurance has always been counter-intuitive; why would you sign up for a plan where you pay money just in case you are injured or need treatment for a disease, and when that time comes the person you have been giving money to this whole time tries to fight to save every cent, at the expense of effective treatment?

Now, at least, everyone will be insured, or at least bearing the costs of the nation’s healthcare. Right now, taxpayers and the national debt fund people’s care who aren’t insured and who don’t pay their medical bills. This is a huge reason why healthcare is more expensive. That cost should start to come down as the costs are shifted across the spectrum.

But all of these points pale in comparison to the fact that we as a nation have been able to start a dialogue about the proper forms of healthcare and the ways that we pay for them. Our booming health crisis is only getting larger (pun intended), and there will need to be more seriously drastic steps taken on a federal level to head off a disaster. The Affordable Care Act at least starts to get everyone, especially the troublesome people who rebuffed paying their bills, into health schemes where they should in theory see a doctor every once in a while and who might be able to nip problems before they grow into chronic diseases.

The Wrong Wing has always said that we don’t have a healthcare system, we have a stop-you-from-dying system. Once you are brought back from the brink of death, a hospital rep shows up with forms and asks for your insurance card. Now, everyone will have one, in the hope that the health system will provide just a little more care, and perhaps a few more moments to recover before hounding you about what treatment you can afford.

Supreme Decisions: Obamacare Ruling Expected Today

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The John Roberts’ Supreme Court has made some questionable calls since the W Bush years. The biggest and most blatant injustice towards the citizens of the United States was its ruling on the perversion of free speech in campaigns and unlimited political donations from the rich and corporations. Today, the court looks poised to strike down all or part of the Affordable Care Act. It will only be the beginning of the trouble.

fat americans

If only support for Obamacare was this robust

As we have seen, the Supreme Court gets to evaluate how it feels about certain laws and programs, without ever having to understand or plan out the consequences of what follows a ruling. In the case of the health care act, the Justices will say that citizens cannot be regulated or forced to purchase anything, less they face a fine. The broken health system — which is already the most expensive in the world per capita, piling up debt, depressing our nation’s preventative medicine, and effectively killing our citizens — will go right back to the way it was; a fast track towards a health apocalypse.

Republicans hate Obamacare because it came from Obama. Mitt Romney created an identical legislation when he was governor of Massachusetts, but has separated himself from the initiative that he championed. There is no single reason to oppose Obama’s health care bill, except for the inexplicable idea that the government is forcing people to do something they don’t want. This is ludicrous. There is not a single citizen of this nation that does not eventually need health care.

Republicans themselves are also a giant part of this problem. Ballooning waste lines, skyrocketing diabetes, all-you-can-eat-buffets; Republicans are rapidly pushing the limits of elastic pants, with foreseen consequences that in the near future will mean a huge portion of our population managing multiple chronic diseases and trying not to lose their limbs. Why Republicans, who dominate the fattest states, would not want some system to help to manage their self-inflicted conditions, is startlingly unknown and reflects the same “me, now” mentality that led to their obesity in the first place.

Moreoever, why Republicans think that health insurance companies are the answer should be an important question, but Obamacare eliminates the need for it because it keeps the system of private insurers in place! Even the executives of insurance companies love Obamacare, because it means more customers! So there is no reason that anyone who is happy (ha) with their insurance coverage should have to change.

If the Affordable Care Act is struck down today, there will be retaliation. It will not come from the wounded Democrats, or the great thinking minds of today. It will not come from rationality or reason. It will come from the bankrupting of this country to pay for the poor decisions and laziness that we as a rich nation have come to expect. The cost of health care will continue to skyrocket until we approach the edge of the heliosphere, and even at that point, there is nothing to stop it from continuing to increase.

 

Marco Rubio on The Daily Show

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The Tea Party has a new strong man. In an extended interview with champion-of-sanity Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Florida Senator Marco Rubio revealed that he hasn’t even the tiniest clue of what is going on around him. A point that Stewart enforced by commenting on their completely disconnected universes.

marco rubio

Nothing builds biceps like filibustering

Being a young senator is difficult, no one listens to you, and the youthful exuberance of being elected serves only to annoy the elders who have patiently waited their turn for power. So it was no surprise that Rubio spent the entire interview complaining about not being able to add amendments to every bill. That can be forgiven, he is young. But what can’t be forgiven is who he chose to blame for this obstructionism: the Democrats.

Like a puppy that keeps eating a shoe even after being scolded repeatedly, Rubio neglected to answer any of Jon Stewart’s questions about congressional behavior with anything more than a jab at the Dems. There was no mention of seniority in the senate, nor of political capital, nor of the difficulty in driving consensus. He kept on saying that the Democrats were cutting him out. His whining was not sympathetic. Let’s see how he changes his tune after two decades in Washington.

The interview is a mantle piece for why the GOP will never be able to constructively add to solutions that will help our nation progress forward and better the lives of its citizens. They are unwilling to come close to compromise unless it is for “legal loopholes,” which in an interview like this is really a tension relief loophole (when the two try to find something to agree on).

In the end Rubio praises the discussion that they were able to have as what we need more of. It just goes to show how far Rubio’s head is up in the clouds if he thinks exactly what we need so badly are more discussions like the one he presented. Can we find a legislative loophole to remove him from office and send him to Alaska to go kayaking with Sarah Palin?

Egypt’s Election Results: Morsi Wins, The World Worries

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For first time in modern memory Egyptian citizens voted in a presidential election, and though the longterm outcome remains a central worry for the US, the election itself is highly symbolic. The winner, Mohammed Morsi, is the candidate fielded by the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative theological group. What they do now, the world waits to see.

Egypt's Election

Still standing the test of time

Egypt is strategically important to the United States for both security and political reasons. Mubarak, Egypt’s fallen strongman, who seems on the cusp of death, was a longtime American ally which provided a massive buffer zone between the Middle East and northern Africa, essentially placing an artificial secular, and neutral-towards-Israel wedge between the Arab world. But this week’s election has shown that division existed more on a political level, and that Egypt’s population and beliefs are much more similar to their neighbors in the region.

Israel, and its American supporters, fret about the devolving situation in the Sinai peninsula and the continued adherence to the peace treaty that ended Egypt’s conflict with Israel during the second half of the 20th century. America has been giving Egypt military aid for years, one worry is the country turning its firepower towards Israel, either directly or in an effort to aid the Palestinians. The Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important transit points for goods and fuel and lying entirely in Egypt, is currently pledged to remain open to all nations, but could become limited or extorted against the west.

Politically, the Middle East has Syria, Iran, and transitioning nations like Yemen to worry about. But Egypt’s massive size and population requires that stability be recovered quickly. Another point that the election revealed is that the Egyptian population (82 million) is strongly but evenly divided across the political spectrum. This means that the balance of power will remain tentative as parties exchange seats over the coming decade. Real change might be hard to achieve.

The above argument is a big reason why the Muslim Brotherhood’s biggest challenge, gaining legitimacy, is fraught with peril. It is a long road to a good reputation, especially when the world has already labelled you as a semi-terrorist organization with a jihad on the west. While there are certainly informal connections that lead anywhere one chooses to go, the Muslim brothers are now more occupied with helping Egypt through promises they made to voters. The demands of high office, including continuous public scrutiny, might serve to straightlace the outfit away from its questionable connections.

Ultimately, as in every case before it, legitimacy and popularity come from real action that visibly improves the domestic situation. The Muslim brothers say they are working for their people, for Egypt, we must give them time to hold their word. Nothing is sure at the birth of democracy.

The Redistribution Of Wealth; Republican Anti-Tax Ploy

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Republicans want you to believe that taxes are the same as early 20th century communist doctrine. They argue that taxing anyone at all is tantamount to their term of death: the redistribution of wealth. Yet this gaping fallacy neglects the fact that all governments, in every form from monarchies to democracies, utilize taxes to pay for government. Quite simply — and to us blatantly obvious — taxes are not a redistribution of wealth, because they provide services everyone uses, not transferring wealth from one to another.

Tax dollars

Tax dollars hard at work

Transferring wealth from one to another comes in the form of investment, inheritance, property, things that make up wealth. Wealth is the type of money that people save up over time and use to build homes, invest in the stock market, put aside for retirement or a rainy day. There is no structure in place in America today that allows the government to take wealth away from anyone person and give it, in kind, to another person. This just does not exist.

Still, Republicans are quick to harp on social assistance programs as examples of redistribution of wealth. Money goes from those who have more to those who have less. But social assistance programs are not wealth-generating, they are temporary stop-gaps to keep people in their homes and food in their children’s bellies.  No one is using food stamps to buy shares of Apple (the company, not the fruit). In fact if anything the programs are purposefully inadequate to make it as undesirable as possible to stay unemployed. Therefore, since assistance programs do not generate wealth, it cannot be a redistribution of wealth.

Republicans think that any tax, tax plan, tax idea, or especially tax increase is a redistribution of wealth, ignoring these critical services that we already can’t pay for. For our society to continue to function at the level we expect, we have to provide these services that Republicans talk so hard about cutting. That’s because so many of the services the government provides are deeply intwined in our everyday lives. As a result of fearing taxes, the divide between what we need and what we can actually afford explains our mounting debt.

Instead of fixing the debt problem through a balance of trimming services and raising taxes, Republicans focus on antiquated ideals of socialism and communal ownership, which would redistribute real wealth from one to many a la Karl Marx. There is nothing even remotely close to that happening today in any part of the world, even in China, where wealthy business people drive Porsches and live in penthouses like the wealthy anywhere else.

A redistribution of wealth is nothing more than a Republican ploy to poison the debate over taxes in their effort to eliminate services for the poor to close the debt. A baseless charge grounded in hatred.

The Sound Byte Era

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If you are one of the many wondering why public political debates, both from politicians and passionate citizens, have become so polarized, so damaging, and so unproductive, you have the sound byte to thank. The sound byte has terrorized political arguments, because they can single-handedly take a politician hostage. They are simply too damaging.

context is king

Well, it used to be

A sentence is made up of letters and spaces. When arranged correctly, letters make up words, and these words carry meaning. Remove a few letters from a word and the meaning is lost. Words placed together in a certain way create a sentence. Sentences have meaning. Taking out words adjusts that meaning. A sound byte is precisely this; a part of a sentence or thought that is purposefully removed from its context for broadcasting and proliferation. Because attention spans are shortening like the Arctic ice-shelf, people try to communicate everything as quickly as possible, often at the expense of true understanding.

Context, which is fundamentally crucial to human understanding of language, can be removed by choice, and a sound byte can be repurposed. The demands of today’s media competition mean that anyone with editing technology (which is pretty much anyone) can take a few words from a speech or debate and provide a brand new context, thereby creating a story or a specific impression. While something like this should be illegal, it unfortunately is not.

The result: rational arguments which acknowledge the strengths of the opposite position are impossible today. A candidate or politician cannot be heard saying, “my opponent is right about this, that, and the other.” The candidate cannot actually work towards a real and possible solution based on compromise. If he or she does, all the media will take from it is “My opponent is right.”

Because of the above-mentioned factors, negativity has crushed optimism. It is much faster to say: “My opponent doesn’t know what he’s doing,” than to say “I agree with the following points, however I disagree with his approach to…” Instead of getting a constructive debate such as: “Candidate X is right about the problems with our immigration system, such as the cost of illegal immigrants on our health care system, but I feel that the answer lies in naturalization and not deportation,” we get “illegal immigrants are ruining our country and we must get rid of them.”

The technology that records everything and allows any amateur to become James Cameron is irreversible. News agencies will not stop cutting out sound bytes and spreading them around the public. So the change must come from the public itself to demand proper context for quotations and clips. We must retake our understanding, even if it takes a few more minutes.

Finally, Someone Who Cares About Integrity: Politifact

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It is easy to get carried away with the rigors of campaigning and being a politician. They are up against incredibly poor odds and they often make promises they can’t keep. They also need to find arguments to paint negative pictures of their opponents. But increasingly, politicians are making ridiculous statements that are completely false or taken out of context. As both sides sharpen their blades, truth is what ends up being stabbed first.

stat checking

Need more proof that the GOP is the obstacle to progress?

Thankfully, mercifully, wonderfully, there are the folks at Politifact.org. Quite possibly the most rational and objective team on the web right now, they scour sources and experts to verify or deny claims coming from those in the political sphere, including the recent addition of adding common comments reverberating around Facebook. They have become the go-to place to settle an argument over a figure or statement, and their Pulitzer Prize proves it.

Statistics can be dangerous when they are accurate, but meaningless when adjusted. For example, economic figures coming from the Romney and Obama camps on the surface appear polar opposites: Romney claims that the US lost jobs under Obama and Obama cites an increase in 4 million jobs. The difference is the time periods included. Romney is starting from the first day of inauguration, and Obama is starting from 5 months later, after his policy had a chance to take effect. When he took office, America was spiraling recession thanks to the abject recklessness with which the previous President ran the nation.

Normally these types of statements aren’t important, but then again, most of the time it’s not an election year. This election year is different, as each has been in the past. This year, social media is more important than ever, and it means that information, such as claims and statements, will be shared and carried much further. Just like the age-old game of telephone, each time the information passes through another’s screen, it is liable to change. By the time the fact gets around to a few more people, it might be completely inaccurate and almost certainly stripped of all context.

It’s bad enough to hear politicians lie or fail to follow through on promises, but when the masses start slinging around false and contextless statistics, it will become harder than ever to properly evaluate the candidates. It is only the start of the reasons why Politifact is so important to the idea that integrity, even in politics, still matters.

Romney’s Horse: Dressage And The Masses

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Sports are wildly popular in America. The current NBA Finals are managing monster ratings, even with a small market team like Oklahoma City. American men (and some women) paint their bodies and faces on weekend autumn days and brave freezing cold weather to support their beloved teams. Even as major sports take increasing amounts of attention, other more traditional sports carry allure too. 

dressage olympics

Just like the GOP training Romney

Rodeos are as American as Lincoln’s hat. Cowboys gave birth to swagger, and as America swept across the western territories of the Louisiana Purchase two hundred years ago, their image in civilization rose. John Wayne is still the quintessential man after all these decades. Even today, the romanticism of horses and the wild west lives strong within us.

Even horse races can captivate the nation, with winning horses at the Triple Crown events becoming celebrities instantly, like this year’s I’ll Have Another. With all the pomp and circumstance of the hats, the tradition, and the white faces, horse racing at least gets a mention in major media.

Yet there is one variety of horsemanship that normally gets left out. Equestrian sporting tends to be reserved for the super rich, who have access to farms and stables in areas where there normally aren’t many farms or stables, like Boston or New York City. Young preps hop over small fences and bushes. Some have taken the sport so far that they created “dressage” or the advanced training of a horse to respond to minimal commands: some have deemed it horse ballet.

The fact that the American public is nearly completely oblivious to dressage probably helps the Romney’s more than it harms them, as they are sending one of their horses to compete in London’s summer Olympics. What might normally be cause for ridicule, or at least alienation, has given way to general confusion. “What?” is most people’s response.

But it reveals just how deep the canyon between Romney and most of America is. He is fabulously wealthy, and if elected would be the richest President ever to hold office. He has never in his life come close to understanding how difficult it is to make a living without privilege. While he himself has been very successful in business, all this post is saying is that he has so much money that he grooms horses for dressage. A true leader would address the fundamental issues of America and maybe consider donating the metals his horse wins in London to help to feed the poor that is trying so hard to screw over.

Romney’s Running Mate 2012: The Mystery Man

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As fingers touch keyboard to write this post, the GOP and Mitt Romney’s campaign team are vetting possible candidates for the running mate to join Romney in the race to the White House in November. But this year’s election is unusual in a few ways. First, there is a strong absence of powerful options. Second, it is more important than ever to be reserved with a choice (after the Republican’s Sarah Palin disaster of 2008). And third, campaign rhetoric — if it can indeed be called that — by the Republicans during the primaries revealed irreversible damage to the intra-personal relationships of candidates and their supporting bases.

mystery man

Not as sexy as Biden

Normally, a vice presidential candidate comes from the group of presidential candidates during the primary season. Lots of hopefuls toss in their hats at the beginning, most knowing that they will not secure the nomination in the end, but will gain valuable exposure and possibly a route to higher office. The Republican primary contests earlier this year seemed more like a matinee circus show than a political event, with amateur leaders milking the life out of the Tea Party movement. No one in the GOP hoped that Romney would end up with the nomination, even though he was correctly labelled as the front runner the whole time.

Yet here we are now, the Republicans have their #1 man, and now they need a #2. Looking at the other candidates from the primaries, very few of them have any desirability left. Herman Cain came out about an affair. Michele Bachmann was exposed for what she really is: a legislative distraction. Rick Perry was too much like W Bush (which makes you wonder how terrible it is to be a voter in Texas). Newt Gingrich promised the world, lied to everyone’s faces, attacked the field, but ended up with the black eye himself. Ron Paul is never taken seriously by the Republican Party (and there is a Libertarian on the ballot in November already). The only one left is Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum would be the conservative choice, but not a conservative choice. Just like Palin before him, Santorum is too much of a wildcard. His words are aflame with religious doctrine that would bring an uncomfortable spotlight onto faith in a race where Romney wants to avoid discussing Mormonism. He also has proven widely out-of-touch with the American population through his unpopular views on homosexuality and his practice of isolating his children from society. In a race where every candidate is accusing the other of being out-of-touch, it would hurt Romney to go radical.

That being said, many Republican pundits believe that Romney must choose a running mate that is to the right of him, to shore up support from the evangelicals, Tea Partiers, and social conservatives who look wearily upon his record of tolerance. This is nothing more than Republican pundits trying to satisfy themselves, and is the wrong strategy if Romney really wants to win. There is no way that Republicans to the right of Romney on the political spectrum would ever vote for Obama. Even though they might be unhappy with the Republican nominee, they will undoubtably vote for Romney. Half of the trash they spew is about getting Obama out of office, with no apparent reason (i.e. he’s black, he helps the poor, he doesn’t start wars under false pretexts, he cares about progress).

The intra-Republican attacks during the primary season revealed one thing: the GOP has lost its mind. They and their donors spent millions of dollars to paint other Republicans as hurtful, profligate, socialist, and insane, only to have to try to congeal before facing the real enemy: the Democrats. After the ads, the debates, and the statements, there is no way that Romney returns to that pool to pick his fish. So his campaign is certainly looking outwards, and looking for one thing: economic prowess.

Jobs and the economy top the list of American priorities, and Romney’s resume both helps him and harms him, depending on who you talk to. But Romney could gain a valuable boost by selecting a running mate who has proven himself (or herself, but really who are we kidding?) as a strong economic steward, a leader who has taken a state or a city and kept it from bankruptcy, default, and maybe even found some growth. The duo might look like the board room at a major corporation, but that might be just what Americans are looking for. Let’s hope for the left that Romney chooses Santorum.