Let’s look at the bright side. If the new bill passes, the more liberal states will be guaranteed a public health insurance option which can compete with private insurance to drive health care costs down and provide coverage to more people. If you had asked me in mid-August after Obama all but cried uncle on the public option, I would have been ecstatic to hear that a plan like this would still have a chance in October. What about the states that opt out though? Are the uninsured and poorly covered people of those states going to have to move? It’s not clear if the final version of the bill would allow states to opt out by a majority vote of the state’s legislature, the flick of a governor’s pen, or some other method, but however it happens, this opt out could be a blessing in disguise.

Finally, Conservatives will have to put their money where their mouths are. For years, Republicans have been getting away with vague platitudes about smaller government and lower taxes mixed with complicated jargon detailing why everything bad comes from the mean liberals. With all of life’s distractions and the public’s ever-narrowing attention span, these arguments sometimes sound plausible enough to fool a good amount of people into missing the actual results of Conservative policies over the past few decades. When the real effects of real governmental policies can be overshadowed by fears of an impending gunless, tax-heavy police state that will never happen, some people can lose their perspective. But what if the realities of anti-populist policy fall right at the doorstep of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public? What happens when the state next door starts seeing real results from real health insurance competition? If the final health care bill only allows the public opt out after 2014 (which would mean all states would have it for a year or two) as is being discussed now, then every uninsured and underinsured American can get a taste of health reform. How will Mr. and Mrs. Public react if their state’s Republican governor pulls the health care rug right out from under their feet? Suddenly that local race is decided by a lot more than mere party affiliation. Suddenly that vote has real, direct consequences to a family’s pocketbook. Fox News can’t yell over that noise.

So maybe we should embrace this opt out plan as an opportunity to allow average Americans without a daily interest in politics to see the real effects of both sides’ proposals and decide for themselves. Let America experience real reform for a minute, then let Governors Jindal and Pawlenty et al. try to take it away because of some “anti-big government” ideology. Their rhetoric may not be so convincing after people get to see the benefits of a properly run public option in action. And once we get enough Americans on our side, who knows, the floodgates could eventually open for more substantial and meaningful health care reform.

With racism that overt, there’s obviously a large and justified outcry for Bardwell’s resignation. Louisiana Democrats and Republicans alike are joining in the chorus. Governor Bobby Jindal said that “disciplinary action should be taken immediately — including the revoking of his license.” Two sad facts are apparent from this story, though. One, most forms of racism are not this obvious, and two, too many people agree with Bardwell’s “not a racist, but…” assessment.

It’s amazing how often people who consider themselves completely tolerant lean on stereotypes when it comes to race. The definition of racism to them is simple: believing that a person is intrinsically inferior based on the color of his or her skin. Of course that’s part of it, but it’s so much more than that. Bill O’Reilly’s “more tea, M-Fer” episode and Rush Limbaugh’s multiple brushes with racism, among many others, are examples of the undercover racism that is much more prevalent today. Undercover racism is often caused by white resentment against blacks who they perceive to want free handouts or undeserved special consideration. Without a doubt it’s possible to disagree with welfare or affirmative action policies from a non-racist perspective, but too often the roots of the disagreement are much more sinister.

This resentment manifests itself in phrases like “Why can’t I say the N-word when a black person can say the N-word as well as cracker or honky? It’s not fair.” Today’s covert racists claim that the other side is racist for expecting extra “perks.” They ignore the shameful history of the way African Americans have been treated since they were forcibly brought to this country and resent the fact that it makes a big difference today. So they say we should move on, that part of our nation’s history was ugly, but it’s over. They say we should start from square one right now oblivious to the fact that even square one itself in many ways is unacceptable.

So the answer to the previous question is because the N-word has a brutal history that cracker and honky can’t even begin to compare to. That word has a subtext that one who hasn’t been victimized by it could never fully understand. That I could never understand. So I have to take their word for it. I can’t sympathize, but I can empathize. I haven’t experienced it, but I know just how loaded that word is. So I know I shouldn’t use it, not even in a non-disparaging way. There are comparably nasty words that are applied to various other cultures, and all of them are far more offensive than cracker and honky. That’s the scourge of the people who has oppressed all of the other people the most brutally in recent centuries. We don’t get to cry racism.

Undercover racists would say “Please, don’t give me the white man oppressor bit, I haven’t done anything to anybody, that’s all in the past, and what about this group and this group and this group? They were way more brutal than white people. And Group A and Group B were SAVED by white people. You never mention that!” Or something like that. Then you have to get into a “which group was more brutal?” fight which quite effectively diverts attention away from the main issue. Regardless of who did what the worst to whom, in America, white people enslaved black people and eradicated Native Americans brutally. Period. So we don’t get to cry racism.

“But that’s all in the past, it’s not my fault what my ancestors did. Why do I have to suffer?” It’s true. What your ancestors have done cannot be blamed on you. But you are reaping the benefits. When slavery ended after the Civil War, former slaves had to start from scratch. The promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule” had been quickly revoked, and former slaves had exactly zero dollars to their names. Even if every freed slaved had been given forty acres and a mule, it wouldn’t have even begun to approach the amount of wages that would have been accumulated had they been paid for their services. In theory, although not by law, slave owners owed each slave wages for every single hour worked while a slave. No slave owner was required to pay these back wages. Add onto that the punitive damages for years of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and murder and freed slaves stood to be fairly wealthy people if justice had truly been served after the downfall of the Confederacy.

So how does that relate to us today? Well every single person walking the face of the Earth today owes a huge part of his or her successes in life to inheritance. I’m not just talking about posthumous estate inheritance either. The money that was spent on your education and upbringing came from your caretaker, usually one or both parents. They in turn owe a portion of their success to their ancestors and so on. The freed slaves who started at square one could only pass along to their descendants what little they could earn after square one, and as anyone who has ever been poor knows, it’s hard to rise out of poverty when you come from poverty. Poverty, like extreme wealth, lives on from generation to generation. Of course some people beat the odds and rise above their circumstances, but even then they had it harder than they should have. The disadvantages borne from the days of slavery clearly live on in the outsized poverty rates for minorities today.

Every person who has an old slave owner on his or her family tree has benefitted through the generations at least in a small part from resources that should have been paid as wages to freed slaves. I know I have at least one slave owner in my ancestry, so while I’m not directly responsible for any of this, I am benefitting in part from the fruits of someone else’s labor. The subject of reparations is indeed a touchy one, and maybe nowadays it would be impossible to figure out who descended from where and who is owed what. But it would be nice if the powers that be at least acknowledged that it is owed. I mean was it really only this year that Congress finally sorta, kinda apologized for slavery??? And even then it was not without controversy from some corners.

Add into the equation the racism that, especially this week, we can see is still alive and well, and it’s clear the playing field is far from level. And that’s just how undercover racists like it, whether they know it or not. And that’s the problem. People like Keith Bardwell, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh seem to believe that any attempt to actually level the playing field is an affront to white people. They can’t even admit to themselves that they are racists. And as any alcoholic can tell you, the first step is admitting you have a problem. So how can we take the next step in race relations in America when racism is much more subtle and many with racist tendencies can’t even see that there is a problem? Well it’s certainly not going to be quick and easy, but it’s true when they say racism isn’t inborn, it’s learned. And like wealth and poverty, it’s kept alive from one generation to the next. So let’s just try to do our part to not teach this attitude to the next generation. Let’s break the cycle for good.

It must be said that progressives are inevitably at least somewhat disappointed whenever their guy gets in to the Oval Office. After all, the Democratic Party on the whole is much too beholden to corporate interests to see completely eye to eye with the left wing. The reason progressives in general identify with Democrats is mostly due to a “lesser-of-two-evils” mindset. The current governmental reality has only given us three political choices for the most part: far right Republicans, centrist Republicans, or slightly left leaning centrist Democrats. Despite the fearmongering that is quite common in conservative circles these days, Obama has been no exception. So while in certain regards Obama has let down the progressive community, we can’t say that it’s a huge surprise.

Every recent Democratic President has had his shortcomings. For all the positives of the Clinton administration, we have the huge disappointments of NAFTA, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act to be furious about. For all of the potential of Jimmy Carter’s focus on human rights, his initial realistic talk about the Cold War, and the Camp David Accords, we also have his counterproductive obsession with the hostages in Iran, his eventual escalation of the arms race with the Soviet Union, and much more to be angry with him about. Let’s not forget that Lyndon Johnson brought us not only Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Great Society, but also the murderous debacle that was Vietnam.

I’m not suggesting that we should give Obama a break, to the contrary, our most important function as a community is to put pressure on our guy when the pressure might really matter. We could have screamed at Bush until we were blue in the face and he probably wouldn’t have listened to us, but if Obama listens to one-tenth of what we yell at him about at least we’ll have accomplished something. So we should have an adversarial and critical relationship with our government whoever is President, but ESPECIALLY when it’s our guy. Supporting him when he’s wrong just because he’s “one of us” or  following the advice of many Democrats to “just give him a chance” doesn’t do anyone any good. We have to follow the oft-quoted advice of FDR who said “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” In that light let’s look at one of the biggest and most puzzling disappointments that the Obama administration has brought us so far:

This weekend there will be a National Equality March in Washington for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights. Although this type of march would be a good awareness booster at any time, it is especially important now given the disappointment Obama has been to the gay community. At a time when numerous states are finally seeing the light on marriage equality, Obama has stubbornly stuck to his pro-civil union, anti-gay marriage guns.

In addition to symbolic slaps in the face like inviting gay rights opponents to say the opening prayer at his inauguration(Pastor Rick Warren) and sing at political events (Donnie McClurkin), President Obama has perpetrated some very real slights to gay Americans. In August John Cloud wrote about this in Time magazine:

Obama has also said he opposes … the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. Obama has said several times that he would like that law overturned. And yet — sorry, the contradictions keep coming — once Obama was elected, and once a gay couple in California had sued to overturn DOMA, his Administration not only defended the law, but defended it in a legal argument so reactionary that it would embarrass Dick Cheney (who, incidentally, is to the left of Obama on marriage).

There’s also the President’s even more puzzling actions on the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy which only allows gays to serve in the military if they stay firmly entrenched in the closet. The President has repeatedly spoken of his opposition to the policy, and everyone in the country (including Fox News) seemed ready for it to end in January of ’09, but for some reason the policy remains.

The situation becomes even more puzzling when considering the multitude of experts who have suggested that it is well within Obama’s powers to simply instruct the Secretary of Defense to “make investigations a rarity, so that ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ simply does not function,” according to another Time magazine article on the subject. Congress would eventually have to overturn the bill, but even this doesn’t seem to sound that difficult nowadays. The same Time magazine article even cites “a new Gallup poll (which) finds that most conservatives — 58% — now support openly gay people serving in uniform.” The gay community was a big part of Obama’s election coalition, and if he continues to disappoint he could find himself in a big whole support-wise. So when the Equal Rights March comes to Washington this weekend, let’s hope President Obama is listening.

Update: It was announced earlier this week that Obama will give a major gay rights speech Saturday at the Human Rights Campaign’s Dinner in Washington. I’m cautiously optimistic.

The Ayatollahs who actually run Iran are not to held up as examples for the rest of the world. There is plenty of evidence that they stood behind a fraudulent re-election of Ahmadinejad this year, they run an Islamic theocracy that clearly eclipses the elements of democracy that exist in Iran, and they are openly hostile in their rhetoric to Israel.

But as Greenwald and Cole both point out, not only does this not constitute real evidence that they are planning a nuclear holocaust, but they also have done nothing that the United States and Israel have not also done themselves. Let’s remember that America currently flanks Iran from the East in Afghanistan and from the West in Iraq, and as Greenwald points out:

Imagine if Iran had invaded, bombed and then spent the last eight years militarily occupying Canada and Mexico, only for Iranian media elites to keep insisting that it was the U.S. that was the rogue state run by aggressive fanatics who threatened world peace.

The fact is Iran, a flawed and potentially dangerous country that must be watched for sure, IS allowing inspections of their nuclear facilities and IS alerting the IAEA of their existence before nuclear materials are brought there. Assuming they continue to follow through on these promises, it would be virtually impossible for them to build a nuclear device without our knowledge. Plus if it ever turned out they were lying and had built a nuclear weapon, the tally would still be the United States and Israel: a couple thousand nukes and Iran: 1. No objective observer under these circumstances can seriously argue that Iran poses a real immediate danger to anyone.

The fact of the matter is that what Iran is doing now may warrant lots of negotiating and investigating, but it doesn’t come even close to warranting military or economic action. With the thin amount of evidence the saber rattlers have at this point, there must be an ulterior motive (or motives) for wanting to invade Iran. It’s not hard to speculate on what some of those motives might be either.

When we look at a world issue, it is vital that we look at it without the clouding influence of ultra-nationalism. It’s great to love your country, but the best way to do that is to be fair and demand an even greater accountability from it. We need to look at these issues from a global perspective, to look realistically at the other side’s argument. Sure, much of that argument we may disagree with, but if we simply accept inflated and inaccurate versions of what they believe (the ones many saber rattlers are describing), the blood that is shed because of it will be on our hands, too.

So while we discourage Iran from testing missiles and building secret nuclear factories and urge them to allow full and continuous inspections of said facilities, we must hold our allies to the same standard. If Israel, a country that we know possesses nuclear weapons, will not comply with the Non Proliferation Treaty and allow inspections, how can we expect Iran to do so? If Israel regularly test fires missiles themselves, then we look like hypocrites if we demand that Iran does not.

We certainly want to prevent the loss of lives and land in Israel AND Iran. We don’t want innocent people to be killed in either country, and regardless of what we hear them say, WE certainly don’t want either country to be wiped off the map, right? Therefore we must urge both sides to act in good faith if we want any hope of having either side actually comply. Unquestionably supporting one side will only serve to anger the other. And military action against another Middle Eastern country will only cause the tensions between us to get worse.

10/1/09 Update: Juan Cole is on a real roll right now with this issue (that rhyme was an accident, I swear.) Here is another great article from him that came out today.

10/1/09 Update II: And look what diplomacy can do! If Iran holds true to this deal, the saber rattlers might have to come up with a different irrational excuse to bomb Iran!

One of my personal favorite arguments against evolution is one that has been articulated especially nuttily in Ben Stein’s paean to misinformation “Expelled,” but Cameron does a pretty good job too: ”I accepted a lot of things (about evolution) that are not true before I was able to sit down and listen to more then one side and think things through the issues…” The implication here is that the scientific consensus is just one opinion and all the scientists and professors in academia are suppressing the equally valid religious opinion about evolution. Sure, everybody has a right to express their opinion here in America and that’s a great thing. It is my Constitutional right to believe that four plus four equals nine, but Math teachers have the responsibility to keep my opinion out of the classroom. Likewise science teachers have a responsibility to keep non-science out of their classrooms. Philosophy and Religion deal in the realms of the subjective, but math and science are based on objective fact. Evolution, despite what creationists scream, is based on facts. Many of the details have been revised, improved, expanded, and clarified over the years as science not only allows but requires, but the core theories have repeatedly stood up to testing. Creationism is based on untestable claims, therefore is valid as a belief but not as anything more. So no, random opinions based on faith and not evidence do not make up the other side of the story. Evolution is the only side available that is based on evidence and the scientific method.

Speaking of revising and improving previous scientific theories, many creationists like Cameron site all of the things about Darwin’s theories that have been revised and improved in the 150 years since “Origin’s” publication as evidence that Darwin was wrong. As previously discussed, that argument shows a deep lack of understanding in how scientific study works. Darwin’s studies got science on the right track, and over the years new discoveries and innovations have improved the theory and will continue to improve it in the future. Creationists want to paint Charles Darwin as the god of evolution so they can view any flaw in his original theories as evidence that evolution as a whole is a crock, but that’s not the way science treats it. Science treats Darwin as the inventor of evolutionary biology, just like the Wright Brothers are the inventors of the airplane. The airplane as it is today has been improved and changed greatly since the days of the Wright Brothers, in fact today’s airplanes barely resemble the awkward device that carried Orville and Wilbur through the air over a hundred years ago. Others came along after them to perfect the machine, but that doesn’t mean that they lost their title as the fathers of aviation. In the same way Darwin’s role was as the springboard for evolutionary research, not as the infallible creator of a movement. Too many creationists can’t comprehend the difference and that is an essential reason why they are unable to grasp the true nature of Darwin’s role in evolution.

Of course how can we expect the creationists to present a convincing argument to anyone but the already converted when they don’t seem to actually understand the theory itself. Perhaps Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort should actually read one of those copies of “On the Origin of Species” before they hand it out. Almost none of their arguments against evolution are actual aspects of the real theory. For example, did you know that the Big Bang Theory is completely unrelated to Darwinian evolution? It’s not only a completely separate theory, but it’s in a completely separate branch of science! You wouldn’t know that, though, from listening to arguments from creationists like Cameron. He argues that evolutionists believe that “something came from nothing” by taking a quote from Richard Dawkins out of context. Of course he doesn’t believe that something came from nothing but that something came from “NEARLY nothing” like how a baby starts as a microscopic zygote (NEARLY nothing in that it can’t even be seen by the naked eye) and evolves into a fully formed infant. Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad, in an ABC debate with Cameron and Comfort, pointed out (at the 4:34 mark of the linked video) that the first law of thermodynamics (he mistakenly called it the third law of thermodynamics) states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so that pretty much negates the “nothing from something” argument. Exactly zero real scientists in the world disagree with the first law of thermodynamics. Of course the real truth, as Dunning repeatedly points out, is that evolutionary biology begins with the “Origin of Species,” which was millions of years after the origin of the universe itself.

Beyond misunderstanding the basics of real evolutionary theory, creationists like Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein take the horrendously illogical and highly offensive leap of at least partially blaming Darwin for the tragedy that was Hitler’s Final Solution. In defense of these claims Cameron says that “you can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin’s ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms… if you take Darwin’s theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things.”  Sure, and if you take Jesus’ Beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers” to its logical end you could reason that you should never, ever fight for anything that you believe in for any reason. No one would say that that’s what Jesus really meant. Taking everything to its logical conclusion (aka extreme) is what’s known as a “fallacy of the excluded middle” and is an incredibly dishonest way to conduct a rational argument.

There’s an atrocious moment in “Expelled” where Ben Stein, after visiting the sites of former Nazi concentration camps, looks into the eyes of a statue of Darwin as if to say “How could you have caused this?” From a purely logical standpoint, though, it’s just ridiculous to blame the originator of an idea for the misinterpretations of that idea that future generations employ. It’s true that Hitler applied Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” maxim as a social and philosophical construct, but that of course was not the context within which Darwin intended the maxim to be applied. After all, Darwin’s observations and theories dealt with the natural world, not the behavior of people. Natural selection eliminates weak and useless aspects of an organism’s biology in nature and does not mean that humans should try to do the same. Any connection that is given between natural evolution and eugenics is pure folly. The term “Social Darwinism” has been used in various fields ranging from politics to economics to psychology to describe the “Survival of the Fittest” (a term coined by Darwin’s rival Herbert Spencer and not Darwin himself) of a certain group of people. Charles Darwin was not primarily focused on any of these fields and proponents of the term wouldn’t count Darwin as a great influence. It’s just a nickname for a phenomenon and only creationists hell-bent on demonizing Darwin would apply it to the man himself.

Finally, perhaps the most maddening aspect of the creationist sliming of Darwin is the suggestion that evolution necessarily excludes God. Apparently if God exists, the only way that life could have possibly began is in a “poof” and a wisp of smoke. In the previously linked article, Kirk Cameron says that “atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is ‘The Origin of Species.’” Cameron believes that evolution is a recruiting tool used by atheists intent on thickening their ranks and therefore is a tool of the evil one that cannot possibly be true. But let’s put this issue into perspective. Science is necessarily God neutral. That means that while science does not provide for the existence of God, it also does not preclude it. If you review the definition of the scientific method linked above, you can plainly see that science only deals with hypotheses that can be proven and falsified. Since the existence of God is based on faith and can neither be proven nor falsified, God must necessarily fall outside of the realm of science. So science attempts to explain the ins and outs of the natural world, not who may or may not be behind it beyond the physical world. That is why there are plenty of scientists (even evolutionary biologists) who also happen to believe in God. They hold the perfectly valid but scientifically useless belief that God is behind natural selection. Furthermore, assuming God exists, how much sense would it make for him to go through all the trouble of creating the Earth and establishing a system of rules which we see every day and call science, only to break those rules as his first act as ruler of the Earth!?!?!?!?! Act 1 – Make the Earth appear in a “Poof!” Act 2 – Make a system of rules called science that contains unbreakable laws like gravity and inertia. If you ask me, for a Christian nothing should show the glory and majesty of God MORE than the beautifully complex set of rules that he established to govern the natural world and the creation of it. After all, what’s more awesome? “Poof!” or “the process by which forms of life having traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental pressures, as predators, changes in climate, or competition for food or mates, will tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than others of their kind, thus ensuring the perpetuation of those favorable traits in succeeding generations?”

So perhaps Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort should look into this whole natural selection thing a little bit more before going to such great lengths to falsely discredit it. They don’t even have to give up their firm belief in the Almighty to do it! Science and religion can coexist just as cozily as science coexists with atheism right now, all it takes is a little dose of reality and a giant helping of open mindedness. Don’t be afraid, after all a very famous philosopher once said “The Truth will set you free!”

10/1/09 UPDATE: New discovery alert! Suck on this, Cameron.

Type in a random politician’s name at opensecrets.org and look at the amount of money from each industry flowing into that candidate’s coffers. And that’s just the hard money! Can we seriously argue that that money isn’t directly buying influence and seriously wounding the integrity of the political process? In the 1975 decision Buckley vs Valeo, the Supreme Court’s opinion has been interpreted into the often talked about “money equals speech” rule that so many hide behind today. The main thrust of this argument is that the First Amendment’s free speech protections also protect campaign contributions. Throw in the corporate personhood ruling from the late 1800′s that allowed corporations the same constitutional rights as human citizens and BAM! you have legalized influence peddling. Of course current law bars corporations from contributing directly to a candidate, but individuals from those corporations can still do the contributing for it. There’s also a cap on individual contributions to limit the amount of influence that can be peddled by any one person, but the big money still gets its voice heard loud and clear. Remember, those limitations are just on the hard money. The limitations on the soft money are much less stringent, and the bottom line is with all the improvements and changes in the laws, politicians are still serving the big money interests after all these years.

The evidence of this loyalty to the big money is especially obvious in the health care debate. Can it possibly be a coincidence that the Blue Dog Democrats who are holding up reform are also big receivers of money from Big Health Insurance? How can they seriously look us in our faces and tell us that their concerns about the public option are for our benefit? Look at the desperation with which Blue Dog Democrats like Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana grasp for reasons to keep private insurance not only around, but competitive:

I know there are some people really pushing this public option, but I think it really undermines the essence of our efforts to create a real market-based private sector model but with strong, I guess, safeguards for consumers.

Despite the fact that Landrieu “guesses” that we might, maybe, possibly need safeguards for consumers, is there any doubt where her true loyalties lie? And can we really ignore the possible influence that the health insurance money she received may have on her refusal to accept anything but a “market based private sector model”? Even in the unlikely absence of a true connection between money and influence, the mere appearance of impropriety present would warrant an investigation for any other sector of society. But these are the lawmakers, and we can’t expect them to regulate themselves. Not without a little public pressure at least.

Our current system forces politicians like Landrieu to beg for help from the big money donors in order to stay competitive. The donors in turn give to everybody just to be safe, so no matter who wins, he or she is in debt to the givers. Not only is it considered rude to ignore the voices behind the money that put you in office, but if you ignore them, you run the risk of losing that money for the next election. We are practically forcing our elected leaders to be beholden to the firmly entrenched powers that be. As long as money equals speech, money also equals volume, and the big money voices will always drown out the small squeaks of poor John and Suzie Q. Taxpayer. Even President Obama, with his revolutionary internet, people-based campaign financing, takes money from all of the usual suspects.

The most maddening aspect of this issue is that we can hardly be angry at politicians for betraying us when the system that we allow to exist forces them to do just that in order to stay in office. We need to get rid of the notion that money equals speech. Voting is speech. Peacefully demonstrating and protesting is speech. Money can buy advertisements for products or even political issues, but it shouldn’t buy elections, directly or indirectly. I’m not suggesting that freedom of speech should be curbed in any way. I am a true believer that the government has no right to curb freedom of speech or expression and I reject all but the most obvious national security reasons as exceptions to this rule. Individuals and groups should be free to advocate any position they want in any forum that they can obtain. But when specific contributions are given to specific candidates from groups or individuals representing groups, that candidate’s ability to operate as an advocate for ALL citizens is necessarily compromised. Even if the strings are invisible, the strings are still attached. And no kind of bribe is protected by the First Amendment.  In the end, what good is the ideal of “one man, one vote” when a million dollars in reality can buy a million times the influence of that one trip to the ballot box? The only way to make sure that our representatives in Washington are working only for the people is to take away all other incentives. Full Public Financing equals Free Thinking Lawmakers.

Socialism is a term that is often misused blatantly on the right but also more subtly on the left, and finally I hear a real live United States Congressman talk like he knows what the word means! Republicans are flat out wrong as can be when they describe the current health care proposals as socialism, but even single payer health care isn’t truly socialized medicine. While it would contain aspects of Socialism (as many areas of American life do), single payer would still allow for the hospitals and health clinics, etc. to remain privately owned. The government would just be the PAYER! In England, the Nation Health Service (NHS) is socialized medicine. Doctors and nurses are government employees and the government runs the hospitals which are part of the NHS.

In America we have socialized education because public schools are run by the local governments to which they belong. Contrast this with a theoretical single payer education system in which the government would pay for students to attend private schools. (Sounds like the Republicans’ voucher system, huh? That is if the vouchers were intended to pay the entire tuition for every private school. Maybe if we called the voucher system single payer education, we could scare the Repubs away from it.)

Many nations have single payer health systems which also feature government run hospitals, but this is not an aspect of the basic single payer system. So while a single payer system COULD be socialized medicine, it is not necessarily going to be. This may sound like mere semantics, but the term “socialized (blank)” has become so overused and misapplied by everyone that it’s refreshing to hear someone that actually cares about the real meanings of words. So thank you, Anthony Weiner, for injecting some reality into our Representative Democracy; it’s a far cry from what we saw from your colleague, Joe Wilson, on Wednesday night.

It seems to be an accepted tradition in many modern countries (including our own) that if something is a fundamental right, it should be provided by the government to all citizens. National and local security has been determined to be a right, so we have a military and local police forces. House fire prevention is a right, so we have the fire department. Apparently having roads to travel on is a right, so we have a highway system. One of the fundamental debates at the heart of the health care reform battle is whether or not health care is a right (can you imagine someone arguing that it’s not? Oh right, people are doing that every day.) Fundamental human rights have always been important to the American discussion, but what happens when one of these rights is underserved?

The public education system in America, with all of its flaws, is still one of the few aspects of our society that exhibits real equality. Anyone, no matter his or her economic situation, can get an education from first grade through high school free of charge. While it’s possible to earn a decent living with only a high school education, there are many reasons why expanding free public education can help us out in numerous other areas. Oh, but I can hear the cries now, so everyone sing along: WE CAN’T AFFORD IT! Currently the public education system is run mostly at the state and local levels, and many school districts are woefully underfunded already. That is a legitimate worry which needs to be dealt with as well, but while we’re at it why not finish the task that we started and make ALL levels of education available to all Americans? Yes, we’d probably have to raise taxes on the upper income brackets back to pre-1980′s rates, and we’d have to address the cost of education in America to work out a financially feasible way to do it, but just think of the benefits!

Too many Americans are denied the opportunity to answer their true callings because they can’t afford college. Sure a person can make a decent living as a longshoreman or a union factory worker, and it’s important to fight for the rights of those workers so that they can make an even better living. But should a person who is uniquely gifted in, say, mathematics be denied his or her full use to society because college is too expensive? The more people who are able to do specialized jobs, the better off society is. The more people who are happy with what they do, the better off society is. College dropout rates in America are high, and graduation rates have stalled for more than three decades according to a recent article in U.S. News and World Report. And financial reasons are a major factor in that dropout rate. In addition to that there are the numerous talents who forgo college altogether for financial reasons. It hurts our ability to recruit the best and the brightest in a skilled workforce when only a fraction of our youth can afford to even get the tools needed to play the game. Science and technology, medicine, economics, how much advancement have we already missed out on by excluding such a swath of the public from the upper echelons of education? How many geniuses stopped after getting a bachelor’s degree because a master’s program and a doctorate would mean even more debt? Too many. The investments that we make in higher education in this country will be more than returned in all different kinds of societal benefits: socially and monetarily.

But what about the issues of today? I’m glad you asked. Because one of the ways in which an expanded free public education system can most benefit the United States in the future is in the area of health care. One of the major complaints from health care reform opponents deals with the theoretical long waits associated with universal health care. Of course most of these horror stories are greatly exaggerated, and American wait times are often comparable, but it’s common sense to say that more patients may equal longer wait times. Unless there were more doctors too. At this point in the health care crisis, we need to encourage more young Americans to become doctors to meet the demand of a hopefully growing amount of patients who can afford health care. So why do we make it so financially difficult for so many Americans to become doctors?

Doctors coming out of medical school often have huge student loan debts that can reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the hardest things for a former student attempting to break into the work force to do is to get out from under the mountain of debt accumulated through these loans. Some graduates can only afford to pay the monthly minimum interest on the loan and are thus stuck with these debts for much of their lives. Many potential medical students choose not to become doctors because they are intimidated by the great debts that they will accumulate. Also, young doctors are often forced to go where the money is to pay back these debts instead of taking less lucrative but more personally fulfilling offers. Eliminating the need for these costly loans through free public institutions for qualified medical students would mean more people could afford to become doctors which in turn would result in a greater availability of medical care.

The skyrocketing cost of health care that we are so seriously concerned about right now is also relevant to this issue. The question of doctor compensation is addressed in Matt Taibbi’s phenomenal new Rolling Stone piece on health care. This article is essential reading for anyone who wants a firm grasp on the political sausage-making that has gone into health reform this year. In a section about the gutting of the public option, Taibbi explains one of the ways in which Blue Dog Democrats sought to weaken the public option:

40 Blue Dogs expressed concern [in a letter to House speaker Nancy Pelosi] that doctors in the public option “must be fairly reimbursed at negotiated rates, and their participation must be voluntary.” Paying doctors “using Medicare’s below-market rates,” they added, “would seriously weaken the financial stability of our local hospitals.” The letter was an amazing end run around the political problem posed by the public option – i.e., its unassailable status as a more efficient and cheaper health care alternative. The Blue Dogs were demanding that the very thing that makes the public option work – curbing costs to taxpayers by reimbursing doctors at Medicare rates plus five percent – be scrapped. Instead, the Blue Dogs wanted compensation rates for doctors to be jacked up, on the government’s tab.

So a real public option could cost some doctors – unfortunate but maybe necessary – but what about those seemingly insurmountable loan debts? Imagine a system where doctors could afford to begin practicing medicine at more modest salaries because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings given to them by Uncle Sam. Doctor pay is important, it’s a tough job that takes immense skill and a sharp mind, so they deserve to be compensated handsomely. Eliminating this loan debt through taxpayer funded public education could offset the lost earnings some doctors may experience due to much needed health care cost controls. Even if these savings only occur in the long run, they would still be real and important. In fact they may be enough to make a real difference in the struggle to make health care more affordable for all.

This may sound like a classic case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. A skeptical observer might say that health care expenses are not being eliminated as much as they are being transferred into extra education expenses. But that view ignores the overall cost benefit of a more educated and better equipped work force. For example, an easier road to medical school means more doctors from impoverished backgrounds who can break the cycle of poverty in their families potentially reducing crime while making health care more readily available to the communities that they eventually return to – it’s a winning scenario for everyone if we’re willing to make the investment.

Still, the possibility of free college education opportunities for all seems unlikely at this point. After all there is the recession, record debts and deficits, and an already gigantic federal budget. And I’m not denying that to do it we’d need a huge change in attitude both economically and politically, but this is something that America CAN do. The British established their National Health Service when they could seemingly least afford it: in 1948 while they were recovering from the devastation of World War II. And we don’t want to say that we can’t do something that a third world country like Cuba has been doing for years, do we? We can reform health care AND expand free public education if we want to. The benefits to the American people would be tremendous.

While I was puzzled by his suggestion that “Yahoo goes left,” I found his faith in my open mindedness quite reassuring. I guess we all have our weaknesses. I’ve also included my hopefully open minded and intellectually honest response below with minor revisions (I can’t help tinkering with essays even after I publish them, it’s yet another advantage the blogger has over the print journalist.)

__________________________________________________________________________

From: *********************

Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 12:08 PM

To: Steve Guggenheimer

Subject: Krugman Story

Dear Stevie,

Found a story on yahoo (yahoo goes left unlike drudge) about Paul.

See below

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/313552/%22Krugman-Is-100-Wrong%22-About-Deficits-and-Govt.-Spending-RCM’s-Tamny-Says?tickers=%5EDJI,%5EGSPC,SPY,DIA,TLT,TBT,GLD

Could you address what is discussed with intellectual honesty and open mindedness or just a knee jerk reaction?

Let me know,

********(audience member from way back and currently)

___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Krugman Story

Steve Guggenheimer

Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 1:51 PM

To: ********************

Hi ******, thanks for the email. I read the article and am familiar with the arguments put forth by both sides so let me address this. I don’t at all think that running huge deficits is a good thing although it is quite common for the United States to do so. It is true that Obama’s deficits are unbelievably higher than anyone else has ever proposed, and many liberals would explain that away by saying Obama didn’t get us into this mess but he’s got to spend to get us out. But that is only partially true. Obama did not get us into this mess; there is plenty of blame to go around starting with the Administrations of both Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan. Despite this the deficit that Obama is proposing is larger than I think it needs to be. I have written on this topic at my blog at guggen.wordpress.com so I’ll refer you to the article called “Deficit Realities” for the specifics, but here it is in short:

Now what Krugman means by running deficits to spend your way out of a recession is true and despite right-wing noise, has proven truein the past. My problem is that we can do that without running as HIGH a deficit as we are now. There is plenty of wasteful spending in the budget (see my blog), but the stimulus isn’t part of it. That stimulus is absolutely necessary. But it is certainly true that the deficit and the national debt needs to be minimized to avoid future problems, but that doesn’t mean automatically cut all social programs. The government needs to be there for all of its people and in some cases that means spending on those left out (wholly or partially) of the economy by private enterprise.

Another way to minimize the deficit that the right wing won’t talk about is raising taxes on the insanely wealthy, which we have done in the past (see my blog entitled (“Paying the Cost of Health Care.”) The reason the right wing doesn’t talk about this possibility is that in many cases the deficit is not their primary concern. What they really care about is getting rid of those pesky social programs which make higher taxes necessary and which often threaten their private interests.

To address the article you linked to specifically, however, we must look at these three Friedman-esque principles which it enumerates:

1. Government spending “crowds out” private enterprise and rising deficits raise the risk of a run on the dollar.

2. Stimulus spending causes people to become unproductive because it shows enterprise isn’t rewarded. “It’s a disincentive to work,” he says, making a similar argument about unemployment benefits.

3. Bailouts impede capitalism by rewarding failure and giving capital to non- or unproductive businesses, as we’ll discuss further in another segment.

- The first part of #1 is ridiculous because social programs are aimed at the people left out (wholly or partially) by private enterprise or who are being mistreated by private enterprise. That stimulus was made to create jobs for those that private enterprise had abandoned due to their own financial problems. Now it’s true that a work force made up of government employess for, say, a construction contract has much less overhead and can underbid a private contractor in many cases, but that competition just provides the private contractor with an incentive to cut costs and keep employees. It comes down to whether you’re worried about the employees at the bottom or the profit margins at the top. Those employees at the bottom are just trying to survive. Those profit margins at the top are just trying to maximize, keeping those employees would not hurt the stockholders, it would just make their profits only amazingly high instead of insanely high. Stockholders and business people have a right to make a fair profit, but the government has a right to prevent them from hoarding an unreasonable amount of that profit.

- The second part of #1 can be true to an extent and that’s why the deficit should be minimized. But to say that the economy is bouncing back in spite of the stimulus is insane, the spending to employ workers is the only reason we’re not in a Depression right now. Remember if the money keeps funneling up like these right wingers want, the average person will have less and less to spend. And what we need to get out of this financial mess is the regular people buying things again.

- #2 is insulting because the private sector operates to maximize its profits by minimizing its expenses. So if it has 1,000 employees and decides it can get by with 500, then 500 people are out of a job. To say that the government giving those 500 people a job causes them to become unproductive is crazy. Enterprise is rewarded, but not all people are enterprising. The private sector is simply not big enough for everybody with an idea to succeed, those people who don’t succeed still deserve to be able to earn a living. And saying that unemployment benefits are a disincentive to work is heartless as well, unemployment benefits are barely enough to survive, but without them many people who can’t find work would literally starve. At the risk of being redundant let me stress this: private industry is about one thing: profit. That quest for profit leaves many people out of the economy through no fault of their own. It is inhumane to tell those people that they are useless because they aren’t a boon to a company’s profits. These people can still be useful to society and should be utilized and allowed to make a living.

- With regards to #3 I agree with that statement for the most part. Any business that is too big to fail is too big to exist. The government has a right to protect our national security in more than just a military regard. If our public economy depends on private mega-companies to survive, then we as a country are essentially being held hostage by corporate interests. If a company can maneuver itself into a position where if they fold, the nation’s economy folds, then they are free to do whatever risky and unfair practices that they want because if they screw up, the government has to bail them out in order to save the national economy. This cannot continue. Unfortunately under Obama it looks like they are trying to allow it to continue.

That’s just a tiny snapshot of my positions on the issue. I think Paul Krugman is one of the best economists in the world, and I know that he doesn’t support deficits just for the sake of deficits. He knows through an extensive knowledge of history that spending is necessary when the economy gets into trouble.

Thanks again for writing ******** and with your permission I’d like to post this e-mail on my blog to share it with others as well.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FYI – He never wrote back although I sent more e-mails asking for his response. I informed him that I would post the article unless he sent me an objection, then I waited a couple of days before I posted.

Now there is little doubt that an immense chunk of the deficit spending is a necessary response to economic problems that Obama’s predecessors are largely responsible for, and even minus a recession, the United States has run a deficit almost every year since 1968. In addition to that, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has explained why it’s not a good idea to try to balance the budget during a recession and why it can sometimes even be disastrous. So sometimes it’s okay to run a deficit, and even when it’s not, we usually still have.

But still, any which way you slice it, adjusting for inflation (with this nifty inflation rate calculator), calculating the deficits as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, whatever, Obama’s deficits are the biggest. And that’s fine if these deficits are absolutely necessary, but are they? Almost doubling the national debt within ten years is a scary thing to think about. That effects interest rates, the value of the dollar, and our standing in the world like never before. So if it’s at all possible, it should be avoided or at least minimized. So how do we minimize it? Do what the conservatives say and abandon the stimulus and universal health care and the improvement of any social program for the foreseeable future?

No.

That’s the important stuff. In a nation that’s interested in justice, those should be the first things we worry about. Whether the wealthy will acknowledge it or not, national prosperity should be measured by how the least of us are doing, not the richest of us. But Obama’s deficit projections aren’t so high just because of health care and the stimulus. They’re high because he wants to please everybody. He wants to be a Democrat with the stimulus and health care in addition to being a Republican with the military industrial complex and corporate welfare (okay, unfortunately these days those are often Democratic priorities too).

The bailout plans of 2008 continue largely intact in 2009, Iraq and Afghanistan are still war zones and money pits, Blackwater is still getting taxpayer dollars, and despite GOP rhetoric, the defense budget went up again under Obama’s proposed 2010 budget. The President is being true to his campaign promise of bipartisanship by giving too much to too many of his opponents. But conversely, saying yes to so much means disappointing both sides when the answer that they want is “no.” Democrats want out of Iraq (well at least they said that before the election) and the curbing of Bush’s claims on executive power. Republicans want the status quo as far as taxes and mediocre health care. “No’s” on these issues are proving unacceptable to some in both parties.

The only way to get America back to a fiscally responsible AND socially just nation is to make the hard choices. Cutting the defense budget would almost certainly be an unpopular move, but is there any doubt that the current defense budget is packed full of waste and unnecessarily large? Look at the “Global Distribution of Military Expenditure in 2007″ on this page. America’s defense budget is almost as large as the rest of the world COMBINED! That’s not about security, that’s about dominance and imperialism.

And what about the secret deals the current administration is making with drug companies to secure their high profits? The aforementioned wars that we’re still pouring money into even though they are making us less safe? There is so much room for savings in the Obama budget that we can’t honestly say that this huge deficit is necessary. We don’t need to run this large a deficit in order to reform health care, fix the economy, and conduct the necessary business of government, but right now the Obama administration is choosing to spend, spend, spend.

The President must know that he can’t please everybody. It’s already been all but proven that no matter what he does the Republicans will call him the illegitimate baby of Hitler and Stalin, and now the liberal wing of the Democratic party is starting to show signs of disillusionment with Obama’s more Conservative tendencies. The President needs to use his massive unpopularity with the Right wing to his advantage. After all, the Fascist/Socialist/Traitorous name calling really can’t get that much worse, so why can’t Obama become the right wing nightmare that they are already claiming that he is? Yank huge corporations off of the government teat, REALLY reform health care, end unnecessary defense spending, and while you’re at it, no more arugula in the White House kitchen! Maybe that last one went too far, but really, Mr. President, come to the light! I know you have it in you! This is the difference between a Roosevelt legacy and a Bush legacy. Please, become the liberal that the right wing already thinks you are!