Month: September 2009

2010, the GOP, and Play or Pay

Greg Sargent pulls out some interesting figures from a recent WaPo poll:

* That Dems hold an overwhelming 20-point lead on which party is most trusted on major issues, with Obama preferred over Republicans by 12 points on health care.

* That a majority, 53%, agrees that “government reform of the nation’s health care system is necessary to control costs and expand coverage,” underscoring yet again that the public wants government action.

* That a plurality now believes reform won’t prevent people from keeping their own health care, suggesting the public may be it reform as less and less threatening.

* That a big majority, or 62%, believe Republicans have not made a good faith effort to cooperate with Dems on health care.

That last one seems the most damning. Everyone talks about 2010 being full of doom for the Democratic party. To be sure, historic majorities like the current Democratic position don’t last. By definition, any “historic” majority is going to include seats that, for one reason or another, are more likely to be held by the non-historic-majority party more often than not.

But, and it’s a big but: to go back to the “predictable” seat holder party-wise, you still have to give those “predictable” voters a reason to prefer you. And the GOP isn’t doing it so far. Even worse: people are noticing. Naturally, we need to see some of these toss-up districts broken out to be sure, but I suspect this polling data is more or less on the nose.

The bad news for Democrats in this poll is this:

a big majority wants Dems to craft a bill that will win GOP support

Since we know a priori that no proposal will win GOP support (party leaders have done everything but put that in writing on granite tablets), there would appear to be a rather hazardous, built-in capacity for outrage. That is: voters, never ones to pay a lot of attention, will see that some healthcare reforms passed, not realize that nothing rolls out until 2012 or later (circa 2010: “I ain’t seen nuthim from it ‘tall!”), see (and be told repeatedly) that not one member of the GOP voted for it in the House and that (at most) one or two GOPers voted for it in the Senate, and will assume that all the “problems” with the bill are well and truly the fault of the Democrats. And, here’s the rub: they’ll assume it’s all because they wouldn’t work with the GOP, not because the GOP refused to work in good faith with the Democrats. The ever feckless Reid et al. will try to point out that no GOP proposal or counter-offer (beyond Go Die in the Streets) ever appeared. But the media cares not for nuance, and you need to be setting up the short, two or three word rhyming drumbeat right now, every day, every hour, and every minute about GOP intransigence such that, when the time comes (and it will come), you can merely call back to your groundwork, which will seem familiar, and will almost automatically become the basis for the discussion. No Democrat should even be approaching a microphone without uttering something like “The GOP needs to Play, or Pay.”

Of course, that will not happen. And, we all know that, even if the Democrats managed to gain seats in 2010, it will be portrayed as “good for Republicans.” Everything always is.

Cost Benefit Analysis (Result: Go Die in the Streets)

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:

United States: $7290
United Kingdom: $2992
Italy: $2686
Spain: $2671

We must be getting the best outcomes, right? Think of all our technology!?! Think again:

As of the 2006 data (the most recent I can find), we ranked 27th in infant mortality, just behind the Slovak Republic, with Mexico nipping at our heels. Life expectancy at 65 for females (compared among the relatively wealthy nations) ranks 14th, males 18th. We perform similarly poorly in almost all metrics you look at, perennially trailing countries that spend 4 or 5 times less per person than we do; hell, we trail countries that people would otherwise routinely mock as sadly “backward” or “economically stunted.” Dread France beats us on costs and outcomes. Repeatedly. (This data and much more available here. Use it. Please.) So, just to summarize in the simplest, clearest terms possible:

we pay 2.4 times more per person on healthcare than our next nearest competitor and get substantially worse outcomes than countries spending even less than that.

But, by all means, GOP: don’t mess with such a powerhouse of efficiency. Well, beyond your proposed “solutions” of blowing up the existing employer-based system and putting everybody out on the streets to fend for themselves.

Today’s GOP can effectively be summed up by the phrase “Go Die in the Streets.” Seriously, it applies to every position they have. Clearly, they’re working backwards from it to form whatever passes for policy in their lairs.

Just to review, I give you the 2010 GOP Platform:

Social Security: Go Die in the (Wall) Streets

Welfare: Go Die in the Streets

Immigration: Go Die in the Streets (preferably of your home country, but we’re not picky)

Healthcare: Go Die in the Streets

Military Spending: Go into the Streets so you can Die

Firearms/Gun Control: Go Die in the Streets

Abortion: Go Die in the (back) Streets

Prove me wrong, children. Prove me wrong.

GOP: Officially Defunct

There is no serious dialogue between the Democrats and the GOP. How can you possibly form any governing coalition between groups when one half of those groups refuses to accept empirical reality?

This is a post about Joe Wilson, but not about him specifically. But let’s start there. He’s the one who lied when he called out “You Lie!” in reference to coverage of illegal aliens. Facts are troublesome things to the modern GOP; one need not read any further than the name of the appropriate subsection to see what’s what, but Politifact goes one further:

…health reform leaves in place the status quo on illegal immigration, and certainly does not provide any new benefits particularly for illegal immigrants

If this outburst were limited only to the sad fucktard that is Joe Wilson, that’d be one thing. But Dana Milbank lays out the entire sad situation:

Wilson was only the most flagrant. There was booing from House Republicans when the president caricatured a conservative argument by saying they would “leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” They hissed when he protested their “scare tactics.” They grumbled as they do in Britain’s House of Commons when Obama spoke of the “blizzard of charges and countercharges.”

When he asserted that “nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” there was scoffing and outright laughter on the GOP side. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) shook his head in disbelief. Several Republicans shouted “What plan?” and Rep. Louis Gohmert (Tex.) waved at Obama a handwritten poster he made on a letter-size piece of paper: “WHAT PLAN?” Gohmert then took that down and replaced it with another handmade poster that said “WHAT BILL?”

The essential outcome of all this is something the media seems to forget on a daily basis: There is no GOP anymore as a functional political party interested in governance. Full stop. All policy debate, healthcare or otherwise is being conducted by Democrats: liberal and conservative. They then have to pass said policy through a perfectly mysterious 60-vote supra-majority in the Senate that the media can never see fit to explain either. Just why is it that the Senate cannot move on 51-vote majorities? Why is that anti-democratic policy in place and ruling our worlds? Easier to repeat whatever it is Drudge is peddling, I suppose. But consulting the MSM, you will never, ever find out what’s behind those mysterious 60-vote requirements. But, rest assured, there is no dialogue, because there is no (functional) GOP. It seems more and more likely that the ultimate outcome of the current situation is a new third party that, over time, first relegates the GOP into a regional, state-level party, and then into Whig-town.

And but Obama is exactly right, though probably a few decades late, in issuing this warning:

[When] we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

One might add that we also lose the ability to govern the country at all.

You’d hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP (or the public at large) will see this sequence as a tipping point, and Joe Wilson will become the Joe McCarthy of his era (though, in his case, managing to be his own Joe Welch). Based on the various FOXnews reactions last night, I seriously doubt it. Things will only get much, much worse as Joe Wilson is held out as some sort of conquering hero and sets about creating a whole crew cast in the vapid image of Sarah Palin.

You Lie!

Your Liberal Media hard at work again. But one example from the link:

Politico’s Glenn Thrush hailed Wilson’s heckling as the night’s “defining moment” in a piece headlined, “Wilson’s rallying cry.” But was Wilson’s boorish accusation true? Did Obama “lie” when he claimed Democratic health care reforms would no offer up free care to illegal immigrants? On that count Politico remains politely silent.

You Lie!

Tablet Rasa Redux

Steve Jobs all but introduces the upcoming Apple Tablet (hopefully the upcoming Macintosh tablet, but time will tell) in these quotes from an interview with David Pogue of the NYT:

There are some things that I’m focusing a lot of attention on right now—to polish

[…]

We have some really good stuff coming up.

Keep in mind, Jobs has previously stated that he considers most tablet-type computers to be, uh, shit. Additionally, we know that a number of pre-iPhones (for lack of a better term) died on the vine because one SPJ deemed them unworthy (he’s occasionally referred to these as their “best product decisions” or some similar construction: better to shitcan something bad than put it out there prematurely and sully the brand. Witness the Newton.

Likewise, he presages that this doodad will be far more than a reader:

I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices [like the Kindle], and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.

Even if the tablet runs the iPhone OS, it will be a far more capable everything than Kindle is a reader. If it runs garden-variety Mac OS X, it will likely outperform many (or most) netbooks in terms of absolute utility. How could it not? People already get pretty good results hacking the Mac OS onto these devices. An optimized version, from Apple, would dominate the space assuming it was priced within, say, $100 of its most direct competitors (honestly, it’s hard to figure out what those are in a field pretty well suffused with crap).

Go to Queens

Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder and chief ideas-man (check this New Yorker profile for the rest of the story) apparently isn’t satisfied with exotic-wood-aged beers or ancient recipes beers. According to the NYT, he’s after the big banana: saliva-fermented beers. Well, partially saliva-fermented, anyway. Central American custom has one chew corn, spit it into a container, let said corn/spit ferment, and then: enjoy! Witness the true salesman in action:

“You need to convert the starches in the corn into fermentable sugars,” the always entertaining Mr. Calagione said by phone from his headquarters in Rehoboth Beach. “One way is through the malting process. But another way — there are natural enzymes in human saliva and by chewing on corn, whether they understood the science of it, ancient brewers through trial and error learned that the natural enzymes in saliva would convert the starch in corn into sugar, so it would ferment. It may sound a little unsavory. …”

And, of course, Dogfish Head is a reasonably large operation. Even a pilot batch for them requires a lot of, uh, chewing:

“We’re going to have an archaeologist and historians and brewers sitting around and chewing 20 pounds of this purple Peruvian corn,” he said. “You kind of chew it in your mouth with your saliva, then push with your tongue to the front of your teeth so that you make these small cakes out of it, then lay them on flat pans and let them sit for 12 hours in the sun or room temperature. That’s when the enzymes are doing their work of converting the starches in that purple corn.”

[…]

“It’s dismal, I’m not going to lie to you,” Mr. Calagione said. “I’d say everybody is deeply, unpleasantly surprised at how labor intensive and palate fatiguing this stuff has turned out to be.”

The article details the whole chewy denouement. Any homebrewers out there can likely use this important tidbit:

“It’s better if you drink water,” Mr. Calagione said. “I take a drink of water before every time I do it. It’s not as pummeling on my gag reflex.”

Noted.

They churned out a few kegs of this stuff and found some folks familiar with the traditional product to test it out for them:

This is not chicha,” Angel Marin (Ecuador) and two others said, almost simultaneously.

“It tastes like beer,” said Yanko Valdes (Chile).

“It’s supposed to be sweeter,” said Martin Estel (Peru). “It’s not bad though.”

Asked about the chewing and spitting method, Mr. Marin said that it was “old school — in the jungle.”

He also made a suggestion: “You want chicha, you should go to Queens,