Contemptible, yes; surprising, no

By Mustang Bobby

Norm Ornstein on the Republicans’ attempts to sabotage Obamacare and in the process deny people healthcare and demolish the system that provides it, all because they hate the man who signed the law.

When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable — unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better — not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.

But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation — which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil — is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate — even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists — takes one’s breath away.

Maybe I’m more cynical than Mr. Ornstein, but the actions of the Republicans do not take my breath away. I was wondering when they would get around to doing all of this.

These are the actions of cowards, bullies, and racists. Cowards because in the decades leading up to Obamacare, they never had the guts to stand up to the powerful lobbyists who represented the groups such as insurance and pharmaceutical corporations that profited mightily from the broken system; indeed, they lived off their campaign donations. Bullies because they never allowed anyone the chance to try to fix a system that was keeping the poor and the chronically ill in a vicious cycle of debt and despair. And racist because they knew the system preyed upon the minorities and their families, and also because the law that passed was modeled on Republican ideas forged by the Heritage Foundation and Bob Dole and put in place by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts; but because it was championed by Barack Obama, it had to be evil socialized medicine because that’s what secret gay Kenyan Muslims want.

What I don’t get is that if the Republicans are right and Obamacare will crash and burn on its own, why don’t they just stand aside and let that happen? It’s probably because they really know that it will work and that people will like it and the GOP will end up looking like the cowards, bullies, and racists that they are if it succeeds. So they’re willing to let people go broke or even die just to score political points and win an election. Now that’s contemptible.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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A.M. Headlines

(Ramesh Ponnuru): ""Drop disastrous plan to defund ObamaCare"

(New York Times): "Scores of demonstrators killed in Egypt"

(Politico): "Obama to visit Hill Democrats next week"

(CNBC): "Wall Street wants Yellen, not Summers as next Fed chief"

(The Washington Times): "Rand Paul to Chris Christie: You need to talk more to real Americans"

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A view of the Curiosity rover from high above Mars

By Michael J.W. Stickings

After the stunning images of Earth from spacecraft orbiting Saturn and Mercury, showing us what our planet looks like from a long way away, here's another amazing image from space.

Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the red planet since 2006, it shows the landing spot of the Curiosity rover (see my post from last August, upon its landing, for details about the rover and its mission), the rover's tracks, and, yes, the rover itself. As Slate's Phil Plait (who helpfully annotated the image) explains:

The Curiosity rover is about 3 meters long, so it's easily visible in HiRISE [High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment] images. Its wheels are 50 centimeters across and a little less than that wide, so the tracks are visible as well. The rockets used in the last moments before the rover landed on the surface blew the dust and surface material around, so that blast pattern (which looks blue in this color-enhanced shot) is easily seen in the image, too...

The tracks are a little over 3 meters (10 feet) apart, to give you a sense of scale. At this point, the rover had traveled about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from its landing site. On July 21, it took its longest jaunt yet, traveling about 100 meters in a single drive. Its eventual goal is Mt. Sharp (technically, Aeolis Mons), which is roughly 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the rover's location.

Engineers have been cautious about moving Curiosity around but will soon take it on even longer drives. Eventually, its auto-navigation system will be used, allowing the rover to go beyond routes deemed safe by looking at previous images; essentially the destination can be programmed in, and the rover will find the best path to get there itself. 

Incredible. Simply incredible.

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Rand Paul imagines there's no racism -- it isn't hard to do

By Frank Moraes

The smart bigot's argument against affirmative action is that the very idea is racist. As George Will is fond of saying things similar to this, "If you want to stop racism, stop being racist." It all sounds so great. According to this theory, all we need to do is stop thinking in racial terms and everything will be fine. The problem is that we won't all stop thinking in racial terms. We might stop talking in racial terms. We might all pretend that many individuals, institution, and system are beyond operating in racial terms. But racist thinking will then simply have free rein to work its pernicious magic. So all we're really getting from people like Will is an appeal to ignore racism and hope it goes away (not that it matters one way or another to him).

A good example of how racism works can be found in Texas. Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, Texas began working to make its voting system more racist. Of course, there is nothing new about this. According to a federal court ruling from last year, "The [Texas Congressional District 23] mapdrawers consciously replaced many of the district's active Hispanic voters with low-turnout Hispanic voters in an effort to strengthen the voting power of CD 23's Anglo citizens." This is the kind of thing that the Voting Rights Act was designed to protect against. But now the Supreme Court has ruled that they have to be allowed to suppress the vote and only then stopped.

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that the federal government still can go after this kind of behavior before it directly affects voters. In a transcript of a talk he gave to the National Urban League Annual Conference, he said, "Based on the evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented last year in the redistricting case, Texas v. Holder -- as well as the history of pervasive voting-related discrimination against racial minorities that the Supreme Court itself has recognized -- we believe that the State of Texas should be required to go through a preclearance process whenever it changes its voting laws and practices."

This, of course, is great news. But it gets to the heart of this ridiculous idea that if we liberals would just shut up about racism, it would go away. That's just not true. Institutional racism existed that effectively made it impossible for blacks to vote in the south from the 1870s up through the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That's roughly 90 years of pretending that there was no problem. If it really were going to work itself out, it would have done so in that amount of time. And that is not even counting the de facto Jim Crow that currently exists in the form of the massive over-application of drug laws against African American communities.

But don't think that George Will and his band of sophisticated bigots are an old and dying bread. Steve Benen brought my attention to an interview that Rand Paul did with Yahoo! News in Iowa. Now remember: Paul is one of the more "reasonable" Republicans. And he said, "I don't think there's anyone in Congress who has a stronger belief in minority rights than I do." And he isn't lying. That's what he thinks. He thinks that explicit government racism is wrong. He even understands the drug law issue. What he doesn't understand -- and this is key -- is how America isn't otherwise a level playing field.

This is just willful ignorance -- the kind of ignorance that is very flattering to a man like Rand Paul. For example, he is a doctor. So is his father Ron Paul. But I'm sure it never occurs to him that that is correlated in any way except that Ron gave him some really great genes. But all the evidence shows it is just the opposite. So Rand Paul can think that he's the number one proponent of minority rights. But the truth is that just like the bigots who came before him, he just wants everyone to pretend. Unfortunately for him, most of us don't have the talent for such delusion.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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John Boehner thinks Steve King is crazy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll recall that Iowa Republican Steve King made some remarkably bigoted comments about the children of undocumented immigrants the other day -- essentially that most of them are drug mules.

There's no doubt that many Republicans find this sort of thing offensive and are embarrassed by it, but rarely do they actually call out their own.

But House Speaker John Boehner, to his credit, has apparently had enough of this wacko, and he's basically telling him to shut the fuck up:

Boehner on Thursday called his comments about illegal immigrants "deeply offensive and wrong."

"What he said does not reflect the values of the American people or the Republican Party," the speaker said.

I would agree with the first part, but the second part is open to question. Certainly most Americans do not share such bigotry, but who is more in tune with the values of the Republican Party, Boehner or King?

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The 12% Congress

By Mustang Bobby 

Say what you will about President Obama's approval rating falling to below 50%, he'd have to be somewhere on the same level as anthrax and galloping diarrhea to get to the level of the United States Congress:

The new NBC/WSJ results show Congress' approval rating at 12%, with 83% disapproving. When was the last time support for Congress was this awful? NBC/WSJ have been doing national polls for about two decades, and it's never been this bad.

Given that Obama's support is still lukewarm, and he'll never be on the ballot again, I'd argue that Congress' woeful approval rating is significantly more important.

Indeed, this number could get considerably worse if congressional Republicans kill immigration reform, force a debt ceiling crisis, and threaten a government shutdown.

Indeed, the closer one looks at the poll, the worse things appear for the legislative branch. Obama's personal favorability is 48%, while for House Speaker John Boehner, it's 18%. Only 22% believe congressional Republicans emphasize unifying the country, while 67% believe they prioritize partisanship. A 56% majority believe GOP lawmakers are "too inflexible" when dealing with the White House.

And a 51% majority wants Republicans to stop holding votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

As a practical matter, if GOP lawmakers wanted to be more popular, it'd be pretty easy — they could, in theory, pass a popular immigration-reform bill, turn off the deliberately harmful sequester, pass a measure to reduce gun violence, maybe consider a bill or two that creates jobs, or compromise on a budget plan.

The most maddening thing of all is that next year, fully 90% of these people will win re-election, and the Republicans stand a 50-50 chance of getting a majority in the Senate as well.

So explain to me why elected officials who have a lower approval rating than the dictator of North Korea can rest assured that they will never lose their job or face the consequences of basically bringing the country to a halt through a perpetual act of adolescent petulance.

Congress may suck, but we're the enablers.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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Did George Zimmerman get away with murder?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, a lot of us think so, and so does one of the jurors:

The only minority on the all-female jury that voted to acquit George Zimmerman said today that Zimmerman "got away with murder" for killing Trayvon Martin and feels she owes an apology Martin's parents.

"You can't put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty," said the woman who was identified only as Juror B29 during the trial. "But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence."

She said the jury was following Florida law and the evidence, she said, did not prove murder. 

After the loathsome comments of that juror who came out in defense of Zimmerman, and who was probably going to vote to acquit no matter what, it is refreshing to see such a sense of responsibility given the gravity of the situation:

"I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury. I fought to the end," she said.

However, on the second day of deliberations, after spending nine hours discussing the evidence, Maddy said she realized there wasn't enough proof to convict Zimmerman of murder or manslaughter under Florida law. 

I said it afterwards, and I'll say it again: The verdict, sadly, made sense. The jury did what it had to do and ended up reaching a verdict that was probably the right one given the circumstances.

The problem wasn't the judge or the jurors or the system, even though there is racial discrimination in how such incidents are treated by police and prosecutors. In this case, the problem was the law, which allowed Zimmerman to carry a gun while acting as a self-appointed vigilante and then to shoot an unarmed black teenager, whom he was clearly targeting, supposedly in self-defense.

That's how he got away with murder.

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