The Argument:
As far as the “birthers” go, common sense says if there wasn’t anything to hide, then nobody would be hiding anything, right?

My Answer:
There is a fundamental principle of inquiry – that is assuming one cares about the truth – that assertions should be based on evidence. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. So far as the courts and I can tell, nobody is hiding anything. To accept assertions on insufficient evidence risks making oneself a tool for evil hands.

By the way: The argument presented is a common fallacy.  The argument in the general form goes something like: If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide. I assume everyone reading this can understand why this argument is not valid.  It always bugs me when I hear people say it, especially in this country where we have an enshrined right to privacy arising from the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Counterpunch:
But isn’t it a duty to show the evidence if a person is running for President?

My Answer:
Yes, it is. And this was done to the satisfaction of the U.S. courts more than once.

The Non-Sequitur:
And that is enough to satify a you?  Big difference between this and McCain, and you know it.

My Answer:
Yes, there is a big difference.

McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a tenuous and temporary extension of the US and not a state of the union. If elected, McCain would have been the first US President to have been born outside the states. This was a serious legal matter that ultimately ended in a (nonbinding) Senate resolution and required real legal investigation by a bipartisan legal review. This is because “natural born” is not defined in the Constitution. While McCain would be very, very likely to prevail in a legal challenge, it is not assured. In short, the courts have not ruled on this matter.

Obama was born in Hawaii, our 50th state, and a state of the union. He has provided documentation of his birth adequate for all legal purposes. In addition, his original birth certificate has been examined by the director of the Hawaii State Department of Health who attested to its authenticity under oath. The Republican governor of the state, Linda Lingle, has also attested to Obama’s status. The US courts have ruled on this matter.

So, yes, there is a big difference. Obama’s status as a naturalized citizen is well established. McCain’s is not.

President Barack Obama

Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says Obama’s school speech uses taxpayer dollars (i.e., your dollars) to indoctrinate your children.

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.

Source: CNN

Really. Do you support compulsory government-funded education? Okay, there’s no point in asking that.

Anyway, I found nothing particularly objectionable in the speech itself. You can read it here (whitehouse.gov), if you dare. That’s right. It’s on the Internet, where anyone might see it.

Most seem to object to the content of the lesson plan.

[...] Critics objected to the language of one of the lesson plans, for students in pre-kindergarten through grade 6, that suggested that students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Another assignment for students after hearing the speech was to discuss what “the president wants us to do.”

Source: FOX News

That letter writing exercise has been changed. It is now “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.” (Ibid.)

Okay. It takes some fine parsing to take offense at the original plan, but then many believe that the Obama administration is making use of subtle linguistic cues to help liberal educators spread a message of socialism. Nothing can be done to help such people. But what about the speech?

I can’t imagine how seeing Obama’s face on television would have scarred me. Write a letter? What did Obama say he wanted me to do? Stay in school? Thankfully I only heard that from video games, along with “Winners don’t use drugs!” Of course, I did stay in school and didn’t use drugs, so the damage was done. Hopefully there’s still time to save this generation from my fate. Teaching ill-defined fear of our elected leaders is a good way to start.

Van Jones

Gone. Unsurprising, really. Was Van Jones a truther? Well, he signed the petition, and I don’t think he can point to any public statement where he repudiated the truthers until recently… and then very weakly. He says he was the victim of a “vicious smear campaign.” Sure, I’ll grant that. So? He’s a politician and a lawyer, after all.

See the quotation and his repudiation of the truthers in the USA Today.

Is what he said really a big deal?

At times like this I like to quote the late Richard Mitchell, of The Underground Grammarian. In his essay “Less Than Words Can Say” he offers us the passage below, which I quote in full. The italics are his, the bold emphasis is mine.

Not many years ago, it was a popular sport to collect and publish silly mistakes made by schoolchildren in their compositions. Many books of these so-called boners were printed for the delectation of grown-ups who laughed and chuckled. “Heh, heh, ain’t they cute.” Sometimes venturesome publishers went even further and printed collections of idiocies from the notes that schoolchildren brought from home. These were usually pathetic examples from barely literate people, but we chuckled and laughed some more. Now, like desperate drillers looking for new pockets of gas, we publish collections of the pomposities and malapropisms of politicians and bureaucrats. Again we chuckle and laugh. We don’t find them quite as cute as those cunning kids, but still we laugh. It makes us feel superior. And because we feel superior we forgive; and we’re willing to believe that a member of the city council, say, or a senator, shouldn’t be judged too harshly merely by the inanity of his words. We’ll still reelect him. After all, anybody can make a mistake. We make this mistake because it does not occur to us that there is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words, and we pay attention only long enough to be amused. In fact, however, those silly little mistakes always mean something important.

You can find an archive of Mitchell’s writings at The Underground Grammarian.

On Meet the Press today (September 6, 2009) David Gregory was interviewing David Axelrod, the President’s Senior Adviser. It isn’t on Hulu yet, so I’ll include a link to the YouTube clip. It will probably be taken down soon. Here’s the part of the exchange I find interesting, with me inserted.

Gregory: Do you find it, what he [Van Jones] said, objectionable?
Me: [Yelling at the TV] Just say yes! Just say yes!
Axelrod: Well I haven’t read all of, of his comments either, David. Again, I’m focused on how we get health security for all Americans, how do we get this economy moving in the right direction. We’ve pulled back from the abyss of a potential collapse, and now we have to build for the future and get people back to work. I think those are the things we should be focused on, and that’s what I am focused on.
Me: [Groan]

See the segment on YouTube.

Why is this hard? If Van Jones said that he had been interested in what the 9/11 truth movement had to say, but after he found out he realized that they were nuts, he might be okay. (There are still his comments about Republicans, of course, but that’s a different, also toxic, matter.) So I have almost the same reaction to Axelrod’s inability to reject Van Jones’ comments as I do with, say, John McCain’s inability to reject President Bush’s policies.

Okay, so is this really a big deal? Does believing that government officials may have been complicit in 9/11 really mean you are unfit to hold office? Our elected officials believe a great many surprising, wrong, and even downright idiotic things, but we elect them anyway. Perhaps he was merely a victim of picking an unpopular thing to support.

I don’t think it is just a matter of an unpopular choice. First, let me say that our government has done some terrible things and covered them up. If you need a short list, email me or, better still, consult the historians. Isn’t it possible that members of the Bush administration were actively complicit in the 9/11 attacks? Of course not.

First, the explanation given is simple, direct, and easily understood. Religious extremists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings. We know where they trained to fly, how the got in the country, etc. The trail is really clear, the story hangs together, and it makes sense. In fact, even the engineering makes sense. We know why the buildings, even building 7, collapsed. All the evidence (and there is a lot of it) supports the story we all know; none of it supports the truthers’ many versions. The truthers are in the same situation as the birthers.

The other story is that members of the administration let it happen. I don’t buy this, either. Bush did not surround himself with the kind of people who passed at the chance to be heroes. Plus, how did they find out? From the CIA? The NSA? The FBI? In all three cases the intel would have triggered law enforcement actions, such as investigations and the creation of files. Maybe folks should have known, but sadly it seems they did not.

So we’re back to whether or not it matters. And I say yes, it does. This administration has an ambitious agenda (whether you agree with it or not) and needs public support to accomplish any of these things and even to just accomplish the business of running the country. We’re engaged in two wars started as a result of 9/11, and going through upheavals on who specifically broke the law on interrogations. Adding someone who thinks, absent any evidence, that the former administration assisted in these attacks is toxic.

So, exit Van Jones, for now. He was one of the co-founders of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and will remain actively engaged in political life, I’m sure. With only minor apologies to Fitzgerald, there are plenty of second acts in American lives.

Health Care

How about passing simple legislation that is straightforward? We could do each of these – but not in one bill!

1. Allow purchasing health insurance from out-of-state vendors. That is, “crossing state lines” to buy insurance. This is currently illegal.
2. Allow and encourage the formation of health insurance alliances that pool many small businesses or even individuals.
3. Require insurers to offer a basic “minimum coverage” policy. We could require everyone to purchase it… and make it (a) tax exempt or (b) refundable. We could even do a “prebate” as with the Fair Tax.

These would probably help now. More high-power tinkering could be done down the road. I really, really don’t understand the rush to solve our problem with a giant heap of legislation whose net effect is nearly impossible to predict because of its complexity. It is idiotic, and it might doom any sort of meaningful reform or cost control measures.

As for the above, the only one that requires any outlay from Uncle Sam is possibly option 3. The others just introduce and encourage competition.

Health Care

I’ve seen the “public option” compared to the Post Office (by the President), and I just saw it compared to public colleges by Sen. Schumer (D-NY).

The explanation of the public option that I keep hearing is: The government will set it up, and then it must compete on its own, and the government will be “hands off” after that. To that I say: maybe. Suppose the public option plan begins to have trouble, and starts to fail. Won’t we bail it out? It has to compete with other insurers. Believe it or not, these have patents on business processes. Will the public option be given the royalty-free right to use these processes? If so, it isn’t a level playing field.

Does the government even have the authority to create such an entity? The Post Office is, after all, explicitly an enumerated power in the constitution. Clearly they do… but really, should they?

If Schumer’s analogy (like public colleges) is apt, then I would point out that the government subsidizes public colleges. But I am repeatedly told that the public option will not be subsidized.

The Post Office is a pseudo-independent corporation and receives no tax funds. But it has only been this way since 1971 (thank you Mr. Nixon); before that the Postmaster General was a Cabinet position, and was, in fact, in line to succeed the President.

Maybe Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the models to follow. But Fannie and Freddie are protected monopolies. Then again, so is the Post Office. It is illegal for anyone else to deliver letters.* Even better, all three are exempt from state and federal taxes and free from most government regulations.** We could expect much the same from the public option, I suspect.

(* The USPO has a monopoly over the delivery of certain kinds of mail, and also over access to your mailbox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service)

(** Fannie Mae pays property taxes: http://www.fanniemae.com/aboutfm/charter.jhtml. But not state or local taxes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_mae)

It is starting to look like the public option is dying. Maybe that’s sad, but there’s no way to know. So far as I can tell, it was never adequately explained.

Health Care

In order for the market to reduce the cost to you, you need two things.

• You need to have a choice.
• You need to be the one paying the bill.

If you lack either of these, you will be, in essence, ignored by the market, almost as if you were a non-participant.

So… what about health care?

First, we have little or no choice in most cases. Most of us have health insurance provided by our employers, and they typically have just one or maybe two options. This leads to a lack of choice that Obama and others decry, and hope to fix by introducing a public option. Further, I am not the one paying the majority of the bill; my employer is.

The insurance company negotiates a contract with my employer, and seeks to satisfy them. I have no other options, since I cannot afford to go off the employer-provided insurance, and so I’ve lost choice and I’m not the party paying. That’s not a good situation when you are the consumer of a good.

To find out why we ended up with this system we have to go back to World War II. During the war labor is scarce, for obvious reasons. Companies would typically compete for labor by offering better wages, but there are price and wage controls in place. Companies are, however, allowed to compete by offering employee insurance plans, including health benefits.

I found a pretty good discussion of this here:

Offering insurance policies to employee groups not only benefited insurers, but also benefited employers. During World War II, wage and price controls prevented employers from using wages to compete for scarce labor. Under the 1942 Stabilization Act, Congress limited the wage increases that could be offered by firms, but permitted the adoption of employee insurance plans. In this way, health benefit packages offered one means of securing workers. In the 1940s, two major rulings also reinforced the foundation of the employer-provided health insurance system. First, in 1945 the War Labor Board ruled that employers could not modify or cancel group insurance plans during the contract period. Then, in 1949, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in a dispute between the Inland Steel Co. and the United Steelworkers Union that the term “wages” included pension and insurance benefits. Therefore, when negotiating for wages, the union was allowed to negotiate benefit packages on behalf of workers as well. This ruling, affirmed later by the U.S. Supreme Court, further reinforced the employment-based system.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of government intervention that shaped the employer-based system of health insurance was the tax treatment of employer-provided contributions to employee health insurance plans. First, employers did not have to pay payroll tax on their contributions to employee health plans. Further, under certain circumstances, employees did not have to pay income tax on their employer’s contributions to their health insurance plans. The first such exclusion occurred under an administrative ruling handed down in 1943 which stated that payments made by the employer directly to commercial insurance companies for group medical and hospitalization premiums of employees were not taxable as employee income (Yale Law Journal, 1954, pp. 222-247). While this particular ruling was highly restrictive and limited in its applicability, it was codified and extended in 1954. Under the 1954 Internal Revenue Code (IRC), employer contributions to employee health plans were exempt from employee taxable income. As a result of this tax-advantaged form of compensation, the demand for health insurance further increased throughout the 1950s (Thomasson 2003).

I leave it to the historians out there to check that, but it jives pretty well with what I’ve read elsewhere.

So let’s summarize. Our gov’t created a system that reinforced employer-provided health insurance. This resulted in lack of competition, and now they are going to fix the lack of competition by adding a public option. What have I missed?

Barack Obama

What about Obama’s KENYAN birth certificate produced by Orly Taitz?
http://gnn.tv/threads/36212/Shocking_New_Birth_Certificate_Proof_Obama_Born_In_Kenya

I was asked about this recently. It took me less than one minute to find the following, and follow just a few of the references.

From Wikipedia (they determine our reality):

On August 2, 2009, Orly Taitz released and attached to court documents what she alleged to be an authentic Kenyan birth certificate. Legal documents submitted describe the document as an “unauthenticated color photocopy of certified copy of registration of birth”.[47][48] The document was almost immediately revealed to be a forgery. It purports to have been issued by the “Republic of Kenya”, when in fact, such a state did not yet exist at the time of Obama’s birth as indicated on the document (Kenya was a Dominion of the British Crown until 1963).[49][50] Additionally, Mombasa, the city indicated on the certificate as Obama’s birthplace, was not located in Kenya, but in Zanzibar.[50][51] Subsequently, evidence was unearthed that the alleged Kenyan birth certificate is probably a modified version of a 1959 Australian birth certificate found on an online genealogy website.[52][53] The Washington Independent cited an anonymous blogger [54] as having taken credit for the forgery and posting four photos substantiating the claim.[55] Examples of actual 1961 Kenyan birth certificates have also been revealed, which look substantially different from the document Taitz submitted to the court. [56]

I don’t think that anything will satisfy the birthers because I do not think they care what the truth is or even what the United States Constitution says. As far as I know the birthers still have no evidence. All the newspaper evidence and official documents support Obama’s birth in Hawaii; none support anything else.

If I’m missing something, let me know.

Sarah Palin

The Palin speech really is poetry. Read below. It makes me want to go to Alaska.

And getting up here I say:
It is the best road trip in America.
Soaring through nature’s finest show.
Denali, the great one,
Soaring under the midnight sun.
And then the extremes.

In the winter time it’s the frozen road
That is competing with the view
Of ice fogged frigid beauty.
The cold though.
Doesn’t it split the Cheechakos
From the Sourdoughs?

And then in the summertime,
Such extreme summertime.
About a hundred and fifty degrees
Hotter than just some months ago,
Than just some months from now,
With fireweed blooming
Along the frost heaves
And merciless rivers that
  are rushing
    and carving
      and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins.

It is as throughout all Alaska
That big wild good life teeming
Along the road that is north
To the future.

I wonder who wrote it? It isn’t crazy-talk. “The cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?” A cheechako is a newcomer to Alaska, while a sourdough is a long-time resident of Alaska. And “north, to the future?” That’s Alaska’s state motto. Denali? That’s the local Athabaskan name and official Alaskan name for Mount McKinley, and it means “The Great One.” It has greater bulk and rise that Everest, so it’s a good name.

Whatever else you might say about Palin, this part of the speech was directed to Alaskans, her constituency, and while people down here in the lower 48 might chuckle at it, it was actually a good political speech. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand — her resignation with a year and a half remaining — but then that is one of the hallmarks of a good political speech.

In short, don’t count Sarah Palin out. She may not get my vote, but if she learns to speak to the rest of America in this way then we can expect quite a bit from her in the coming years. After all, we’re suckers for poetry.