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Karl Rove argues that a "public" insurance option will cause individuals and companies to drop private insurance and switch to the "public" plan:
They'd be happy to shift some of the expense -- and all of the administration headaches -- to Washington. And once the private insurance market has been dismantled it will be gone. [E.A.]
I must be missing something--why would the collapse of private health insurance be irreversible? It can't be that hard to start a private insurance company--it's not like starting a private nuclear power company or even an auto factory. If we enact a public plan, but at some point in the future a potential market for private insurance opens up--maybe because Republicans win huge congressional majorities and decide to end government-run insurance--private insurers will spring up to make money in that market, no?...
P.S.: Rove's pet Bush-era plan to buy Hispanic votes with a giant semi-amnesty of illegal immigrants--now that would be irreversible. ...
P.P.S.: I also don't understand how a public plan would 1) lure customers by paying extra-low fees to doctors and hospitals (causing business to decide that dropping private coverage was "cost effective") while at the same time it would 2) be "far too expensive." I can see the one flaw, and I can see the other. I can't see both at the same time. ... 12:01 A.M.
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Take it away, Matt Yglesias! ... 12:00 A.M.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2009
This impressive timeline of the Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal** alludes to an obvious John Edwards lie I'd forgotten about (it's hard to remember them all). In his alleged "confession" on Nightline, Edwards was asked by Bob Woodruff about a photo that seemed to show him holding a baby in the Beverly Hilton, when he was visiting Hunter [emphasis added]:
WOODRUFF: And that picture is absolutely you and you are holding that baby.
EDWARDS: The picture in the tabloid. I have no idea what that picture is.
WOODRUFF: But you've seen it right?
EDWARDS: I did see it and I cannot make any sense out of that. When I went to this meeting you've already asked me about, uh, I was not wearing a t-shirt, I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I don't know who that picture -- I don't know if that picture is me, it could well be, it looks like me. I don't know who that baby is, I have no idea what that picture is.
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WOODRUFF: But are you saying you don't remember holding that child of Miss Hunter?
EDWARDS: I'm saying you asked me about this photograph, I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby -- I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that.
WOODRUFF: You did say you did meet her at a hotel in California.
EDWARDS: She was there, Mr. McGovern was present, and that's where the meeting took place.
WOODRUFF: But you don't remember a baby being there?
EDWARDS: No.
Does anyone believe this? Even if the baby is (as he claimed***) not his, how could he not remember the baby being there? If the pictures were from another visit, then he still knows perfectly well "what that picture is." ... Even his wife seems to have given up on this line of defense, resorting to the contradictory, but equally implausible 'politicians-hold-babies-all-the-time' response.
P.S.: Is it true that the Center for American Progress' Jennifer Palmieri, last seen emasculating poor Matthew Yglesias, really "helped [Edwards] prepare" for the dissembling Nightline interview, as reported by Walter Shapiro? There's a line she can put on her resume! ...
P.P.S.: Even the liberal New Republic is getting into the business of spotting St. Elizabeth's dissembling. Like Lee Stranahan yesterday, TNR's Jason Zengerle notes that on "Larry King" Mrs. Edwards said she "dismissed" tabloid reports of the Hunter affair on 'they-write-about-airplanes-on-the-moon' grounds, even though by her own account her husband had confessed to at least a one-night stand a year earlier. ...
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**--My main problem with this timeline is that, by focusing on Rielle Hunter and Edwards, it creates the appearance that Hunter was Edwards' only extramarital affair, something that's very much unclear at this point. If that's not true--if Edwards had been screwing around for years, for example--it would cast the subsequent agonizing and dissembling in a very different light, no?
***--In his televised "confession," remember, John Edwards claimed not only that the baby wasn't his but that it couldn't possibly be his, a certainty Elizabeth now seems to have abandoned (she says she doesn know--"I don't have any information" -but that it might be "discovered" that the child is his.) ... 5:09 P.M.
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Center for American Progress' Jennifer Palmieri says the daily "8:45 A.M." call among leftish activists (disclosed by Politico) is an attempt to give the White House a "coordinated echo chamber on the outside." [E.A.] She is subtle, isn't she? ... It wasn't enough for Palmieri to emasculate poor Matt Yglesias. Now she has to belittle the entire left wing of the Democratic Party. ... Jane Hamsher resists. ...
Update: Jonah Goldberg argues that CAP is a cargo cult. ... 2:34 A.M.
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Eduwonk's Andy Rotherham reads Obama's education speech to find the battle lines between the President and the teachers' unions. ... He links to others who do the same thing. ... And he writes good heds. ... P.S.: Obama did have a strong-but-vague graf on dismissing bad teachers:
And just as we've given our teachers all the support they need to be successful, we need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. And that means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. But let me be clear -- (applause.) Let me be clear -- the overwhelming number of teachers are doing an outstanding job under difficult circumstances. My sister is a teacher, so I know how tough teaching can be. But let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there's no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. [E.A.]
Will Jennifer Palmieri let them talk about this on the 8:45 A.M. call? Seems risky--might detract from the requisite unanimity. Or else they all might decide to go after Obama. ... 2:46 A.M.
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Friday, January 16, 2009
Matt Yglesias defends his manhood! His site wasn't hijacked by Jennifer Palmieri! Rather, he assumed her proposed blog post
"represented her putting her foot down, so I kind of didn't say anything more about it, and just stuck if up there ...."
Hmm. Does that make it any better? ... P.S.: The point is that until recently Yglesias had a nice perch at the Atlantic, where nobody was going to put their foot down simply because he offended a Democratic interest group. But he opted for the joys of cocooning "community," so now when a ranking politico like Palmieri puts her foot down, he rolls over. ... 4:39 P.M.
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Card Check Slow Track Watch: Labor strategists deny (to Mark Ambinder) that Obama's remarks to WaPo constitute a slow-tracking of "card check." And I know that some business groups still think there's no slow-tracking of "card check" (if it's not in fact already a done deal). So let's assume there's no slow-tracking of card check! ... But it sure sounds to me like the only bill Obama expects to pass soon would be a compromise (for example, retaining the secret ballot but speeding up various time limits or altering other provisions in ways that would still aid unionization drives). ... If you were Obama and you wanted to slow-track "card check," or force a "reform" compromise that feel short of eliminating the secret ballot, you would tell the Post what Obama told the Post, no? If you were a labor strategist and you were worried that Obama was slow-tracking card check, you wouldn't tell that to Ambinder. You'd tell him that there was "every reason to believe" that Obama would keep his "committment," in order to keep the heat on. ... Update: Anti-card checker Peter Kirsanow is still worried. "Unions understand that the planets won't align for them like this again. ... They won't back down." True. But that's also a reason to discount the bravado they show to Ambinder. They're not going to give up this early and say, "Gee, looks like 'card check's' not going to happen.' ... Not that they might not ultimately win. [via Shopfloor] ... See also Rubin. ...
P.S.: Obama's framework is admirably clear. (It's not mine!)
"[I]f the business community's argument against the Employee Free Choice Act is simply that it will make it easier for people to join unions and we think that is damaging to the economy then they probably won't get too far with me."
Of course, the issue isn't only whether it will get far with Obama, important as that is. It's also how far it gets with 41 senators. ...
P.P.S.: Obama says
Here's my basic principle: that wages and incomes have flatlined over the last decade. That part of that has to do with forces that are beyond everybody's control: globalization, technology and so forth. Part of it has to do with workers have very little leverage and that larger and larger shares of our productivity go to the top and not to the middle or the bottom. I think unions serve an important role in that.
The obvious initial question is whether, in a more fully unionized economy, the net productivity gains would be there to be "leveraged" down. Not a lot of gains being leveraged to UAW members these days. ... 2:59 P.M.
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"You Call This a Downturn?" Well, it depends if that ugly red line keeps going in the direction it's going, no? ... P.S.: Keep in mind, the line measures how much employment has fallen versus all other recessions after x number of months. So the current recession started mild, but is now somewhere between "medium" and "harsh." Trending "harsh." ... 11:45 A.M.
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Thursday, January 15, 2009
'We Had a Hat': UAW workers rally against wage concessions to GM in Michigan. ... Old Rules: You demanded higher wages and held rallies against your employer. ... New Rules: You demand higher wages, help drive your employer into bankruptcy, and then you hold rallies against the government that bailed you out. ... P.S.: Shouldn't the mayor of Warren, Michigan be more worried about preventing GM from disappearing, taking all its jobs, than preventing a 10% or 20% pay cut? ... P.P.S.: I just took a 10% pay cut! Do you see me protesting? No! But I'm going to milk it for all its worth. ... P.P.P.S.: I see a parallel to the counterproductive Gran Marcha: A few more rallies like this and GM won't see another dime from Congress. ... [via Brian Faughnan]10:19 P.M.
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Andy Levy turns today's airplane heroism into a pitch to America's Last Employer. ... [via Insta] 9:47 P.M.
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“I know as much or more than Cheney." Mr. Biden said. "I’m the most experienced vice president since anybody.” Wow. a) Biden has no private sector experience after age 30, right? b) How insecure is this guy? Getting close to dangerously insecure, no? ... And here we we'd just succeeded in explaining away the "I have a much higher IQ than you do" aria of credentialist braggadocio. ... 9:45 P.M.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Inaugural Schmoozalism: kf discovers that the mood in Washington among veteran Beltway Dems is a lot more skeptical of Tim Geithner's innocence regarding his tax errors than public reaction by offical Dems (or some GOPs) would lead you to expect. Maguire would feel right at home. ... 9:32 P.M.
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Friday, January 2, 2009
New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones has found a way to make himself readable--limit himself to 140 characters at a time. Unfortunately it seems to be a stunt, not a hard technical limit. [Via Rachel Sklar] 4:16 A.M.
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Footnote to a footnote to a footnote: Those closely reading the complaint in the Vicki Iseman libel suit against the NYT (and who isn't, really) may notice a quote from Matt Yglesias on page 21, calling the Times' Iseman story "a pretty shameful attempt to set up a Kaus-like presumption of guilt." Q: What's that "Kaus-like" all about? A:Yglesias was almost certainly referring to this 2007 kf post, which isn't about McCain and Iseman but about John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. It argued that Edwards' initial denial of the National Enquirer's original story was too sharp and confrontational (he'd said it was "made up") which was "not necessarily a smart move for a politician in Edwards' position." Yglesias thought I had assumed Edwards' denial was b.s. (which of course it was). I claimed I didn't assume his guilt--that even if Edwards was innocent it would be unwise for him to directly attack his accusers, lest that spur them redouble their efforts and make it a two-day story or worse. I admit it was difficult to avoid assuming Edwards' guilt since I pretty much knew he was guilty.
P.S.--Yglesias wrong, so very wrong: In the event, Edwards' denial spurred the Enquirer to redouble their efforts and they nailed him. ... Meanwhile, Yglesias had argued: "No doubt by now we've had all the legitimate news organizations in the country looking into it and it seems that . . . nobody can come up with any evidence." It turned out, of course, that "legitimate" news organizations hadn't spent a lot of effort looking into it. ...
Whatever you do, do not let this man speak for the Center for American Progress Action Fund! ... 3:17 A.M.
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1) Immigrants are leaving Southern California. 2) Crime is falling in Southern California (contrary to criminologists' 'hard-times=crime' predictions).
Is there a connection? I don't know. But don't expect the Los Angeles Times to even ask. ... [Thanks to alert reader R.] :2:07 A.M.
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I missed "The Music of Seal on Ice" TV special. Did someone liveblog? ... 1:44 A.M.
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You're No LGM, or even FMK: Exhausted by 24 hours of nonstop mindless piece-rate sneering, Gawker's Alex Pareene resorts to one of the oldest tricks in the book! (But you'll have to be nastier than that to make me link, buddy!) ... 1:39 A.M.
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
I recently took a 10% pay cut. Maybe I should have tried to postpone it until 2011, UAW style! But I've always thought variable pay--rising and falling with the economy--was a good idea, since it enables firms to avoid layoffs in down times. And I'm a terrible negotiator. I didn't think I had much leverage. It was all over in about 40 seconds. Faster than the Wagner Act!
According to the NYT, lots of employers are taking this wage-cuts-not-layoffs approach. In theory this should help the economy recover faster, no? I'm influenced in this view by Martin Weitzman's Share Economy, which notes that one of the flaws in classical economic theory that prompted Keynes' corrective was the stickiness of wages. In theory, they're supposed to fall in a recession until it pays employers to hire people. In practice, they don't. But now, they do. At least a bit more than before.
Taking a wage cut isn't the form of "variable pay" that Weitzman advocates--if I remember right, he wants workers paid a "share" of the firm's profits or revenues, structured so that every time a new worker gets hired (and takes a share) it effectively lowers the pay for existing workers (whose share is now split among more people). That creates an incentive for firms to constantly go out and hire in bad times and good--an incentive that doesn't exist in my case. (My pay's gone down, but it won't go down more just because Slate hires someone new--unless of course they hire them to, you know, replace me). Still, if wages are less sticky downwards, it should help, no? ...
I attempt to hurriedly make this point in the gala "New Year's Bloggin' Eve" edition of bhTV. ... 6:28 P.M.
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How come you almost never see Saturn Astras on the road here in Southern California? They're still selling them, aren't they? How bad could they be? ... All of GM's efforts should be as successful as its campaign to kill Saturn. ... 6:10 P.M.
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As 2008 ends, the search for Matt Yglesias' manhood is focused on a remote, wooded area near Oxon Hill, Maryland. ... 5:22 P.M.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Alert reader D on the SEIU chief Andy Stern's defense of "card check" in a bloggingheads discussion with Robert Reich:
His substantive problem is that he assumes the conclusion, which is that workers need and want unions. Anything that interferes with that is therefore by definition wrong and is contrary to their will or at least to their best interests. If workers vote a union down it must be because they were intimidated, because a negative vote like that would be like a man voting against eating. It would be unnatural and open to suspicion. Stern could not stand up to a good interviewer for five minutes. Even Reich knew he was not responding to the question and was unconvincing - which is saying plenty.
One of the good things about bloggingheads is that if you can't make your case there you can't make it anywhere. You have the time, you have a non-disrespectful, non-cross-examining interlocutor, you're in familiar surroundings and don't have distractions.
In the process Stern dances around the issue of taking away the secret ballot, saying the issue is "whose choice about how to form the organization is this, the employers or the workers." No, the issue is how do you determine what the workers' choice is. If Stern wants to have a secret ballot about whether to have a secret ballot, then he'd be amending the labor law to give workers the choice he says he wants to give them. (Maybe that's not a bad compromise.) ...
P.S.: A common tactic of card check proponents is to say that opponents aren't really against the elimination of the secret ballot, they are really against unions. Hey, why can't I be against both? There are two legit issues here: democratic principle and whether more American-style unionization is the answer to our economy's problems. Yes, if there were a procedurally fair reform that promised to dramatically increase the unionization rate, I'd have a more difficult choice. But this isn't that case. I'm willing to bet that a) workers who vote anonymously, free of the collective social pressure that can come with public voting, will rationally decide, often enough, that the drawbacks of unionization (in terms of the adversarialization of the workplace, lost productivity, and winding up like Detroit) outweigh the benefits, and b) workers who do decide to unionize their companies will find those companies losing out in the marketplace and shrinking (as has been the case, most conspicuously, with Detroit). ... Bet (a), at least, is a bet Stern obviously doesn't want to take--even though in the bhTV interview Reich is clearly, if timidly, trying to push him in the direction of a package of reforms aimed at curbing employer "coercion" rather than ending the secret ballot. ... 7:54 P.M.
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"We don't report stuff like this" Except, you know, when it involves John McCain and not Pinch Sulzberger. ... Keep rockin! ... 6:01 P.M.
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Monday, December 22, 2008
The "Community" Strikes Back: Matt Yglesias is kidding either himself or us when he claims that he won't self-censor just because Jennifer Palmieri, "Acting CEO" of the outfit he blogs for (the "Center for American Progess Action Fund") commandeered his site** to post a disclaimer in BS-ese after Yglesias criticized a CAP ally. He writes:
Under the circumstances, it’s better for me, better for CAP and CAPAF, and better for everyone to understand that I’m writing as an individual not as the voice of the institution. Pointing that fact out isn’t contrary to me having an independent voice, it’s integral to having one. ...[snip] ... My role is to say what I think on the blog; that’s what I’ve always done and will keep doing.
No. Next time Yglesias wants to write something that might alienate one of CAP's numerous friends, he has to ask himself a) do I want Jennifer Palmieri to come squat on my blog again, and b) even if she doesn't, do I want the hassle of arguing with her or my bosses to prevent them from acting to ... er, "clarify" the situation in some other way? That has to tip the scales slightly--and, if my experience is any indication, more than slightly--in favor of pulling your punches and avoiding the hassle. ... Keep in mind, Palmieri didn't intervene because what Yglesias said was wrong--factually or logically---but rather simply because what he said differed from the position of the "institution." Why doesn't she get her own blog? ...
This is all hugely embarrassing for CAP. Palmieri, last seen helping John Edwards lie, owes Yglesias a published apology. I would think Yglesias could and should insist on it--he was a prestige acquisition for CAP, and it would damage them if he left. As things stand, he's been semi-emasculated.
Keep rockin'.
P.S.: Is the group Third Way's "domestic policy agenda" really "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit"? America wants to know! Or it does now! Isn't the first rule of flackery don't issue a denial that just gives more publicity to the charge you are denying? ...
**-- I should not have said "commandeered." I regret the error. CAP is a key leader in the progressive movement. I look forward to working with them in the future. What I meant to say is that Yglesias "allowed Palmieri an opportunity to issue a different opinion." Our fraternal Soviet comrades are welcome in Prague anytime! ... [via Insta] 9:58 P.M.
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