Pic of the Day: 'Websites For Dummies.' Hilarious!

Book given to Kathleen Sebelius today in Memphis by a Republican State Senator.  Hilarious. 

Pic of the Day: Another Common Core Outrage

Italy: The Nation That Crushes Its Young

 

By Beppe Severgnini

My son Antonio just turned 21 years old, and I’m worried. Not only is his generation of young Italians grappling with the longest economic slump in modern times, but they also have to deal with us, their fathers and mothers.

I’ve taken to calling us the Generazione Pitone, the Python Generation. We refuse to give ground, and instead slither forward and ingest everything in our path. We have stamina. We are selfish. We have a soundtrack (that’s why Bruce Springsteen is still touring). And now that we’re getting old and retiring, we cost plenty.

America’s baby boomers are not alone in the world. Every Western country produced a substantial postwar generation that has no intention of stepping aside.

But Italy is special. Old-age pensions swallow 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and 57 percent of all social spending. No other country in Europe spends so much on making its past comfortable.

And the future? Unemployment among people ages 15 to 24 is a record 40.1 percent, while the number of people 55 or over who are still working has ballooned to 3.5 million from 2.8 million in just five years. Italy is no country for young men, apparently.

Italy is still one of the world’s most attractive countries, a land graced by the arts and blessed by the weather; it is sumptuous at table and abounding in elegance. But clearly this is not enough. Many young Italians have begun to flee their iconic, pythonic homeland.

It would be sad if Italy’s emigration went back to the way it was in the 1950s, when people had to leave for Northern Europe, the United States or Australia to feed their families. And yet that seems increasingly likely. About 60,000 move abroad every year, seven out of 10 taking a college degree with them.

Almost 400,000 graduates have left Italy in the past decade, and only 50,000 similarly qualified foreigners have arrived. This is not the healthy, free movement of people that the European Union was set up to encourage. This is a nation on the run.

Young Italians who leave to find a job sometimes do so at great risk. Joele Leotta was a 20-year-old waiter who had relocated from Lecco, in Lombardy, to the British town of Maidstone, southeast of London. He was kicked and punched to death by a gang of Lithuanian immigrants who accused him of stealing their jobs.

Even getting into the job market is challenging. Many simply give up. According to government figures, three million Italians — half of them young — have stopped looking for employment. That’s a third more than the European Union average.

Part of the problem lies in the Italian legal framework. The Biagi law, a well-intended piece of legislation, has made the labor market more flexible. But the system it has created is based on short-term contracts, which undermines the market for stable, long-term jobs.

Internships, supposedly a way for businesses to help young people, have turned out to be a system in which young people help business by providing skilled, poorly paid labor. And then there’s the paperwork: To hire an apprendista, or trainee, an employer must apply to 12 separate offices.

As a result, even those young people with jobs are hurting. The average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s is about €1,000 a month, or about $1,375 — hence the media nickname Generazione Mille Euro. Not the sort of money that will get you a bank loan for your first home.

The previous and current governments — under the prime ministers Mario Monti and Enrico Letta — tried to sort this out. But economic stagnation is making a difficult task harder. Only two economies have grown less than Italy’s between 2001 and 2011. One was Haiti, which continues to suffer from its 2010 earthquake, and the other was Zimbabwe, which continues to suffer from Robert Mugabe.

Silvio Berlusconi, who was Italy’s prime minister for most of that time, had his own views on what young people could do to get ahead. When a 24-year-old woman named Perla Pavoncello asked him in 2008 on national television how she could start a family without a job, Mr. Berlusconi, the country’s illusionist in chief, answered, “You should look to marry a millionaire, like my son, or someone who doesn’t have such problems.” He then added, “With that smile of yours, you could even get away with it.”

But the real problem is the stranglehold of the Python Generation. “La classe dirigente” — the Italian ruling class — is Europe’s oldest: the average bank chief executive is 69 years old; court presidents, 65; and university professors are on average 63.

We have all the good jobs, and we’re not giving them away, even as we get old enough to move into a well-pensioned retirement. The intergenerational contract, the thread that binds society, needs to be re-knotted.

One of the 77-year-old Mr. Berlusconi’s nicknames is “The Caiman,” a creature not known for its delicacy. We pythons are younger and subtler. By applying and maintaining sufficient pressure, pythons eventually cause their prey to succumb from asphyxiation.

Thirty years ago we were finishing our education, settling into jobs and sniffing out the future. Back then, we wanted to achieve a better world. Today, it’s a better car. 

We can call that progress, but it isn’t. Just ask our children.

Beppe Severgnini is a writer and columnist for Corriere della Sera.

Immigration: A Bigger Problem Than You Think

By Walter Russell Mead

The modern Fordist paradises of the industrial world have seen their birthrates crater to the point that mass immigration is the only thing that can keep their economies staffed. This is riskier than it looks. The industrialized West is undertaking a historic experiment in real time: by allowing and even encouraging mass immigration from countries with vastly different cultural foundations, Western societies are testing whether people with deep cultural roots and few if any common loyalties can build cohesive and coherent societies in the 21st century.

For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, this is a less risky experiment than for others. The English speaking societies of the British diaspora have a long history of receiving and assimilating millions of immigrants. The process has rarely been easy or without costs, both to the hosts and to the new arrivals, but over time it has largely been a success. Those societies are wealthier, wiser, and intellectually and culturally richer because of their immigrant populations, and tension between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic “first settlers” and immigrants from later waves tends to disappear after one or two generations.

Pessimists worry that immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere will change America’s cultural balance, and/or that Muslim immigrants will fail to assimilate, becoming a permanent liability. But the hopeful signs outweigh the negative indicators, at least where I sit. The fashionable residential borough of Queens where I live is ground central for immigration in the Greater New York area, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Colombians, Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, African Americans, and Anglos all seem to be getting along reasonably well. That isn’t a scientific survey, I acknowledge, but the opinion pollsters and others supplement my unscientific sampling of the streets of Queens. The American assimilation process still seems to be in pretty good shape.

Europe’s problems with immigration, though experience differs from one country to the next, are much deeper. A commendable desire to avoid inflaming tensions and setting one group against another largely inhibits the establishment discourse about the nature and severity of Europe’s immigration issues, but driving this issue out of the respectable mainstream only empowers groups like the National Front in France and much uglier parties in countries like Hungary and Greece to exploit a hot button public issue that the mainstream parties do their best to ignore.

Much of the discussion of the problem focuses on the difficulty of integrating immigrants, particularly those of either Muslim, Roma or sub-Saharan African origins. There is much discussion of the perceived incompatibility of Islamic theology with the beliefs and practices of the postmodern, post-Christian and postindustrial West. Roma and sub-Saharan African cultures are, for different reasons, seen by some as too far removed from the social norms of contemporary Europe to allow for easy assimilation.

While it is difficult to construct a public discussion around these issues that steers a course between the Scylla of bigotry and the Charybdis of bland political correctness, there are important issues to be addressed. As one example, many (though by no means all) of the Roma seeking to take advantage of European Union mobility guarantees to escape the poverty and discrimination they face in their eastern homelands lack the skills and education to get and keep decent jobs in western Europe. Western Europe is not exactly a job creating dynamo for low skilled positions; many who move there will live on the fringes of society rather than carving out a comfortable, secure place in their new homes. For many of the immigrants, that’s an improvement: if you must live by your wits on the margins of society it is better to live on the margins of a rich country than of a poor one. Better France, Germany and Denmark than Bulgaria and Romania. It’s important for mainstream politicians to be able to discuss and address issues of this kind because they are very much on the public mind and will not go away.

There are other problems that arise from the nature of immigration into Europe. In France for example, immigrants from North Africa make up a very large proportion of the immigrant population. Their proportion is so large, and their difficulties with integrating into French society are so similar and so acute, that in a significant number of cases they are developing a North African or Islamist identity that is cohesive enough to form a rival pole of attraction. Instead of assimilating into a French identity, there is a tendency among some to assimilate into a permanent minority identity that could pose long term problems for the French state.

The biggest problems that Europe faces, however, stem less from the nature of the immigrants than from the nature of Europe’s social order. Since the 19th century, Europe has moved toward the creation of the ethnic nation state. The central demand of European democrats going back to the era of the French Revolution was for the right of each people to construct a state of their own. Every people had the right to live under a government of their own choosing, under laws that reflected their own cultural values and goals, and under policies that would promote the culture and well being of the gens that constituted the foundation of the state.

So powerful was the drive for ethnic nation states in European history that millions were killed and many millions more driven out of their ancestral homes in order to create these states. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were only the latest example of the irresistible force of ethnic nationalism in European affairs. Kosovars, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Macedonians could not bear to live under the rule of people who spoke a different language, had a different religion or cultural tradition. Now most of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia live in ethnically based states, statelets or proto-states and, after the usual atrocities and expulsions, things have settled down.

The Balkans are not unique. Poland and then-Czechoslovakia expelled literally millions of Germans in 1945 and 1946; today those parts of the world are peaceful, democratic and the dominant ethnic group is overwhelmingly the people for whom the state is named and whose cultural values it is intended to represent. Centuries of anti-Semitic hatred, accelerating dramatically all across Europe as nationalism became more powerful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, only abated with the wholesale murder or emigration of the vast majority of European Jews.

Even today, wherever serious ethnic diversity persists, states are in trouble. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia both broke up after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many Catalans and Basques want to leave Spain. The Flemish and the Walloons keep Belgium poised on the brink of breaking up. The Scots are pushing to leave the UK. Tens of thousands have died in fighting between Turks and Kurds. Russia faces huge problems and tensions around many of its ethnic and religious minorities. Russian speaking minorities in the Baltic republics remain intensely problematic. The presence of Magyar minorities in Slovakia and Romania complicates Hungary’s relations with both of these countries.

In Europe, even as church and state increasingly separated in the last 150 years, nation and state fused. The multinational states of Europe’s past (the Austrian, Ottoman, German and Russian empires) began to break down into their component national subunits. In those new national sovereignties, the promotion of the culture and the language of the dominant ethnic group was an integral element of their political structure. You had to speak Polish to teach in interwar Polish universities or work for the Polish civil service—just as Estonia today wants to preserve jobs and privileges for people who are fluent in Estonian. From one end of Europe to the other, the legitimacy of states is bound up with the identification of the state with the national majority.

More than that, the solidarity that underlies European social safety networks is grounded in a sense of ethnic identity and cohesion. The nationalist movements across Europe aimed to resolve class conflicts between the elites and the masses within ethnicities by heightening a sense of solidarity. “We Danes,” “we Czechs,” “we Poles” had to stick together and take care of our own. (America’s looser ethnic bonds account in part for our weaker social safety networks; many Americans see the poor as other and different from themselves.)

Europe’s system of protecting middle aged workers by hanging the young out to dry is in part a system of ethnic protection. The middle aged are much more ethnically homogenous than the young. One consequence of high youth unemployment in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain is systemic social marginalization of immigrant populations, who not only tend to be much younger than the host population but who also sometimes lack the credentials demanded by the increasingly formalized and bureaucratized employment process in many European countries. This is not helping the cause of peaceful assimilation, and one suspects that, as European populations become less culturally homogenous, support for generous welfare states that primarily benefit immigrants will gradually erode.

In many European countries, France included, ethnic nationalism is a force that animates both socialist and conservative nationalist politics. One of the reasons the French Socialists fear the National Front so much is that many socialist voters support the party because they see socialist welfare policies and socialist opposition to “Anglo-Saxon capitalism” as a way to protect the interests of ordinary French people. And by ordinary French people they emphatically do not mean Roma immigrants from Bulgaria or Arab and Berber immigrants from North Africa.

Europe’s social engineers of the last generation seem to have assumed that the “dark forces” of nationalism and chauvinism had been left behind. That was partly true; the horrors of the two world wars have made many (though far from all) Europeans unwilling to fight anymore on ethnic grounds. But the subsidence of ethnic nationalism in European politics was also a function of the mass ethnic cleansings and genocidal killings that left most European nation states fairly homogenous. There was no “German Question” in Polish or Czech politics because there were no more Germans in these countries. The “Jewish Question” largely faded in postwar Europe, in part because of revulsion against Nazism, but also because the Jews were gone. Europe’s architects liked to believe that Europeans had transcended ethnic hatred, but much of Europe’s postwar peace came from the success of ethnic hatred in creating homogenous countries.

What we now see in Europe as the Great Immigration Experiment continues is a steady drift toward a new politics of ethnicity. Nationalist sentiments and movements are gaining force throughout the region. (In this respect, Putin’s Russia is moving in the same direction as its neighbors, though in an even rougher way.) Europe’s remaining multiethnic unions (especially the UK, Belgium, Russia, and Spain) face strong secessionist movements. Throughout Europe, the new nationalism is in revolt against the cosmopolitan projects of the European Union, and it is also in revolt against mass immigration and the threatened loss of ethnic cohesion and homogeneity. We don’t know how effective the European mainstream parties will be at suppressing the growing power of the neo-nationalists, but it looks as if so far the trend over time is for the center, left and right, to decline and for the nationalists to rise.

In America, these problems are not as severe. Our nationalism is not quite as ethnically focused as nationalism tends to be in Europe, and our past history of successful assimilation conditions both the newcomers and the host population to believe that our current waves of immigrants will ultimately settle in just as past waves have done. What also limits the effect of anti-immigrant populism in American politics is that the two groups most powerfully and negatively affected (low income and working class African Americans and whites) have historically been at odds with each other. Each major American political party is an uneasy coalition in which pro-immigration forces on the whole outweigh anti-immigrant ones, and African American and Tea Party-like immigration opponents are unlikely to form an effective coalition on this issue.

Nevertheless, it would be foolhardy to believe that there is no practical limit to the ability of the United States to absorb new immigrants; there is some annual number x between zero and ten million at which anti-immigration feeling would likely reimpose some contemporary version of the 1920s quota system. Illegal immigration is particularly costly and divisive; thoughtful immigration proponents need to pay much more than lip service to the goal of policing the borders, or anti-immigration sentiment could become much more powerful in this country.

But if America is running some risks in going ahead with mass immigration, Europe is playing with fire. It is not primarily because many of the immigrants are from Muslim backgrounds; it is not because of their skin color. It is fundamentally because they are foreign: “not us.” Modernization in Europe was a process of creating ethnically homogenous nation states and, on the far side of the murders and expulsions necessary to create that new status quo, building institutions in which the homogenous states could work together.

Europe forgot that hard truth, and partly as a result, the health of the multinational European Union and the political stability of many of its ever less homogenous nation states are increasingly under threat. The contrast in living standards between Europe and its neighboring regions makes immigration attractive; the implosion of Europe’s birthrate makes mass immigration economically necessary. But the resulting diversity in nation states whose identity is closely tied to ethnicity threatens to summon up the dark demons of past ethnic conflict.

Bad economic times intensify these tensions—just as the hard economic times of the 1930s exacerbated the hatreds and rivalries of the day. Europe today is simultaneously creating depression-like conditions through the euro austerity drive, rekindling intra-European animosities as northern and Club Med countries squabble over whose fault the catastrophic euro situation really is, and, to throw gasoline on the fire, experiencing  accelerated immigration from the east and south.

It is not at all clear that Europe’s leaders fully understand the risks they are running. Polls putting the National Front ahead in France should serve as a wakeup call; mass immigration poses a serious danger to Europe’s social peace.

[Image: Members of the Pakistani community in Athens stand on January 19, 2013 in front of a banner with the portrait of a 27-year-old Pakistani migrant victim in the center of Athens. Hundreds of Greeks and other nationals marched peacefully against racism and fascism. Nearly 3,000 people joined the rally that was set up by municipalities, organisations, migrant communities and main opposition party radical leftists Syriza. This week, authorities arrested a 29-year-old firefighter and another Greek man aged 25 for the murder of the 27-year-old Pakistani migrant in Athens. Courtesy ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)

10 Reasons Why François Hollande Has Flopped In France

Is it the 75% tax trap? Poor communication skills? Or is he just too normal? Unluckily for Hollande, it's all these things and more

By Agnès Poirier, The Guardian

His approval ratings were already disastrous, but François Hollande is now confirmed as the most unpopular president on record. A survey on Monday put his personal approval ratings at 26%, the first time a president has dropped below 30% since presidential popularity began to be measured by BVI polling agency. For voters across the political spectrum it seems, poor Hollande can do no right. Here are 10 possible reasons why it's all gone pear-shaped for the president.

1. The 75% tax trap

The pledge made by Hollande during his election campaign, that he would tax the highest incomes at 75%, alongside his earlier "I don't like the rich" statement, has almost defined his presidency and not in a good way. The biggest irony is that the 75% tax rate, since deemed unconstitutional, will never be implemented. A case of communication gone terribly wrong. Zéro points.

2. He has perfected the art of putting the cart before the horse (otherwise known as getting his priorities wrong)

To start his five year reign with the same-sex marriage bill battle was probably courageous, but ill-advised. In the eyes of most French people, even those in favour of gay marriage, the new government's efforts should have been focused on fighting the public deficit, tackling unemployment and reforming institutions.

3. Hating conflict is not ideal when you're the president of France

Hollande hates confrontation, can't stand discord, and like most self-confessed social democrats, he wants to calm heated debate at all costs. If this has proved useful when negotiating with trade unions over greater flexibility in the labour market, a conciliatory tone in all things is not always useful.

4. He is indecisive

Conciliation often leads to indecision, or the appearance of indecision. His advisers confide that they never know what he really thinks and that his answers to questions are either "oui" or "oui oui". In a country where the favourite three letter word is "non", the presidential habit sounds more than hesitant, it sounds ominous.

5. He doesn't seem able to rein in his party factions

That the Left party's pitbull, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, keeps insulting the head of state on prime-time television and on the airwaves is bad enough, but you could argue that not being a member of the government, he doesn't have to show any deference. However, the Greens holding ministerial positions, calling for French youngsters to take to the streets, is a step too far that even a conciliatory president shouldn't accept.

6. He's too normal

I admit, we quite liked it at first. After five years of sheer abnormality with the histrionic Nicolas Sarkozy, most of us welcomed "Monsieur Normal", a slightly overweight regular bloke, not a jack-in-the-box prone to outrageous behaviour and policies. The problem is, France requires a less than ordinary president, a personality able to grasp the complexities and beauties of such a contrarian nation.

7. He has a weak prime minister

Why oh why is Hollande sticking to Jean-Marc Ayrault as PM? The mayor of Nantes should have kept doing what he does best, being a local figure. The poor man looks so exhausted; he has no authority on his unruly government. Manuel Valls, the current dashing and firm interior minister, would as prime minister stir passions and wake France up.

8. He lacks communication skills

Can Alastair Campbell please help? If Sarkozy was a master dazzler, leaving us no time to rest between announcements of eye-catching new measures, Hollande seems unable to present his actions in clear and effective terms. We don't see him much and when he speaks out, we're not convinced.

9. He has stopped being himself

This is probably the saddest thing. François Hollande, bon viveur and witty charmer, used to make us laugh. If he's still charming and warm in private, with us, his people, he feels he needs to act out a part. We don't see him eat, drink and be merry, he doesn't humour us anymore, he even walks strangely, as stiff as a broom.

10. He hasn't eased our existentialist angst

Many of us hoped he would be able to soothe our national anxiety, which reached alarming levels after five years of Sarkozy paroxysm. Alas, after a wait and see period, we feel increasingly impatient. Soon, we'll be getting angry.

Anti-Semitism Is Now Mainstream In France

 

By Guy Milliere

A few weeks ago, when French Jewish actor Elie Semoun was a prime-time guest on one of the main French television channels, Canal Plus, the words of Sebastian Thoen, a standup comedian who introduced him may have been meant to be to be laudatory, but took quite a different turn: "You never plunged into communitarianism [Jewish activism] ... You could have posted yourself in the street selling jeans and diamonds from the back of a minivan, saying 'Israel is always right, f*** Palestine, wallala.' You show that it is possible to be of the Jewish faith without being completely disgusting."

Semoun was obviously ill-at-ease, but did not react. A couple hours after the show, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) issued a statement denouncing a "dangerous trivialization of anti-Semitism." The President of the TV channel responded by saying that the Jewish community had "no sense of humor." The incident occurred, however, in a context where the French Jewish community has no reason to have a sense of humor.

At the end of 2012, Jewish France was republished. The book is a tirade of extreme anti-Semitism, originally published in 1886 by the author Edouard Drumont, and reprinted repeatedly until after World War II and the fall of the Vichy regime.

The publishing company sent a press release for the latest book launch: "A classic of French literature is finally available again." When Jewish organizations protested, articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro (the two leading French daily newspapers) said that Jewish organizations had "overreacted." The publishing company that reprinted Jewish France issued or reissued other books at the same time, such as The International Jew by Henry Ford; The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed, the first anti-Semitic writer to deny Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and an Anthology of Writings Against Jews, Judaism and Zionism, including excerpts from the most libelous anti-Semitic writings of the last two centuries. These books are now available at all the most popular French bookstores. Thousands of copies of each have been sold. The CEO of the publishing company Kontre Kulture [Counterculture, with a play on words] is a famous French anti-Semitic writer, Alain Soral; his last book, Understanding Empire, purports to explain the "Jewish hold" on the world; it has been on French bestsellers lists for more than two years.

In recent months, an openly anti-Semitic black comedian, Dieudonné, presented a series of shows in the main cities of France and Belgium before large and enthusiastic audiences. One of his greatest hits is a song ridiculing the Holocaust and the "chosen people" : Shoah-Ananas (Holocaust-Pineapple). He popularized a gesture of greeting which he dubbed "quenelle" (a French dumpling), which echoes the Nazi salute. The "quenelle" salute consists of extending the right arm and straightening the hand, but the arm is lowered, and not raised at eye level. "Quenelle" is now used by many young people all over the country when they want to show what they think of Jews and Israel. Recently, pictures of French soldiers stationed outside a Paris synagogue and welcoming visitors with "quenelles" were published on several websites: a military investigation is now under way. The French Minister of Defense said that one should not attach "great importance" to what happened.

At the end of June, a documentary film, Oligarchy and Zionism, was supposed to be released nationwide. The movie poster, with a likeness to editorial cartoons from Nazi magazines at the time of the Third Reich, should have aroused suspicion: it showed a Jew turned into a spider crushing the planet with his crooked legs. The Jew wore a black jacket with the Star of David and the initials of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on his shoulders.

The film itself uses all the themes of "classical" anti-Semitism, with a modern twist. It is based on interviews with Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Thierry Meyssan, who wrote 9/11: The Big Lie, a book explaining that the September 11 terrorist attacks were organized by the CIA and Israel's Mossad. The film's director, Beatrice Pignede, had previously made ​​the film Snapping up the Memory, glorifying the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and she participated in the Fars film festival in Tehran in 2012.

The film was announced in various mainstream magazines as an "important event." It was not released because Jewish organizations threatened to picket movie theaters. It is available, however, on many websites, and has been widely circulated. Beatrice Pignede said she was a "victim of the Jewish lobby" and that the "fate" of her film is "proof" of what she wants to denounce.

To say that the majority of the French population is anti-Semitic would be going too far. Polls show that a favorite public figure this year is popular Jewish singer Jean-Jacques Goldman. But it is clear that anti-Semitism is rapidly gaining ground in France. It is clear there is a real trivialization of anti-Semitism that goes way beyond some ugly sentences uttered by a standup comedian during a prime time TV talk show.

A few years ago, anti-Semitism in France was still hiding behind the mask of "anti-Zionism" and hostility to Israel. It is still true, but more often now, the targets are the Jews themselves, and the mask of "anti-Zionism" has fallen away.

In a recently published book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, Manfred Gerstenfeld explains that what happens in France is happening all over Europe. "Polls show," he wrote," that well over 100 million Europeans embrace a satanic view of the State of Israel (...) This current widespread...view is obviously a new mutation of the diabolical beliefs about Jews which many held in the Middle Ages, and those more recently promoted by the Nazis and their allies."

Seven decades after Auschwitz, the oldest hatred is slowly regaining its place on the continent, and it is no laughing matter.

Related:

Norway: A Tolerant, Inclusive, Diverse, Multicultural Society For Everyone...Except Jews

  

Hitler's Ghost Haunts Europe

British Yobs, Racial Slurs And Why I Fear For My Children: One British Mother's Utterly Shocking Account Of The Anti-Semitism That Her Children Suffer

Pic of the Day: A Split Screen From Hell For The Administration

http://tinyurl.com/mvv96wy

'Toons of the Day: President Know-Nothing

The Single-Payer Fantasy

Obamacare isn’t a Republican idea, and liberals could never get their dream of single-payer.

By Charles C W Cooke

As Obamacare declines toward a possible fall, the assembled denizens of the professional Left are scrambling in earnest to register their excuses with the public. Thus far at least, the award for the most creative contribution goes to former labor secretary Robert Reich, whose Saturday paean to single-payer health care managed to combine all of the most dishonest talking points that have bubbled up since October 1 while constructing in tandem a counterfactual so dazzling that only the truest of apostles could be persuaded by it.

Reich’s column has the Upworthy-worthy title, “The Democrats’ Version of Health Insurance Would Have Been Cheaper, Simpler, and More Popular (So Why Did We Enact the Republican Version and Why Are They So Upset?).” In it, Reich claims that if “Democrats [had] stuck to the original Democratic vision and built comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare, it would have been cheaper, simpler, and more widely accepted by the public.” And, he adds for good measure, “Republicans would be hollering anyway.” 

The underlying conceit here, that the Democratic party had the option of “sticking to the original vision” of single-payer but that it instead settled on Obamacare as part of some sort of grand compromise, is fairly popular among the law’s apologists these days. Republicans, this story goes, are opportunistic hypocrites who dropped their longtime support for a system that looked just like Obamacare the very moment that a black man was elected to the White House. Democrats, meanwhile, are presented as being too nice and too solicitous of their opponents, and criticized for having elected to placate the Republican party by forgoing pursuit of what they truly wanted: Medicare for all.

Reassuring as this tale might be to those who are worriedly surveying the damage that Healthcare.gov has wrought upon their project, it remains self-evidently absurd. Obamacare was passed into law without a single Republican vote; its passage led to the biggest midterm blowout since 1948; and repealing the measure has been, to borrow Harry Reid’s favorite word, the “obsession” of Republicans for nearly five years. It is a law based upon an idea that Republican leadership failed to consider, debate, or advance during any of the periods in which they have held political power — and one that they actively opposed when it was suggested in a similar form by President Clinton during the 1990s. If Republicans were desperate to get something done along the lines that Obama proposed in 2009, they have had a funny way of showing it over the past 159 years.

Champions of the Republican Idea Theory tend to respond to the presentation of these facts by charging that that the concept of an individual mandate was the product of a 1989 paper issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation (something its author vigorously denies), and that Republicans were so taken by the idea of forcing everybody to buy a private product that . . . well, actually herein lies the problem. Truth be told, Republicans were so taken with Heritage’s design that a grand number of two of them ever went so far as to introduce a federal bill based on it and Mitt Romney used it as the basis of reform in deep-blue Massachusetts. Oh, and Newt Gingrich once said something nice about it — in 1995. This, suffice it to say, is hardly a ringing endorsement.

Whatever historical weight the Left chooses to attribute to the Heritage proposal, it cannot change the salient fact that “Heritage” is synonymous with neither “Republican party” nor “conservative movement,” nor that, even if it were, such a link would serve only to confuse matters. As Avik Roy notes over at Forbes, the so-called “Heritage plan” was actually “killed” by another Heritage employee, Peter Ferrara, whose first act after leaving the organization was to campaign vehemently against the idea and to “[convince] 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing” it. Ferrara was joined in his opposition by the Cato Institute, the Galen Institute, and almost everybody on the Republican side of Congress. 

Reich’s fantasy account of a restrained Democratic party does not hold up either. There is a devastatingly dull reason the bulletproof Democratic majority of 2008 didn’t build “comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare,” and that is that it didn’t have the votes. Indeed, with full control of the government, Democrats didn’t even have the votes to set up a public insurance option, let alone to take over the whole system. Long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, Ezra Klein was lamenting that the public option was dead on arrival. Joe Lieberman, Klein noted sadly, has “swung the axe and cut his deal cleanly, killing not only the public option, but anything that looked even remotely like it.”

Lieberman did this for a solid reason: Despite the best efforts of the president, the mooted health-care bill remained deeply unpopular throughout the legislative process, and the public option even more so. Americans, remember, didn’t even want the bill as it currently ended up, and they were so determined to stop it that the progressive stronghold of Massachusetts elected to the Senate a Republican who ran promising not only to “kill” that specific bill but also to end the Democratic party’s filibuster-proof majority. Are we honestly expected to suppose that if the proposal had been farther to the left, it would have had a better chance? Does the progressive movement really think that the public can be persuaded that Democratic legislators “compromised” with an intransigent opposition out of the goodness of their hearts? I think not.

As for Reich’s claim that a single-payer system would have been “more widely accepted by the public”: Is he joking? So acutely aware were the president and his allies in Congress of the fact that the vast majority of Americans did not want to lose their current insurance that, like so many traveling salesmen on the frontier, they just brazenly lied, promising things of their product that it could never possibly deliver and assiduously playing down the scale of the chance that their customers were taking. Again, with Obamacare as it is now, the president was forced onto the defensive, provoked into repeating as mantra that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” and into reassuring voters that “no one will take it away — no matter what.” One can only imagine what he would have had to promise if he had been peddling single-payer.

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who has dismissed the law as an “immense kludge” and is open about his preference for a Medicaid-for-all single-payer model, has managed to grasp that “the reluctance of workers who currently have good insurance through their employers to trade that insurance for something new” meant in practical terms that “the Affordable Care Act was probably all we could get.” It was indeed, and if the Republican party plays its cards right and can turn the disastrous rollout of the law into a setback not just to this particular scheme but to the technocratic model itself, it will be all that the Left “can get” for some time to come.

Nevertheless, as any good liar knows, it is the chaotic and amorphous opening days of any disaster that provide the opportunities for the most ambitious spin. Refusing to allow anything as prosaic as truth to intrude upon their fantasies, progressives are engaged in an audacious attempt to blame their opponents for their signature mistake and, worse, to pretend that the solution to the havoc wrought by magical thinking is to commission even more magic. “We must do what we can,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in a letter to Henry Kissinger, “to bring hammer blows against the bell jar that protects the dreamers from reality.” With Obamacare failing in precisely the ways that they predicted it would, conservatives have been given an extraordinary hammer. They must not let their opponents take it from their hands.

Heckava Job, Clownie!

If The Shutdown Didn't Hurt Republicans Now, What About The 2014 Midterms?

Some predicted electoral disaster for the GOP after the shutdown fiasco, but in two test cases, so far at least, it's not happening.

By Harry Enten of The Guardian

There has been a lot of talk about the possible electoral consequences of the government shutdown. And while the 2014 midterm elections are still a year away, we have two elections in 2013 that can serve as test cases of sorts. In both the New Jersey special Senate and Virginia gubernatorial races, the Democrat was against the shutdown, while the Republican was not. The Democrats have tried to make hay with this, but has it worked? The evidence available suggests that it has not.

Democratic Senator-elect Cory Booker defeated Republican Steve Lonegan by 11pt in New Jersey. That may suggest that the Republican brand was hurt by the shutdown, except for the fact that New Jersey is quite Democratic. No Republican candidate has gotten 50% or more of the vote in a major statewide election in the Garden State since George HW Bush in the 1988 presidential election.

The average margin for the Democratic candidate in the last four senatorial elections before 2013 was 13pt. Booker actually fell short of that margin, though it is well within the historical norm. You'd probably expect a slight decline from an off-year election on a Wednesday, when young and minority voters are less likely to turn out.
Moreover, the polling didn't change after the shutdown. Monmouth and Quinnipiac, two pollsters who call cellphones and have a reliable record in the state, had Booker up by 13pt and 12pt respectively before the shutdown. In their final surveys after the shutdown took place, they had Booker up 10pt and 14pt respectively. That's one up and one down, with no statistically significant difference between the pre- and post-shutdown polls.

You might say that you wouldn't expect to see the shutdown in the New Jersey Senate election. It was a special election, and New Jersey isn't next to the nation's capital.

Virginia, however, is the first place where you'd expect to see an effect. Many jobs were furloughed because of the shutdown. Some Republicans representing Virginia in Congress were against the shutdown. Plus, there isn't much difference between the demographic makeup in an off-year like 2013 and the midterms, like the 2014 statewide electorate.

Again, we see a Democrat out to a big lead. Democrat Terry McAuliffe is ahead by 7pt over Republican Ken Cuccinelli per the latest Quinnipiac survey. This victory would break an over 30-year streak of the White House party losing the Virginia gubernatorial election. So, it had to be the shutdown? That's what Politico suggested, a few weeks ago. 

The problem is that the polling just doesn't backup the shutdown argument. Ken Cuccinelli was a sitting duck before any shutdown hit. His favorable ratings had been dropping since way back in July, and smart analysts like Sean Trende were predicting his defeat from May onwards. One could argue that the ideology that brought Republicans into a showdown with President Obama harmed them significantly in Virginia; the shutdown itself, however, shows no real effect.

An average of the final live interview surveys in the two weeks leading up to the shutdown had McAuliffe ahead by 6.3pt. An average of the live interview polls over the last two weeks has him up by 7.3pt. That's not much movement at all. In fact, Quinnipiac went with the headline "Shutdown Hurt Virginia, But Not Republican In Gov Race" on their latest survey.

What's more surprising, in fact, is that McAuliffe's inability to pull away conclusively comes as he mobilises a big advertisement advantage in the weeks since the shutdown. McAuliffe and his allies have been outspending Cuccinelli and his supporters by ratios of 3:2, 5:2, and 13:2 in the last three weeks, as Domenico Montanaro first reported. These are the types of numbers you'd think would move the dial; yet they really haven't.

Overall, the 2013 major statewide elections don't show any proof that the federal shutdown harmed Republicans electorally. In both the New Jersey Senate and Virginia gubernatorial election, the Democratic and Republican positions mirrored those of their national parties. Since the time of the shutdown, there was not a marked deterioration of Republican numbers in either contest.

Whether or not this holds for 2014 is another question.