It’s the skin color, stupid

Matt Yglesias extracts the key finding from recent paper by Political Scientist Alan Abamowitz.  Racial attitudes strongly predict attitudes towards Obama even when controlling for partisanship and ideology:

The results in Table 2 show that racial resentment was strongly related to ratings of Obama and that this relationship persists even after controlling for party identification and ideology. Regardless of party identification or ideology, whites who scored high on the racial resentment scale had substantially more negative opinions of Obamathan those who scored low on the racial resentment scale.

Obviously, this does not mean that a person’s negative opinion of Obama is driven by race, but it does mean that, in the aggregate you really cannot deny the fact that racial attitudes are strongly related to how Americans think about Obama.  Or as Abamowitz puts it: “These results indicate that Barack Obama’s race remains a major influence on how he is perceived and evaluated by the white Americans.”

What’s a major worth?

Pretty cool chart looking at average incomes by major.

Glad to see that Social Science fares relatively well.  I really do believe there’s genuine (economic, among other) value in the analytical approach good social science takes to understanding the human world that can be applied quite broadly.  I do love this quote in the accompanying article:

“I don’t want to slight Shakespeare,” said Anthony Carnevale, one of the report’s authors. “But this study slights Shakespeare.”

One thing this data is not able to answer at all is life satisfaction/happiness.  Are the people who studied Shakespeare happier because they pursued their dream, rather than business majors who chose that due to earnings potential.  Obviously, earnings potential and potential happiness figure in these decisions for most people, but surely earnings weighs in more for the majors at the top and less for those at the bottom.  I’d be genuinely curious to know if sacrificing potential earnings proves to be worth it for choosing an educational path that is seen as personally more worthwhile and fulfilling– it’s not as if you are starving on $45K/year.  Of course, part of my curiosity stems from the fact that most people who are college professors are smart enough that they could be making significantly more money in other fields, but have chosen this career because of the fabulous non-financial benefits.

Video of the day

This is just amazing.  Fox Business makes regular Fox news look like a model of decency…

Fox Obama Chugging Forties Joplin Tornado | Pop…, posted with vodpod

The Senate “Ryancare” vote

I have no idea if it’s original (probably not), but I think we should term Ryan’s disastrous plan for voucherizing Medicare as Ryancare.  Anyway, good for Harry Reid for forcing Republican Senators to go on the record on this.  All, but 5 of them voted for the Ryan plan.  An interesting collective action problem.  The best interest of pretty much any individual Senator is to vote against this plan.  At absolute best, this is electorally neutral, and in most cases surely looks to be an electoral negative.  That said, the more this vote is all Democrats against all Republicans, the easier it is to play it off as “partisan politics as usual” to try and destigmatize the vote.  The more divided Republicans are on this, the worse it is for all Republicans.  Republicans learned very clearly with Obama’s health care reform effort that you can very much muddy the waters of perception– of both ordinary folks and the punditocracy– by strong party discipline.  In this case, the best approach probably is to double-down and just try and convince everyone that this is just “partisanship as usual” by keeping near unanimous opposition to Democrats.  Still, those Senator X voted to end Medicare ads may yet be quite damning.  No surprise that Scott Brown and the ladies from Maine were among the defectors.

Has Clinton heard of the Affordable Care Act?!

Heard a summary of Bill Clinton’s remarks at this Fiscal Summit thing today and damn did it make me mad.  He’s just got to try so hard to be Mr. Reasonable Centrist that he accuses Republicans of being theologically committed to no tax increases but Democrats as equally theologically committed to refusing to address Medicare reforms to control costs.  Are you serious?!  Has he heard of the Affordable Care Act.  Not to psycho-analyze, but… perhaps Clinton is so jealous that Obama passed health reform where he failed (in part, by going about it in a more politically savvy manner), that he’s blocked it out.   It’s not perfect, but arguably the most important aspect of the reform is the efforts it makes to reduce the growth in health care spending, which it does primarily through a variety of reforms to medical care.  And on a larger level, so annoying to hear Clinton of all people gauging in this absurd false symmetry argument.

Question

That last post had a long quotation in the middle.  For at least one of you reading it– on a Blackberry– that meant the quoted text was huge and took forever to scroll through.  I’m trying to figure out if that is something unique to Blackberry or unique to WordPress.  If you read this blog on a platform other than Blackberry and experience similar frustrations with the quotes, please let me know, and I’ll try and figure out a way to improve it.

Why does the GOP favor wasting money?

Do the Republicans in Congress have to be so so stupid on all matters of health care. A major cost-saving feature of ACA is to institute a board to make sure Medicare does not waste money paying for medical treatments that have no proven value.  Apparently, not wanting Medicare to pay for treatments of no or minimal benefit is rationing!!  Damn, damn, damn this stuff makes me mad.  The Republicans “care” about the deficit and government spending, yet they think Medicare should pay for any treatment any doctor is willing to give?!  Yglesias has the details:

There are currently two approaches to restraining the growth of Medicare spending in Washington. One, espoused by the Obama administration, is to create an Independent Payment Advisory Board which will prevent Medicare from paying for ineffective health care treatments. The other, espoused by House Republicans, is to do nothing whatsoever for the next ten years. And then to promise that nothing will ever be done to harm a precious hair on the head of a single precious person born in the good old days before 1955.

But if you were born after 1955? Then it’s simple—no Medicare for you. You get a coupon, of decreasing value, to go buy private health insurance.

Sometimes conservative pundits claim to believe that the problem with the IPAB approach is that it can’t be made to work. Other times conservative politicians dedicate themselves to fanatical defense of wasteful Medicare spending, denouncing IPAB as Kenyan socialist rationing. And Brian Beutler reports that they have a powerful tool tomake sure IPAB fails—just don’t confirm anyone:

There’s just one problem: Each of the board’s 15 members has to be confirmed by the Senate. That means filibusters and 60 vote requirements stand in the way of staffing a panel that Republicans decry as a government rationing board. And months ahead of the nominations, they’re telling Obama “good luck with that!”

“I think it would be pretty tough,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the top Republican on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, told TPM Monday, when asked about confirming Obama’s nominees to IPAB. “We don’t believe in rationing, nor do we believe in an unaccountable organization like that. I mean that’s crazy.”

“I’d have to think about that. If it were changed, then probably, but the way it’s constituted now, it’d be difficult,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), an influential conservative in the Republican caucus, said Monday in response to a question from TPM.

Then once this effort to increase the cost-effectiveness of Medicare for all Americans is sabotaged, the success of the sabotage will become an argument in favor of scrapping Medicare altogether.

Ugh.  Worst part is I don’t see how you get around this.  Yet more evidence that the Republicans main priority is low taxes for rich people, not reducing the deficit.

The “r” word

My son is retarded.  Ohhh, I think that makes me a horrible person.  Forgive me for not being sensitive to “the r word.”  I certainly get that the word can be used pejoratively, i.e., “you’re so retarded,” etc., and we presumably have better terms now, intellectually disabled, cognitively disabled/impaired, etc., but this word has an actual clinical definition.  Heck, it’s in the DSM-IV!  Thus, I think this youtube video on the matter is way over the top (and NSFW, by the way)

No, I don’t actually call my son “retarded,” but I think people are too sensitive on this one. Maybe that’s because I grew up calling my older brother “mentally retarded,” he is– it’s right there in the DSM– because that’s just what we called people with severe autism back before most people understood autism.  While I’m at it, I don’t get offended if someone calls my son “autistic” instead of saying he “has autism.”  Its certainly not the best way to define him– his life is shaped much moreso by his intellectual disabilities than his  autism, but it’s not worth getting bent out of shape over.  And he’s such a beautiful kid (inside and out), that I’ll throw in a gratuitous picture, too:

Theme of the 2012 Congressional races: Medicare

From the Times:

10:07 p.m. | Updated Democrats scored an upset in one of New York’s most conservative congressional districts on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the national Republican Party in a race that largely turned on the party’s plan to overhaul Medicare.

The results set off elation among Democrats and soul-searching among Republicans, who questioned whether the party should rethink its commitment to the Medicare plan, which appears to have become a liability as 2012 elections loom.

Two months ago, the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, was considered an all-but-certain loser. But Ms. Hochul seized on her Republican rival’s embrace of the proposal from Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, to overhaul Medicare, and she never let up.

Really looking forward to seeing how this plays out in races next year.  Of course, that is a long time from now, but I still see a barrage of ominous ads with “Representative X voted to end Medicare…”

At least 45% are lying

From the Post’s latest non-sensical poll:

About 50% of Americans say they understand the consequences of defaulting on the debt.  Somehow, I doubt that the true figure is more than 5%.  Meanwhile, the fact that 47% believe that approving the ceiling will increase spending is further evidence of ignorance.  We’ve already committed to most all this spending– it’s called Medicare, Social Security, Defense, etc., it’s just a matter if we’re going to borrow the money to pay for the spending we’ve already committed to.  And for that matter, what’s with not being concerned about the US Government defaulting on its debts–please!  Further evidence why we sure don’t want government by public opinion.

Declaration vs. the Constitution

I’m sure you could find examples of Democratic politicians not knowing the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but it’s more fun when it’s Republicans.  Ezra Klein catalogs some recent “misstatements” on the matter:

Oh, Herman Cain.

We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to re-read the Constitution and enforce the Constitution. … And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That bit about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. So perhaps “some people” aren’t the only ones who need to re-read our founding documents.

But Cain isn’t the first to make this mistake. During health-care reform, then-minority leader John Boehner took to the steps of the Capitol to argue that the ghost of George Washington would clearly vote against the Affordable Care Act. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” he said, waving it in the air, “and I’m going to stand here with our Founding Fathers, who said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

As Ezra points out, it is interesting that they use such a vague formulation as somehow in support of their particular view of government.  Of course, when you are a conservative ideologue, everything supports the rightness of the conservative world view.  On a quasi-related note, I also enjoy asking my Intro students about Locke’s Natural Rights of Man and hearing them say “pursuit of happiness” after I start with “life, liberty…” Of course, Locke wrote: life, liberty, and property.  I’ve never actually read an explanation on why Jefferson made that particular substitution.

Photo of the Day, part deux

From the front of Washingtonpost.com, this one is just too good to pass up: