Blessed

Image via Martina S (?).

Blessed are the cabinet members...

“I think one of the really interesting things that people are going to see today — and I think it’s something that should be celebrated — is that the president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. The officials “have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” he said.

... for what shall it profit a man if he gain a government job and set aside his assets? Depends what you mean by "set aside". It's going to profit these guys plenty.

What's the matter with New York?

Dr. Krugman has written that column about West Virginia that everybody needs to write once in a while, that or the one about Kentucky, or maybe Pennsylvania or Ohio, or there's Kansas. What's the matter with Kansas? asked Thomas Frank back in 2004. Why do those people keep voting for the party that wants to starve and punish them? Why do they vote against their own interests?

And West Virginia's a pretty poignant case, on the one hand because of that emotional fixation with jobs in the coal industry, where jobs have been declining catastrophically in the state since 1948! It's been almost 70 years since coal mining had a future in West Virginia, not because of environmental policy, but because of automation, after the companies gave up digging for it in favor of just slicing it off the tops of the mountains. This is a defunct parrot, folks. And Donald Trump keeps getting them to applaud by saying he's bringing it back.

Via West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. Note how productivity starts a very steep deline around 2000; that's not George W. Bush's fault, it's because all the good stuff is gone ("Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away," as the song says), and what's left is a lot harder to get out of the ground, as the price continues to drop because it has to, to keep up the dropping prices of other fuels that burn cleaner or don't burn at all.

Update on deaths of despair

Christophe Dessaigne, "Hour of Despair", 2012, via Midnight-Artwork.

In 2015, two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, startled the world with the information that there was a group of Americans for whom life was getting shorter, unlike any demographic more or less anywhere in decades, in their paper "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century", which found that mortality among white Americans ages 45-54 was rising, mostly due to mental health issues and somatic pain, with drug and alcohol abuse and suicide (I touched on it here), or what they've been calling "deaths of despair".

Since then we've learned somewhat more about the situation, notably that it's especially women, not men, who are dying too early, counter to the facile stereotype according to which the whole thing is a tragic outcome of that rust belt problem of men without college degrees losing factory jobs as the economy changes from manufacturing to services, but that the places where the deaths are occurring are the same as the places where the Trump vote dominates, relatively rural, racially homogeneous regions in a state of economic decline, as if voting for Trump were just another kind of suicidal behavior, an expression of nihilistic despair—but the people who are dying aren't significantly voting for Trump, or at all; the Trump voters are people who live in the same places but are rather better off, older and the owners of small businesses, marked less by economic anxiety than animus against the black Americans and Latino immigrants who aren't even there.

Douthat just sayin, on the ACA

Via.

It's Propaganda Wednesday for Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Is Obamacare a Lifesaver?"), out to let us know we shouldn't be too triumphant over the prospect of living with the Affordable Care Act "for the foreseeable future", as Ryan has said:

now that every G.O.P. policy person who ever championed a replacement plan is out wandering in sackcloth and ashes, wailing, “The liberals were right about my party, the liberals were right about my party,” beneath a harsh uncaring heaven … now, in these hours of right-wing self-abnegation, it’s worth raising once again the most counterintuitive and frequently scoffed-at point that conservatives have made about Obamacare:

It probably isn’t saving many lives.

Note how he stacks the argument in advance by calling it a "point" rather than "a basically unfounded assertion". And the weakness of restricting the issue to that of "saving many lives" (it doesn't mean anything if it improves the quality of life of millions? it doesn't matter if it only saves a relative few? how many lives would be worth the trouble?). And the hedge of "probably", which has no technical meaning here (how would you calculate the probability?) but is merely a way of saying, "Well, who knows?" Just sayin, as usual. But just sayin in italics, so we'll know it's serious all the same.

Brooks's 1.6 cents on tax policy

In 2005 dollars.

A 2% raise for you and me, a 13% raise for the Emperor and his pals, and under Senate rules they must find either someplace to steal the money from or some Democrats' votes. Via Center for Tax Policy.

Shorter former New York Times columnist David Brooks, "Can Elephants Learn from Failure?" March 28 2017:

One of the reasons that the Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act failed was the problem that it was a terrible bill that nobody liked, taking benefits from tens of millions of vulnerable people and giving tax breaks to the wealthy few. If Republicans are able to learn from their mistakes, they will not do this again with the upcoming tax bill, but instead take money from tens of millions of financially strapped people in the form of a consumption tax and give tax breaks to the corporations that provide the income of the wealthy few, which will totally increase economic dynamism and growth, according to research by economists that has apparently been published, though I don't have time to tell you where.

He doesn't get around to the point about how all the voters are going to love this one, either.

Problem Solvers updates

Tongue in cheek, last October (I believe he was explaining that it was "not harmful" for Trump not to have paid any taxes for two decades; yes, I heard that he paid some in 2005, no, that doesn't answer all my question). Via Proud Democrat.

A couple of notes to tack on to Saturday's post on the failure of the Ryan tax cut health care initiative:

First, just that I can't help bragging about it when Dr. Krugman looks like he's channeling me two days later:

One important answer would be to spend a bit more money. Obamacare has turned out to be remarkably cheap; the Congressional Budget Office now projects its cost to be about a third lower than it originally expected, around 0.7 percent of G.D.P. In fact, it’s probably too cheap. A report from the nonpartisan Urban Institute argues that the A.C.A. is “essentially underfunded,” and would work much better — in particular, it could offer policies with much lower deductibles — if it provided somewhat more generous subsidies....

Make America Kampuchea

Can't find credits for this image of Phnom Penh in 1976.

For the past month or so Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has been serving up a series of "immodest proposals"

floating genuinely radical visions of how policy makers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation. These will not be ideas that I find entirely convincing, they will not be fully fleshed-out, and I will disavow responsibility if they’re ever put into disastrous practice.

Which is kind of the ultimate in "just sayin". If you like it, I'll gladly take credit for it, but if you don't, remember I said it wasn't serious at the outset.

But then the first one was just a laundry list sounding an awful lot like a marriage between the Trump campaign at its most "populist" and the "Reformy Con" agenda to which Douthat himself sometimes likes to suggest he adheres, with tax expenditures for everybody, a kind of WPA for the middle-aged, massive deficits, and little bits of gratuitous Douthat nastiness so you don't think he's turned into a Reagan liberal:

Handout or protection racket?

Via.

Blogfriend Ten Bears comments on yesterday morning's post:

They're beaten. Like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act is now the "law of the land" and we will indeed be "living with it for the foreseeable future."

A government handout to the insurance industry.

An industry that, notes commenter Tom Riker, "insures millions of people. That includes the Medicaid expansion, helping millions more. That stabilizes the finances of rural hospitals..." And that employs something like 530,000 people, which is a lot of people to throw out of work at one blow in a revolutionary change in the management of the economy. And 40-odd percent of which is nonprofit companies. The ACA contains mechanisms to increase the nonprofit side but Republicans in Congress gutted them, as I tell you all the time.

The for-profit companies don't regard it as much of a handout, either, because of the caps it puts on profits. Eighty cents out of every dollar they take in in premiums must be paid out in claims, thanks to the ACA (that's the minimum medical loss ratio), 85 cents in the large group market that ensures most of us with jobs (and all the overhead has to be paid out of what's left over, before anything gets to the shareholders), and thanks to the list of ten essential health benefits they're no longer allowed to sell the kind of "skinny" plan designed to never pay out any claims at all. They especially don't like the exchanges of the individual market, which is why they're pulling out of them or trying to create monopolies, county by county.

It's not so much a handout as protection money, where the insurers are the gangsters running the street of health care and can fuck you up if you try to do something in their territory. And they don't seem to think it's enough.

Prove it to me, Problem Solvers!

Authentic criticism via deathandtaxes.

SENTENCES THAT WILL HAUNT THE GOP: Ryan says #Obamacare is "law of the land, it's going to remain the law of the land" #trump #theresistance pic.twitter.com/WvFQJYpl8J

— Jonathan Beeley (@foreignpolicy77) March 24, 2017

Then there was Congressman Tom Reed, Republican from Western New York, known from Horseheads to Ithaca as Problem-Solvin' Tom (see below), and one of those guys who was talked into backing the awful Ryan bill by the special upstate New York provision or Is There Any Way We Can Get Upstate New York Reps to Vote for This Turkey Amendment in which they proposed to put Medicaid, which is funded in New York by county property taxes, on the state government instead, except for New York City, whose residents would thus continue to pay the highest property taxes (by far) in the state while financing Medicaid for the rural areas (where they'd be getting enormous property tax cuts) through income tax, of which city residents also pay far more, to the tune of some $2.3 billion (even as the state government would keep refusing to pay the city the $4.3 billion it has owed us for more than a decade since the Campaign for Fiscal Equity judgment holding that Albany was violating city residents' constitutional rights by their unequal funding of education).

To th' crack of doom

Image via oceanweb.net.nz.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("The Trump Elite. Like the Old Elite, But Worse!") provides an interesting deconstruction of the concept of legislative verticality:

Legislation can be crafted bottom up or top down. In bottom up you ask, What problems do voters have and how can they be addressed. In top down, you ask, What problems do elite politicians have and how can they be addressed?

The "you" there being not the you and I who are reading the column—we're just eavesdroppers—but the legislation-crafters; it's "bottom up" when they see themselves as the elite deciding what the voters need, and "top down" when they regard themselves as the servants of the elite trying to figure out what their masters need. Where in the conventional picture we think of the elite as the "top" of a social pyramid and the masses as its support, Brooks has turned this picture upside down, with the elite at the bottom holding the structure up like Atlas supporting the sky, and the masses idling cheerfully above, which is a decent analogy for the classically conservative view, when you think about it.

And the legislators scurrying around the lower floors, depending on whether they themselves identify as elite or not, which is a Brooksian novelty, and one he might like to rethink—seems to me he'd be compelled to say liberal legislators regard themselves as the elite at the very bottom earnestly caring for the whole population, and conservative ones as the gentlemen-in-waiting on the ground floor keeping the true elite or 0.01% secure, as it sleeps like Smaug in the cellar, with its subterranean treasure.

Fish in the Ocean of Story

Julia Zanes, Fish in the Ocean of Story II, 2008.

The way things have been going this week, anything anybody says is likely to be outdated about five minutes after you hit "publish", but I have a couple of things that might work out, riffing off Marcy Wheeler/Emptywheel—first, a post on Rep. Adam Schiff's remarkable narrative which impressed me so much on Monday—maybe I'll get to Rep. Devin Nunes later on.

On Schiff, she's skeptical about what she calls a "temporal feint" in the story, or "fudging the timeline". Respectfully—I think she's the smartest person over there on the edges of the Forest of Greenwald, and she certainly knows many things I don't, but this is narratology—she's poking at holes that really aren't there in the

passage which — if it were accurate — would be a tight little presentation of quid pro quo tied to the change of platform at the July 18-21, 2016 RNC. But it’s not.

This is the central sequence of July:

Old Trump pops off

Wunschmädchen: Iréne Theorin as Kellyanne Conway and Thomas Mayer as President Trump in Andreas Kriegenburg's July 2012 staging of Die Walküre for the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, via Likely Impossibilities.

Poor old Rex, patiently bearing the cross God and Mrs. Tillerson gave him, as reported with tons of literary color commentary by Erin McBride for Independent Journal Review, whose editors apparently don't believe in cutting, or possibly don't exist, but innocently revealing, as has been widely noted this morning, that he doesn't really want his new job:

So why, then, did he want the gig?

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.” He paused to let that sink in.

A beat or two passed before an aide piped up to ask him why he said yes.

“My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

Passover without Jews

The Four Sons. From An Amsterdam Haggadah, 1695, via University of Chicago.

Just three years ago, former New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a Passover column in which he managed not to mention the story of the first 18 chapters of Exodus, the biblical narrative of the Hebrews' escape from slavery in Egypt that is central to this key Jewish holiday—instead he made it about the rest of the book, in which God gives Moses the Law, which is celebrated on a completely different holiday later in the year, Shavuot or the Feast of Weeks.

Today he makes up for it with a Passover column (a couple of weeks early, it begins April 10) in which he manages to discusss Exodus without mentioning Passover ("The Unifying American Story"), or Jews at all, let alone Egyptians, like the Trump administration celebrating the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 without mentioning Jews. It's a very remarkable performance:

Note on the Narratology

From Dino Felluga, "Introduction to Narratology"

The conventional wisdom on our side seems to be that the climax of today's House Intelligence Committee hearing was FBI director James Comey acknowledging, as he has seemed so unwilling to do for such a long time, that the FBI and other agencies are indeed conducting an investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, including with reference to the question whether anybody from the Trump campaign was personally involved in it.

But to me it came before that, in the opening statement by Rep. Schiff, laying out with such clarity what the public evidence consists of, and why the committee investigation has to take place: especially where he shows how documents from the Steele dossier compiled last summer essentially prophesied the events that would take place in the fall:

Sonnet: On Reading. By President Donald J. Trump

Photo by Steve Round, via RSPB.

What do we mean when we say the words of President Donald Trump should be taken seriously, but not literally? I mean, I don't actually say it, but if I did, would I mean anything?

I'd like to stipulate one possibility, that we have a word for language that is to be understood seriously but not literally, and that word is "poetry". When Shelley addresses a skylark with the words, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!" we don't assume that Shelley is too stupid to realize that a skylark is not a bird, or that he's lying about it.

We see that we're reading a poem, and we look for the words to be doing something other than merely meaning what they say; in this case, that there's something uncannily unphysical about the bird singing, so high up in the air he'd practically be in Heaven, if Shelley believed in Heaven; so high he can't be seen, as if he weren't a bird, hot little bundle of muscle tissue and feathers, but truly disembodied:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
    Bird thou never wert,
   That from Heaven, or near it,
    Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

And speaking of profuse strains of unpremeditated art...

Roll over, Beethoven

You've got company.

Just let me hear some of that rock 'n' roll music any old way you use it I am playing I'm talking about you. God bless Chuck Berry Chuck 😎 pic.twitter.com/XmwmaGzGpL

— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) March 18, 2017

These are so raw and happy and unproduced you might find them disturbing. RIP Chuck.

Annals of derp: When Obama's approach to HUD budget was the same as Trump's, except for a couple of details

Facepalm photo by Robert Sikora.

It's Jim "Crème" DeMint's house propaganda organ, the Heritage Foundation Daily $ignal, wondering why Trump gets criticized for doing exactly the same crap that President Obama did:

The president’s budget called for slashing funding for a block grant program primarily because it was difficult to determine whether it was getting the desired results.

That was President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. It justified the $3.7 billion cut in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program by asserting:

What part of "deconstruction of the administrative state" don't you understand, Brooksy?

Age of Wonders 3, just right for Yale Professors of Grand Strategy, screenshot.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks (his formerness may not be obvious as he continues to drool down the Times pages twice a week, but the evidence remains) has the hottest of hot takes on Emperor Trump's endorsement of the Ryan tax cut health care bill and the "skinny budget" proposal the White House released yesterday. He thinks he sees a pattern in the devastating cuts proposed in more or less everything constructive the government does, and it's that working-class hero Stephen Bannon has lost all his influence on the Emperor ("Let Bannon Be Bannon!"):

[Bannon's] governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies. I’m beginning to fear that he’s spending his days sitting along the wall in the Roosevelt Room morosely playing one of those Risk-style global empire video games on his smartphone.

Because instead of doing what Brooks heard the No True Conservative say he was going to do, sticking it to the "hedge-fund guys" taxwise, insuring everybody, and mounting that trillion-dollar infrastructure plan ("Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda—the trade and immigration parts—but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy"), Trump seems to have signed on to the most reactionary agenda you can imagine, as if—as if he were some kind of Republican!

Make Ireland Great Again—Bring Back the Druids

St. Patrick (in halo) reclines on a hillock, while the beasts of the vision he is having frolic underneath. Wauchier de Denain, Lives of the Saints, Paris, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Royal MS 20 D. vi, f. 213, via University of Notre Dame.

.@realDonaldTrump Happy St. Phatrick's Day to you too! (It's Pádraig, not Phadraig)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2017

Political hypochondriacs: Optimism report

Roller Coaster, by gechalx/DeviantArt. Nowhere to go but up! What's that you say?

It's so weird how we live now, like political hypochondriacs, constantly checking the national temperature for clues to how sick we are.

And that goes for Team Optimist as well as the despairing. I'm really pumped because yesterday was a Good Day, where Dutch voters decisively rejected fascism, I think, and Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu and Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland both concluded in separate cases that President Trump's "travel order" is meant as the fulfillment of his often repeated campaign promises of a "complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering this country until our country's representatives can figure out just what in the hell is going on."