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Friday Cat Blogging - 10 February 2012

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:01:33 +0000

Today, both cats grace the same frame, one looking in and the other looking out. In this photo, the cats are a metaphor for Man's ineluctable failure to appreciate his place in the world. One's nature wants to be in, the other's nature wants to be out. In five minutes, their roles will reverse, world without end. As always, the ISO 9000-approved windowpane prevents true understanding. It is the human tragedy given feline expression.

Alternatively, the cats just want me to open the door, and this picture is merely a representation of the fact that cats don't have opposable thumbs. For which we can all be thankful.

In other cat news, your cat may be turning you into an introvert. Or an extrovert. It depends. Details here.

And with that, I can get back to obsessing over hotel accommodations in Rome later this year. My needs are modest. I'm looking for a place with big, lovely rooms; modern, well-equipped bathrooms; situated in a quiet neighborhood in the center of town; providing all modern amenities; with a friendly and helpful staff; and all for a low price. Oddly enough, I'm having trouble meeting all these modest requirements. What's going on?

Angels Are Now Waltzing on the Edge of a Healthcare Plan

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:11:06 +0000

Well, we now have the details of the "accommodation" that President Obama has made over the contraception issue. Institutions affiliated with the Catholic church will be able to opt out of contraceptive coverage completely, so the bishops are said to be completely satisfied. The LA Times explains the rest:

The change essentially shifts the responsibility for providing and discussing contraception from the religious employer to the insurers. Any employer who has a religious objections to providing contraception will not have to provide that service to employees, but in those cases the insurer will be required to reach out directly to the employee and offer contraceptive care free of charge.

I've been laughing about this over email with a friend, who writes:

Further according to them, "Policy experts within the administration believe that there is effectively no cost to providing contraception, because use of it prevents much more expensive care they would otherwise have to provide."

Catholic bishops are reportedly thrilled. Insurance companies not heard from yet.

You think these things don't turn on the number of angels on the head of a pin? Apparently, they really do.

Not clear to me why they think there's "effectively no cost" and the insurance companies won't object, since if that were the case, they would have been offering this from the beginning of time.

If this gets everyone to sing Kumbaya, who am I to object? But really, this is just idiocy. If insurance companies are required to provide contraceptive coverage "free of charge," they will, of course, simply raise rates elsewhere to cover all these "free" contraceptives. And Catholic hospitals and universities will all pay these slightly higher rates, which means they're paying exactly as much for contraceptive coverage indirectly as they would be if their healthcare plans covered it directly. Just as Catholic bishops who pay income taxes already pay indirectly for contraceptive care subsidized by tax dollars. (Which they do. That's life in a pluralistic democracy. We all pay for stuff we disapprove of.)

Still, I guess this accommodation means the bishops can convince themselves their money isn't going toward paying for the evils of contraception. Kumbaya!

POSTSCRIPT: I just want to add that it's possible that this is a cunningly brilliant move. Obama gets to show — again! — that he's always willing to meet his critics halfway, and if the insurance companies play along with the "free of charge" charade then the critics really don't have a leg left to stand on. If they continue to object, then they're exposed as simply opposed to birth control, not merely standing up for religious liberty.

On a broader note, I don't think there's a single person in the world who has a consistent opinion on the fungibility of money. And you know what? As silly as that is from a purely technical point of view, it's probably not a bad thing. We all need ways to fool ourselves into making compromises we otherwise wouldn't make, and in the grand scheme of things, inconsistency over the fungibility of money is a small price to pay for a better lubricated society.

The Employment Picture Remains Murky and Hard to Parse

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:50:14 +0000

Paul Krugman says that although the employment picture is looking up, it still has a ways to go. To illustrate this, he displays a chart showing the employment-population ratio for prime age workers age 25-54:

I agree that this is a telling statistic. It really does indicate that we haven't made up much of the ground we've lost since 2007, so I don't have any argument with Krugman using it. At the same time, you get a different picture if you pull back and disaggregate the data a bit. Here's another view:

I don't want to make too much of this, especially since I'm not sure exactly what we should make of it. But the employment-population ratio among men has been declining steadily for over half a century, and right now we're only a point or two below the trendline for men. Conversely, participation among women plateaued starting in the mid-90s, which suggests that we're still a good four points or so below the trendline for women.

Maybe. The question is what the long-term trend really is. I'm not sure what to say about that, but it's been niggling at me for a very long time. Basically, I just want to caution everyone not to treat 2007 as a magic year. There's no question that employment is still in the doldrums, but the question of where the employment-population ratio "should" be is not easy to pinpoint.

Drone Attacks Are Popular Because They're Better Than the Alternative

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:44:46 +0000

As you may recall, I think one of the most important questions you should ask yourself when you ponder public policy is, "Compared to what?" Michael O'Hare asks this question regarding drone attacks:

I think our emotional reaction to stuff like this depends a lot on what alternatives we instinctively compare it to. Is the drone a cowardly analog to lying in wait for a bad guy and bushwacking him, a pusillanimous substitute for standing up and ‘fighting like a man’, putting your safety at immediate risk? Or is it just like launching a bullet from far away, or dropping a bomb from high in the air, or planting a mine that goes off when you’re in another county, except better because it’s more accurate and selective, can be called off right up to the last second, and even safer for the pilot/operator?

Here's a related point, prompted by the news that even a majority of liberals approve of drone attacks. Again, the key question is, "Compared to what?"

When you think of drone attacks, are you mentally comparing them to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? If so, they'll seem like superior alternatives: more focused, less deadly, less costly, and less likely to spiral out of control.
Or, are you mentally comparing them to no war at all? If so, they'll obviously seem more deadly, more costly, and, as Mike points out, maybe even cowardly and pusillanimous too.

If liberals are implicitly choosing the first option, that might explain why so many approve of drone attacks: because they want us to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and they think of drone attacks as a way of allowing that to happen. They may or may not approve of the attacks in a vacuum, but if that's what it takes to provide cover for a drawdown, then it's an acceptable compromise.

I'm not sure how you get inside people's heads to see if this is the lens they're using. But I suspect that something like this explains what's going on, just as "Compared to what?" explains a lot of other things that otherwise seem a little mysterious at first glance.

Compromise Due on Contraception?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:58:06 +0000

I see that the Obama administration is expected to offer up a compromise on contraceptive coverage later this morning. Greg Sargent wisely tweets, "I see no reason not to wait for final proposal. The world won't be worse off if we yell 'cave' in an hour, instead of right now."

Fine. I'll wait. Politically, though, it sounds like a disaster no matter what the compromise is. All the folks who have had Obama's back on this are going to be wildly furious, and the Catholic bishops, having smelled blood already, will not be appeased. Not even slightly. They won't accept any compromise other than an absolute, ironclad exemption for any institution that's associated in any way with the church, putting a clear end to all the nonsense about this really being an issue of copays or some other secondary issue.

This has not been well played.

Why I'm Feeling So Hard-Nosed Over the Contraception Affair

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Over the past week I've written a few posts expressing support for the Obama administration's decision to require health care plans to cover contraception, as well as for its decision to permit only a very narrow exemption for religious organizations. I haven't really laid out the whole case, though, and today I want to do that in telegraphic form. Then I want to tell you the real reason that my reaction to this has been stronger than you might have guessed it would be, especially considering that this isn't a subject I wade into frequently. But that won't come until the end of the post. First, the bullet point warm-up:

In any case like this, you have to look at two separate issues: (1) How important is the secular public purpose of the policy? And (2) how deeply held is the religious objection to it?
On the first issue, I'd say that the public purpose here is pretty strong. Health care in general is very clearly a matter of broad public concern; treating women's health care on a level playing field with men's is, today, a deep and widely-accepted principle; and contraception is quite clearly critical to women's health. Making it widely and easily available is a legitimate issue of public policy.
On the second issue, I simply don't believe that the religious objection here is nearly as strong as critics are making it out to be. As I've mentioned before, even the vast majority of Catholics don't believe that contraception is immoral. Only the formal church hierarchy does. What's more, as my colleague Nick Baumann points out, federal regulations have required religious hospitals and universities to offer health care plans that cover contraception for over a decade. (The fact that some such employers don't cover birth control is mostly the result of lax enforcement.) It's true that the Obama regulation tightens this requirement, but only modestly: it covers organizations with fewer than 15 employees and it bans copays. Dozens of states already have similar rules on the books. So when Kirsten Powers says, "One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith," that's just wrong. They've been working under similar rules for a long time without turning it into Armageddon.
Some matters of conscience are worth respecting and some aren't. If, say, Catholic doctrine forbade white doctors from treating black patients, nobody would be defending them. The principle of racial nondiscrimination is simply too important to American culture and we'd insist that the church respect this. I think the same is true today of the principle of nondiscrimination against women, as well as the principle that women should have control of their own reproduction. Like racial discrimination laws, churches that operate major institutions in the public square have to respect this whether they like it or not.
This new policy doesn't apply to churches themselves or their devotional arms. It applies only to nominally religious enterprises like hospitals and universities that serve secular purposes, take taxpayer dollars, employ thousands of non-Catholic women, and are already required to obey a wide variety of secular regulations. At organizations like these, the money that pays for employee health care doesn't come from the church, it comes out of the income stream they get from their customers and clients.
What's more, this is hardly a unique matter of conscience. Anyone who pays taxes, including Catholic bishops, ends up financially supporting things they disapprove of. Public regulations often involve financial commitments too, and this one is no different. It's also pretty minuscule. This is an issue that's very clearly being blown up for partisan political reasons far beyond its actual impact on religious organizations or religious conscience.

Now, having said all that, it's also true that I'm normally fairly sympathetic to granting religious exemptions to public policy. You can make a case—not a great one, but a case—that allowing an exemption to the new contraceptive policy wouldn't actually work a huge hardship on the women affected. And the Catholic Church's objection to contraception, wrongheaded though I think it is, is plainly of long standing. This is no made-up issue.

So why am I really feeling so hard-nosed about this? The answer goes back a few years, to the controversy over pharmacists who refused to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill. I was appalled: If you're a pharmacist, then you fill people's prescriptions. That's the job, full stop. If you object to filling prescriptions, then you need to find another occupation.

But of course, the entire right-wing outrage machine went into high gear over this. And it was at that point that my position shifted: if this was the direction things were going, then it was obvious that there would be no end to religious exemption arguments. The whole affair was, I thought, way over the top, and yet it got the the full-throated support of virtually every conservative pundit and talking head anyway. This was, in plain terms, simply a war on contraception.

So I changed my mind. Instead of believing as a default that we should take religious exemptions seriously and put the burden of proof on the rest of us to explain why they shouldn't be allowed, I now believe that neutral public policy comes first and the burden of proof is now up to churches to provide convincing arguments that (a) An important matter of conscience is being violated, and (b) The public policy in question isn't important enough to be applied across the board. On the matter of contraception, I don't think they've made a convincing case for either one.

Contraceptives and Copays

Kevin Drum — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:29:24 +0000

I'm curious about something. Chris Matthews has been insisting for days now that the real issue in the Obama administration's new contraceptive rules is copays. That is, the problem isn't that the rules require Catholic hospitals and universities to provide healthcare coverage that includes contraceptives, it's that they're required to provide healthcare coverage that includes contraceptives with no copay.

Is there anything to this? I haven't heard a single critic of the new rules highlight this. Quite the contrary. Every one of them appears to believe that requiring contraceptive coverage from Catholic institutions is just flat-out wrong. Allowing copays wouldn't change this at all.

So where is this copay argument coming from? Does anyone know?

On a related topic, why was there (to my knowledge) no outburst last August, when these rules were first announced? The Catholic hierarchy certainly objected to them at the time, but aside from a few brief mentions it barely got any news coverage at all. My cynical view is that the only difference between then and now is that the Republican presidential primary is in high gear, but maybe there's more to this. Again, does anyone know?

UPDATE: In comments, Frank Parnell offers an answer to my second question:

According to NPR, the bishops were upset when the when the rules were announced in August, met with the White House, and (wink, wink, say no more) thought they received assurances from Obama that they would receive a broad exemption. Either someone badly misinterpreted the discussion, or someone is being less than truthful, or a bit of both.

And here's New York Times religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein a few days ago on NPR:

Well, I think part of the reason the bishops are so outraged is that they feel that they were given a signal by the administration and directly by President Obama. Archbishop Dolan met with President Obama. They talked about the work that the Catholic Church does, that the Catholic Church is not just parishes, but is also hospitals, is universities, charities and that all these institutions have a right to express their religious freedom and religious conscience.

So, Archbishop Dolan thought that he had gotten through to President Obama and thought he had a signal that this decision would go their way. So, when it didn't, they felt greatly betrayed by the president.

So there you go.

Survey Says 24% of Kids Have Moved Back In With Their Parents

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:13:29 +0000

Pew Research has a new survey out about the effect of the lousy economy on young people, and it's chock full of interesting things. Go read it! But I think I was most surprised by this:

It's not all that surprising that lots of young people are taking crappy jobs or going back to school or even postponing having a baby. But a full quarter of them have moved back in with their parents? Yikes. I'm not sure how much this has changed over time, but it's a helluva lot regardless.

Quote of the Day: Ray LaHood Does Not Like the House Transportation Bill

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:00:26 +0000

From Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation and former Republican congressman, on the mind-bending stew of tea party crankery being stuffed into the transportation legislation currently being jammed through the House by its Republican leadership:

This is the most partisan transportation bill that I have ever seen. And it also is the most anti-safety bill I have ever seen. It hollows out our No. 1 priority, which is safety, and frankly, it hollows out the guts of the transportation efforts that we’ve been about for the last three years. It’s the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Chart of the Day: Unleaded Gasoline and Teen Pregnancy

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:52:24 +0000

Charles Murray is concerned about the moral collapse of the white working class and ascribes it to the breakdown of traditional values that began in the 60s. But Paul Krugman hauls out a couple of charts showing that violent crime and teen pregnancy have been dropping over the past few decades and makes a pointed observation: "So here’s a thought: maybe traditional social values are eroding in the white working class — but maybe those traditional social values aren’t as essential to a good society as conservatives like to imagine."

Maybe! But then again, maybe both Murray and Krugman are missing the boat. I've written before about Rick Nevin's research showing the startlingly strong correlation between the drop in childhood lead exposure (mostly thanks to the introduction of unleaded gasoline) and the drop in violent crime, but I've never mentioned the actual title of the original paper he wrote. Here it is:

How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy

Guess what? The reduction in blood lead levels over the past few decades seems to be a very strong predictor of the drop in teen pregancy levels. Here's Nevin:

Although other social trends and government policies are often cited to explain the rise and fall in unwed pregnancy and crime rates over recent decades, the role of childhood lead exposure seems to be especially apparent in the best-fit lag structures for gasoline lead regressions. In the case of the unwed pregnancy regressions, the best-fit lag for each bracket is consistent with changes in lead exposure in the first years of life....The fit between the temporal patterns, with lags consistent with the known risks of lead exposure in the first years of life, provide striking visual support for the association between lead exposure and undesirable social behaviors.

His "striking visual support" is below. Make of this what you will. Just keep in mind that sometimes neither "traditional moral values" nor economic stagnation provides all the answers. Sometimes you ought to be looking elsewhere.

Yet Another Last-Minute Step Away From the Cliff in Europe

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:59:24 +0000

The financial situation in Europe keeps looking dodgier and dodgier, and yet I continue to persevere in my belief that, at the very last moment, European leaders will end up doing more or less the right thing. ("Right thing" being very broadly defined, mind you, to be anything that prevents collapse and a euro crackup.) That seems to have happened yet again today:

After days of dramatic talks, Greek political leaders reached a deal on Thursday to support a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by Greece’s financial backers in return for the country’s latest bailout.

The deal is expected to unlock the €130 billion, or $172 billion, in new loans and save Greece from a potentially disastrous default.

Not everything is coming up roses, of course. The deal still has to be approved by a variety of folks in Greece, and there's always a chance of some last-minute theatrics. It's also true that the austerity measures agreed to will make Greece's economy spiral ever downward, so while the final implosion of the euro area has been delayed, it hasn't necessarily been prevented. That's going to depend a lot on Angela Merkel, the patience of the German populace, and the future actions of the European Central Bank.

But for now, collapse has been averted at the last minute. As usual. Whatever happens in the future, I think we can expect that this is when collapse is always going to be averted.

Today's Dilemma for Conservatives

Kevin Drum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:26:52 +0000

This cracks me up:

Florida’s poor can use food stamps to buy staples like milk, vegetables, fruits and meat. But they can also use them to buy sweets like cakes, cookies and Jell-O and snack foods like chips, something a state senator [Ronda Storms] wants stopped.

....[Her] bill would also require the state to launch a culturally sensitive campaign to educate people about the benefits of a nutritious diet. Supporters say it would help recipients follow healthy eating habits and prevent taxpayer funds from being used to purchase luxury foods like bakery cakes when they can whip up a cheaper box mix.

What a dilemma. On the one hand, this bill promotes the exact same nanny-state behavior that Republicans howl about when Michelle Obama or Michael Bloomberg starts nattering on about salt consumption or fatty foods. On the other hand, it punishes welfare recipients, something that's always good for a round of applause from right-wing audiences. What's a conscientious conservative to do?

Bernie Goldberg on Conservative Bigotry

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:24:09 +0000

I missed The O'Reilly Factor on Monday — I was probably in the middle of fighting with Expedia over some travel arrangements — but Bob Somerby tells us we missed a good one. Bernie Goldberg, the liberal-turned-conservative who's a regular guest, had something to say about the conservative campaign to get Ellen DeGeneres fired as a spokesman for JC Penney:

GOLDBERG: There's something that needs to be said, no matter how uncomfortable it makes some people listening to us. There is a strain of bigotry — and that's the word I want to use — running through conservative America.

It doesn't mean all conservatives are bigots or even that most conservatives are bigots. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a strain of bigotry, and it goes against gay people, for instance.

Ellen DeGeneres did nothing wrong. She's gay. Right? There is — reasonable people may disagree on gay marriage. That's fine. But to, but to call on somebody's dismissal to be fired, to lose her job because she's gay is bigotry. And I don't care how many people listening to us right now don't like that.

O'REILLY: Well, I mean, the argument though—

GOLDBERG: Let me say — let me say one other thing briefly, Bill. In the middle of the last century, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was another strain of bigotry on the right, and it was against black people. That has to leave the conservative movement.

I used to be a liberal. I became a conservative because liberals were a little too crazy for me. A lot too crazy for me, actually. But you know what? I am immensely uncomfortable with the bigotry on the right, and I don't care how many people don't like it. I am sick of it.

Bob thinks it's counterproductive to throw around charges of bigotry too casually, and I suppose I agree. At the same time, he was happy to see Goldberg say this on the air, and so am I. That's because the problem here isn't so much that there's a strain of bigotry on the right — there are strains on the left and the center too — but that conservative leaders are too tolerant of it when it wells up and conservative media are too willing to stoke it in order to goose ratings. That's the real crime, so it's nice to see Goldberg and O'Reilly call it out. I wish they'd do it more often, but good for them for doing it even occasionally.

Which reminds me: Bob is doing some fundraising for his site right now. I find him a huge pain in the ass on a bunch of levels, and I disagree with him about as often as I agree. That said, I also read him every day because he routinely talks about stuff that no one else on the left pays much attention to. It may not be obvious from my writing, but his site helps keeps me honest. He's worth donating a few dollars to if his stuff is up your alley.

Chart of the Day: Homegrown Terrorism Has Shrunk to Minuscule Proportions

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:16:42 +0000

Today's chart comes from Charles Kurzman of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. It shows the steady decline over the past decade in indictments for support of terrorist attacks in the United States:

The number of violent plots carried out by Muslim-Americans was also down substantially in 2011, and virtually all of them were disrupted early. From the report: "Of the 20 Muslim-Americans accused of violent terrorist plots in 2011 only one, Yonathan Melaku, was charged with carrying out an attack, firing shots at military buildings in northern Virginia. Nobody was injured."

This comes via Dan Drezner, who notes some recent remarks by a Pentagon official that we might have been overestimating al-Qaeda's capabilities all along. Then some snark:

Now, I'm sure that the reason for this lull is that Al Qaeda's remaining assets in the United States are focusing their energies on getting all turkeys to become halal or something. That said, I'm going to continue to insist that the United States faces a much less threatening threat environment now than it did fifty years ago. Oh, and that I don't need to listen to Representative Peter King when he opens his mouth on national security issues.

Nobody is suggesting that the threat of homegrown attacks is zero. But it's very much a manageable, garden-variety law enforcement problem at this point. It's way past time for everyone to dial down the panic.

Today's Shopping Tip: 3D Clip-Ons

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:10:45 +0000

And now for something completely different: a shopping tip. This is for my readers who wear glasses and like going to the movies. A few weeks ago I bought a pair of 3D clip-ons, and I'm here to tell you that they're great. More and more movies are being released solely in 3D — which means we're getting to the point where it's hard to avoid 3D even if you don't like it much — and trying to wear those clown-size theater 3D specs over your usual prescription glasses is a huge pain. The clip-ons are far more comfortable and unobtrusive, which makes them a great investment, especially since they only cost four bucks. And I suppose they can even double as ordinary clip-on sunglasses if you're into such things. Highly recommended.

Everybody Loves Drones

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:55:43 +0000

The Washington Post has a new poll out that asks about drone attacks on suspected terrorists. Everybody loves them. What's more, two-thirds of the country likes them even if the targets are American citizens:

Greg Sargent says these numbers are even more depressing than they seem:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

OK, that's depressing. But I guess I'd still like to dig into this a little further. How many people approve of these attacks on American citizens if they understand that there's no court judgment involved, no finding of guilt, no warrant, no nothing? Just the executive branch unilaterally deciding they need to be killed. It would be tricky to phrase this in a neutral way, but without it I don't think we really have a clear picture here. Most people, when they hear a question like this, aren't primed to think about any of these things, and probably don't give them any thought. They might feel differently if they did.

The Month of Santorum

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:13:14 +0000

So Rick Santorum won three states last night. Does this mean we all have to pretend to take him seriously for the next three weeks? I'm feeling a little queasy over the possibility already.

At the same time, I'm getting ready to concede that my valiant efforts to show that Mitt Romney isn't really all that strongly disliked were misguided. Republican voters just don't like the guy, do they?

The Hypocrisy Trope That Won't Die

Kevin Drum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:37:43 +0000

President Obama has publicly condemned the Citizens United decision and has publicly opposed the role of super-PACs in campaign finance. Recently, though, he signed off on a plan to actively support Priorities USA Action, a leading Democratic super-PAC that's had trouble raising as much money as its Republican counterparts. "We're not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back," explained Obama's campaign manager. "With so much at stake, we can't allow for two sets of rules. Democrats can't be unilaterally disarmed."

Is this hypocritical of Obama? For the thousandth time, no, no, no. The playing field is the playing field, and once a public policy has been legally put in place you'd be a sap not to play by the same rules as everyone else. If you oppose the mortgage interest deduction as a matter of policy, you still have every right to take the deduction as long as the rest of the country keeps it in place. If you're a Republican governor who objects to the stimulus bill, you'd be actively irresponsible not to take your share of the money once it's there. If you oppose earmarks, you still have an obligation to your district to take them as long as they exist.

This trope needs to go away. Seriously. Just deep six it. We should never hear this nonsense again.

Catholics Do Not Have a Deep Moral Objection to Contraception

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:50:40 +0000

Should secular Catholic institutions (such as hospitals and universities) be required to abide by federal rules that say healthcare plans have to cover contraception? Or should they receive a conscience exemption from this rule, as churches themselves do?

Two new polls today shed some light on this question. The first one, from the Public Religion Research Institute, asked if all employers should be required to offer healthcare plans that cover contraception:

All Americans: broad agreement, 55%-40%
Catholics: broad agreement, 58%-37%

But maybe respondents weren't specifically primed to think that some employers are churches that have theological objections to birth control. So the second survey asked the general question first (getting similar results to the PRRI survey) and then asked specifically if Catholic hospitals and universities should be included:

All Americans: broad agreement, 57%-39%
Catholics: broad agreement, 53%-45%

In both cases, the numbers are much higher for Democrats and Independents. It's really only Republicans who object much, which strongly suggests that most of the objection is rooted in ideology, not religious conscience.

Now, there's obviously no reason that churches should be bound by opinion polls, but here's why this matters anyway: as I mentioned in passing a few days ago, it's important to understand whether contraception is truly a matter of contention in America. It's arguably reasonable, I think, for the government to tread carefully in areas where there's substantial, highly-charged controversy, such as abortion. But contraception just isn't one of those areas. Catholics agree with the new policy on healthcare plans at the same rate as other Americans; what objection there is, is mainly ideological, not religious; and as a much-cited Guttmacher survey shows, 98% of sexually-experienced Catholics use active methods of birth control. The takeaway from all this is pretty clear: conservatives may oppose the contraception requirement for ideological reasons (which is fine), but it's plain that contraception is simply not a moral hot button for Catholics. To put it plainly, it's not a matter of conscience. It's a matter of conscience only for a tiny number of men in the formal hierarchy of the Catholic church. That's it.

My position on this is plain: the church hierarchy's objection to birth control is medieval and barbaric. All those Catholic pundits raising hell over the new contraception regs should spend their time instead raising hell with their own church over a policy that's caused incalculable pain and misery for millions of women around the globe. Instead, they're all claiming that although they don't have any problem with contraception, they think the government should be more sensitive toward those who do. But it turns out there's practically no one who does. They're all pointing their fingers toward a group of people that barely exists.

When there's a societal consensus in a secular country, religious institutions have to accept that, and in America there's a virtually unanimous societal consensus on contraception. Americans don't have any problem with contraception. American Catholics don't have any problem with contraception. And on a public health basis, requiring healthcare plans to cover contraception is common sense. No one — almost literally no one — thinks there's any problem with it. It's a non-issue.

Chrysler is Just Trying to Sell You a Car, Okay?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:24:39 +0000

Matt Yglesias on the Chrysler Super Bowl ad that seems to have Karl Rove and the right-wing outrage machine in an uproar:

Apparently Clint Eastwood is personally upset that some people took Chrysler's "halftime in America" to be a positive commentary on the Obama administration.

This seems totally untenable to me. Whether Eastwood or Chrysler executives like to talk about it, the company—currently enjoying double-digit sales growth—would not currently exist today if not for the Obama administration…Whether you like what he did or not, there's no denying its impact. The automobile industry of the upper Midwest is still with us specifically because Team Obama chose to ensure that it would remain there.

I don't get this. It's yet another one of those things that I see, think nothing of at the time, and then subsequently learn has become a cause celebre.¹ To me, this just seemed like an ad for Chrysler, very much in line with their campaign of the entire past year, which revolves around the "comeback" of Motor City and the grit and hard work that made it possible. I don't know if that's a good advertising theme or not, but it's the one they chose.

To say that Chrysler's ad is a commentary on Obama because Chrysler got bailed out is to say that every Chrysler ad is implicitly a commentary on Obama. Ditto for every Citibank ad and every AIG ad. That's crazy. They're ads for cars, bank accounts, and insurance policies. I think Jon Cohn probably has the right take here:

I have no idea whether Rove really believes Chrysler produced that ad in order to do President Obama a political favor.² But the fact that he and other Republicans are so worked up could mean that they are scared—not of the advertisement itself, but of the themes it contains.

Those themes are optimism and national pride. As Salon's Joan Walsh noted on the Ed Show Monday evening, Republicans have basically owned those themes since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan won an election with them. But lately President Obama has been the one making the case that it's morning in America or, at least, just before dawn. He did it in the State of the Union and he's done it in a series of major speeches since.

…If the recovery continues, Obama will have a pretty powerful claim to reelection: That his economic policy choices, made in the face of fierce Republican opposition, are paying off. Rove knows this as well as anybody. I suspect that's the real reason he's so angry.

Yep. I suspect so, too.

¹For the record, this happens to me nearly as often on the left as on the right.

²Actually, I think we do have a pretty good idea. He doesn't.

It's Almost Time to Boost the Economy. Almost.

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:16:51 +0000

Ben Bernanke told Congress today that the long-term deficit is indeed a problem, but it's a problem for the long term. The best way to address it is to combine future budget tightening with present-day budget loosening, which will boost the economy and produce lower deficits in future years:

Bernanke raised concerns that a sharp, immediate push to reduce the deficit could harm the recovery in the upcoming months. In January 2013, he pointed out, the Bush tax cuts will expire, and the major spending reductions triggered by the Budget Control Act will take effect, absent any further action by Congress. As a result, “there will be sharp change in fiscal stance of the federal government. Without compensating action, it would indeed slow the recovery,” Bernanke told the committee members.

However, Sen. Pete Sessions (R-Ala.), the highest-ranking Republican on the committee, pressed Bernanke to answer whether the country’s current deficit was itself holding back the recovery and discouraging key market players. “They’re not reacting to the current level of debt. What they’re attentive to is the process,” Bernanke said, pointing to the political dysfunction that led to the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the US credit rating last year.

Roger that. But it's still a little too early, I think. If Congress takes action right now, it risks having an effect this year, thus helping President Obama. Better to wait until summer, when a sudden conversion to Keynesian pump priming will be timed perfectly to help the economy in early 2013, when a Republican might inhabit the Oval Office. Timing is everything in politics, after all.

Gay Marriage Ban is Unconstitutional — For Now

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:20:10 +0000

A district court and now the 9th Circuit court have both ruled that California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. This is great news. However, I assume that it doesn't really matter much since the case will now go to the Supreme Court, which has a history of not really caring about the opinions of the hippies on the 9th circuit. I further assume that the Supreme Court will be divided 4-4 on this question, with Anthony Kennedy providing the swing vote depending on his mood that day. Lately, though, his mood has been conservative, so the betting money says this will get overturned 5-4.

That's pretty deflating, isn't it? But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure serious court watchers will weigh in soon.

Also of note: this was a very narrow decision. Basically, the court said that California already provides same-sex couples with all the rights of opposite-sex couples, and Prop 8 does nothing to change that. All it does is prohibit same-sex relationships from being legally described as "marriage":

Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.

....All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of 'marriage,' which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for "laws of this sort."

In other words, this ruling has no impact at all in states where same-sex couples don't already have all the rights of opposite-sex couples, and the court declined to make a broader ruling that might have addressed that. (Though they say they wouldn't have hesitated to do that if the narrower ruling hadn't been available to them.)

Also of note: the court ruled that the backers of Prop 8 did indeed have standing to defend it in court. They lost on the merits, not because they had no legitimate right to defend Prop 8 after the State of California decided not to.

Republicans Once Again Unleash Reality Distortion Field

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:01:39 +0000

In 1995, when congressional Republicans grew annoyed that independent reviews of science produced answers they didn't like, they shut down the Office of Technology Assessment. In 2001, when Senate Republicans grew annoyed that parliamentary procedure produced results they didn't like, they fired their parliamentarian. Now, in 2012, congressional Republicans are annoyed yet again with the real world, and their answer, yet again, is to create a new reality more to their liking. Bruce Bartlett explains:

On Feb. 3, the House passed H.R. 3582, the Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2012. Innocuous on the surface, its long-term purpose is to institutionalize Republican economic policy into the very fabric of budgetary analysis.

The legislation would require that the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation do a “dynamic” analysis of major legislation....The dynamic calculation would be supplementary and not replace the current official scoring methodology, but the obvious long-term goal is to require official revenue estimates to incorporate “Laffer curve” effects in order to make it easier to cut taxes and harder to raise them.

....My concern is that the Republican effort is just a smokescreen to incorporate phony-baloney factors into revenue estimates to justify unlimited tax cutting....It already has a very well-financed Center for Data Analysis that the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, used to analyze his budget plan last year, bypassing the Joint Committee on Taxation and C.B.O.

Moreover, my memory is still fresh regarding the documented Republican effort in 2003 to suppress internal estimates of the cost of the Medicare Part D program. Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, has testified to the pressure that was put on him by a Bush administration political appointee, Tom Scully, which was documented by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Dynamic" analysis has been a hobbyhorse for years among movement conservatives, all of whom are convinced that the CBO is engaged in a liberal vendetta to prevent tax cuts by issuing reports showing that tax cuts will....produce less tax revenue. Sneaky! Dynamic scoring, they're convinced, will show just the opposite, and blow the field wide open for more and more glorious tax cuts.

As usual, though, it's not clear to me what the purpose of this legislation is. Are they seriously trying to get it passed? That seems unlikely. Are they going to use it as trade bait in future budget negotiations? Maybe. Or are they doing it solely because it's a hobbyhorse among the tea party crowd and they want to show that they're truly dedicated to the cause? My guess is Door #3. But you never know. They might actually be serious about this stuff.

UPDATE: A reader points out something I should have mentioned: CBO has done dynamic scoring before on its own, and the results have been pretty undramatic even with a Republican appointee in charge. For example, CBO's analysis of the 2004 budget is here, and the results of dynamic scoring are in Table 16. Result: maybe a bigger deficit than standard scoring, maybe a smaller deficit. And the differences were small no matter what.

Of course, maybe that just means they weren't using the right dynamic model. I'm sure there's a more agreeable one around somewhere.

The Komen Foundation's Even Bigger PR Problem

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:15:15 +0000

Clara Jeffery has a piece today about the Komen Foundation and what they can do to recover from their Planned Parenthood fiasco, and it's worth a read. But it reminded me of something I've been meaning to point out: one of the remarkable things about this controversy is that a lot of it hasn't really been about the controversy itself. Rather, for a lot of people it seems like it was just a long-awaited excuse to finally blow up over their long-simmering dislike of the Komen Foundation and its seemingly endless commercialization of all things breast cancer related. I don't really have much to say about this since I'm pretty removed from the whole thing, but one PR lesson Komen should learn is that apparently there's long been a helluva lot of unvoiced annoyance/discontent/exasperation/anger/etc. toward the Komen Foundation among a lot of women. And now that it's finally out, it's going to be hard to stuff it back into its bottle. I wonder if they had any idea before this that they were so heartily disliked by so many people who — until now — just didn't feel like it was OK to say so out loud?

Obama's Choice: Good Policy or Good Politics

Kevin Drum — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:52:52 +0000

Jonathan Chait takes note today of the progress President Obama has made in his campaign to highlight Republican obstructionism and work around them with executive orders that he can implement on his own:

I was skeptical last October that Obama’s initiative would help his approval ratings, but it looks like I was wrong. Obama’s poll numbers have climbed over the last several months, with his net job-approval rating, which had bottomed out at minus ten percentage points, approaching parity.

....Republicans are beginning to grasp their own inadvertent complicity in Obama’s comeback. Some, of course, believe that their failure lies in having compromised too much. But political realism is advancing. Representative Tom Cole bluntly asserts that his party simply needs to disappear from the national debate: “The big thing for us is to not be part of the conversation instead of trying to inject ourselves into it.” It’s sound advice. If Republicans weren’t charging around threatening to overturn decades of American social policy and possibly plunge the world into economic crisis if Obama refuses to accede to their goals, Obama would have a harder time defining himself in opposition to them.

The payroll tax fight offers the first test of whether or not the new breeze of tactical realism will prevail, or be overwhelmed by countercurrents of militant obstruction.

This also means that we'll soon get a test of Team Obama's view of the importance of politics vs. policy in an election year. If Obama's campaign is working, then it's actually in his interest to (subtly! quietly!) pick a fight with Republicans so that they'll look obstructionist yet again over the payroll tax holiday. But if it's policy that he really cares about, then he'll just take the win if Republicans offer to cave in. We should find out soon which it is.