Eric The Blue

Smooth operator swings, misses

As a voting drudge, I must be unusually interested in healthcare policy—when it comes up in these candidate debates my attention is out of all proportion to the journalistic commentary afterwards. I wrote, here, that Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare, eight years after running on rescinding it and giving us “something better,” showed how bankrupt he and his party are on this matter. 

Smooth-talking J D Vance did nothing to change my mind the other night. 

When Walz brought up “concepts of a plan” and said that really there was no plan, unless you count throwing sick people off their affordable insurance, Vance parried with a flow of words that included: “We currently have laws and regulations in place, in place right now, that protect people with pre-existing conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to make the health insurance marketplace function a little better.”

I think a better debater than Walz would then have said something like:

Well, I’m happy to say I agree with one thing the senator said there. It’s true that there’s a law right now protecting people with pre-existing conditions. The name of that law is Obamacare. It’s the law Trump says he wants to repeal. And in fact, when he was president, he came within one Senate vote of succeeding. I doubt anything could show better than what you just heard how vacant Republicans are on this question of vital importance to millions of Americans. These guys tout the provisions of a law they hate and want to scrap in order to argue that everything would be just fine if that very law was repealed!

I don’t know how Vance would have responded—some anodyne nonsense, no doubt—but any talk of “the healthcare marketplace” or “market solutions” would have given Walz a chance to explain that, actually, the vaunted market is the problem. Insurers figure out how much you’re apt to cost them before deciding what policy to offer, at what price. If for example it’s auto insurance, they want to know about your car, how far you drive it, your age and gender, the number of moving violations you’ve had, etc. The analogous questions, transferred to the realm of health insurance, cause unhealthy people not to be able to afford it.  

As a society we’ve decided it’s okay if people with poor driving records pay more for auto insurance. But we haven’t decided it’s okay if people with poor health prospects can’t afford medical insurance. Only Republicans have decided that.

Bleep

A few years ago, I overheard my daughters discussing which of their parents swears more. The older one had the final word: “Dad pretty much only swears when the Twins are sucking or Trump is on TV,” she said.

Thought of that today as we’re coming to the end of possibly my top Bad Language Month of all time.

After Roe, a natural experiment

The decision of the Supreme Court reversing Roe, thereby returning the question of abortion to the states, has created a natural if unintended social experiment: what is revealed by diverse attitudes and policies relating to pregnancy, abortion, maternal health, child birth, and the welfare of children?

Here is a list of the 14 states that have enacted what the New York Times calls a total abortion ban (since the “exceptions” are so deliberately attenuated as to have no practical effect):

Idaho                    North Dakota
South Dakota         Oklahoma
Texas                    Missouri
Arkansas                Louisiana
Mississippi              Alabama
Tennessee              Kentucky
Indiana                  West Virginia

And here is a list of the ten states with the highest—worst—rates of infant mortality:

41. Oklahoma                  46. Louisiana
42. Georgia                      47. Delaware
43. Ohio                           48. Arkansas
44. Indiana                       49. South Dakota
45. West Virginia              50. Mississippi

You can double check my cross checking, but it appears that, of the 14 states that have enacted an abortion ban, seven rank among the bottom ten for infant mortality.

Here are the bottom ten states for rates of maternal mortality:

Tennessee                Mississippi
Alabama                   Arkansas
Louisiana                  Kentucky
Virginia                     South Carolina
Georgia                     Indiana

So, many of the usual suspects—again, seven of the 14 states banning abortion show up in a “worst ten” list for health outcomes related to pregnancy and child birth.

Why the strong correlation between opposition to abortion and poor outcomes for mothers and newborns? Toleration of high infant mortality isn’t consistent with the “commitment to life” that abortion opponents claim for themselves. One theory of the case might be that abortion opponents, who are overwhelmingly religious conservatives, have the view that

i. if a pregnant woman is considering abortion, she must have sinned

ii. if she has sinned, she should be punished

iii. by doling out the punishment, they perform God’s work here below; or, in the alternative,

iv. they aren’t sure God himself would be sufficiently cruel.

This at least has the strength of accounting, in some rational way, for how “commitment to life” seems to dissolve at birth. The real goal is to punish.

Funeral notes

Trying to verify information about my aunt’s funeral, I ended up reading, on her church’s website, the following from the pastor’s July/August newsletter:

History clearly shows America was founded by devout Christians on Biblical values and principles. These truths that were self-evident became the foundation upon which the Constitution of the United States was written. A document that includes the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

When was the last time you actually took time to read them? With each succeeding generation since 1776 that America has drifted away from God, we have seen the decline of our civilization, culture and church.

I’d be a little disappointed if Haitian immigrants thought the founders were moved by their Christian faith, and that the Declaration of Independence was part of the Constitution, but my bar for the clergy is low. In his eulogy of my aunt, who loved to sing, the reverend assured us that she was now belting out hymns in heaven. “By the way,” he said, “it’s a literal place.” He paused to allow this portentous nugget of theology to settle.

My sister and I had driven separately, so that she could stay till whenever and I could get home for my after-school Uber duties. Since I got to the church just as the service was beginning, we didn’t speak until we sat together at the lunch in the church basement after the graveside service. Almost the first thing she said, eyes rolling, was, “I wonder where he thinks heaven literally is?”

She’s a chemistry professor. I was about to say that hers was an interdisciplinary question and she’d have to consult a colleague, maybe in religious studies, when we were joined by some other mourners. Thinking about it again now I remember that Edmund Wilson, after the Sputnik launch, wrote in his Journal that it was a point in favor of atheism that the cosmonauts hadn’t encountered God on their journey. I thought that was pretty obtuse but apparently the best retort is that the rocket hadn’t propelled them far enough.

In the old days, the funeral lunches in this rural church were, thanks to an undeclared kitchen competition among church ladies, a fabulous spread. This one, however—disappointingly institutional. To be fair, then, the minister might be onto something with respect to decline.

Tuesday night TV

The dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio, are getting a lot of attention, but if I had to pick a favorite moment, I think it would be Trump’s crash landing on the topic of Obamacare. He’d been ranting about it being a disaster when the moderator interrupted, “Do you have a plan to replace it, yes or no?”

Trump: “I have the concepts of a plan.”

I always thought it odd that he could in 2016 run on repealing Obamacare and replacing it only with “something better.” This was a matter of vital importance to millions of Americans with insurance through Obamacare, but never a hint about what “something better” might entail. Then he won, was president for four years, and kept perfectly mum about the replacement component of what came to be called “repeal and replace.”

But no more! Eight years into it and he has “the concepts of a plan.”

I suppose it’s of a piece with his answer to the (entirely predictable) question about whether he regretted any of his actions or inactions on J6. He said the bad stuff was all Nancy Pelosi’s fault—“they” asked him to give a speech, he gave a speech, that was his only connection to the events of the day. After 3.5 years all he’s managed to work up is “Pelosi’s fault!” And it’s taken a full eight years to develop the as yet undivulged “concepts of a plan.”

Probably he has no choice but to talk about Hannibal Lecter and the pet-eating immigrants of Springfield, Ohio. He’s got nothing else. Well, insults. “Kamala Harris is dumb as a rock,” he says.  The intellectual abilities of others is one of his regular themes—all the talk about IQ, for instance, as in, “So-and-so is an extremely low IQ individual.” He’s barely smart enough to feel insecure. Pathetic!

Old white Nebraskans with German surname like Trump

My favorite current campaign kerfuffle is the one concerning the Nebraska Walzes who are voting for Trump. They posed for a viral pic wearing their personalized MAGA gear and got a favorable notice from the unintentionally hilarious Power Line Blog, here. 

When Walz’s sister saw the photo, she said she didn’t recognize a single person. It turns out that the Walz Family Trumpers are the children, and the children’s children, of Walz’s paternal grandfather’s brother. So think of your dad’s dad’s brother. It’s his kids, and the kids of those kids, who are “The Walz’s for Trump” (as their tees say). I don’t doubt that Walz’s sister didn’t recognize them. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met the analogous Jorgensons. 

You might as well just say that there are some old white people in Nebraska who are going to vote for Trump. 

Apparently Walz has a brother who also likes Trump. Oh the stories he could tell, he says, about his brother. But he isn’t telling them. Maybe Tim smoked a cigarette after football practice or something. 

It’s been pointed out that some of the Trumps have quite a dim view of Donald—and they actually know him. More weighty, perhaps, is the fact that his chief of staff, his defense secretary, his national security advisor, and his vice president have all pointedly declined to endorse him. I guess voters will just have to weigh these things—what the Nebraska Walzes don’t like about Tim Walz, what top members of the Trump administration don’t like about Trump. Easy to see why everyone thinks it’s going to be close!

 

Back to school

In a couple of weeks we’ll be back to the following at 3:25 in the afternoon—

Me: How was school?

Them: Fine. 

Me: Did your lawyer tell you to keep your answers brief?

Them: Wasn’t funny in 2019 either.

—but right now, first week of school, I’m getting a lot of unsolicited info. Want to know about the new cell phone policy in the Minneapolis Public Schools? No one at our house likes it, though for different reasons:

Them: But, like, if there’s a code red active shooter situation, wouldn’t you like me to be able to call you?

Me: Call me? You’d be checking TikTok. Just like in math class.

My high-school junior said she overheard a freshman boy ask his buddy, “Did you have any idea there’d be no recess?”

Walking toward the front door on my first day back at school, I passed a lot of parents headed the other direction. One, a 30ish mom, pushed a baby stroller with one hand while using the other to dab her eyes with a Kleenex. I’m guessing she has, in addition to the baby, a nervous kindergartner. They are so cute plodding along the sidewalk, kind of serious looking, backpack where it should be up on their shoulders and still scraping the ground behind them.

On the stump

Wasn’t able to watch The Interview but I bet an astute observer was able to detect how flustered Harris must be by Trump’s nimbleness on the campaign trail.

—“My administration will be great for women’s reproductive rights!”

—Free IVF for everyone who wants it!

—Harris is a phony, no core beliefs!

—Not my fault if the videographer I hired was there!

—Why won’t the fake news report that Walz was just the assistant coach?

—I’m not weird, you are!

You can tell my mind is closed cuz as of now I’m nevertheless leaning to Harris. Just need to hear more about if she’s actually black.