Hard Core Conservative Confusion Illustrated Once Again

Conor Friedersdorf states a truth that few have enunciated as clearly or succinctly:  "Secret policy and secret law corrode representative government, undermining Americans' ability to govern themselves."

How do conservatives respond to threats posed by the Patriot Act and the national security state? They want to shut down the government unless Obamacare is defunded. Defunding a law that everyone knows about is, of course, the best way to deal with secret policies and secret laws. Damn, it all seems so obvious, I'm shocked that every President since FDR hasn't made that policy central to their administration.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that conservatives who spend most of their time bragging about the strength of their values seem to have a confused sense of priorities?

Gordon Howie Reads Mother Jones!

That's the conclusion I came to after reading this from Gordon this morning:

Republican Paul Ryan and others are promoting the idea of “vouchers” and “block grants” from the Federal government to individual states, allowing them to create their own “program details” for entitlements.

That sounds like a great idea, right? So what’s the problem?

Both parties seem to be ignoring the basic problem, which is taking the money from taxpayers in the first place.

Last evening, I came upon this Kevin Drum post on the Mother Jones site. Drum quotes Ezra Klein, hardly a conservative leader:

Every Ryan budget since the passage of Obamacare has assumed the repeal of Obamacare. Kinda. Ryan's version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance, as without those policies, it is very, very difficult for Ryan to hit his deficit-reduction targets. [emphasis mine]

Gordon Howie is repeating liberal riffs by complaining about Republican taxation in general and golden boy Paul Ryan's plan specifically. Is Gordon becoming a RINO?

Life Imitates Art without the Happy Ending

James Verone gave a bank teller a note that that claimed he had a gun and demanded $1.  He took the dollar and then sat down on a sofa and waited for the police according to a USA Today article.  Vernone claims "that he has no money but suffers from a growth on his chest and ruptured discs."

According to the article Vernone "hopes for a three-year sentence, so he would be eligible for Social Security by the time he gets out."  Unfortunately,

[h]is plan may not work entirely as he had hoped. Because he demanded only $1 and did not use a weapon, Verone was charged not with bank robbery, but with larceny, which carries a much shorter sentence.

Although Vernone claims to be "a logical-type person," I originally thought him a bit of a romantic.  O. Henry wrote classic short story "The Cop and the Anthem" which features a protagonist who seeks to go to jail for the winter.  The ironically named Soapy tries to steal a free meal from a restaurant, attempts pick up a young single woman with lecherous intent, and throws a brick through a plate class window.  In each case he avoids arrest.  Finally, he stops outside a church to listen to hymns being sung, vows to turn his life around,  and gets arrested for loitering.  He gets his three month sentence.

It turns out that Verone is indeed a logical thinker.  Huffington Post cites a Slate article that

that health care in prison is at best as good as a low-income health plan and at worst, almost nonexistent.
From Slate:

The majority of ailments are treated on-site, but inmates who are gravely ill can be taken to the nearest hospital. Sick prisoners must make a nominal co-payment for each visit to the jailhouse doctor—usually $5 or so, taken from an hourly wage that typically runs between 19 cents and 40 cents an hour. Costs above that are covered by the state.

If that fact weren't bad enough, IO9.com reports that black males have a higher life expectancy in prison than they do outside prison.

Being in prison could save your life - depending on your racial background. A group of epidemiologists studying patterns of death among prisoners have discovered that black men in prison die at much lower rates than black men outside.

Annalee Newitz, the articles author uses two studies to back up this assertion.  First,

Public health professor Anne Spaulding and colleagues gathered these statistics in part to understand what happens to people after they leave prison. Often ex-prisoners have a much greater likelihood of dying in the months after their release. What they discovered was that comparing survival rates in and outside prison revealed racial differences that were stark. Writing in the American Journal of Epidemiology, they assert:

Based on the relatively poor health of incarcerated populations and the high mortality rates seen after release, one might predict that inmates would also suffer from high mortality while incarcerated. A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report, however, showed that while incarcerated, inmates aged 15–64 years experience 19% lower mortality than comparably aged controls in the general population; among blacks, mortality for prisoners is 43% lower than age-adjusted mortality for the general black population.

Later, Newitz writes,

A study published last year in the journal Demography backed up this finding. Sociologist Evelyn J. Patterson studied US Bureau of Justice statistics and census data and concluded:

White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

In other words, it's not just car accidents and shootings that are to blame for these racial discrepancies. It may be that black men survive better in prison because they get better health care behind bars than they do in their communities.

Verone's logic and these studies show the need for better care for the poor, especially when unemployment hovers near or above 9%.  I fear that some will call for reducing the quality of health care in prisons rather than increasing the quality of care for those outside prison.

Minor Musing about Politics and Liberty

A couple of days ago, The Madville Times posted about the apparent failure to get enough signatures to refer two bills made necessary by federal health care reform.  In the comments, Steve Sibson, Cory, and I were amiably discussing Hegel without a philosophical license. when Sibson ended the conversation by, "The end-game is the same…statism. The frog’s water is now boiling."

Given the topic, Sibson seems to be saying that health care reform will end the Republic.  Big government certainly carries inherent risks, but I've always been confused why health care reform was the issue that animated tea party supporters.

Why wasn't it the Patriot Act? Why did it take 10 years to see reports like this one?

Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn resistance from a single senator, Republican freshman Rand Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of privacy rights.

Paul held up the final vote for several days while he demanded a chance to change the bill to diminish the government's ability to monitor individual actions.

The measure would add four years to the legal life of roving wiretaps — those authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device — of court-ordered searches of business records and of surveillance of non-American "lone wolf" suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups.

The roving wiretaps and access to business records are small parts of the USA Patriot Act enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But unlike most of the act, which is permanent law, those provisions must be renewed periodically because of concerns that they could be used to violate privacy rights. The same applies to the "lone wolf" provision, which was part of a 2004 intelligence law.

Paul argued that in the rush to meet the terrorist threat in 2001 Congress enacted a Patriot Act that tramples on individual liberties. He had some backing from liberal Democrats such as Durbin and Udall, as well as civil liberties groups who have long contended the law gives the government authority to spy on innocent citizens.

"The Patriot Act has been used improperly again and again by law enforcement to invade Americans' privacy and violate their constitutional rights," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office.

 Why wasn't it NCLB?  Why did it take nearly a decade to read this?

“I think what you’re seeing is the Republican Party going back to its conservative roots and, yes, going back to its core principles and I think that’s a good thing,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in an interview here, adding: “I would argue that we did lose our way for a while.”

Jindal, who was an official in Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services and served two terms in Congress during the Bush era, cites No Child Left Behind as an example of wayward Republicanism.

“How does it make sense for Republicans to be imposing this one-size-fits-all approach from the federal level onto the states and the local school board when we’ve always believed that government that governs closest to the people governs best?” he asked.

Why aren't conservatives angered about situations like this one?

Risen claims the intimidation began under the Bush administration but has continued into the Obama era. "I believe that the efforts to target me has continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on freedom of the press in the United States," Risen wrote.

When it comes to basic liberties, I have to agree with E.D. Kain who writes,

Rand Paul is quickly becoming one of the most important voices on civil liberties in the Senate, alongside a small cadre of others like Democratic Senator, Ron Wyden, of Oregon. I think it’s important to get away from the left/right Republican/Democrat politics and work to elect as many civil libertarians as we possibly can.

Update:

Several people have pointed out that Rand Paul’s free-speech record is pretty bad. Perhaps the civil libertarian label doesn’t apply. Still, on some level I’ll take what I can get. Paul has voiced sensible opposition to the Patriot Act, the TSA, and the war in Libya. He’s far from perfect, but he’s better than many nonetheless. So far, at least, he hasn’t plotted the assassination of a U.S. citizen.

I'll take every ally I can get in the war to preserve freedoms, but I get really confused by the items that become priorities that motivate anger.  All of the above situations seem to be more of a threat than health care reform which seems to be an insurance company protection act that might hit my pocket book but won't take away basic liberty.