Prejudice does not stop being prejudice despite being popular or widely held. And constitutional rights do not loose their force even if they are applied to people, beliefs and behaviors that make many other people squeamish. That’s really the entire point of the bloody thing. Fundamental rights are not subject to popular opinion or the vote. That’s because they are fundamental rights.

Those who would say otherwise are just opportunistic jack-wagons. And I think the general reaction to their odious arguments is best summarized by the great orator, Sean Connery:

Naturally just like the gay marriage “strategy” the party’s elected leaders will pretend to be scandalized and run to distance themselves from these “outside the mainstream” initiatives. All the while while enjoying the benefits of the extra two or three percent on their bottom lines.

via Joshua Green at the Atlantic:

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

The legalization movement appears to be gaining steam. As many as a half dozen states could consider the issue this fall. If the correlation Merlino describes really exists, then Democrats will have an advantage in those states. Does it?

Political scientists disagree about whether gay marriage bans helped Republicans, though a growing body of scholarship suggests that they probably did. So far, nobody has measured marijuana’s effect at the polls. But Stephen Nicholson, a leading expert on ballot initiatives at the University of California at Merced, told me that he plans to. What’s more, he sees an intriguing precedent in the nuclear freeze initiatives of 28 years ago, which he has studied. “In the 1982 midterms, 10 states had ballot initiatives on the nuclear freeze,” Nicholson told me. “This had a significant positive effect on Democratic candidates.”

Green has a bit more on the phenomenon/possible strategy in a slightly longer article here. And there is a full cover story in the National Journal this month on the growing movement to revisit marijuana’s status as a controlled substance. But you’ll need to subscribe or run to your local library to read that one.

As a tactic would it be dirty and underhanded? Sure. But they called Karl Rove a genius for doing the same thing with gay marriage. This might actually do some social good. Win-Win I say.

Via Democracy in America, a recap:

I think popular deficit anxiety is related to a mistrust that what worked to end the Great Depression will still work today. The political will to achieve sufficient stimulus spending to kick-start the American economy out of its shortage of aggregate demand in the 1930s arrived in the form of an existential military threat: for four years, the government blew out all the stops on spending and printed money like there was no tomorrow. (Wars make it easy to get people to think that way.) At the end of the war, the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and the de-militarising economy faced a realignment that dwarfs anything today’s creative-destruction fans could imagine. But that late-1940s economy could count on two things: lots of young families who’d been starved of consumer goods for years and had built up a tremendous appetite, and a technological moment in which all sorts of fabulous new consumer goods were just being invented and advertised and pouring onto the shelves. In an industrial economy that was inventing amazing stuff people had never seen before—Whirlpools, Buicks, split-level ranch houses—demand was not hard to create. Today’s post-industrial economy is still creating a lot of amazing stuff people have never seen before, but a tremendous amount of it is downloadable and free. Much of the rest is fabulously expensive, and only useful if you have a rare genetic disease.

Paul Krugman has a famous essay in which he explains that our inability to imagine what people will spend money on as the economy changes is a failure of our imagination, not of the economy. But still, I’m having a hard time imagining what people will spend money on as the economy changes. We could certainly use a bunch of high-speed trains, a smart electric grid, highway and water-main upgrades and so forth, but only government can pay for those things, and to do that, you have to either tax or borrow. And those are the two things the public remains unwilling to do, because they don’t believe the spending will do the trick.

It seems to me that there is some room for splitting the difference here. I think a reasonable coalition could be assembled to cut spending by:

• raising the retirement age to 68 or or even 70, as the EU is preparing to do
• increase the social security contribution limit above $102,000 to say… oh, half a million sounds good

cutting several tens of billions from the Pentagon budget by killing programs aimed and fighting a Major Land/Air/Sea War (I’m looking at you DDG-1000, F-35and, and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle) and refocusing on asymmetric war fighting (people).

One could then take about half of that and put it straight to bottom line deficit reduction — the retirement, SS moves alone would have long-term beneficial help for the deficit beyond the simple year-on-year revenue savings — and put the other half into big budget, big vision jobs projects like high speed rail and smart grid technology.

This is something that could probably get done in the House. In the Senate on the other hand, good luck getting it through without some Senator blocking the process because his/her sacred cow of a DoD project is on the chopping block.

Why, you make everyone a contractor.

IT giant IBM told Personnel Today that the firm’s global workforce of 399,000 permanent employees could reduce to 100,000 by 2017, the date by which the firm is due to complete its HR transformation programme.

Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, the consultancy arm of the IT conglomerate, said the firm would re-hire the workers as contractors for specific projects as and when necessary, a concept dubbed ‘crowd sourcing’.

“There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings,” he said.

Okay, first of all “crowdsourcing” as it is normally understood is the idea that an organization’s customers, stakeholders and other interested parties can often come up with a solution to a particular problem better than insiders who are often blinded by organizational groupthink and prejudices. Thus the problem is thrown out to the public where people, usually for free or for credit only work away at all or parts of the problem.

Wikipedia is crowdsourced.

What IBM is doing is firing a two-thirds of its workforce and then hiring them back on an as-needed basis, sans benefits like retirement and HEALTH INSURANCE.

At first blush (and second) this looks like a pretty cold-blooded, typical Evil-Big-Corporation thing to do, you have to admit that for a company that is in IBM’s line of work — increasingly in the business of using smart people to solve problems on a project basis, less in the “making stuff” business — then this kind of business model makes a lot of sense. Given the increasing ubiquitousness of broadband connections and applications “in the cloud” that allow for long-distance collaboration it is probably inevitable.

Which brings into even starker contrast the need to get away from the employer-based model of health care financing and to an individual-based, portable model. All of which means we are going to have to revisit the single-payer and cost containment parts of health care again sooner rather than later.

Director, Robert Rodriguez, (El Mariachi, Spy Kids, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City) pulls together an all-star cast to mess with Arizona’s new immigration law.

If the political blogosphere covered basketball games, we’d not only be told about shots, makes, and misses, but every rotation of the ball on the way to the hoop. “He shoots, the ball appears to be on course, it’s getting closer and still seems like it’ll make it, I give it a 90 percent chance of going in, IT HITS THE BACK RIM, it didn’t make it, it definitely appears as though it may bounce out, it’s going to bounce on the rim a second time, now it’s perched on the lip and may go in or out — an instant poll of the crowd confirms that 75 percent of people think it’ll wind up a miss — my God it’s actually falling into the basket, this moment it is falling through the net, it’s a basket!”

So, yeah. Remember last July when Senator Jim DeMint declared that Republican’s would make health care “Obama’s Waterloo?” How’s your French, Jim? There were two great generals in that battle. I guess Obama gets to be Wellington.

But seriously, this blog has been saying for more than a year that the GOP was playing a dangerous game by betting the farm on absolute opposition to all Democratic initiatives. And now where are they?

Republican David Frum hits the nail on the head:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Funny how circumstances can change, innit? American’s are now going to have eight months to decide for themselves how they like the reality of health care reform as law, as opposed to the spectre of Obamacare socialist fantasy. They’ll find that the red flag does not fly above the United States and that freedom has not evaporated.

Instead they may just decide that they have an expanded view of freedom; freedom from needless pain and suffering; freedom from the hideous choice between food and medicine; freedom from the fear and shame of debt and bankruptcy.

Millions will come to grips with the fact that this is what change looks like. It looks pretty much like the day before except perhaps just a bit brighter.

The sun will rise on a November morning eight months from now and millions of Americans will then cast their votes based on the realities of what has been done this week, not the fears. They will have had time to reflect on what political courage means and what it’s worth both as a matter for the pocketbook and the history books.

And history will write, not one single Republican voted for it. And if yesterday was Waterloo, might November look like Cannae?

But come on! This is just gloating!

An Atlantic Monthly article by Megan McArdle questions whether health insurance coverage saves lives, drawing from a narrow slice of the literature to suggest the beneficial effects of insurance coverage on mortality might be negligible. While it is true these effects have been challenging for researchers to assess accurately, this question deserves more than a selective reading of the literature to inform the public and policymakers properly. Indeed, when reviewed comprehensively and with an understanding of key clinical and methodological nuances, the research to date provides consistent and compelling evidence that health insurance coverage significantly improves health outcomes, particularly for adults with treatable conditions (McWilliams 2009).

How many lives would universal coverage save each year? A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands. Short of the perfect study, however, we will never know the exact number. In the meantime, we can let perfect be the enemy of good. Or we can recognize the evidence to date is sufficiently robust for policymakers to proceed confidently with health care reforms that promise substantial health and financial benefits for millions of uninsured Americans.

Invade A Hospital Image: The Daily Dish

The Democratic Party cannot go into the midterm elections with health care reform undone. If it comes down to it, they will go with the budget reconciliation process and let the chips fall. But they absolutely cannot let the best chance to get this done in 50 years slip through their fingers. The question the GOP has to ask themselves, when push comes to shove are they going to remain 100% in opposition when the most important social welfare legislation since Medicare gets done? The original Medicare bill got 17 Republican votes in the Senate and 70 in the House, by the way.