Month: October 2012

How the world works in Romney’s bubble

by digby

Once again, Mitt says everybody in America has hunky dory health care even if they don’t have insurance:

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’  ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.

“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”
He pointed out that federal law requires hospitals to treat those without health insurance — although hospital officials frequently say that drives up health-care costs.

Uhm:

Sunday, May 20, 2007

The Best Health Care System In The World

by digby

Tale of last 90 minutes of woman’s life

In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.

“Thanks a lot, officers,” an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. “This is her third time here.”

The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She’d been given prescription medication and a doctor’s appointment.

Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, “You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do,” according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.

Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone’s apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the “disturbance” in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez’s record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.

[…]

The story of Rodriguez’s demise began at 12:34 a.m. when two county police officers received a radio call of a “female down” and yelling for help near the front entrance of King-Harbor, according to the police report.

When they approached Rodriguez to ask what was wrong, she responded in a “loud and belligerent voice that her stomach was hurting,” the report states. She said she had 10 gallstones and that one of them had burst.

A staff member summoned by the police arrived with a wheelchair and rolled her into the emergency room. Among her belongings, one officer found her latest discharge slip from the hospital, which instructed her to “return to ER if nausea, vomit, more pain or any worse.”

When the officers talked to the emergency room nurse, she “did not show any concern” for Rodriguez, the police report said. The report identifies the nurse as Linda Witland, but county officials confirmed that her name is Linda Ruttlen, who began working for the county in July 1992.

Ruttlen could not be reached for comment.

During that initial discussion with Ruttlen, Rodriguez slipped off her wheelchair onto the floor and curled into a fetal position, screaming in pain, the report said.

Ruttlen told her to “get off the floor and onto a chair,” the police report said. Two officers and a different nurse helped her back to the wheelchair and brought her close to the reception counter, where a staff member asked her to remain seated.

The officers left and Rodriguez again pitched forward onto the floor, apparently unable to get up, according to people who saw the videotape and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Because the tape does not have sound, it is not possible to determine whether Rodriguez was screaming or what she was saying, the viewers said. Because of the camera’s angle, in most scenes, she is but a grainy blob, sometimes obstructed, moving around on the floor.

When Rodriguez’s boyfriend, Jose Prado, returned to the hospital after an errand and saw her on the floor, he alerted nurses and then called 911.

According to Sheriff’s Capt. Ray Peavy, the dispatcher said, “Look, sir, it indicates you’re already in a hospital setting. We cannot send emergency equipment out there to take you to a hospital you’re already at.”

Prado then knocked on the door of the county police, near the emergency room, and said, “My girlfriend needs help and they don’t want to help her,” according to the police report. A sergeant told him to consult the medical staff, the report said. Minutes later, Prado came back to the sergeant and said, “They don’t want to help her.” Again, he was told to see the medical staff.

Within minutes, police began taking Rodriguez into custody. When they told Prado that there was a warrant for Rodriguez’s arrest, he asked if she would get medical care wherever she was taken. They assured him that she would. He then kissed her and left, the police report said.

She was wheeled to the patrol vehicle and the door was opened so that she could get into the back. When officers asked her to get up, she did not respond. An officer tried to revive her with an ammonia inhalant, then checked for a pulse and found none. She died in the emergency room after resuscitation efforts failed.

According to preliminary coroner’s findings, the cause was a perforated large bowel, which caused an infection. Experts say the condition can bring about death fairly suddenly.

You might think that it was just this one hospital or an isolated incident, but you’d be wrong:

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said.

The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was described by police as a particularly outrageous case of “homeless dumping” that has plagued the downtown area.

“I can’t think of anything colder than that,” said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career. “There was no mission around, no services. It’s the worst area of skid row.”

You know the old saying, “as California goes, so goes the nation?” The health care system in Los Angeles is broken and it’s an exciting preview of what’s coming to your town next if something isn’t done. The population of uninsured is huge here and growing and the hospital system is so strapped that only the richest facilities offer halfway decent care. Get ready America.

If people can live with this, which many can I’m sure, then no problem. Just let paraplegics die in the gutter and women with perforated bowels writhe around in pain on the floor of emergency rooms because people are so hardened that they really don’t give a damn anymore. I guess we can all just cross our fingers and hope we get rich and stay very, very lucky so it doesn’t happen to us. After all, if worse comes to worse we could win the lottery. (Oh never mind, the Governor wants to “lease” the lottery to private interests so that he can cover his ass long enough to get out of office before the entire state budget blows up.)

The good news is that the one thing we can always rely upon is the warm compassionate conservatives who are very, very religious people and hold some things sacred above all others: the rich shalt never, ever have to pay their fair share of taxes and fetuses and blastocysts shall be protected above living human beings. This is what’s known as “the culture ‘o life.” I do believe it was Jesus who said, “if you aren’t entrepreneurial enough to go online and comparison shop for the best emergency room you deserve to be dumped in a gutter to die.” Or maybe it was Newt Gingrich. It’s so hard to tell the difference.

Poll of pundits

by digby

The Daily Show on polling addiction:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

“The CNN instapoll poll is polling well among pundits who no longer give a shit.”

“That’s got to be a big demographic.”

“That is the the biggest demographic.”

Out of the mouths of babes. (Well, I think Stewart and Jones are babes anyway…)

.

What the tweakers have in mind for you

by digby

Here is a good piece on the Democrats’ emerging position on Social Security and what it will meant to you if it happens. The whole thing is worth reading, but I wanted to highlight this one section on the “tweaks”:

So how big are these so-called “tweaks”? Let’s take them one at a time, keeping in mind that the average monthly retirement benefit under Social Security is $1,230, and most people have little or no other income in retirement. For single persons who do not own homes, benefits are 92 percent of net worth. Hello old people living alone in rental housing, we need you to tighten your belts!

1. Benefits are determined by applying cost-of-living changes to a worker’s wages. Explaining exactly how here is boring and unnecessary. All you have to know is that a small change in a factor applied over many years adds up to a big change at the end. Imagine you received a gift of $1,000 at age 21, and you bought some kind of asset that accumulated interest indefinitely. If you made three percent interest after taxes, after 30 years you have $2,427. But suppose it is only two and a half percent? Doesn’t sound like much, right? It’s only half a percent. After 30 years you have $2,098, a fourteen percent reduction. Imagine living frugally, then needing another fourteen percent of frugal.

Proposals for reduced cost-of-living adjustments, sometimes referred to as a “diet COLA” by people whose own well-being will be unaffected, will be accompanied by arcane commentary to the effect that the factors currently in use are overstated. This commentary will be provided by economists cherry-picked for their advocacy of this view, and we will be told that “all economists” agree, which will of course be a lie. (See Dean Baker’s Getting Prices Right: The Debate over the Accuracy of the Consumer Price Index.) And by the way, none of this discourse confronts the likelihood that prices of the things purchased by the elderly do not grow at the same rate as those for the population as a whole.

2. The second favored tweak is an increase in the retirement age. This reform is designed by people who work sitting on their ass. Now your humble correspondent plans to work until age 70, perhaps well over possible retirement age increases. But I’m sitting on my ass too. If I had to pick up Mitt Romney’s garbage, I might look forward to an earlier retirement. In fact, I might positively require it. Distinguishing between me and the sanitation worker in practice would entail a complex and error-ridden bureaucratic process, and the current administration of Social Security and Medicare already leaves much to be desired. Try calling them some time. It’s fun!

An increase in the retirement age might not look like much to someone just starting out, but it will look quite different to people in their 50’s who do not find joy in their daily work. Moreover, a later retirement means less benefits. After all, retiring later doesn’t mean you get to die later. A higher retirement age is a benefit cut. How big a cut, you will ask. But first, there is an additional malignant feature of this device: It has a bigger negative impact, the lower one’s income. The reason is that those with lower income have shorter life spans on average, so their years of retirement benefits are reduced by a higher proportion than those with higher income. So it is unnecessary and unfair to boot.

It has been estimated that for the lowest 20 percent of couples, their wealth is reduced by 18 percent. The highest comparable income group has a reduction of eight percent. Any higher taxes on the rich or battery plants in Michigan will be cold comfort to those in benighted circumstances absorbing a retirement age tweak.

3. The third celebrated tweak is described as means-testing, which means reducing benefits for those with higher income. First we get regaled with tales of millionaires receiving needless benefits. The problem is that the definition of “rich” undergoes a dramatic transformation, between this sort of propaganda and actual proposals. The reason is that eliminating benefits of the really rich has a negligible effect on total program expenses. So “on Social Security rich” is going to be much less than “rich in the eyes of any fool.”

We might note that Social Security is already means-tested — benefits for those with higher incomes are taxed. If we were absolutely compelled to means-test, the income tax would be the logical tool, since it takes into account family size, other income, dependents, etc. Done on the Social Security side, however, means-testing benefits (= taxing benefits more) is a crude method of economizing. You all can guess why the income tax will not be used for means-testing. Don’t make me do all the work here, people.

A long-standing objection to means-testing is political. By increasing the extent of means-testing, the program’s universality is diminished and its political support weakened. Universal in this context means there is some systematic relationship between what you pay and what you get, hence the “insurance” part of the general designation “social insurance.” Means-testing weakens the link between contributions and benefits. It increases the number of higher income persons who would just as soon have no program at all, since their accumulated foregone payroll taxes would exceed their benefits under the program. The political fallout would magnify the nascent over/under 55 conflict noted previously.

The bottom line is that for the majority of retirees with little or no savings, a benefit tweak IS a slash in benefits.

Keep in mind that this is likely to be done while snowing you into believing that it’s “shared sacrifice” because oil companies could be required to end some superfluous subsidies and wealthy people will be “asked to pay a little bit more.” You are supposed to feel good about this because “we’re all in it together.” Except, of course, that’s nonsense. The wealthy will feel nothing, will suffer not at all, will not even know it happened. Their lives will go on completely unchanged. And possibly the upper middle class will make some minor adjustment and carry on unscathed as well, assuming they aren’t unlucky enough to have a catastrophic illness or some bad luck that makes them lose their financial security. (Keep your fingers crossed, suburban professionals!)

But it will make a difference for the majority of Americans who struggle through life paying their taxes, working at average or low paying jobs and who, for a variety of reasons (mostly because they don’t get paid enough money) are unable to save much for their retirement. Those people are going to hurt. A lot. Especially as they get really old.

I certainly hope that you aren’t one of them. But unless you are lucky enough to be born to Mitt and Ann Romney and he’s leaving his massive tax free “401K” to you, it’s a crapshoot. I never planned on being poor in my old age. But it turns out that life throws a lot of curve balls at you and you can’t always predict where you’re going to be when you’re in your 50s and 60s — or where the economy will be. Plenty of people lost their nest eggs in this recession — and once you hit a certain age, you don’t have time to make it back.

Social Security is all that keeps millions and millions of people from living in abject poverty:

And, by the way, women are particularly impacted:

Because women tend to earn less than men, take more time out of the paid workforce, live longer, accumulate less savings, and receive smaller pensions, Social Security is especially important for them. Women constitute 56 percent of Social Security beneficiaries aged 62 and older and 68 percent of beneficiaries aged 85 and older.

Women pay 40 percent of Social Security payroll taxes but receive 49 percent of Social Security benefits. This is because women benefit disproportionately from the program’s inflation-protected benefits (because women tend to live longer), its progressive formula for computing benefits (because they tend to have lower earnings), and its benefits for non-working spouses and survivors.

Not that we weren’t working, mind you. We just didn’t get paid a fair wage — and still don’t today! But hey, we’re greedy geezers just the same, right?

.

If only life were like this

by digby

Oh wait … it is!

Naturally, the political press in Australia is pooh-poohing this. her cabinet is in the midst of a bunch of scandals and she’s unpopular for a variety of reasons. This is a typical reaction:

“Australians have been listening to this squabbling for the past two or three years and it just goes from one topic of squabbling to another topic of squabbling,” said John Wanna, a politics academic at the Australian National University.

You put in bitch in charge and that’s bound to happen, amirite?

I don’t have an opinion on her politics or her government’s efficacy. All I know is that I feel goodthis morning having listened to that speech. Better than I’ve felt in months, if you want to know the truth. Maybe people don’t want to hear a powerful woman confronting a smug, sexist hypocrite head on like that, but goddamn it needed to be said by somebody. Bravo.

.

“Specific information” and the failure of the press

by David Atkins

A respondent to the latest NYTimes swing state poll says of Romney’s debate performance:

“The debate made me feel better about” Mr. Romney, one poll respondent, Paula Gregory, 37, a clerical manager for a construction firm who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said in a follow-up interview. “I had more specific information from him and he had real rebuttals to accusations that had been made, most specifically about his tax plan.”

Real rebuttals, as in: “It doesn’t matter what I said before, if I say it’s not true, then it isn’t.”

Look, there’s no question that the President didn’t do remotely enough to call Mitt Romney out on his sudden reinvention in Denver.

But on the issue of his tax plan, Obama did point out that Mitt’s plan was to cut taxes by $5 trillion, which would have to increase the deficit or be made up for in costs to the middle class. When Romney insisted that the President was lying about that, all the President could do was say that Romney’s plan did, in fact, do that. What else was the President supposed to do? Flash anger? Call him a liar? Most Americans in the squishy don’t take too well to that sort of thing, particularly from melanin-endowed politicians.

This is what the press is supposed to do. It’s what a debate moderator is supposed to do. If a candidate trots out a mind-boggling lie on stage, it’s supposed to be the job of a fair arbiter to say,

“Wait a moment, Mr. Romney. You have in fact been calling for a $4.8 trillion tax reduction across the board, offset by elimination of deductions. What specific deductions would you eliminate to avoid raising the deficit or burdening the middle class?”

Now, the President could in theory have taken it upon himself to ask this question. But that’s not supposed to his job, and it would have seemed very small on that stage, effacing him and his policies while allowing Romney to take center stage. Instead, both men engaged in a “did not/did too” battle of boring in which the more asinine and confident-sounding bully came out the winner.

The fact that no such question was asked after Romney’s nakedly false assertion is not just a dramatic failure by Mr. Lehrer, but representative of the decades long failure of the press in seeking a perception of balance over the pursuit of the truth.

Fortunately, it would appear from the same poll that most people aren’t actually buying Romney’s snake oil in major quantities, as the latest numbers in Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado have barely moved–or moved in Obama’s direction–since late September:

Time will tell if enough voters are smart enough to see through Romney’s lies. But one thing’s for certain: the press has failed spectacularly to do its job.

.

Whining Job Creator ‘O The Day: David Siegel still a huge jackass

by digby

Via Think Progress

Subject: Message from David Siegel
Date:Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:58:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: [David Siegel]
To: [All employees]
To All My Valued Employees,

As most of you know our company, Westgate Resorts, has continued to succeed in spite of a very dismal economy. There is no question that the economy has changed for the worse and we have not seen any improvement over the past four years. In spite of all of the challenges we have faced, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration. Of course, as your employer, I can’t tell you whom to vote for, and I certainly wouldn’t interfere with your right to vote for whomever you choose. In fact, I encourage you to vote for whomever you think will serve your interests the best.

However, let me share a few facts that might help you decide what is in your best interest.
[…]
So where am I going with all this? It’s quite simple. If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.

So, when you make your decision to vote, ask yourself, which candidate understands the economics of business ownership and who doesn’t? Whose policies will endanger your job? Answer those questions and you should know who might be the one capable of protecting and saving your job. While the media wants to tell you to believe the “1 percenters” are bad, I’m telling you they are not. They create most of the jobs. If you lose your job, it won’t be at the hands of the “1%”; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country.

If you haven’t seen the documentary “Queen of Versailles” you probably don’t understand the depth of depravity in that statement by the man whose wife is the title character. This is a man who’s made his fortune bilking people out of money they cannot afford for time-shares that aren’t worth spit. He’s the guy whose conspicuous consumption is so over the top that they made a movie out of it, a movie in which he is revealed to be one of the stupidest businessmen on the face of the earth.

In fact, when I saw the movie that was the main takeaway. Here was a guy who’d made his fortune mostly through luck and timing — and a flood of cheap money — who refused to let go of a Las Vegas white elephant even though it would have saved billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. There was no reason for it other than his oversized ego, which also had him building the most hideous oversized structure this side of the Mall of America, which he dubbed “Versailles.”

At the end of the movie he was sitting in a piles of papers and dogshit, yelling at his childlike wife and confused kids about turning off the lights when they leave the room. That made me happy. He was going down, down, down and nobody deserved it more. And his kids would be better off for not having the world handed to them by this creep.

Unfortunately he, like the rest of the 1%, no matter how inept and undeserving, has recovered his fortune and is back in business. The fact that he’s still whining like a spoiled toddler is testament to just how sick all that money has made these plutocratic jerks.

Now he’s doing God’s Work (job creatin’) by copying wingnut chain emails and sending them to his employees. If these are the titans of capitalism who are supposed to save us all, I’d say it’s time we start gathering our survivalist gear and hoarding canned goods. The future is not bright.

.

Watch your wallet: David Walker’s got a new plan

by digby

So, David Walker’s throwing out some new deficit hawkery in the hopes that nobody gets too hung up on Simpson Bowles and fails to keep their eyes on the prize — insuring that that DC consensus that the deficit is the biggest problem this country faces, intact:

On Wednesday, David Walker, CEO of Comeback American Initiative, proposed another alternative that would challenge the political orthodoxy of both parties.
To most Democrats’ chagrin, Walker’s group wants to block-grant Medicaid, repeal and scale back parts of the Affordable Care Act, and raise taxes on Americans who are above the poverty live but pay no federal income taxes, as it outlined in a 2011 fiscal reform plan.

“There are a lot of people well above the poverty rate who aren’t paying income tax,” says Walker, the former Comptroller General who previously ran Pete Peterson’s foundation. He acknowledges that the tax change won’t be a big money saver. “That’s not going to generate a lot of money, but we’ve got to have more people have a stake in government finance,” he explains, adding that the framework would hold middle-class taxpayers harmless.

Likewise, Walker says, Republicans wouldn’t be happy with the group’s proposal to scale back defense spending to President Obama’s recommended levels, or with the higher effective tax rates on the wealthy. And many in both parties might be taken aback by Walker’s proposal to impose a consumption tax akin to a VAT and phase out the employer deduction for health care, which would radically shift the country away from a employer-based health care model. (Walker says it would be replaced by a system that would offer “basic coverage for all citizens,” though he didn’t go into the details.)

Walker’s group, which is supported by Peterson, shopped these ideas to colleges and business groups in 16 states. He says that these reforms—taken as a whole—were exceedingly popular among those who attended the tour’s public events. But concerns surfaced at Wednesday’s press conference: One woman questioned whether block-granting Medicaid would harm poor and disadvantaged Americans.

Alice Rivlin, who was also part of the Bowles-Simpson commission, agreed it was “a very legitimate concern” about the Medicaid block-grant. But Rivlin, who appeared at the event in support of Walker’s group, dissuaded the audience from getting too hung up on the specifics.

“I’ve noticed some of you taking notes on specific proposals he was offering I think that’s not the point,” Rivlin said. “He put out in the public domain a set of proposals we ought to be talking about. I wouldn’t agree with absolutely all of them. But that’s the essence of getting to a solution.”

Stop being so picky about these details, people! Focus! We’ve just proposed to repeal parts of Obamacare, block grant Medicaid and get rid of the Employer Deduction for health insurance, thus likely throwing millions of Americans into the hellhole known as the individual market, but you needn’t worry your pretty little heads one bit. David Walker says he’s got an idea for some kind of “basic health care” to be named later and the wealthy will have to “pay a little bit more” so all you plebes should be mollified.

These people are relentless. They never stop proposing and propagandizing and keeping the pressure on to fundamentally change the compact between the government and the people.

Do. Not. Trust. Anything. They. Say.

.

Romney Dogwhistles online, too

by David Atkins

Mitt Romney has been flooding newspaper websites with webads. Here’s one of them:

Speaking to an adoring sea of white? Check. Railing against “dependency” as the root cause of our economic problems? Check.

It’s not even subtle. The guy needs to win 61% of white vote, and he’s doing his damnedest to get there.

.

Will the real Mitt Shady please stand up, please stand up?

by digby

Watch the first five minutes or so of this NOW with Alex Wagner from this morning to see all the various Mittster positions on abortion in living color. It’s quite something:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For those wondering what is Mitt’s “real” position on abortion, I’d probably default to this. I have no reason to believe he isn’t sincere about his religious beliefs.

In 1973, the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released the following statement regarding abortion, which is still applicable today:

“The Church opposes abortion and counsels its members not to submit to or perform an abortion except in the rare cases where, in the opinion of competent medical counsel, the life or good health of the mother is seriously endangered or where the pregnancy was caused by rape and produces serious emotional trauma in the mother. Even then it should be done only after counseling with the local presiding priesthood authority and after receiving divine confirmation through prayer.”

I haven’t heard any of the mainstream wags talk about this, but I wonder if Mitt’s performance couldn’t begin to shred the myth that people care about “authenticity.” If the GOP base sticks with this guy we’ll know they’re just partisans, which is par for the course. But what about these alleged “undecideds” in the so-called middle who Romney is supposedly wooing? Aren’t they one ones who demand authenticity the most? If they’re breaking for Mitt you just cannot say they are sticklers for authenticity.

I honestly don’t think we’ve ever had a presidential candidate who’s taken both sides of fundamental definitional issues like this one has. Yes, Tricky Dick was a liar and Reagan made things up and Clinton was slick. But this man has openly run for high office as both a moderate liberal and a hardcore conservative — within a ten year span. And in this current race, he’s running as both. He proves that in this polarized age you can be completely inconsistent in your views and get away with it.

Obama did this too, to a certain extent, but it was far more subtle using a sort of theatrical, content free liberal “style” and symbolism to create the illusion to those who wanted to see it that way that he was further to the left than his plain words clearly placed him. (Clinton did it too, with the whole baby boomer, sax playing, draft dodging and pot smoking.) I think that’s a fairly commonplace political sleight of hand.

Mitt’s the same guy to everyone — a vaguely patrician heir to a famous name who made a fortune through inscrutable financial transactions. The only people his persona dogwhistles are his donors. There’s no way for him to subtly signal to either his base or enough moderates that he’s one of them. He isn’t. He’s the quintessential One Percenter, without even the slightest claim to the common touch. So he has to literally say that he’s all things to all people.

.

Dispatch from Conservative Bizarroworld

by digby

Elections expert Richard Hasen poses an important question:

What if President Obama wins re-election and Republicans don’t believe it?

The question isn’t far-fetched. For several weeks, we have seen Republicans challenge the veracity of a number of election-related facts, and the outcome of the presidential election may be no different.

First, some Republicans claimed that public opinion polls were all skewed to show an Obama lead. As Slate reported, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans and 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe in the skew. Republicans confidently claim that the polls are oversampling Democrats, not realizing that these are self-reported party identifications, which rise and fall with candidates’ support.

Distrust of the polls is not a new phenomenon, and it is not confined to Republicans. As Nate Silver pointed out, when Democrats were behind in 2004 they believed the polls were skewed toward Republicans. Fortunately, the Romney debate performance last week apparently was enough to “unskew” the latest numbers.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a relatively rosy jobs report, which not only reported better-than-expected hiring for September but also upward revisions for earlier months. Soon thereafter, a number of Republicans, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, questioned whether or not the numbers were accurate. Welch tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can’t debate so change number.” What evidence did Welch have? Nada.
[…]
All of these conspiracy theories—like the earlier birther controversies—indicate that if we are unlucky enough to have a very close election in November in which President Obama ekes out a victory, we can expect Republicans to question the election results, too. We’ll have the Fraudulent Fraud Squad telling us that Democrats used voter fraud to steal the election. Hucksters like John Fund will point to “bizarre” anomalies in vote totals from Democratic areas and tout new conspiracy theories. Social media will likely fan the flames.

I have never been a believer in “poll-skewing” theories, but I cut the 2004 Dems a little slack because of the results of the 2000 election. When you see a dubious result like that you can be forgiven for being skeptical for a while. As the article points out, the “skepticism” on the right, on the other hand, has morphed into full-fledged delusion.

But then, this was the one of the goals of the Vote Suppression movement. It’s true that they want to keep Democratic partisans from voting. But they also need to feed the bedrock conviction that no Democrat can be legitimately elected. They did this going back to Clinton, when Dick Armey famously declared, “Clinton is not my president” and continued when they became rabid dogs in defense of Bush’s dubious victory in 2000. Obama won too big for them to create doubt about the legitimacy of the vote, so they came up with this birther nonsense to allow these wingnuts to believe that the president himself wasn’t a legitimate candidate.

I don’t know what to do about this. We’re dealing with a large number of people, including some of our society’s wealthiest magnates, who are living in an alternate universe.

For instance:

TUCHMAN: Paul Ryan has said it himself that he believes there is media bias against the GOP ticket. And at these rallies, a widespread belief that presidential preference polls are part of that conspiracy.

TUCHMAN (on camera): Do you think the pollsters want the Obama ticket to be in front?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: I think they’re shaping them for Obama. I mean, the media, the liberal media, and whatever they can to help him.

TUCHMAN: Do you think that the polls that have shown that Obama is in the lead are inaccurate?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I don’t believe those. I don’t believe them. I know they had a poll that said that the polls were wrong. They had a poll that said the polls were wrong. So I don’t — I don’t believe that.

TUCHMAN: Do you believe the poll that said the polls were wrong?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. I don’t believe any of it.

TUCHMAN: It’s easy to bash polls and pollsters. And not at all unusual. But it becomes more complicated when new polling comes out that indicate your candidate is in front.

(Voice-over): That’s what happened the middle of our day with Ryan, when a Pew Research poll showed the Romney-Ryan ticket in the lead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Everybody says that the polls are skewed in one way, you know? So.

TUCHMAN (on camera): A recent poll has come out that shows Romney in front. How do you feel about that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Well, he got a good bump, you know, out of the debate.

TUCHMAN: So you’re saying you believe that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: Yes.

A lot of people aren’t even aware that they’re being self-serving. They think it’s self-evident that Democrats cannot legitimately be elected because everyone says that the US is a conservative country. And that’s just the one’s who watch the mainstream news. Those who are tuned into the right wing media hear that Democrats are all radical leftists if not full-fledged communists. And they don’t know a single person who is a radical leftist of full-fledged Communist so how could any of them possibly win without cheating?

This is a huge problem for our democracy, but unless some people on the right decide that it’s a problem for them I doubt there’s anything we can do to change it. Conservative bizarroworld has always been a feature of American life, but now they’re making a huge profit at it. It’s hard to see what mechanism will change that.

Update: When I say that conservative bizarroworld has always been a part of American life, this has always been ground zero:

Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. Some of these changes have been mitigated by recent federal and state court rulings against the GOP, yet it’s still breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region…

The consequences of these changes will be to make it harder for growing minority populations to be able to cast a ballot in much of the South and to make the region more segregated politically at a time when it is becoming more diverse demographically. “The net effect is that the potential for any coalition to exist in the Democratic Party of moderate-to-progressive whites and African-American voters is pretty much decimated,” says Crayton. Obama is betting he can once again turn out such a coalition in states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but that task has become tougher in 2012. The outlook for state and local Democrats in the region is far bleaker.

The regression in the South today when it comes to voting rights is eerily reminiscent of tragic earlier periods in the region’s beleaguered racial history. “After Reconstruction, we saw efforts by conservative whites in Southern state legislatures to cut back on opportunities for black Americans to cast a ballot,” says Crayton. “It’s hard to dismiss the theory that what we’re seeing today is a replay of that scenario.”

.