Compared to what?

The congressional Republicans would like you to know just how complicated our health care system will be under the Democrats' proposed reforms. Yes, they've tried this trick before, but they're generally right: it'll be complicated.

But--like their claims that health care post-reform will cost a lot of money, that some of that money will go to bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats will make decisions about allowing and preventing care--the Republicans tend to skip the part about how whatever bad thing they're describing IS ALREADY TRUE UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM. That's a fairly significant thing to leave out. (Someone should point it out to them; I'm sure it was an honest mistake they made! All those times, over and over again.)

Anyway, TNR has a good corrective: a chart showing how convoluted health care is right now. Oh nos! We can't give this up for something COMPLICATED!

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait details how the Republicans aren't really acting like Republicans on health care--they're being awfully spendy. What they're acting like is health insurance lobbyists--e.g., by opposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid payments. WTF? Here's Chait:

Conservatives certainly have understandable ideological reasons to oppose the Obama health care reform as a whole. It's the particulars of their opposition that arouse curiosity. The right has presented its opposition to health care reform as principled disagreement with "big government." But opposing "big government" can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.

It's not that every conservative apparatchik is walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash and a conspiratorial grin. Intellectual corruption doesn't work that way. The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right. Health care is an issue where precious few conservatives have paid any attention to the details of policy. And the industry is a natural ally of the conservative goal of preventing single-payer health care. So the industry has managed to define its self-interest as the conservative position on health care.

And Jonathan Cohn reminds us to stop comparing our health care future to Canada and England, neither of which represents a model that's remotely on the table here, and to look instead at France and the Netherlands--countries whose citizens have no interest in trading places with us when it comes to health care.

Salmon vs. DeLong on stimulus

Felix Salmon: The economy's still bad. This means we spent too much on the stimulus bill, and any more will be useless.

Brad DeLong: That's "like sticking your toe into the ocean and pointing out that your hair is still dry."

That we may be several

The Episcopal bishops have voted to affirm gay and lesbian ordination. Now the resolution returns to the House of Delegates.

Anglicans in the Wilderness declares a "golden opportunity to pray online for The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion," adding the following:

For the sake of preserving an atmosphere of peace, when you come to pray we hope your prayers posted online will not presume or ask for any particular outcome at General Convention, nor preach on any hot-button issue.

Okay, fair enough. But then there's this from their Twitter feed, complete with a link to a not-exactly-neutral writeup:

Thank you Lord for the clarity of TEC's D025. Help us now to choose. Help us to decide rightly. http://bit.ly/kPYXi

Thank God for the clarity of confirming that TEC is apostate and deserves to be cut loose? That's a rather suspicious-sounding prayer. If your wish is to stay in communion with a TEC that doesn't ordain gays and lesbians, wouldn't the appropriate prayer be one of lament that the bishops decided this way, or petition that the House of Delegates will somehow decide the other way, rather than gratitude for CLARITY? If your goal is for the apostate liberals to be even more so and thus further marginalized, fine, but don't call that praying for the church.

Elsewhere, Mark Silk: "Give the Duncanites a couple of decades, and they'll be fighting over the ordination of gays and lesbians to.

"Cruising down Wilson / All up in my Prius"

Northern Virginia's Arlington County is an interesting specimen of urban-village planning, with walkable business districts and high-rise residential buildings built around subway stops. By no means a worst-case scenario when it comes to suburban living.

Still, this video (via FPR) about Arlington's yuppy-and-chain-store landscape is pretty funny:

Yet another reason not to shop at Trader Joe's

They're the 17th best Chicago-area grocery chain on sustainable seafood issues.

Safeway/Dominick's is fifth.

James Stambaugh's "Christianity must..." list

I don't think I'll ever agree 100 percent with someone else's list of what Christians need to believe / do / say / focus on / whatever. But James Stambaugh's 10 Things Christianity Must Do gets closer than most.

I'm not quite as absolutist as he is about either #3 or #8 on his list. But I think I'm pretty much with him on the rest of it. Take a look--good stuff.

Rick Warren among the Muslims

The latest episode in Rick Warren's ongoing effort to roughly alternate when he's pissing off liberals vs. his own base: he's speaking at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention this weekend. On Our Nation's Birthday, no less!

Good for him.

God bless Barbara Ehrenreich

She's a fine writer who's devoted herself to writing about being poor in America. Astonishingly, this is a pretty rare thing.

Here she gets into something important, and overlooked: what does a recession, with its nouveau poor and its somewhat less rich, mean for people who were barely getting by--or weren't--in the first place?

Affording Harvard

This is a really cool idea.

Of course, a larger-scale solution might include reforming the federal student loan system itself, making schools get rid of legacy admissions, and promoting the Washington Monthly's college rankings over the U.S. News ones among the hiring classes. Just saying.

Ken Schenck on inerrancy

Ken Schenck has devoted a couple recent posts on his fine biblioblog to the different understandings of inerrancy that exist within Wesleyanism. (Obviously, we're in subtler territory here than with the "different understandings of faith that exist within evangelicalism!" topic recently so popular in the MSM.)

On the one hand, you have the Chicago Statement of the late 70s, which is formative for conservative reformed circles and the Evangelical Theological Society. On the other, Wesleyans--and others--have long affirmed inerrancy without endorsing or implying all the specifics the Chicago Statement gets into. In Schenck's second post, he gets into how specifically some of these details fall short in his view. It's good stuff. (The first [numbered] graf is from the statement itself; Schenck's comments follow.):

2. Scriptures are supreme. The authority of the Church is subordinate. Creeds, councils, declarations are of lesser authority.

Given the assumptions of the authors, I agree. I think the "Church" here is understood in a political sense--the political bodies of church history, not least the "Catholic church." I certainly do not think any political church holds such authority, and the creeds and councils are still political statements. In my opinion, however, when these authors say "Scriptures," they really mean the Bible read Christianly, the Bible read as Christian Scripture. They would disagree that they meant this, but in my opinion they cannot see their own glasses and how those glasses color their perspective.

From my point of view, these sorts of statements involve such subtle but significant misunderstandings of language that I almost don't know what to say. It poses as contradictory options things that, on deeper examination, I believe are virtually the same. I'll agree to it in the same way I agree when my son says something like, "So it's better to score a touchdown than strike out, right Dad?" What I'm thinking, though, is that he's a little confused.

In my opinion, so many of the meanings these signatories themselves found so authoritative in the text of Scripture were themselves products of their own Christian tradition. The signatories would deny that this is the case, but they do not properly see themselves, in my opinion.

The NIV is a wonderful example of the "say one thing, do another" dynamic I see necessary for this hermeneutic to sustain itself.

Say: We are listening to the Bible. Our interpretations come from the plain sense of the text. We are under the authority of the text and not letting the Church have a higher authority.

Do: Let's translate "form of God" as "very nature God" so the full divinity of Christ is not in question (Phil. 2:6)--is "shape" really the same as "very nature"?! Let's translate "firstborn of creation" with "firstborn over creation" (Col. 1:15) so there is no question of whether Jesus is created or not. Let's add a word out of nowhere to "did not give" so it reads "did not just give" (Jer. 7:22), even though there is no such word in the Hebrew--we don't want to leave any question about whether Leviticus was written at the time of the exodus. Let's add another word out of the blue so that "to the dead" reads "to those now dead" so there is no room for the dead being saved (1 Pet. 4:6)--Protestants don't believe such Catholic ideas. Again, let's add another word that isn't there in the original so that "is not concerned" reads "is not just concerned" so we give no room for allegorical interpretation in 1 Cor 9:9-10.

Most of these moves have no clear basis in the text and seems in each case to be motivated overwhelmingly to maintain the perspective of the neo-evangelical tradition, thus deconstructing the fundamental claims of this hermeneutic. When push comes to shove, those of the Chicago Statement approach consistently trump the most obvious meaning of the Bible with evangelical tradition, in my opinion.

The Church is something more profound and Spiritual than any of the specific creeds or councils... and the Church led by the Spirit is already assumed in much of what the crafters of this Statement call the "Scriptures."

I particularly like his example of the creation of the (CRC- and NAE-initiated, evangelical-usage-dominating) NIV. It's one thing for inerrantists to acknowledge the value of reading the Bible in original languages. It's quite another to confront the actual process of translation and its ideological undertones. Whether the NIV is a special case in this regard isn't the point, so much as the fact that we constantly read the Bible through particular lenses, even and especially when we deny--knowingly or otherwise--that we're doing so.

Via James McGrath.

Happy Father's Day! See you at work tomorrow, unless you can afford unpaid paternity leave.

Something I'd like for Father's Day (along with a church service that doesn't observe Father's Day): paid paternity and maternity leave. Most industrialized countries have it; we don't. I wrote about this (and paid sick days) for Utne awhile back. This week, EPI's indispensable Snapshots series highlighted the issue:


I don't think I'll get either of my wishes this year. Maybe cause I'm not a father yet? I'll get moving on that--this is important stuff. The ability of parents to spend time caring for and bonding with newborns without losing their income or their job is a family value, if anything is--unless, that is, family values only matter for people who can afford to keep one parent at home full-time and/or take unpaid leave.

Calling the kettle hateful and ignorant

If you're going to not only totalize and personally smear Prop 8 supporters but even go so far as to write hateful letters about them to their own neighbors, you ought to at least get your facts straight:

Last November, Jay Pimentel began hearing that people in his neighborhood were receiving letters about him. Pimentel lives in Alameda, Calif., a small, liberal-leaning community hanging off Oakland into the San Francisco Bay. Pimentel, who is a Mormon, had supported Proposition 8, the ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. And that made him a target. "Dear Neighbor," the letter began, "Our neighbors, Colleen and Jay Pimentel" — and it gave their address — "contributed $1,500.00 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. NEIGHBORS SHOULD BE AWARE OF THEIR NEIGHBORS' CHOICES." The note accused the Pimentels of "obsessing about same-sex marriage." It listed a variety of local causes that recipients should support — "unlike the Pimentels."

Pimentel, a lawyer and a lay leader in the small Mormon congregation in Alameda, is markedly even-keeled. Yet the poison-pen note still steams him, even though in May the California Supreme Court validated Prop 8 as constitutional. He is bothered less by the revelation of his monetary contribution, which he stands by, than the fact that the letter's author didn't bother to find out that every other Saturday for 15 years, he or someone else from Alameda's 184-member Mormon ward has delivered a truckload of hot meals to the Midway Shelter for Abused and Homeless Women and Children — one of the organizations the Pimentels allegedly wouldn't support.

Read the whole article.

Nope, they're not going to tell us who they're talking to

This is disappointing. Where's that transparency you talked about, Obama?

For the last time: Fresh, local food isn't elitist; assuming that poor people don't want it is.

Until this weary critique goes away, we need good examples. Here's a great one.

Who's rationing, and what's being rationed?

Sens. McConnell and Kyl are cosponsoring a bill to prevent the federal government from rationing health care. Without such a measure, OMG IT COULD BE AS BAD AS CANADA!! (The press release even manages to work in a comparison to "socialized health-care systems.")

But why single out public insurance with your fear of rationing, when private insurers (actually, already) deny care to the people they cover all day long? Today's Leonhardt column details the various destructive ways care is being rationed now. ("The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly.") And Ezra points to the fact that the factor by which more Canadians than Americans have to wait for care is about the same as the factor by which more Americans than Canadians AVOID care because it's too expensive. He and others have pointed to this study before--it's from 2001--but this doesn't keep the rationing boogey man from remaining a political winner.

If the Republicans think not having to wait in line awhile for elective surgery is more important than ensuring that lower-income people can have surgery at all, they should say so. Of course, they won't--they'll just keep whining about how Americans want to make their own health decisions, with their doctors, instead of having some big government bureaucracy tell them what care they can and can't have access to. They won't mention that a big PRIVATE bureaucracy is already doing this, a lot.

Jonathan Cohn asked both senators this morning whether they'd like to outlaw rationing for private insurers, too. He hasn't gotten a reply yet.

Quick quiz: FotF succession edition

Question: Does this nugget from Focus on the Family's new CEO--

Daly says he is results-oriented, not an ideologue.

"When those who are right, left and center all say, 'Let's make abortion rare,' let's meet at that starting point," Daly said. "Let's shove off the rhetoric and get together on practical matters."

--prove any of the following?

• OMG, the religious right is dead!
• Most evangelicals are totally moderates!
• The religious right is very much alive, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo just use their "hey, we should do something about all the poor people!" shtick to distract from the fact that they're totally part of it, and now they've got their man at Focus!

Or is it just that, along with (perhaps) not being a blowhard and a bully, Daly's a bit savvier than Dobson?

Monsanto's unbiased thoughts on Monsanto

So I'm looking forward to seeing the movie Food, Inc., which opens in Chicago this Friday.

Big ag's naturally less excited about the film, a sort of feature-length primer on all things food movement. Monsanto has a blog, called Monsanto According to Monsanto. Why? Hey, they're glad you asked:

The title Monsanto According to Monsanto is a spoof of The World According to Monsanto, a horribly biased documentary which portrays Monsanto in a very negative light. Aside from the shoddy journalism, we at Monsanto found it incredibly arrogant that the filmmaker would present her own twisted view of Monsanto as the company’s view of the world.

Unfortunately there’s no shortage of people, particularly on the internet, who have taken it upon themselves to speak about Monsanto – what the company is, what it does, and why. Many of these folks have their own agendas. If anyone should speak to Monsanto’s vision of the world, it’s those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is. This is the main reason for this blog.

"Particularly on the internet"! Nothing like using a blog to imply that teh internets aren't credible. But more importantly: WTF? Seems to me that what's really arrogant is talking down to us internets readers to the point of suggesting that we might actually believe that "those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is"--i.e., staffers paid to write spin pieces--are "folks" with less of an agenda than a documentary filmmaker has.

At any rate, via Ethicurean, intrepid citizen blogger Monsanto According to Monsanto is shocked--shocked!--that Food, Inc.'s Robert Kenner would criticize Monsanto for prohibiting its seed buyers from saving seeds. Mr. Kenner! Don't you care about intellectual property, sir? If not, I guess you won't mind if people bootleg your nice little movie, will you?

Hmm. The fact that Monsanto's seeds are corporate intellectual property, and not, say, something occurring in nature, is of course a big part of the problem. That aside, an "ooh! I think I see a hypocrite!" gotcha like this is a silly distraction. The problem with Monsanto et al is that they're destroying our health, our planet, and peoples' livelihoods. One way they do this is by forcing farmers to buy new seeds every year. Kenner can't credibly criticize this without immediately putting his film in the public domain? That's absurd, a comparison that depends on very narrow terms of conversation.

Big ag's mounting a major defensive, and it's going to take a lot of work to keep them from defining the debate. Bonnie does a good job in the comments here--take a look at the back and forth she gets into w/ a Monsanto employee. (You can tell he's one of the cool kids and not some corporate goon because he has a South Park avatar!)

DC's homeless homeless advocate

Via Ann Fontaine, a great All Things Considered story about a homeless advocate who is himself homeless.

This is the most interesting and moving thing I've seen about homelessness since this guy's art (via Jeff Severns Guntzel).

"We'll ask the lord to forgive us for all our sins / And we’ll look at the latest in gold-plated firing pins"

I posted briefly earlier this week on a Louisville pastor's "open carry celebration" at his church.

Now Gary Stern's covered the story--and added a nicely illustrative (if unsubtly ironic) concert video by the Beat Farmers. Here's "Gun Sale at the Church":

Who's to blame and who's responsible for fixing it

Wednesday's David Leonhardt column is terrific for its clarity and fairness. His two "basic truths" about the deficit:

The first is that President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

Here he goes through the methodology. And here's a pie chart by Matt Yglesias: