Loaded Bases And Loaded Dice

God, sometimes I hate the world so much.  Here's an excellent but very depressing piece from Jon Cohn explaining that the entire argument for striking down Obamacare and denying 30 million people health insurance is that it punishes non-compliance with a fine of X instead of taxing everyone X and refunding those who comply.  That's the only reason this vicious sideshow can even happen.

Of course, then someone pops up in comments arguing that had the Democrats tried this, it would have made a near-impossible battle even harder, and likely cost Obama any chance of re-election. 

This, of course, is true, though again not a cheery thought.  Just to pile on the horror, though, said commentator seems to think this is proof Obama's ego was the problem.

The more time I spend observing American politics, the more it becomes obvious that vast swathes of the Left, the "centrists", and conservative apologists for the Republicans, are all engaged in an endless, brutal battle over which Democrats and liberals might have shaved a few decimal places of the percentages of progressive successes, when the real problem is that the Republicans have so thoroughly rigged the deck, and/or burned the prize at the end of the game.  The elephant is in every room.  Criticising Obama's ego at this point is like bitching over someone settling for a pair instead of going for a flush, when they're playing five-card draw against Shaw Gondorff.

It seems to me self-evident that a country in which no government initiative requiring a tax increase can be deemed acceptable, and in which no monetary penalty can be deemed constitutional, there's literally nothing left to fight over any more.  Paralysis is total.  It's governance by Catch-22.  And the only way out is to gain a sizable majority in the House, a supermajority in the Senate, and do so repeatedly until the Supreme Court has a majority of non-conservative judges.  Good luck with all of that.

Thirty million people, tens of thousands of whom will die each year from the moment Scalia starts posturing about how he's helped make America safe for broccoli haters from Juneau to Tallahassee.  I am reminded again how much the right screamed when Obama dared suggest that the Supreme Court was a institution one might hope to not be entirely devoid of empahty.

Radio Friday: Too Close To Home

Over the last few days our department is in the process of re-ordering its security protocols, and scuttlebutt is it's because animal rights activists visited the campus this week and tried to break in, apparently convinced that we're hiding shaved mice in our desks.

In honour of their noble quest to make it harder for me to run statistical analyses designed to keep people alive and free of pain, we now turn to our old friends, Rob and Dave.

Friday Space Hulk: The Other Side

I've finally gotten around to settling on a colour scheme for my Space Hulk genestealers, by which I mean I finally settled on a method of replicating the "classic" look.  I'm really loving the Citadel washes, though it took me so long to get round to trying them that it looks like they're about to be phased out anyway.

Basic Logic: Foreign Policy Edition

It's pretty difficult to accurately describe Mitt Romney saying something stupid as "news", these days.  This is the guy, after all, who's said "I like to fire people"[1], "I'm not worried about the very poor", and just this week told Jay Leno that, should Obamacare be gutted by the Supreme Court, he doesn't have any interest in helping out the millions of people with pre-existing conditions from getting access to health insurance.

(That last one, by the way, is particularly indicative of moral bankruptcy and general dickishness.   Just to take one example, my sister was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was ten years old, and will be on expensive medication for her entire life.  Mitt Romney's argument boils down to saying that she should have had her own personal health insurance policy by then.  Obviously, my sister isn't an American citizen, but right now she's working in Ontario instead of Alaska because only the former will let her contribute to the country, rather than insisting she just lets her brain keep shutting down.)

I wanted to flag this up, though, because whilst pretty much everything Romney says is equally vacuous and deceitful, some comments are more widely believed than others.  The context here is that recently Romney described Russia as America's "number one geopolitical foe".  Calculating the exact degree of rank insanity contained in that remark is left as an exercise for the reader, but rather unsurprisingly, it's led to some rather cutting comments from Medvedev.

So what does Romney do?  He takes this as evidence that America's enemies prefer Obama, therefore Obama is a bad president.  We explore this nonsense in the form of a one-act play:

OBAMA: Hello, Russia.  I don't like you, and you don't like me, but let's see if we can at least manage some civil business transactions, hmm?
MEDVEDEV: Very well, America.  There is much we can gain from such talks, even if your constant preening and hypocritical rhetoric makes me want to vomit into an ushanka.
OBAMA: So we agree.  Let us start with the issue of nuclear weapons, and see if we can-
ROMNEY: Oy oy oy!  Russia!  Russia, you dirty c***!  Fuck off back to the Urals, comrade!
MEDVEDEV: I do not know who you are, but your President and I are busy negotiating a new treaty which will reduce the number of horrifically violent weapons both our countries have ready to-
ROMNEY: No reducing, you vodka swilling cocksuckers!  More missiles mean more dead Russkies!  Woo-hoo!
MEDVEDEV: You are an ignorant and unpleasant man, and I'd like you to leave so I can conclude my business here.
ROMNEY: Oh, reeeeeeeeeeeeally!  So you prefer that guy over there, huh?  Point proven, my friends!  Point motherfucking proven!

The idea that anything your enemies desire must automatically be bad for you never fails to rear its head during election cycles, as though one could actually bypass the cost and organisational headaches of a presidential election by simply polling the heads of antagonistic states and choosing the candidate who shows up the least often (one problem with that: millions of people would all become president at the same time, including Steve Earle, Kent Brockman, Sooty, Skeletor, and most seriously, Sarah Palin).

Even by the standards of such stupidity, though, claiming something significant in a country preferring opposing heads of state that don't reflexively despise them is completely ridiculous.  And that's before you factor in Romney just full on inventing bitter enmity between contemporary Russia and the US. 

It's like running a sandwich bar, and telling every Muslim who walks in that you hate them so much you'll be sticking pork rinds in their paninis, and then suggesting there's something suspicious about how many Muslims prefer to get lunch from the cafe over the road.

Not that a Republican politician concludeing that only his side gets to be turds constitutes news either, of course, but there you go...

[1] He later complained people had taken this remark out of context, a few weeks after his campaign was caught out pretending a soundbite of Obama quoting a Republican was actually Obama quoting himself, and said "out of context remarks are fair game."

... And The Sky Full Of Swastikas

I've spent the last few months desperately pretending that Nazis-from-space film Iron Sky was the product of a particularly livid cheese dream. Alas, Tomsk has disabused me of this comforting notion, and laid bare the encroaching horror.



I genuinely don't know what's scarier, an obvious Sarah Palin clone in the Oval Office, the fact that she's absolutely right that no US President ever lost re-election during a war they started, or that all those damn space Nazi-ettes are so damned sexy...

Gearing Up For Outrage

This is the week the US Supreme Court has chosen to decide whether or not the mandate within the Affordable Care Act (now better known as "Obamacare") is constitutional.  Essentially, the ACA forces people to buy insurance - or more specifically, it raises the taxes of those who don't.  The reason for this is obvious - if you're going to build your healthcare system on insurance companies (which I don't like as an idea, but that's another story), you can't let people refuse to buy insurance until the very moment you get sick.  Everyone has to buy in, otherwise the costs for those who have insurance all the time become astronomical.

Of course, just because something is a logical step (from an admittedly wrong-headed starting point) doesn't mean that it's legal.  Simply put (which it has to be, since I'm clearly neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar), can Congress force an American citizen to pay for something they don't necessarily want, within a commercial context?  (That last part is pretty important of course, because it would be awful if people tried to argue they shouldn't have to pay for bombs used to blow up Pakistani wedding parties, or what have you).

Supporters of the ACA argue that they can - it's unquestionably constitutional to tell the public that if they want to buy something, they have to buy it in a certain way (assuming that method is determined to be both reasonable and in an area the government has any stake in), and since anyone without insurance can still go the emergency room, it's argued that every American citizen ends up purchasing health care at some point, even if on some occasions it's the taxpayer that pays the bills.

Opponents of the bill argue, well, I'm not really sure, to be honest.  Some of them are staking everything on the idea that this method is actually unreasonable, though I can't figure out why.  Others are arguing that there's a bright line in the constitution between "you must buy this" and "if you buy this, you must do it like this", which there isn't, or that the founders meant to put that line in, which is possible, and that trumps anything so irrelevant as the fact that everyone buys health care, and getting some other poor slob to pay for it doesn't change a damn thing.

Still others have just gone stark raving mad:

It ought to scare liberals to come run and join conservatives, because what it means is when this president's out of the White House and you get a conservative in there, if this president has the authority under ObamaCare … to trample on religious rights, then some redneck president's got the right to say, 'you know what, there's some practices that go on in your house that cause people too much money and healthcare, so we're going to have the right to rule over those as well

Leaving aside the fact that Gohmert, displaying his typically tight grip on the issues of the day, is confusing the Supreme Courts deliberations with the fight earlier this month about religious exemptions for insurance providers, this is exactly the same crap that the perennially mendacious and ignorant Megan McArdle was pedalling when the ACA was first passed. 

Actually, it's even worse.  McArdle's "argument" was that if a majority of elected officials pass a law despite it being fractionally less popular than unpopular at the precise moment the vote is called, there's nothing to stop a later majority passing a law that almost everybody would absolutely despise.  In short, officials are not elected based on what they claim are their policies, which they then try to enact and are re-elected or not based on what they attempt and what they accomplish.  They are simply there to note the current opinion polls and vote accordingly every time.  I'm not saying (holy God, am I not saying) that this is never how politicians behave, just that it's the first time I've seen the argument that this should be the standard template for the Republic.

Still, worthless as McArdle is, at least she's aware of the concept of checks and balances (she just presumably believes they're irrelevant in the Athenian democracy she's always thought she lived in).  What's going to stop a psychotic red-necked President from imposing all the crackerjack laws he damn well pleases?  Motherfucking Congress.  Also, the voters.

Also, the constitution, which, contrary to Gohmert's apparent belief, does not cease to apply to all mandates just because it allows things he doesn't like.

(Not that it really matters, I'm betting.  I reckon the mandate is headed for the scrap-heap.  There's some optimism on display around the internet, but I say no court that handed down Bush vs Gore gets the benefit of any doubt on anything, ever again.)

(h/t) Attaturk.

Update: Shorter Dahlia Lithwick: Conservative Supremes won't vote down ACA, in case it makes it harder for them to be remoreless turds in future.

Technical Difficulties

My apologies to anyone suffering from eye-strain over the latest Guilds strip.  Apparently the latest round of "improvements" to Blogspot now means that pictures are forced into sizes that can be seen entirely on-screen without zooming, whether you want to zoom or not.

I've broken the strip into three legible pieces, which pisses me off more than I can say.  At some point, I shall have to think hard about how to present the comic in future.

Grr...