Predictable Responses

Now that an agreement has been reached with Iran regarding its nuclear technology, bowels are being blown all over conservative land. The race to see who can denounce it best is on! The responses have been all too predictable and I have to wonder if people are even paying attention to what conservatives are saying anymore. It's always the same "Obama succeeded again so we have to act like 8 year olds" response. I mean, have they even read the agreement yet? How can they denounce it?

I haven't had the time to read through it yet so I don't have an opinion either way but I am interested to see what their alternative is to the pact. Will it be a bitch fest with nothing at all to replace it...AGAIN?

5 Years Of Conservatives Wrongly Declaring 'The End Of Obamacare'

What A Week!

What a fantastic week for Barack Obama, Democrats and liberals everywhere. The Affordable Care Act is solidified...gay marriage is the law of the land...the trade bill is about to be signed by the president...Confederate flags finally coming down...and this speech....





Stunning...

The reaction from conservatives has largely been the typical adolescent furor. This, however, caught my eye...

Huckabee and Santorum Sign On with Minister Who Wants To Set Himself on Fire Over LGBT Rights

...as a fantastic example of how conservatives in this country are really no different than Islamic extremists (see: American Taliban). If I were in Homeland Security, I'd keep an extra eye on the right wing groups for the next few weeks and possibly in perpetuity.

Because our country is finally moving in the right direction and the mouth foamers are likely not going to stand for it. Given that they throw a good hump into their gun collection every day, I'd wager that more than a few of them are going to act up violently, as was the case with Dylan Roof.

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll accidentally shoot each other:)

Not The New Normal

A Blow To Right Wing Bloggers and Commenters Everywhere

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act 6-3.  

“It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,” the majority of the justices wrote. “Congress made the guaranteed issue and community rating requirements applicable in every State in the Nation. But those requirements only work when combined with the coverage requirement and the tax credits. So it stands to reason that Congress meant for those provisions to apply in every state as well.”

In short, stop with the adolescent wordsmithing.

This ruling illustrates what adults in reality think of right wing blog arguments and comments, essentially the plaintiff's case. They rejected it utterly.

Combine this with the likely ruling striking down gay marriage bans and our country is really looking a heckuva lot better these days!

Saving Lives

One of the main reasons why I support the president is that he has literally saved lives since he has taken office. The passage of the Affordable Care Act has led to more people having insurance and getting medical care that didn't have it before.

Ergo, lives saved.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Pretty spectacular!

The Republican Brain Part Five: Smart Idiots

The next section of Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Smart Idiots" and it's honestly one of the most depressing sections of the book. It begins with a study of why motivated reasoning, which we talked about last time, occurs in individuals. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, has a classification system based on how people reason with their moral and political values. Imagine a Cartesian plane like this one:

Now, imagine that the X Axis is a measure of individualism on the right and communitarians on the left. With the Y Axis, imagine egalitarians on the bottom and hierarchicals on the top. Broadly speaking, Kahan discovered that US conservatives are in Quadrant 1 (individual, hierarchical) and US liberals are in Quadrant 3 (communitarian, egalitarian). It's important to note here that individuals are really scattered all over the place and we're just talking about general groups.

Still, this explains so much to me personally. I've always wondered how a group of people who are so obsessed with individual rights are also so authoritarian. Now we know. They believe that a chief organizing principle for society is hierarchies, with the "right" people at the top. With so many US conservatives from the South, this clearly goes back to the Antebellum and all of its mythical structures.

So, how do these classifications apply to the issues of the day? One of Kahan's studies took groups of people and had them imagine helping a friend make a decision about three important topics: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear wasted can be stored safely underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime or worsens it.  The study subjects were then shown fake excerpts from a variety of "experts" on each topic.

The results were very telling. Only 23% of individual-hierarchicals agreed that any of the experts knew what they were talking about while 88% of communitarian-egalitarians accepted the experts as being knowledgeable and trustworthy. Right here is that instant and most adolescent reaction to people who are in authority and knowledgeable of which I always speak. Why? I simply don't get it. Are they that insecure about themselves?

What tends to happen in examinations of these issues is what Mooney calls the "My Expert v Your Expert" battle. Even worse....

When they deny global warming, then, conservatives think the best minds are actually on their side. They think THEY'RE the champions of truth and reality; and they're deeply attached to this view. That is why head-on attempts to persuade them usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed the backfire effect: Those with the most strongly held but clearly incorrect beliefs not only fail to change their minds, but hold their wrong views more tenaciously after being shown contradictory evidence or a refutation.

This is very key information to have when having a discussion with a conservative these days. Remember, they feel like they are under physical attack. If they have very strongly held views, it will be worse due to the backfire effect.

Now, what's interesting about the backfire effect is that applies to conservatives only. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State found that when conservatives were shown more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs and that tax cuts do not increase revenue, they were MORE likely to believe the claim than before. I can personally attest to tax cut-revenue BS sadly being valid. Yet, when liberals were shown evidence in the same study that refuted claims that George W Bush "banned" embryonic stem cell research (he never did), liberals didn't backfire. They weren't more likely to believe the claim and, in fact, wavered more given the new information.

What this tells us quite simply is that liberals are generally more reflective and tend to be more open to new information. Consider the basic definitions of each word in objective reality

liberal: not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted

conservative: not liking or accepting changes or new ideas

I'm always willing to accept valid, unbiased and verifiable data regardless of whether or not it supports my ideology. I am speaking of information that the cold and rational part of the brain can analyze. I haven't seen any such data from conservatives on most of the issues I discuss and quite honestly dismiss nearly all of it as wacky, ideological nonsense. Speaking of which...

The split over whether Iraq had the touted

 "WMD," and whether Saddam and Osama were frat buddies, represented a true turning point in the relationship between our politics and objective reality. In case you missed it: Reality lost badly. Conservatives and Republicans were powerfully and persistently wrong, following a cherished leader into a war based on false premises-and then, according to these studies, finding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.

The "cherished leader" line echoes what I have said previously about President Bush and conservatives. He was their savior...their white knight... yet, on his watch, we suffered the worst attack on our home soil in history, a city fell into the sea, and the economy collapsed. By any metric in objective reality, he was a colossal failure. Much of the anger toward Barack Obama comes from the massive cognitive dissonance occurring within their brains.

At this point, we come to the most depressing part of the chapter and the origin of its title. Mooney posits that there is a "smart idiots" effect when it comes to many of these issues. One would think that the more educated a person is, the easier it is for them to accept objective reality. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because they are extremely intelligent that they can come up with intricate counter arguments and employ confirmation bias to convince themselves that their belief system is solid. Never was this more true than with global warming.

Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the "radiative" properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation would otherwise escape into space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place,  but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we are seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.

This is a great example of objective reality and thankfully one that is more reliable than people, especially the educated ones. Pew polls over the years have shown that Democrats accept this objective reality and Republicans do not. Worse, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely he is to reject the theory of man caused global warming. Astonishing...

Mooney offers further explanation of why this is the case. Even smart conservatives, for example, chiefly consume conservative news sources like Fox News. So, like anyone else, they are being conditioned. The more intelligent they are, the more resistant which does hold some good news for the rest of us in objective reality. We can, at least, attempt to persuade the less intelligent conservatives because the studies and the data show that they are easier to persuade.

What's even more vexing about this is that Kahan's studies sprinkled in other questions that were scientifically based but not very political. Nearly all respondents, despite their cultural background, answered the question with their colder and more rational System 2 brain. In fact, those who scored higher on the non political scientific questions but were individual-hierarchical distrusted climate science in greater numbers. Stunning!!

One big takeaway from all of this is the liberal line of "educate more people" needs to be retired. Becoming more knowledgeable will actually make it worse so the old idea about converting people with more education needs to go away forever. It won't work. They will just get worse.

In wrapping up this first section of the book, "Politics, Facts, and Brains,"  Mooney warns...

Motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues-not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that. 

Add in all of the new media of the last two decades and it truly exacerbates the problem.

The next section of the book is called "The Nature Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty." It looks to be an even deeper explanation of the problem which is sort of a drag. At this point, I'd like to get to some solutions on how to go forward!

He Don't Wanna!

Check this out.

Man Who Would Rather Go Blind Than Get Obamacare Now Going Blind

Anyway, Lang is now stuck in a position where, suddenly having come around on this whole insurance thing with the impending loss of his eyesight, it’s too late for him to sign up under what his wife calls “The Not Fair Health Care Act.” Furthermore, his income has dropped now that he’s out of work, making him ineligible for a federal insurance subsidy. (What about Medicaid, you ask? Well, South Carolina was one of 17 states that opted out of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.)

This is my favorite part.

Lang has set up a GoFundMe page, and people are donating—

Ah well...as long as the feddle gubmint and that secret Muslim Obama don't give out the charity.

The Republican Brain Part Four: Denying Minds

The next section in Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Denying Minds." Recall my last post on this subject in which we examined the Marquis de Condorcet and his failing to recognize that having more factual information available doesn't always mean that reason will win. More avenues of data does not equal greater acceptance. Clear refutations of false claims does not mean they will be discredited and prevented from hanging around like zombie lies (e.g. supply side economics, tax cuts increase revenue etc). Why?

To understand exactly how the human brain denies facts, Mooney turns to the example of the Seekers. The Seekers were a UFO cult that were studied by a social psychologist named Leon Festinger in the 1950s. They believed that on a specific date, a UFO was going to come rescue them and take them away. When that day came and they weren't taken away, Festinger took great pains to note how all members of the group were able to change their story, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, so their belief system continued unabated. He dubbed what they experienced cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. An individual who experiences inconsistency (dissonance) tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, and is motivated to try to reduce this dissonance—as well as actively avoid situations and information likely to increase it.

This is exactly what happens to conservatives when they are confronted with information that is psychologically uncomfortable. They avoid situations and information that makes this sense of discomfort continue. Like the Seekers, they goalpost shift when their now completely refuted claims meet their demise. All too often, the goalpost shift takes the form of a personal attack against the person who refuted their claim. This makes complete sense because they feel themselves feel like they are under attack.

Worse, they table turn and, in typical adolescent fashion, they accuse liberals of having cognitive dissonance and goal post shifting. I've always seen this as simple and rudimentary reaction-a dodge to avoid responsibility. On certain issues, liberals do experience cognitive dissonance on certain issues (corporations, nuclear power, GMOS etc) but not to the degree that right wing bloggers and commenters claim they do. Conservatives have such a large collection of prior beliefs and commitments that cognitive dissonance is much more acute with them. So, when facts disrupt their lives, they seek to achieve consistency as a protection mechanism. This is what Festinger discovered that the Seekers did when their prophecy failed to come true.

Mooney notes that similar things happen with smokers who rationalize their habit. "It keeps me thin" or "I'll quit when my looks don't matter so much." I think this type of denial occurs every day within the Gun Cult. "Accidents won't happen to me. I'm responsible. So are all my gun buddies." "We aren't responsible for other people's stupidity." And so on...

Mooney notes...

Neuroscientists now know that the vast majority of the brain's actions occur subconsciously and automatically. We are only aware of a very small fraction of what the brain is up to-some estimates suggest about 2 percent. In other words, not only do we feel before we think-but most of the time, we don't even reach the second step. And even when we get there, our emotions are often guiding our reasoning.

That's why I've always been amused by conservatives who caterwaul about "feeling" liberals and "rational, thinking" consservatives." Once again, they head off at the pass, table turn, and redirect any attention away from what is really going on with them...an emotional reaction driven by cognitive dissonance. In essence, we are talking about motivated reasoning. People tend to believe information that fits within their psychological make up (nature AND nurture...physiology and environment and there is scientific evidence that proves that they do this.

So why do people behave like this? Why do conservatives do it more often? Mooney notes that what is really going on here is a response by our primitive brain (subcortex, the limbic regions) that ends up overwhelming our more evolved, rational brain. These are the areas that deal with emotional and automatic responses whose purpose has been to keep us safe from danger for so many millenia. The newer parts of the brain (prefrontal cortex) that controls abstract reasoning never really kicks into gear because of the rapid response of the primitive brain. Frustratingly, these newer parts of the brain are responsible for mankind's greatest innovations yet they rarely "drive the show," as Mooney puts it. Perhaps it's simply a matter of convenience or we have become too lazy but we don't stop to really think things out.

System 1, the older system, governs our rapid fire emotions; System 2 refers to our slower moving, thoughtful, and conscious processing of information. It's operations, however, aren't necessarily free of emotion or bias. Quite the contrary: System 1 can drive System 2. Before you are even aware you are reasoning, your emotions may have set you on a course of thinking that is highly skewed, especially on a topic you care a great deal about.

So, the spreading activation occurs after the emotional response and reason is often overwhelmed. Again, the example of the Gun Cult applies here. Their primitive brain is driving the show and they are not taking the time to think rationally about the fallout from their ideology. They worry about piles of dead bodies in a gun free zone and completely fail to recognize the mounting piles of dead bodies every year with out of date gun laws...completely irrational and highly rooted in just such a spreading activation.

Here's another example of how this plays out.

Consider a conservative Christian who has just heard about a new scientific discovery-a new hominid finding, say, confirming our evolutionary origins-that deeply challenges something he or she believes ("human beings were created by God;" "the book of Genesis is literally true"). What happens next, explains Stony Brook University political scientific Charles Taber, is a subconscious negative (or "affective") response to the threatening new information-and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations that are called into the conscious mind based on a network of emotionally laden associations and concepts. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs" says Taber, "and that will lead them to construct or build an argument and challenge what they are hearing."

We see this on a daily basis with the president's policies. Every time he succeeds at something, the motivated reasoning wheels start to click into place for conservatives. Suddenly, an improving economy becomes the fucking apocalypse with their primitive brain driving the whole thing.

What this means is that conservative aren't reasoning, they are rationalizing. They aren't being scientists, they are being lawyers. They are winning the case within themselves by giving in to confirmation bias, offering greater weight to information (Fox News, right wing blogs etc) that bolsters our beliefs. They also give in to disconfirmation bias by hungrily trying to debunk any other information that interferes with their belief system.

So when good arguments threaten core belief systems. something very different happens as opposed to the reaction to the statement "2+2=5." The primitive brain doesn't come into play because there is no emotional response. We logically conclude error. We don't suffer from Francis Bacon's "idols of the mind." We are indeed capable of "cold" reasoning but all too often, this doesn't happen.

Mooney notes how this develops over one's lifetime. We are driven personally in how our brains were made (nature) and how we were brought up. We are driven beyond our own identity to hang out with people who think the same way we do. For conservatives, this is very deeply true. The beliefs that come out of this are physical, mind you, and not some floating entity next to their bodies. When they are attacked, it's no different than a physical assault. This is a very key point that everyone must understand when debating conservatives these days. It's no different than if someone invaded their home and threatened them.

And it explains so much. Now we can begin to understand why they take the positions they do. They favor loose gun regulation because they want to protect themselves. They favor tough immigration laws because they want to protect themselves. They want less government because they want to protect themselves. Consider every position they hold and ask this question...are they simply trying to protect themselves? Is that why they are being so irrational? The answer is yes. Now, I truly understand the motivation behind all the personal attacks I've experienced over the years. I am fucking up their shit and they view me (and all other liberals, really) as an invader threatening their way of life.

More importantly, we can understand, through scientific evidence, why this occurs more often with conservatives than with liberals. At the end of the chapter, Mooney notes Drew Westen's of Emory University's study on strong political personalities and their reaction to information that directly challenges their views. Westen presented respondents with an example of Bush flip flopping on something and Kerry flip flopping on something. Conservatives bent overbackwards to excuse the former and filet the later. Liberals did the reverse. Yet, Westen noted that Democrats were more likely to see hypocrisy in their own candidate and Republicans were less likely to see it in their candidate. The authors conclusion?

A small but significant tendency to reason more biased conclusions regarding Bush than Democrats did towards Kerry.

And while all of this was happening, respondents were having their brains scanned. None of them were using parts of the brain associated with cold and logical thinking. All of them were using the regions associated with emotional processing and psychological defense. As Mooney notes,

These people weren't solving math problems. They were committing the emotional equivalent of beating their chests.

Adolescents, Wordsmiths and The Right Wing Blogsphere

The New York Times has an interesting piece in today's paper about the "four words that imperil" the Affordable Care Act...interesting in that it fails to address the real problem with King V Burwell. It seems some parties concerned are most befuddled at how a simple phrase could lead to a Supreme Court Case that could ultimately lead to the removal of health care subsidies for all those states which do not have their own exchange. Well, when you understand these assholes...

and the fact that they live  most of their lives in the comments sections of blogs vainly attempting to wordsmith and fallacy their way into a "win," you grasp the origin of the problem. The drafting error of the ACA that led to the use of the words "the state" was the sweetest crack cocaine for the conservative base which is filled with adolescent losers that one frequently sees trolling various online forums. After all, nothing sends these children into a tantrum like the words "the state." 

Shit...every right wing blogger from here to Timbuktu sprung a boner at the thought of being able to finally "get" Obama and those liberals in the ULTIMATE FLAME WAR. The lead attorney and all the plaintiffs in this case are classic examples of the mouthfoaming conservative who endlessly try to find some way to wordsmith and bamboozle their opponents into defeat. Of course, it can never actually be about the law itself because they have fucking lost on that every single time. It has to be some sort of hyper obsessive focus on a word that will ultimately spell "doom" for those evil statists.

Then, they can merrily dance their happy dance with one another, issuing imperial declarations at how we've all been told many times how right they have been all along, revealing the inner authoritarian they pretend doesn't exist. 

I suppose this is finally their day in the sun and they should get to enjoy one last chance at denying success to their mortal enemies. Consider what joy their lives will be filled with should SCOTUS rule in their favor. The adolescent glee in the air will be almost palpable....

...until reality sets in...:)

TPP A Go Go

The fine folks at my favorite news publication, The Christian Science Monitor, have put up a bias free (as per the usual) piece on the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership agreement. Take some time to go over it and review the facts. Here's something that jumped out straight away for all the NAFTA whiners out there.

In reviewing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, CRS found that "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."

This is one of those great myths from the left that really needs to go away. Meanwhile, even the progressive press is starting to cave...

Turncoat Democrats, It’s Time to Support Obama on Trade

The answer emerges from the top TPP hit on Google, an op-ed posted Tuesday by a lobbyist for U.S. domestic manufacturers. The lobbyist, who has read recent TPP drafts as part of his Democratic lobbying work, is outraged that Obama negotiators “dismiss individuals like me who believe that, first and foremost, a trade agreement should promote the interests of domestic producers and their employees.” 

This candid statement puts the anti-TPP campaign squarely in historical context. Powerful domestic interests have opposed free trade from before the U.S. Constitution was ratified and continued to oppose trade deals like Bill Clinton’s NAFTA negotiations in the 1990s. The beneficiaries of free trade—from the jobless who might get jobs, to the low-income consumers who benefit from cheaper products, to the high-poverty regions of the developing world that would benefit from exporting to U.S. consumers—just don’t have the same public relations resources. But although the social media campaign is an anti-TPP rout, its substantive arguments are profoundly at odds with progressive traditions.

Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

The Democratic Brain

As I've been reading Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain, I've taken note of how Democrats can sometimes fall into the same trap with their cognition. The last section of his book promises an examination of this particular form of dissonance concerning things like nuclear power, GMOs, and vaccines.  In looking at current events, we can see yet another example.

I live in Minneapolis and many of my friends are extremely liberal. Any mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and mouths begin to foam just as they do with Monsanto. It's completely ridiculous and, as the president notes above, they are just plain wrong. Not only does this agreement fix some of the issues with our domestic labor vis a vis NAFTA but it expands opportunity for our workers. We can't return to protectionist trade practices in this age of globalization. That's what causes world wars.

Why don't my fellow Democrats understand this?

The Anger Translator

GOP Supporting the Affordable Care Act?

From Hot Air via Talking Points Memo...(say what?!!)

Senate GOP leadership wants to restore federal ObamaCare subsidies through 2017 if SCOTUS strikes them down

Heavy majorities, including a majority of Republicans, want the subsidies restored if the White House loses in Halbig, an ominous sign for the congressional GOP. In theory, voter anger could be so intense that both chambers of Congress will end up back under Democratic control, ensuring that the subsidies will be restored anyway.

Just as I predicted. 

And now even Hot Air is admitting what the rest of us already knew: the ACA is gaining popularity because it's effective and working. 

It looks like it may not matter much how SCOTUS rules on King v Burwell in June.

Do The Facts Matter Anymore?

The "Destruction" Continues

Check this out...

Now how could this have happened?:)

The "destruction" continues...

Good Words

From a recent piece on Politico...

Some are insisting on a “better deal” than the framework nuclear agreement reached with Iran on April 2. But the idea of a better deal is a chimera, an illusory option, and it should not lull us into thinking there is another agreement to be had if only we were to bear down harder. The present agreement, which depends on important pieces to be resolved by the end of June, can substantially reduce the ability of Iran to develop a nuclear weapon over the next ten years or more and also creates a dynamic that could be a game changer in the combustible Middle East. 

The rest of the piece explains why this is true and completely torpedoes the Right's talking points.

Sorry, conservatives, you are going to have to allow the president yet another win. It's what is best for the country and, more importantly, the security situation in the Middle East.

So, grow the fuck up!!

Pants Shitters Unite!

The United States, Iran and five other countries that no one ever mentions came to a framework agreement yesterday regarding Iran's nuclear energy and weapons development. Before the details (which are included in the link above) were even released, we saw this.

John Boehner in Israel: ‘The world is on fire’

Iran nuclear deal threatens Israel's 'survival,' Netanyahu says 

Republican senator compares Iran deal to Nazi appeasement

O...M....G...!!!!

I don't think I have seen this much pants shitting since Obama got Osama!! Appeasement? I wasn't aware that we were granting large swaths of land in the Middle East to Iran...oh wait, maybe we are as we fight alongside them against ISIL:)

When I saw the reaction to the framework of this yet to be detailed and signed agreement, it became glaringly obvious what was really going on. Conservatives are going to have to endure yet another Obama success and they don't wanna hafta because he is a poopy headed fat face whose face is fat!!! (I put Bibi in this category as well since he has decided to behave as insecurely as the Republicans due to his impending irrelevance).

So, while the 8 year old boys have their little temper tantrum, take a look at the details of the framework. It's glaringly obvious that the effectiveness of the sanctions (which are now ookey-dokey with conservatives) have led Iran to this massive capitulation. It's a laundry list of actions that Iran has to take or else it's back to the Big Squeeze. They must really be hurting. In fact, I can attest to this personally.  

One of  my long time students is Iranian. She and I have had many conversations about relations between our two countries. Her and her family travel back to Iran frequently and she has noted just how angry the people are with their government. This is why they are giving up so much. The government is growing increasingly afraid of another uprising-one which they will not be able to quell as they have in the past. The younger people in particular want to be a part of the world community and look to the United States with great envy as a model for what they want their society to be someday. They are very tired of the old ways and crave change.

It's time to help them get there and this agreement is a very large first step. 

It's Worse If You're Correct

I have come to the conclusion that when you are debating politics with a conservative, it gets worse the more you are accurate.

I recently engaged in a long discussion on Facebook over whether or not Barack Obama has destroyed our economy. I pointed out several key indicators (jobs, GDP, stock market, debt/deficit) which indicate that he has not "destroyed" our economy. In fact, it has vastly improved on his watch. As I presented them with more and more data, they grew increasingly hostile. One fellow named Dana eventually wrote this.

I hope that you and the rest of the liberals in this country do us a favor and end your own lives. 

I have to admit that I was pretty shocked by this statement. No one in the group (about 14 people) called him out on it. In fact, they kept piling on me. I did get a message from a guy named Connor who told me that Dana said the same thing to him. How can someone like this be so angry? The whole discussion certainly confirms many of the assertions I've made about conservatives in the past (adolescent, anger, hate, fear etc) but something new came out of it.

As we near the end of the Obama presidency, our country continues to improve in a number of sectors. Like the frustrated child that simply can't take someone doing a better job than they do, conservatives are going to grow more petulant...more hateful...more angry...and behave in ways that we probably can't imagine.

I'd advise all of you to be careful about future discussions like this and realize that facts may no longer help. It seems now that they make it worse.

Five Numbers, Five Years

As the Affordable Care Act hits its five year anniversary, here are five numbers to keep in mind.

$7.4 Billion: The Amount of Money Hospitals Saved on Uncompensated Costs Last Year

29: Number of States (Including the District of Columbia) That Have Expanded Medicaid

$66 Billion: The Amount of Economic Output the Nation Is Losing by States Not Expanding Medicaid

$1.2 Trillion: The Cost of Obamacare Over the Next Decade (Revised lower yet again)

56: Number of Unsuccessful Votes in Congress to Undermine/Repeal the Law