Archive for June, 2011

WASHINGTON — Last week, U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), an obstetrician, trotted out a well-worn canard about the Affordable Care Act: It will kill old people. Gingrey had trained his overheated rhetoric on one portion of the new law — the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

“Democrats like to picture us as pushing grandmother over the cliff or throwing someone under the bus. In either one of those scenarios, at least the senior has a chance to survive. But under this IPAB, where a bunch of bureaucrats decide whether you get care. . .I guarantee you . . .that the patient is going to die,” Gingrey declared.

Gingrey’s gambit was a bit desperate. He managed to remind voters that the plan he favors — a proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program — has its own considerable political liabilities.

He also put the spotlight on what is arguably the smartest innovation in the new health care law — an independent panel of experts who will make decisions about cutting Medicare costs. …

Continue reading Here’s why health care “rationing” is old news »

WASHINGTON — As a guide for law or legislation, the Southern Baptists’ new resolution on illegal immigrants is virtually useless. It’s vague, confusing and perhaps inherently contradictory. It wouldn’t help Congress pick its way through the political thickets associated with addressing the plight of the undocumented.

Nevertheless, the Baptists have done something very useful: They have established a moral marker for their congregants, some of whom are governors, state legislators and members of Congress. Since so many conservatives in public life like to point to their religious views as a guide for their political acts, the resolution ought to have a substantial influence on immigration debates.

Last week at its annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention called for “a just and compassionate path to legal status” for the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented workers. The “messengers,” as the convention delegates are called, also denounced bigotry and harassment …

Continue reading Southern Baptists’ struggle over immigration »

WASHINGTON — It took a week for the technicians to fix the air conditioning unit, but I reminded myself that I had faced similar inconveniences in a house I actually owned. The spastic climate systems that go out during extreme weather — the temperatures were in the 90s when it went down — are no reason to doubt the wisdom of renting.

Still, I’ve had trouble getting used to my status as a tenant. I bought my first house when I turned 30 and reaped a tidy profit when I sold it. I bought another house after that, believing that home ownership was the foundation of stability, respectability and security.

You see, I grew up steeped in the property-owning ethic; I was told repeatedly that rent was money wasted. My parents were not only owners of their primary residence but also landlords. They believed in buying property to build financial security.

And they were right — back then.

But much has changed since my childhood. My mother and father lived in the same house for more than …

Continue reading Home ownership is overrated »

WASHINGTON — In America’s tiny towns, isolated hamlets and rural enclaves, lots of poor folks manage to get by without an automobile or the driver’s license that goes along with it. They pay their utility bills in cash at local outposts. They ride to church and to the doctor’s office and to the grocery store with neighbors or nephews.

They never travel by airplane. Indeed, many never leave the county in which they were born and will almost certainly be buried. Having grown up in a small place in Alabama, I’ve known many of those folks and transported more than a few.

Yet, despite the limits of their lives, lots of those Americans are regular voters, taking pride in their active participation in a rite of citizenship. That’s especially true for the elderly black Southerners who lived through the stark repression of Jim Crow and the triumphant civil rights movement that, finally, laid him low. They show up at the polls on Election Day to cast their votes for Democratic …

Continue reading GOP’s hostility toward the right to vote »

WASHINGTON — It’s hard to take Congressman Ron Paul, perpetual presidential candidate, seriously. The Texas Republican is a committed libertarian — which means he doesn’t think government should do much of anything.

But his anti-war views and his attacks on military spending are beginning to resonate even among the GOP base, a constituency that prides itself on a muscular patriotism.

Their hawkishness is waning as Americans come to understand, once again, that war is costly.

You wouldn’t think that lesson would have had to be re-learned, but it did. For a decade after 9/11, Americans managed to ignore the costs of our military adventures — the profligate spending as well as the lost and tragically altered lives.
The national denial was greatly assisted by the rise of the highly-skilled, all-volunteer Armed Forces, staffed largely by working-class men and women without many professional options. It was easy for those of us without family members or close friends in combat to …

Continue reading What Ron Paul gets right »

WASHINGTON — It was a cheap stunt captured on video camera, an ambush meant to embarrass a prominent Congressman, but it managed, nevertheless, to highlight an interesting subtext in the narrative of the religious right: Many of its members are enthralled by libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed “radical atheist” who mocked Christians. How is it that she has become the hero of so many social conservatives?

Last week, just after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan finished talking to an audience of religious conservatives here, he was confronted by Bible-wielding activist James Salt, who demanded that Ryan read the Gospel of Luke. Salt, who works for the left-leaning Catholics United, was protesting the budget cuts Ryan has proposed — cuts that will disproportionately affect the poor. Ryan rushed to a waiting vehicle rather than accept Salt’s proffered Bible.

Shortly after that, a small group of liberal clerics held a press conference to protest Ryan’s fiscal …

Continue reading Christian right deifies an athiest — Ayn Rand »

WASHINGTON — I’m going to let you in on a big secret, a closely-held and dirty truth about Georgia’s farmers: They depend on immigrants, some of whom are here illegally.

What’s that? You knew that already? Not such a secret?

Well, Georgia’s agri-business leaders are posing and posturing as if it is. They dare not admit that they need the sweat and toil of migrant laborers so much that they are not always fastidious about searching for legal documents.

But the gut-busting pressures of a harsh new Georgia law targeting illegal immigrants — modeled after a controversial law in Arizona — may force farmers to speak the truth out loud. At the very least, it may force them to campaign openly for a broad immigration reform proposal that grants legal status to illegal laborers.

It’s not looking like a good year for many of Georgia’s farmers, who were already struggling with a warming earth. As drought conditions worsen in some portions of the state — upgraded from moderate to severe — …

Continue reading Georgia’s big secret: State needs illegal workers »

WASHINGTON — I won’t procrastinate. I’ll get the most difficult part of this column over right now: I was wrong. I was shortsighted, naïve and narrow-minded to endorse the concept of drawing Congressional districts to take racial demographics into account.

In 1982, the Voting Rights Act,  with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named “majority-minority” districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress that had admitted only a handful.

The tactic worked. In 1980, there were only 18 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, there are 44, many of them elected from districts drawn to meet the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.

Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered …

Continue reading Voting Rights Act: I was wrong about racial gerrymandering »