Town Of Oriental Elections

Out of town this week, so no posts so far. But tonight is a big event in Oriental - the candidate's forum. And voting starts tomorrow.

With ten candidates for five seats on the Town Board, voters will face some difficult choices. My advice: don't reelect any incumbents. I thought about posting my reasons, but decided against it. My reasons have to do with policy, not personalities, though in some cases it is hard to separate the two.

I don't know anyone who follows town affairs who believes the present Board has done well.

I will vote for Benjamin Cox. He has the knowledge and skills to contribute valuable insights to the Board.

Something to bear in mind is, voters don't have to vote for all five commissioner seats. There are good reasons to vote for the one or two that you support and no others. There is also the option of casting write-in votes. I could be tempted, for example, to write in Lilli Stern's name. I think she is going to contribute a great deal to the Town, whether in office or not.

I intend to vote for Lori Wagoner for mayor.

Time for a new broom.

Effect Of ACA On Different States: Those Expanding Medicaid Do Much Better

Here is an excellent report examining how different states do under the Affordable Care Act. The report has a good summary graph of the difference between states expanding Medicaid and those not expanding Medicaid. If state governments are concerned for the welfare of their citizens, expanding Medicaid is a no-brainer.

More On The History Of Republican Election Strategy

Yesterday I provided a link to an article by Michael Lind shedding light on Republican strategy. A strategy, by the way, that has been pretty successful as well as destructive.

Today I offer a link to an article in Salon.com by Salon's editor, Joan Walsh: http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/the_real_story_of_the_shutdown_50_years_of_gop_race_baiting/

This new article complements the piece by Michael Lind.

I have been following the developments described by both authors for about seventy years. They pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Bruce Bartlett Predicts: Shutdown Will Defeat Republicans In 2014

Writing for the Fiscal Times,  Republican pundit Bruce Bartlett sees a possible Republican defeat in 2014 because of the government shutdown. His analysis is here.

Speaking Of Ponderous Matter

Yesterday's New York Times reported the award of the Nobel Prize in physics for the Higgs Boson, that gives mass to particles in space, or something like that. When experimenters at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland detected the Higgs Boson, it completed the verification of the Standard Model, which is a very big thing in physics.

The article explained the function of the Higgs: "According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial."

What most needs explaining now is the origin of the New York Times' tortured analogy. My theory is that the Times had no science writer to do the article, but because of the shutdown of the US government, there was a political reporter available - one who usually covers Congress and to whom such an analogy makes sense. Otherwise, there is no rational explanation.

NC Health Insurance And Medicaid

Information is accumulating that the McRory Administration war on Medicaid and the General Assembly's refusal to expand Medicaid is fraudulent from beginning to end. And North Carolinians are suffering as a result.

Here is what NC Health News has uncovered. The bottom line is that NC Medicaid has one of the nation's lowest administrative costs instead of being 30% higher than similar states. But the incoming administration suppressed that information. They wanted an excuse to reject Medicaid expansion, which is a central element in keeping overall health care costs down.

Then the General Assembly prohibited the Insurance Commissioner from providing any assistance to Insurance companies interested in taking part in an insurance exchange. The News and Observer explains.

For ideological and partisan reasons, the Republicans in charge of North Carolina have intentionally sabotaged the Affordable Health Care Act and increased profits for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Expanding Medicaid would reduce costs and increase competition.

Lincoln On Political Extortion

“A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”

Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Tea Party Radicalism: Just A Bit More Extreme?

Much current commentary tends to describe the Tea Party phenomenon as just a bit more extreme than mainstream Republicanism, but within the American tradition. Francis Fukuyama recently tied the Tea Party efforts to the parts of the US Constitution that make it hard for anything to get done.

Michael Lind thinks it is more than that. It may have roots going back to Jefferson and Jackson (and to the Anti-Federalists, but Lind doesn't bring that up), but it represents a fundamentally anti-democratic undertaking. Think Downton Abbey.

Here is Lind's article. It is the best analysis I have read lately, putting it in the context of the American Civil War, the failure of reconstruction, and the reaction to the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.

There are a lot of different ways to look at current American politics. The different angles overlap, and they all seem to involve race to some degree.

I strongly recommend reading Lind's article.