The Prophet That Wasn’t

Is Ron Paul really the spirit behind the Tea Party protests? ALSO: Charging for software, and other horrible things; Different planets saw different Obama speeches; And the numbers still suck

Midwife of the rEVOLution Sure, Tea Partiers say they like the Texas congressman. But are the ’Baggers the spearhead for the Ron Paul Revolution? | Original images: Leah Tiscione and Obamunism.us

Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect and Tom Schaller of FiveThirtyEight both agree that Ron Paul is the spiritual leader of the Tea Party protesters, even if he doesn’t hold any temporal power in the movement:

Three-quarters of the way through 2009, it is fringy Ron Paul, more so than John McCain or any of his other primary opponents, whose ideology is setting the conservative agenda. Even without the direct influence of their titular leader, Paul’s campaign army is marching on, mobilized by intense opposition to health-care reform.

But I just don’t see it. Goldstein’s entire argument revolves, rather tacitly, around the fact that Tea Partiers recite line-and-verse the Gospel of Ron Paul—guns, individualism, the 10th Amendment, small government, "illegal" taxation, anti-immigration. But this rote pseudo-intellectualism is closely linked to Ron Paul only because of his relatively high-profile role in the last Republican primary contest, where Paul gave the voice of a very small but rather vocal group of anti-war, anti-drug enforcement, anti-Fed libertarians. I would be willing to bet that if Ron Paul never existed, the Tea Partiers would be saying much of the same thing and for much the same reason.

This reminds me of the discussions foreign policy experts have had over the years on al Qaeda, the relationship between "cells" in Europe, the middle east and Pakistan/Afghanistan, and the supposed lack of command-and-control structure int he organization. Osama bin Laden didn’t invent radical Salafist terrorism, nor does he control all of its facets worldwide. Ron Paul didn’t invent the language of the American radical right. He just co-opted it for his own political purposes.

Despite this, Schaller takes Goldstein’s argument one step father:

First, what’s interesting here as pertains to media coverage is the very real possibility that the same "mainstream/liberal media" that ignored and dissed Ron Paul and his supporters are now bending over backward to give them coverage beyond their actual numbers. Second, as pertains to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, what’s interesting is the possible elevation of a movement that two years ago was insufficient to nominate its preferred candidate to a position of being able to change the policy debate and cow the very same Republican elites who lined up, almost to a person, behind other Republican presidential contenders.

Yet the tea partiers don’t seem to like libertarian, anti-war candidates like Paul. They seem to like more conventional raving ring-wingers like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin. Whither the Ron Paul revolution, that supposedly high-minded, diverse, anti-war libertarian dawah that inspired Silicon Valley? It’s all mixed up with the prudish fundies and the clamorous warmongers. And here Schaller steps on his own foot:

What the vast majority [of Tea Party protesters] do not seem to be complaining about, so far as I can tell, is how the Administration is fighting and managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or its overall security and intelligence posture—that is, they don’t seem too worried that Obama is going to let America be destroyed from the outside.

But that was the whole reason that Paul stood out in 2008: his opposition to the Iraq war. In the 2008 election, Paul played the role of an extremely conservative Obama, offering a radical departure from the status quo, not the nihilistic extreme conservatism that the Tea Partiers represent. These people might have some idea about why they like Ron Paul—like how they have some vague notion of why they love Sarah Palin and hate Obama—but they’re revolution is more like a primal scream from the mouths of incoherent radicals—half of whom are easily riled by economic and political frustration, the other half just mad a black dude is in the White House.

There’s no point in liberals attempting to intellectualize the inherently anti-intellectual. That’s how liberals fall for Ron Paul—and for libertarian narcissism in general.

Insurance Luddites

Kara Lynn is a Californian with A.L.S. who did what all other technology consumers do: She upgraded. But as the New York Times reports, Medicare, which covered her $8,000 computer and software that turns her typing into speech to help her communicate, wouldn’t touch the commonplace solution that did a better job at a fraction of the cost: an iPhone.

Under government insurance requirements, the maker of the PC, which ran ordinary Microsoft Windows software, had to block any nonspeech functions, like sending e-mail or browsing the Web.

Dismayed by the PC’s limitations and clunky design, Ms. Lynn turned to a $300 iPhone 3G from Apple running $150 text-to-speech software. Ms. Lynn, who is 48 and lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said it worked better and let her “wear her voice” around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son, Aiden, who has Down syndrome.

Worse:

The proprietary devices have some special qualities. They are sturdier than typical computers and have better speakers and links to support services.

But the prices may seem hard to justify based on components alone. One $5,000 DynaVox product is essentially the speech software bundled with a two-pound keyboard that has a six-inch screen. And the manufacturers mark up standard accessories by as much as 2,000 percent. Prentke Romich, for example, charges $250 for a Bluetooth wireless adapter similar to those that cost $20 in stores.

This is ridiculous on so many levels. What does it matter to an insurance provider if the equipment they pay for has side benefits, especially commonplace ones like browsers or word processors? Why would the insurance companies want to force manufacturers to waste time removing functionality on perfectly good computers?

And since when is a setup like Lynn’s so complex that it costs $8,000?

Thankfully, Lynn found a good solution in the commercial market. But this whole story, tells us something about the consumer software industry: Why is there one? Why are we fighting over commercial software licenses when it could easily be developed by both big corporations and tiny research labs and distributed to consumers for free? A 5 second Web search got me to this page, which lists Linux-friendly voice-related software. This one sounds like it would do a decent job for Lynn. There’s even an international Open Source Speech Recognition Initiative.

Software isn’t any old good like a car or a flashlight. It’s absolutely free to distribute, it can be made to work in any hardware environment, it gets better with time, and well-resourced organizations like governments, universities and technology corporations have plenty of incentives to develop them for the public good and for profit. There are a whole lot of bad things going on in Lynn’s story, but at the core is the ridiculousness of tricking people into paying for something that should run like water.

Republicans are from Mars...

I usually roll my eyes at he said/she said coverage of some politically polarizing event, and this is why: The New York Times’ Opinionator looked at opinions from the blogosphere on Obama’s health care speech YOU LIE to Congress, and the comments from the right sounded like they were either from pure partisans or people who were watching the speech from a neighboring planet (optics probably not good from Mars; Venus is also cloudy).

Yuval Levin at NRO:

Obama concluded with a painfully inappropriate abuse of the memory of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy-calling by name on several Republican friends of Kennedy’s, as if to shame them into voting for a bill they do not support because failing to do so would be a failure of friendship. Is this how a president behaves? Using the memory of the recently deceased as a club with which to pound upon the man’s friends?

<ahem> Tucker Carlson

What percentage of his speech was spent lashing out at his enemies, real and imagined? Radio and cable-television pundits, George W. Bush, former Congresses, unnamed ghouls employing “scare tactics,” whose “only agenda is to stop reform at any cost”—they’re all against him, Obama said. And they’re lying.

<hackhack> Bill Kristol in WaPo:

So there is no health care crisis. There are a host of normal public policy issues dealing with health care that can be dealt with through the normal political process.

But that doesn’t suit Obama. He’s decided a big victory on health care is key to his political success. He’s decided we all have to acquiesce in a massive overhaul of our health care system because…he’s decided he wants it.

Paranoid, brazen, vain? Whatever’s bad, I guess. Even the lobbyists have more nuance.

Catching Up, Falling Behind

Paul Krugman says the U.S. economy is 8% off what it should have been if we didn’t have a huge recession. That’s a trillion dollars of lost productivity every year—and a good reason why governments need to spend now to avoid worse economic conditions—and deficits—later.

That’s disturbing—so why have rich folk started to buy houses in Ontario again?

Existing home sales in the GTA rose 27 per cent in August, helping boost Ontario sales to 15.9 per cent compared to the same time last year, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association

...

CREA said the high prices were the result of demand in the more expensive housing markets skewing figures upward.

Improved demand combined with fewer listings is drawing down inventory in the market. Listings were down by 13.3 per cent in August from a year earlier.

So that’s why everyone on TV says this is good news, even though real estate fundamentals still suck. Recessions for us mean bargains for them!

Meanwhile, the average life expectancy of blacks from New Orleans is under 70 years—right up there with North Korea. That’s 50 years behind the rest of the United States. One shitty economy, two Americas. End.