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Blue islands

I’ll preface this post by repeating something I’ve said before: social security, Medicare, public schools, public libraries, immigration, reproductive choice, sensible gun control, racial tolerance and getting the state out of the marriage business are all bedrock conservative values that are also shared by liberals. I grew up on a blue island. Oak Ridge TN was a highly educated and tolerant community when I grew up there, in a state that was pretty right-wing. Later, I moved to the People’s Republic of Chapel Hill, a blue island in the state of Jesse Helms. From there, I moved to St. Louis, a blue island in a state where the Confederate flag of treason is displayed proudly. After 40 years, we finally moved to Rhode Island, a tiny blue state, but not a blue island, since it is surrounded by blue states. I don’t have a problem with political diversity. It’s just that we don’t really have it in America today. Because of our electoral system, there can only be two stable parties. Today, t
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On the taxonomy of evangelical Christianity

  I was raised Roman Catholic, but I'm not a practicing Christian. That said, I'm not blind to the marketing of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, in the service of right-wing politics.    To the best of my knowledge, there is no place in the Gospels where Jesus stated an opinion on abortion, homosexuality or gay marriage. Happy to be educated here, but if Christians are followers of Christ's example and Jesus was silent, so should faithful Christians be silent (or at least not claim the mantle of Christianity on those topics). In re: immigrants, Jesus was not silent, however. "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" and "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me". So xenophobia is obviously not Christian.   Jesus did say that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, and judge not, lest you be judged. So I won't judge those who claim to be evangelicals but ignore the Bible. I
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Immigrants aren’t taking all the jobs

The popular right-wing grievance is that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants are taking all the jobs. In particular, they’re stealing jobs from US citizens. What’s the evidence? If it were true that immigrants were stealing jobs from citizens, then if you plotted labor force participation by citizens and non-citizens over time, they would have a reciprocal relationship. As non-citizen participation rose, citizen participation would fall. Over at jabberwocking,com, Kevin Drum posts the graph, and it shows that both citizen and non-citizen participation move in tandem. I don’t see any evidence for job stealing there. One problem with the job-stealing hypothesis is that it is based on the lump-of-labor fallacy. In this model, there are only a finite number of jobs in America. But that’s not how it works. When a person works, they don't just light their paycheck on fire. They use their salary to pay for goods and services; IOW, they’re creating jobs. This is true regardless of citizens
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Polls vs political betting markets

I had an email exchange a couple days ago with Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo about polls (which he’s written a lot about recently) and the election betting market (which he had never mentioned). Yesterday, he used our exchange as a jumping off point to explain why he doesn’t believe the betting market is reliable and certainly no improvement over polling. The money grafs: “First of all, as I said, bets are largely made on the basis of polls. But let’s go a bit beyond that. In theory at least in equity markets you have armies of industry analysts studying industries and providing insights into the future challenges and profitability of businesses. Same in commodities, currencies, bonds, etc. Investors make investments on the basis of this and other kinds of information. To the best of my knowledge there’s really nothing like this informing political betting markets. Again, it’s mainly polls and the “analysts” who you see in the media. If we’re talking about calling most race
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American xenophobia

Donald Trump and JD Vance are campaigning on xenophobia. There’s no evidence that immigrants are any sort of threat to America, and the data show that immigrants commit crimes at *lower* rates than American citizens. Sadly, though, fear of the other seems to work in America: “Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that event that he feels strongly about Trump’s proposals on immigration. He shared that he felt uncomfortable recently when he went to rent chairs from a business and five men who spoke a foreign language were standing outside waiting for a bus. “Not one spoke a lick of English,” he said. “You see a whole different environment.” Actually, Jeffrey doesn’t know whether these men do or don’t speak English. He only knows he didn’t hear it during the brief time he was in earshot. If he heard me speak, he probably wouldn't know that I can speak some French. Look, I’ve traveled to plenty of places where I don’t speak the language—Spain, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Greece, Ru
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Private practice docs are cutting off Medicare patients

The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic. When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance companies would pay a premium to be seen by docs in an academic health care practice. Managed care put an end to that, and the medical school from which I recently retired is struggling to stay in the black after many years of deficits. At the other end of the food chain are private practice docs. As America ages, more and more of their patients are on Medicare (as am I). And the government is proposing to slash Medicare payments again. The only way to weather these cuts is through joining group practices, which can achieve an economy of scale. “Will his independent practice be able to survive another Medicare payment cut? That's what Terre Haute, In
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COVID infection can cause brain damage

 I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared. But lets be clear: the survivors weren’t necessarily healthy. Many polio survivors spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung. Others had a permanent limp or other neurological disability. With COVID, many survivors report neurological impairments like loss of taste, brain fog, anxiety or depression, as well as respiratory issues. Recent imaging studies of the brains of early COVID survivors have pinpointed the sites in the brain that are affected: “The 31 patients included in the study had all been hospitalized with COVID-19 towards the beginning of the pandemic, before  vaccines  were available. Like many patients admitted to hospit
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