So the editor of the state news website Alaska Dispatch goes to a public campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller being held in a public school. And as the editor, Tony Hopfinger, tried to question Miller, Miller’s private security guards “arrested” Hopfinger and put him in handcuffs. They detained Hopfinger until real police showed up and had him released.

The security company claims Hopfinger was “trespassing” at a “private event.” The event was open to the public and being held on public property.

Hopfinger felt threatened as the thugs closed in on him and shoved one of them. The shoved security guard was unharmed, but naturally bloggers of the Right have seized the shove as proof that Hopfinger, not the security guys, was the real “thug.”

According to the “Gateway Pundit,” “A liberal reporter in Alaska was handcuffed and detained after he harassed Republican candidate Joe Miller after a town hall event. The reporter also assaulted a man.” The headline on the site Conservatives4Palin is “Joe Miller’s Security Reportedly Detained Blogger Who Physically Assaulted Another Individual.”

So in the wingnut’s version of events, the thugs detained Hopfinger because he assaulted them, leaving out the part about how the thugs were threatening Hopfinger.

When other reporters at the event tried to find out what was going on, Miller’s goons threatened to arrest them, too.

Hopfinger has been trying to get Miller to answer questions about alleged misconduct in a past job as a lawyer for a county government. Miller simply refuses to discuss the matter. Miller accused Hopfinger of trying to create a “confrontation.” I guess people running for office may not be confronted. The Miller campaign also called Hopfinger an “irrational blogger” who was overcome with anger.

According to a reporter from the Anchorage Daily News, Miller got testy with some of the audience questions. For example:

Another criticized Miller’s announcement last week that he would no longer answer questions about his character or his personal history. While his opponents have previous records in elective office, he does not, the woman said. “In this instance, you have no record, so it’s meaningful and it’s reasonable that we would want to examine your professional background and your military …”

Miller interrupted her and said he knew she was a supporter of his opponent, write-in candidate Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Steve Benen asks,

And in the larger context, I can’t help but wonder: is this what the Tea Party crowd has in mind for America’s future? In their version of “limited government,” should we expect extremists candidates to hire private security forces with the power to detain reporters who ask candidates about their background?

Is this their vision of American “freedom”?

Why, yes it is, Steve. That’s exactly what their vision of “freedom” is. It’s a place where hard right-wing ideologues have absolute rule, and anyone who dissents will be labeled irrational and shipped away for “treatment,” just as Stalin did with dissidents back in the ol’ USSR.

Oh, and Steve also notes that the centerpiece of Miller’s platform is his love for the Constitution. This would be the Constitution as a tribal totem of the Right, not the Constitution as the charter of our government, the latter of which Miller clearly would like to shred. Keep that straight.

I’ll be scarce for a couple of days, so just talk about whatever. I apologize in advance for any comments stuck in the moderation line. Regular blogging will resume Monday.

In this corner, Nobel prize-winning economist Joeph Stiglitz, who correctly predicted our current economic maladies a decade ago. In that corner, Dick Armey, bleating the stardard Republican zombie talking points about balanced budgets and the evils of government spending. But Andrew Leonard writes in “Unfair Fight“:

Dick Armey, of course, was House majority leader for the first two years of George Bush’s first term, during which the first round of the Bush tax cuts were passed, without any corresponding cuts in spending, with the result that the Clinton-era budget surplus was transformed almost immediately into annual deficits.

Leonard calls this exchange an “unfair fight,” but in spite of the fact that Joseph Stiglitz has facts, credentials, and a track record of correct predictions his side, and Dick Armey is a gasbag, whose view will the American people adopt as conventional wisdom? Do I really have to tell you?

Thers at Whiskey Fire compares the economic wisdom of Paul Krugman, another Nobel Prize-winning economist whose predictions going back many years about the fruits of the Bush tax cuts and an unregulated financial system were almost all spot on, versus that of Chuck Norris. Um, yeah, Chuck Norris. As Thers says, Norris’s economic credentials are that “he made action movies and got hit on the head a lot, and also he loves Jesus.”

Krugman and Norris present polar opposite views regarding what economic policies the U.S. ought to pursue. So which view is winning — nay, has won — the argument in national media and most likely in the minds of most Americans?

I don’t blame the American people too much; for the most part, they only ever hear the Armey-Norris side of the argument. The Stiglitz-Krugman view is very well buried beneath a dense layer of media noise paid for by the likes of the Koch brothers.

At the Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg explains to British readers why the U.S. is bleeped:

US campaign laws make it easy for political interest groups and their corporate backers to hide their spending in elections. “This is a world of shadows,” said Taki Oldham, an Australian documentary maker who spent months following Tea Party activists.

Oldham’s documentary is called “(astro)Turf Wars,” and it can be viewed online. Here is the trailer, in which Dick Armey makes a brief appearance:

One gentleman appearing in the trailer that I don’t recognize says that America is drowning in propaganda, making real democracy all but impossible. Yeah, pretty much.

And, of course, the money that is buying America and burying democracy isn’t just coming from the Koch brothers and the other wealthy family trusts that fund the think tanks and media infrastructure burying us. In this election cycle, at least $885,000 is coming from overseas.

First, I want to thank everyone for your expressions of sympathy. I’m sad, but I’m not stressed about being sad. This is the stuff life is made of.

Anyway — here are some things to read while I catch up on other things.

Sean Wilentz, “Cofounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” in the New Yorker.

“Blockage of Nobel prizewinner exposes Senate’s dysfunction,” editorial, Boston Globe.

Remember Veronique de Rugy, the genius who declared last April that Democratic districts got more stimulus money than Republican ones? And a quickie analysis by Nate Silver showed that the “Democratic districts” nearly all were state capitals? Stimulus money to the states went to agencies of the state governments, which were nearly always located in the same district as the state capital, and for some reason districts surrounding state capitals tend to vote Democratic. Well, she’s back, and now she’s arguing that President Bush was far stronger at job creation that is President Obama. “There were more jobs created monthly under President Bush than under President Obama,” she says.

If that’s not how you remember things, you are not alone; see Joe Weisenthal and especially Ezra Klein. I’ll let you try to sort out where Veronique went off the rails, if you wish, but the best rebuttal to her column is the first comment: “I hope you’re pretending not to understand this.”

On the other blog, I am taking on a part of the Academic Establishment that is making a name for itself by slandering Buddhism; see “Murderous Mahayana?” and “Where Religion Ends and Sociopathy Begins.” This may not interest all of you, but the second post in particular is more about Assholes of Academia than Buddhism.

She just slipped away, but she always gets the last word.

In the New York Times, economist Gregory Mankiw writes that if the Bush tax cuts on upper income taxpayers are not extended, he probably will not work so much. That’s because for every $1,000 of “extra” income he earns, he would only bank $523. And compounded over 30 years, that $523 would barely buy his children a hamburger, given the projected value of 2040 dollars.

OK, I made up the part about the hamburger, but not the rest of it. And that $523 is hardly worth the effort. He has everything he really needs, mind you, but he just wants us all to know that if he doesn’t write as many articles or textbooks we’d be deprived of the enjoyment of his economic wisdom.

Well, y’know, as much as that would stress me out, on the list of sacrifices I’m willing to make for the greater good, not reading Mankiw is right up there with giving up Bridezillas. Maybe even haggis. Life is hard. Kevin Drum thinks so, too.

In other news, Carl “Mr. Furious” Paladino made anti-gay remarks in Brooklyn today. Deep down, Carl enjoys being a slumlord way too much to be happy as governor.

The DNC is making a major ad buy accusing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of stealing the election with foreign money. Sic ‘em.

Finally — I believe Miss Lucy may be in her final hours now. I need to spend some time with her, and I also am behind other work I should be doing, so if I’m a bit scarce in the next couple of days that’s why. I hope y’all can find stuff to talk about.

The hell with current events. I want Mystery Science Theatre.

Normal blogging will resume when I get in the mood.

Yesterday a federal district judge found the individual mandate requirement in the new health care law to be constitutional. From what I can pick out from news stories, U.S. District Court Judge George Steeh ruled that decisions about whether or not to purchase health insurance do fall under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

“The decision whether to purchase insurance or to attempt to pay for health care out of pocket is plainly economic,” Steeh wrote in a 20-page opinion. “These decisions, viewed in the aggregate, have clear and direct impacts on health care providers, taxpayers and the insured population, who ultimately pay for the care provided to those who go without insurance.”

The suit had been brought by the Thomas More Center, a Christian group apparently dedicated to making sure the poor are always with us, assuming they don’t die from medical neglect. Rob Muise, an attorney for the Center, makes a slippery slope argument explaining why the center will repeal appeal the decision:

“The trouble, if you think about it, is if Congress has authority to regulate nonactivity then it has the ability to regulate anything,” Muise said. Congress can “tell you to exercise three times a week, to take certain vitamins, to refrain from eating certain foods because, at some point, costs are going to be incurred to the health care market. I find that very troubling when we have a federal government that’s supposed to be of limited, enumerated powers,” he said.

Libertarians and other righties are willfully ignoring the larger point and have fallen into squabbling about the fine points of the judge’s language, in particular language about economic activity versus inactivity. Judge Steeh argued that failing to purchase health insurance is an economic activity rather than an inactivity, because the decision impacts everyone else. Righties are responding to this argument with much hooting and derision.

Ilya Somin writes at Volokh Conspiracy:

The problem with this reasoning is that those who choose not to buy health insurance aren’t necessarily therefore going to buy the same services in other ways later. Some will, but some won’t. It depends on whether or not they get sick, how severe (and how treatable their illnesses are), whether if they do get sick, they can get assistance from charity, and many other factors. In addition, some people might be able to maintain their health simply by buying services that aren’t usually covered by insurance anyway, such as numerous low-cost medicines available in drug stores and the like. In such cases, they aren’t really participating in the same market as insurance purchasers.

Is there a charity anywhere in the U.S. providing major medical care to the indigent, in particular one that isn’t receiving some assistance from taxpayers? I can’t think of one. And I’m not even going to bother to address the “low-cost medicines available in drug stores” comment. The bottom line is that there is no way anyone can live in such a way as to never need medical care until one drops dead from old age. And except for the mega-wealthy, the odds are very, very long that if your insurance isn’t paying the bills, you aren’t going to be able to pay them, either. The only way the enormous majority of uninsured people will not eventually be a cost to taxpayers and the insured is if they die suddenly in accidents while still young and healthy, at which point they would be a cost only to the coroner’s office

If the mere possibility that you might purchase a similar service somewhere else is enough to count as “activity” and therefore regulable under the Commerce Clause, then almost any regulatory mandate would be permissible. For example, a requirement that each citizen purchase a gym club membership and exercise for one hour per day could be defended on the basis that, otherwise, people will be less healthy, which will make it more likely they will spend more money on medical care, health insurance, and perhaps other forms of exercise.

The biggest problem with this argument is that the decision of a healthy person to not jump into the health insurance risk pool has a real and immediate impact on the cost of insurance for those in the risk pool. You can’t say the same for choosing to not purchase a gym membership.

The opinion also claims that the Commerce Clause covers “economic decisions” as well as “economic activity.” “Economic decisions,” by this reasoning include decisions not to engage in economic activity. That, however, would allow the Commerce Clause to cover virtually any decision of any kind. Pretty much any decision to do anything is necessarily a decision not to use the same time and effort to engage in “economic activity.” If I choose to spend an hour sleeping, I necessarily choose not to spend that time working or buying products of some kind.

This is silly. You could also argue that not spending the hour sleeping will reduce your productivity, since you’ll be sleep deprived. Choosing to spend an hour sleeping doesn’t negate the possibility that later that same day you will engage in the same amount of work or shopping that you would have done without the hour sleeping.

The crew at Reason‘s Hit & Run likewise are in fantasyland:

In fact, one could opt out of the market entirely if one were so inclined. Granted, most people aren’t, but a lack of religious motivation doesn’t actually constitute no possible motivation at all. Regardless, even if one doesn’t opt out of the health services market entirely, it’s relatively easy to vary the degree to which one opts in. One individual might choose to see a doctor regularly for routine or preemptive care; another might choose to see a doctor only when very sick. Today’s decision effectively declares that in order to reduce the cost of uncompensated care, the government can force individuals to buy into a particular set of benefits—it’s not merely a mandate to buy any kind of insurance, but a mandate to buy insurance deemed acceptable by the government—regardless of whether that individual would’ve purchased that same level of benefits on his or her own. (It also ignores the minor detail that the law requires taxpayers to pay in excess of $100 billion a year to solve a $43 billion problem. More on uncompensated care here.)

Again, the issue is not only that an individual without insurance will almost certainly eventually end up being a burden to taxpayers and the medical care system generally, although that is a big issue. The issue is also that when young and healthy people opt out of the risk pool there is a real and immediate impact on the cost of insurance for everyone who is in the risk pool.

One of the reasons the mandate is important is that it reduces the amount we’ll all pay for our insurance. This will be especially critical when insurers will no longer be able to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Obviously, the young and healthy would have no incentive to purchase insurance until they need it. Then the cost of insurance will be a great deal more burdensome to everyone else.

The “uncompensated care” link leads to an argument that the costs to the health care system of people who can’t pay for their care are relatively small. I don’t buy it, but I don’t have time to check the research now. The point is, again, that we’re not just talking about the costs of taking care of the uninsured.

As Jonathan Cohn wrote, “it’s not possible to regulate the insurance industry, in a way that would make coverage available to all people, without compelling every person to get coverage.”

The final argument from the Right is that all decisions to purchase or not purchase anything has an impact on the cost of that thing; lots of people buying toasters enables lowering the price of toasters. I assume that would be true, since manufacturing and shipping probably would have lower per-unit costs. That works for books, anyway, which is the one thing I know about manufacturing.

However, having to pay a couple of bucks more to purchase a toaster is not a burden to everyone in the same way a large, uninsured population is a burden to everyone — including libertarians, although they’re too blinkered by their beloved ideology to see it.

Update: Classic wingnut reaction, from Volokh:

How in the world is a decision to self-insure “shifting costs to other market participants?” The government is saying to the individual that unless you pay for something you neither want nor need, we are going to provide it for you anyway and dispoil you by force to pay for it.

The defect in this argument is its circularity. Lo Stato decrees that it has the power to command us to buy insurance for ourselves because it wishes to provide insurance for others and it need our money to do so. This reasoning is bottomless. It consists of seizing a power by a process of bootstrapping. Step back and look at it in terms of the source on constitutioal power. It admits that the power to command purchase of a good did not exist before the state asserted it.

In context of the argument at Volokh, I take it “a decision to self-insure” means not buying health insurance. And, of course, in this sense “self-insure” is a fantasy for all but multi-millionaires. And the decision by young and healthy people (I assume the writer is such and has had little dealing with the health care system) to stay out of the risk pool directly and immediately raises the cost of insurance for everyone in the risk pool.

And then when the idiot is hit by a bus or needs cancer treatment or whatever else he can’t imagine ever happening to him, the hundreds of thousands of dollars he can’t pay for his care will either fall to the rest of us, or he will find himself doing without care he needs to save his life. Oopsie!

He neither wants nor needs insurance, he says. I assure you, dude, when your time comes to need health care, you’re going to want it.

There are lots of interesting stories today that I haven’t found time to write about, but I want to be sure everyone is aware of accusations against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce using foreign money to influence elections, and Rupert Murdoch’s part in that. The Chamber is one of the organizations in the center of the nexus of money, media and manipulation that is killing America.

If you watched Rachel Maddow last night, you saw Republican honchos Ed Gillespie and Michael Steele bending themselves into pretzels defending Christine O’Donnell’s weird claim that she is “privy” to “classified information.” Greg Sargent has a transcript of exactly what O’Donnell said.

There has been much guffawing at the idea that O’Donnell has a security clearance, but so far I haven’t seen anyone point out that much of what she said about Christianity in China is nonsense. Here’s what she said:

O’DONNELL: There’s much that I want to say. I wish I wasn’t privy to some of the classified information that I am privy to because I think that I —

QUESTIONER: Can I interrupt and say how are you privy to classified information?

O’DONNELL: Because I’ve been working with various non-profit groups for over 15 years. And we’ve been sending missionaries to China for a very long time. And these missionaries go to China, risking their lives because you are not allowed to be a Christian over there.

So a country that forces women to have abortions and mandates that you can only have one child and will not allow you the freedom to read the Bible. You think they can be our friend? We have to look at our history and realize if they pretend to be our friend, they have got something up their sleeve.

First, it is simply not true that Christianity is banned in China. Doesn’t anyone else remember that President Bush attended a Christian church service while in Beijing to watch the Olympics?

And neither is the Bible banned in China. In fact, the Bible is being printed in China.

China bans foreign missionaries of any religion, but of course that doesn’t stop the determined evangelical from going there anyway. In 2008, a number of Christian mission organizations encouraged people traveling to the Beijing Olympics to do a little faith witnessing while they were there.

I doubt there have been any official Christian missions in China for several years. I understand there is very low key, “underground” Christian missionary work going on, however.

In recent years Beijing has been posing as a great friend to religion, which is why President Bush’s visit to a church was a great publicity coup for the Chinese Communist Party. But religions are considered to be something like trade unions in China, and they must be registered with the government and headed by loyal Party members. Non-registered churches are illegal; non-registered religious observances attended by more than 12 people are banned.

There are bureaucracies set up to supervise religions. In the case of Buddhism, the government often dictates what ceremonies can or cannot be performed, how many people can participate, etc. Monks receive salaries from the government, and many of the larger monasteries are more or less run as tourist attractions.

But my impression is that Beijing doesn’t care what religious beliefs people hold as long as they are loyal to China, and only China.

For example, the Catholic church in China is more or less severed from Rome, and bishops are appointed by the Party, not the Pope. And, of course, the Party has taken over the job of recognizing reborn lamas of Tibetan Buddhism.

Any resistance to government authority is absolutely not tolerated. My understanding is that China went ballistic about Falun Gong after Falun Gong members staged large peaceful protests of the way they were being treated in Chinese media. And, of course, Beijing is raving, mouth-foaming insane regarding His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

But the larger point is that Once again, we see little Christine making it up as she goes along. Along with pushing her for the details of her “security clearance,” I’d like to know which “non-profit groups” she’s been “working with” all this time. My bet is they don’t exist.