RUTHFULLY YOURS

From time to time, something will leap out to me as an illustration of the fact that blacks and whites often inhabit separate realities. I’ve often told the story of the editorial in a black neighborhood newspaper in Philadelphia warning African-Americans to flee urban areas in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections because George W. Bush was planning to — this was presented as unquestionable fact – use nuclear weapons against the inner cities to suppress the black vote. This wasn’t somebody ranting on Twitter — this was in print, in a regularly published newspaper that was, in the early days of the 21st century, still a going concern.

I’ve come to call this sort of thing (with apologies to Richard Hofstadter) the paranoid style in African-American politics. Mild versions of conspiracy theories play a large role in mainstream American politics in the form of folk beliefs about how government works, the role of lobbyists and campaign contributions, and the like. For right-wing populists, it’s the “Establishment” and the “donor class,” for left-wingers it’s the Koch brothers, Big Oil, Big Money, Big Bigness, etc. We’ve all heard the story of how we could be running our automobiles on seawater if not for the fact that the petro-billionaires are suppressing the technology. The closer you get to the fringes, the more prominent the role of conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that conspiracy theory plays an outsize role in mainstream African-American political discourse.

Years after the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the American people, the health-care industry, and the courts still struggle to navigate the law. Its heavy regulations and new tax burdens have generated numerous consequences, many of which are harmful to patients and families. Although supporters point to the millions of newly insured under the law, the truth is, that as many as 90 percent of those are estimated to have enrolled into Medicaid, second-class coverage that, according to a 2014 Merritt Hawkins report, most doctors do not even accept.

Even worse, the government’s Department of Health and Human Services reported in December 2014 that 51 percent of doctors on official Medicaid state lists are not available to new beneficiaries. Meanwhile, millions of other families have lost their previous private insurance directly because of ACA decrees. For new private coverage, insurance premiums have continued to skyrocket. Most alarmingly, the premiums of what were low-cost high-deductible plans are accelerating faster than any other coverage after the passage of the ACA, directly countering the promise of more affordability when the bill was passed. Choice of doctors and hospitals through the government’s exchange-based coverage has also narrowed compared with pre-ACA individual market plans.

Ahead of President François Hollande’s visit to the White House this morning, a French diplomat told CBS News that the French leader will deliver a clear message to the American president: “The imminent threat from ISIS is an emergency that requires urgent action.” So far, Obama has refused to acknowledge that the Islamic State’s bloody assault on Paris demands a change in his approach to the threat. “We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through,” the president told reporters just three days after the massacre. Yet now, some of the administration’s closest supporters are challenging the weakness of the president’s effort to degrade and destroy ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh).

On Sunday, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think we have got to be much more aggressive and much more unified in the effort to take on ISIS.” “I think that the resources applied to that mission, frankly, have not been sufficient,” observed Panetta. “We need to increase the tempo of our air strikes, we need to organize ground forces, particularly the Sunnis and the Kurds, and arm them so that they can take territory back from ISIS.” Doing more to stop ISIS is urgent, Panetta explained, because “they are a clear and present danger, not only to Europe, but to this country as well.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed a similar sense of urgency, saying “we have to be prepared” for an ISIS attack on the U.S. homeland. “I’ve never been more concerned,” Feinstein said. “I read the intelligence faithfully,” she added. “ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding.” Her comments served as a direct rebuttal to the president’s statement, just hours before the Paris massacre, that “from the start our goal has been first to contain [ISIS], and we have contained them.”

On the Glenn Beck show, Friday, incoming Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin explained in two words how he will push back against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate the coal mining in his state: “pound sand.”

The governor elect’s plan to use the 10th amendment to thwart President Obama’s goal of destroying the coal industry is beautiful in its simplicity.

“The powers not given to the federal government are the responsibility of the states and of the people. Every time this has been adjudicated in the past 150 + years – it has been tested in the courts – it has come down on the side of the states,” Bevin explained.

“Never in the history of the world has there been more consumption of coal than there is right now,” he noted, adding that Kentucky, with its rich coal resources, should be allowed to get in on that.

“To my way of thinking, we will tell the EPA and other elected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state – to pound sand.”

From Afghanistan to Iraq and around the world, the military manages to always get Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings to all the force. That’s admirable. Not nearly as cheery is the state of the American armed forces and Washington’s lackluster effort to deliver the troops, equipment, and maintenance the military needs.

The annual edition of the Heritage Foundation Index of U.S. Military Strength rated the state of the armed forces as marginal. Meanwhile, Washington’s treatment of its responsibilities for providing for the common defense has been anything but stellar. “The best thing that could happen for all the services, at least in my view, would be for us to have predictable, on-time budgets,” complained the outgoing Secretary of the Army John McHugh last month before he fled the Pentagon. He continued: “The challenges that all the departments face are significant, but we would be better postured to meet them, even with declining resources, were we assured that we would have a budget on time. That it would be a figure that is known, that we could plan for, and that our industrial partners can plan for as well.” It has been years since Congress and the president passed a defense budget—let alone got one done on time.