Avenue Q; Straight Shooting October 7, 2009March 16, 2017 GET READY TO ENLIST An article in the Joint Force Quarterly, published for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘calls in unambiguous terms for lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces,’ according to the Boston Globe. (Anyone who doubts the injustice of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell – or that it weakens our military – need just watch Colonel Fehrenbach’s four-minute video.) The good news, as explained here, is that the policy is heading for the dustbin: Progressives should realize that Obama had a plan for ending DADT, the plan is working, and that beating up Obama for not doing anything is counterproductive . . . Unlike Bill Clinton’s well-intentioned but ham-fisted attempt to integrate gays into the military ‘with a stroke of the pen,’ Obama’s approach respected the prerogatives of the brass and allowed the military as an institution to save face, while at the same time ensuring that the decision, once made, would face a minimum of internal resistance and sabotage. Yes, the Fabian approach inflicted undeserved damage on those servicemembers who have been discharged in the meantime, while also depriving the country of their services. But to have let that short-term consideration dominate the need to make the transition to a gay-friendly military as smooth as possible would have required an insanely high discount rate . . . ☞ ‘I just finished reading Colonel Om Prakash’s essay in the Joint Force Quarterly on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I am running in a very heavy military district and I can tell you that an article in the JFQ has more influence on the military folks here than does the New York Times. But when the two work together, the impact is magnified (see Saturday’s editorial).’ – Krystal Ball (aforementioned candidate for Congress) ‘You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.’ – Barry Goldwater AVENUE Q Feedback on yesterday‘s admission of puppet confusion ranged from a succinct ‘face it, you’re just old’ (well, there’s that) to this gentler explanation: Jon Winkleman: ‘Avenue Q is definitely a generational thing. I am part of the first Sesame Street Generation. I even remember Sesame Street going on the air as a toddler. If you grew up on Sesame Street, you would think Avenue Q deserved a Pulitzer Prize. For most Americans 45 and under, the show defined our early childhood and view on the world.’ And this additional feedback: Brad Walker: ‘What you have to realize is that Marx and Lopez, the creators of Avenue Q, are Muppet Freaks. Here is a link to a pitch they gave to the Henson organization for a movie called Kermit, Prince of Denmark. Just the two of them, but they do credible imitations of all the Muppet Show regulars. Now take the concerns of young adults (first job, sex, racism) and filter it through a Sesame-Street sensibility, and you get Avenue Q. The first generation that grew up with the Muppets gets a musical that speaks to them.’ Anna Marasco: ‘I had wanted to see Avenue Q for about 3 years when they finally began touring. They booked a date in KC, which is about 2 1/2 hours from Omaha. I informed my husband that this was all I wanted for my birthday and I bought the tickets. Through a series of ridiculous scheduling conflicts, I ended up having to see this with MY DAD. My 60 yr old, Republican, Conservative Dad. My dad and I watched puppets have sex. My. Dad. And. I. Watched. Puppets. Have. Sex. Dad laughed his butt off. At the end, he said ‘That was a lot of fun! It was a good idea to take me instead of your mother. But it’s too bad they had that line about George Bush at the end.’ So if I could watch puppets have sex (along with my dad) you can watch them have sex AGAIN! For the Dems.’ Jonathan Edwards: ‘I saw it on Broadway several years ago. If it helps, close your eyes during the performance to minimize confusion. You really, really don’t want to miss ‘The Internet is for Porn.’ ‘ Kathi Derevan: ‘Clowns: No. Puppets: No. But I hope you Tivo’d or otherwise recorded last night’s Letterman show. Steve Martin and Martin Short were OMG hilarious. It still puzzles me to see these guys, approximately my age, who are now like the Grand Old Men of comedy. WTF? Aren’t they the New Young Things? What happened? Anyway. I’m serious. Find a copy if you don’t have one.’ ☞ Indeed. If this four minutes doesn’t make you laugh, call 911.
Puppets October 6, 2009March 16, 2017 HE’S NOT JEWISH? Well, a day or two after the Telegraph made the claim I linked to yesterday, the Guardian refutes it. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not Jewish. Assuming the Guardian is right . . . “never mind.” DEPO Suggested here Thursday, DEPO closed up 27% yesterday on good news. “Hold on, though,” counsels my guru, “because we are supposed to get the results of two other Phase III trials that I expect to work as well.” MINT Chris Hanacek: “Paying no cash to have mint.com track your finances may be penny wise and pound foolish. I would much rather pony up $50 for software that resides on my own Mac or PC than risk having my financial life hacked and/or data-mined.” ☞ Well, 1.2 million folks have taken this leap . . . and Quicken is buying it for $170 million . . . and it claims to use bank-level encryption – but I hear you. DON’T SEND IN THE CLOWNS OK, I’m not afraid of clowns, but I’m confused by puppets, and I tell you this because I have been asked to attend a performance of “Avenue Q” Thursday October 15 . . . and I am torn. On the one hand, it is a fundraiser for Krystal Ball, the pro-equality young mom / CPA / triathlete running to unseat an anti-equality Virginia Republican congressman – and tickets start as low as $65. On the other hand, the first time I saw Avenue Q – the long-running show that fully 95% of theater-goers adore, according to a scientific poll its TV ads tout – I was among the 5% that . . . well . . . didn’t get it. Was it the puppets I was supposed to identify with or the actors holding the puppets? Who was being funny? Did they have distinct personalities, or were the actors just basically the machinery that made the puppets work? Why were so many people laughing when I was not? What’s WRONG with me? Not gay enough (one of Charles’s recurrent complaints)? Just stupid? PUPPETS CONFUSE AND UNSETTLE ME. I won’t have them around the house. I hate puppets. But, boy, would I like to see Krystal flip that traditionally Republican seat – and what a fun audience it’s likely to be October 15, with a 6:30 VIP cocktail party preceding the 8pm curtain and a “talk-back session with the actors after the show.” The Act Blue page to learn more or sign up is actblue.com/page/aveq. You may or may not see me there.
He’s . . . JEWISH? And Don't Miss Mint.com October 5, 2009March 16, 2017 OVERCOMPENSATION So Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is . . . Jewish? And he overcompensates in denying this by denying the Holocaust? Read it in the Telegraph: A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior. Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. . . . ☞ Just as it’s hard for a Jew to succeed in Iranian electoral politics, so it’s no cakewalk for an openly gay American to succeed in today’s Republican party. Which may explain why Florida’s likeable governor, Charlie Crist, moderate in many ways, supported a ban on civil unions and supports Florida’s status as the only state in the union that bans gay adoption. This four-minute 2006 video makes the case that he is gay, and the movie “Outrage” – which airs at 9pm tonight on HBO – makes the case again. In opposing the rights of his LGBT constituents, could he be overcompensating? Obviously, I think it’s fine to be gay – or to be straight. And it’s okay, if sad, to pretend to be something you’re not. What’s not okay is to hurt other people lest you be thought to be one of them. SOCIALISTS/FASCISTS/CAPITALISTS Jayson Smith: “Kevin asked: ‘Why can’t someone be both a socialist and a fascist? The Nazis were the National Socialist party. Were they not socialists or not fascists?’ The Nazis were Socialists the same way the People’s Republic of China is a Republic.” ☞ Or the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, is Democratic. George Ehlers: “The yin and yang of capitalism and socialism: capitalism builds the automobiles; socialism builds the roads the automobiles use . . . capitalism builds the houses; socialism builds the sewage systems (or mandates the septic tanks) connected to the houses . . . capitalism produces the trash consumers throw out; socialism picks up the trash that would otherwise land in the nearest gully. And so on.” MANAGING YOUR MONEY Alice Gedge: “My first money managing program was MYM. I used every version. Then I switched to Microsoft Money and now that software is no more. Can you recommend a good replacement?” ☞ Everyone seems to use Quicken. But check out mint.com first to see if it meets your needs. It’s come a long way in the last two years. And it’s free!
Friday Fun October 2, 2009March 16, 2017 But first . . . KEEP DRIVING – YOU’LL LIVE LONGER Joel Wesson: ‘As for fear of riding in semi-trailer traffic with one of [those little 158-mpg VWs you wrote about last Thursday], cars and car traffic in the US are really amazingly safe. You can expect (on average) to travel over 67 million miles in a car before being killed in an accident. It works out that the life expectancy of car passengers is longer than the average life expectancy in the U.S. – 67 million miles works out to 127 years at 60 mph, 24 hours per day. You could probably risk it in that little VW, even with NO airbags. A bicycle is only expected to travel 3 or 4 million miles per fatality in the US (merely 300 years at 2 hours per day). However, there are also substantial health benefits to cycling. People are afraid of many things that generally don’t kill them.’ APTERA Gary Diehl: ‘Only 158 MPG? Look into the Aptera. The prototype got 230 MPG and the hybrid model is expected to clear north of 300 MPG. The composite chassis will do far better in a crash and it’s not something you might accidentally run over while talking on your cell.’ ICELAND Piet Bach: ‘One other major (?) openly gay political player you forgot to mention Wednesday: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland.’ NATIONAL PARKS Bob Ceremsak: ‘If you haven’t watched PBS’s National Parks documentary by Ken Burns, I recommend it. It has softened my libertarian views regarding the national government.’ DOCS Marissa Hendrickson, M.D.: ‘Thanks for the link to the National Physicians Alliance. I hadn’t heard about them before, but they look like just the antidote to the undertone of greed that has kept me out of the AMA. I just joined the NPA, and I’m really excited about it.’ And now . . . WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FASCISM AND SOCIALISM, ANYWAY? Kevin Clark: ‘I guess I’m incapable of logical, critical thinking, but why can’t someone be both a socialist and a fascist? The Nazis were the National Socialist party. Were they not socialists or not fascists? Or could you be both in the 30’s but not today? Or maybe they’re not “pretty much polar opposites,” as you put it. Maybe they both want to pretty much control your life but, to paraphrase Ralph, it’s important to remember that the socialists mean well? Personally I don’t find that all that comforting.’ ☞ Hmmm. I’m clearly no political scientist; and “fascism” is not as easily defined as socialism (and is, in any event, less about economics than about tyranny). So, for starters, I’d acknowledge the pretty much in my “pretty much polar opposites.” That said, I think one commonly accepted meaning of fascism is an authoritarian corporate-government symbiosis and dictatorship. That’s pretty different from socialism, the main point of which is to provide strong social services and safety nets even if it means restraints on corporate power. And where the primary feature of fascism it seems to me is tyranny, the primary feature of socialism, I think, is concern for the common good. We’re all for the common good, of course. The legitimate debate is in what balance to strike. Go too far in “mandating” the common good and you can get a nightmare of tyranny and repression. That’s certainly what happened in Russia and China. But few, I think, would call today’s America in any way “Soviet” or “Maoist” for our system of public education or our social safety net (unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disaster relief) or even our minimum wage or earned income credit. Some do oppose these things (Ronald Reagan fought Medicare tooth and nail; Republicans always fight the minimum wage). But our current economics, it seems to me, is more “socially enlightened” than any kind of socialism that goes “too far” – that stifles liberty and kills the incentive to excel; that makes it impossible to grow rich or impedes the freedom to chart one’s own life. In that last regard it might be noted that universal health insurance frees individuals to switch jobs, start businesses, take chances. It enhances liberty. Have a great weekend.
Back to the Tea Party October 1, 2009March 16, 2017 But first . . . HEALTH CARE ADS What do you think of these two, one from Montana, one from Maine? THE APOLOGY Congressman Grayson said on the House floor that the Republican health care plan was . . . “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.” They demanded he apologize, and he did. It’s the kind of apology Democrats should perhaps make more often: Last night here in this chamber I gave a speech. I’m not going to recount every single thing that I said, but I will point out that immediately after that speech, several Republicans asked me to apologize. Well, I would like to apologize. I would like to apologize to the dead. And here’s why. According to this study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” which was published two weeks ago, 44,789 Americans die every year because they have no health insurance. That’s right, 44,789 Americans die every year, according to this Harvard study called “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults.” You can see it by going to our website, grayson.house.gov. That is more than ten times the number of Americans who have died in the war in Iraq. It’s more than ten times the number of Americans who died in 9/11. But that was just once: this is every single year. That’s right: every single year. Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that – read it and weep because of all these Americans who are dying because they don’t have health insurance. Now I think we should do something about that, and the Democratic healthcare plan does do something about that. It makes healthcare affordable for those who can’t afford insurance, and it saves these peoples’ lives. Let’s remember that we should care about people even after they’re born. So I call upon the Democratic members of the House, I call upon the Republican members of the House, I call upon all of us to do our jobs for the sake of America – for the sake of those dying people and their families. I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America. And now, continuing our discussion from earlier this week . . . RALPH – INTO THE BREACH ONCE MORE Ralph: “The responses from people taking insult at my characterization Monday of the DC TEA PARTY video, prompted me to watch it again. That made me conclude that the responders either didn’t watch the video or they are as uninformed as the marchers. Anyone who uncritically accepts arguments like: Obama is working to destroy this country or that he is some kind of foreigner (as evidenced by his appointing czars) is putty in the hands of the likes of Limbaugh and Fox. I was also going to repeat that the marchers all mean well, but the truth is that the Republican Party doesn’t mean well. Lacking any solutions, themselves, they plan to respond to the election of a dynamic, intelligent, charismatic Democratic President by doing everything in their power to stop him from being successful. Their worst nightmare is Obama having a successful Presidency.” ☞ Oh, boy. Well, I highly doubt any readers here are as uninformed as the marchers, so I agree they probably responded to your first post without having watched what you were posting about. But emotions run so high, and feelings are so raw, it sure is easy to offend when no offense is meant – an important fact of modern life we can never be reminded of too often (so thanks to all the angry readers who reminded me). I think the marchers do mean well – what other motivation would they have? Which is why, when we find ways to reach them, showing respect and providing facts they lacked (Reagan and Bush appointed czars, too), they sometimes reassess their views. But reaching people is difficult, because all of us tend to listen mainly to those we already agree with. Look how long it took to persuade most people the Earth is not flat (if it were round, people on the bottom would fall off!) or that humans are the latest link in an evolutionary chain (science, schmiance – it just seems impossible). As to the Republican Party itself, I think it’s only fair to note, first, that by no means are all Republicans comfortable with the marchers’ signs or with Limbaugh/Beck/Palin. But, yes, these things take on a dynamic of their own. The Republican leadership is focused on taking back power in 2010 and 2012, as it was in 1994 and 1996, so they do seem to have made a very clear strategic decision to try to keep anything good from being accomplished on Obama’s watch. One yearns for a more collegial bipartisanship, and President Obama has worked pretty hard, I think, from the very outset of his unlikely campaign, to calm things down and search for common ground. But the discourse has gotten awfully polarized in the last couple of decades (was it this bad in the Carter-Reagan days?) – you really do have to thank right-wing talk radio and pioneers like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove for that, I think – and it’s made worse by the tough economic times. Emotions run even higher when people are hurting or scared. Pete K.: “The folks in the DC Tea Party video remind me of Jay Leno’s man on the street bits where he asks simple questions of passers-by. They appear to be ignorant or downright stupid. The only difference is when Jay asks a nineteen year old who is president, that person is typically caught off guard and does not profess to know anything. The DC Tea Party folks are there with a strong point of view, professing to know what they’re talking about. They might have been expected to ‘study up’ a bit.” Steve Gilbert: “Donald Szostak asks: ‘If those opponents, tens of millions of them, are gullible, ignorant and misguided then why haven’t they been easy prey for the left?’ Because the left doesn’t tell them what they want to hear. Ever since the sainted Ronald Reagan started telling people they could get more by contributing less, a growing number of Americans have bought into the me-first, screw-everyone-else ethic that is so common today.” DEPO I think there’s lots of risk in the stock market after its remarkable six-month run-up. But I’m generally wrong when I try to outguess the market; and, right or wrong, I find it hard to resist a good bet, albeit only with money I can truly afford to lose. So I’ve taken a little of the 30-fold gain on those 2-cent BZ warrants (now 60 cents) and bought a little DEPO. Like the AVNR, JAV, and PARS pharma bets I had hoped might hit big this summer – none did – my guru thinks DEPO could gain 50% or more by year’s end, based on upcoming drug-trial results. Boy’s gotta have a little fun.
I Stand Corrected! September 30, 2009March 16, 2017 But first . . . IS MEDICARE THREATENED? The Right’s Shameless Gambit by Matt Miller The Daily Beast Once the party of fiscal sanity, the Republicans are now wailing that the Democrats’ health-care plan cheats seniors out of money. Matt Miller on how they scare grandma. Connoisseurs of hypocrisy will always find plenty to savor in political debate. But even by the debased standards of modern Washington, the Republican charge this week that Democrats will “hurt seniors” by trimming future Medicare costs is demonstrably false – and exposes as a sham any GOP claim to care about fiscal sanity. “It’s disingenuous to say Congress can cut this much spending from Medicare without having an adverse affect on seniors’ access to care,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), as the Senate Finance Committee took up Chairman Max Baucus’ pivotal bill on Wednesday. But it’s Mr. Kyl who is being disingenuous. Consider some facts: Medicare will spend about $500 billion this year. Under the proposals that Republicans say will bring “rationing,” Medicare will spend about $860 billion in 2019, or 73 percent more than today. Instead of spending $7.1 trillion on Medicare over the next decade, as is currently forecast, Democrats propose spending roughly $6.7 trillion, or about 94 percent of that sum. This means Democrats propose to slow the annual growth rate of Medicare spending from a projected 6.6 percent to about 5.9 percent. As context for this piddling restraint, recall that the U.S. spends 17 percent of GDP on health care today versus 10 to 11 percent among other advanced nations. American does this without achieving better health outcomes than do others, and while leaving nearly 50 million people uninsured. Meanwhile, there are huge regional variations in the utilization of procedures and services that researchers agree bear no relation to quality or results. Some credible analysts say that as much as 30 percent of U.S. health spending is ineffective. At a moment when health economists in both political parties have concluded from such facts that American health spending is radically inefficient, the notion that the Democrats’ tiny brake on runaway costs will “hurt” anyone – except members of the Medical Industrial Complex accustomed to being paid for ineffective care – is absurd. Privately, of course, Republican leaders know this – they’re just reaching for what they hope will be a potent political club to deny President Obama a big health-care win. And, to be sure, Democrats are past masters at “Mediscare” campaigns themselves, having unleashed one against Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s to devastating effect. As a matter of policy, Democratic attacks back then were misguided (as I argued at the time); in any event, two demagogic “wrongs” don’t make a “right.” What makes the GOP’s phony charges particularly damning today is the way they reveal the party’s avowed concern for “fiscal responsibility” to be hollow. As anyone who’s looked at the question soon realizes, it’s impossible to be serious about budget deficits and America’s fiscal future without tackling the outsize growth of health costs. Measured against the scale of the problem, the current Democratic plans are, if anything, overly timid. That the GOP has chosen to puff them up into this month’s version of their “death panel” boogeyman shows Republicans simply aren’t serious about fiscal policy anymore. Or, to put it more precisely, the party’s desire to foil the president politically trumps whatever interest it once may have had in sound public finance. This depressing instinct has become a pattern. Republicans pitilessly caricature Democratic calls for “comparative effectiveness” research as the road to rationing – as if it weren’t obviously a good idea to better understand the relative value of various treatments in the most costly and inefficient health-care system on earth. Republicans didn’t even think about offsetting the costs of the massive 2001 Bush tax cut for the well-to-do, or the $1 trillion America has spent in Iraq, or the hundreds of billions of dollars President Bush spent (sensibly) adding prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. The old-fashioned conservative habit of actually paying for major policy initiatives never seems to occur to Republicans anymore. Far better, contemporary GOP logic holds, to borrow the cash from China and ask the kids to pay it back. Whatever political sleights-of-hand President Obama deploys himself, one thing is clear: By putting his party’s head on the chopping block with candid calls to trim Medicare and raise taxes to pay for ambitious health reform, Obama and the Democrats have shown a commitment to fiscal prudence that Republicans can’t even be bothered to feign anymore. Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. THREE CHEERS FOR GUIDO ‘Guido Westerwelle, the German liberal leader who is poised to become the country’s new foreign minister, has led his Free Democratic party to its best result in 60 years,’ reports the Telegraph. How cool will it be to have one of the G8 foreign ministers be – incidentally – an openly gay man. With the mayors of Paris and Berlin – and Portland and Providence (and soon Houston?) among others – all openly gay . . . not to mention the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, the sheriff of Dallas County, and now the new German Vice Chancellor . . . we draw ever closer to the day when this can elicit no more than a big ‘so what?’ And now . . . ‘WHO AMONG US’ Ken Doran: ‘[Contrary to your NASCAR comment yesterday], Kerry never said this. I congratulate you on having many conservative readers, but let them make their own arguments; don’t buy into their phony memes. One of the core problems of our time is that the mainstream media has had its collective CPU corrupted by its lust for left-right equivalence – not justified in this day and age – and by two generations of ‘liberal-bias’ onslaughts. The consequence is reflexive groveling to the right. Don’t take even a step down that road.’ ☞ Oops! You’re right! Maureen Dowd made it up. (Listen to the real quote here.) And then it spread and spread so that even people like me – who are constantly explaining that Gore never said he invented the Internet and did nothing wrong at the Buddhist temple, and of course Obama is a U.S. citizen, and so on – think they heard him say it on TV. I stand red-faced and corrected. And it gets worse: Mike Watts: ‘In yesterday’s column ‘… believed Iraq played a roll in attacking us …’ you meant ‘role’ not ‘roll’ (unless they were playing with croissants).’
I Didn’t Mean YOU Are Misinformed September 29, 2009March 16, 2017 But first . . . ETHERPAD Marc Fest: Etherpad.com enables really real-time collaborative editing. I have to edit documents together outside parties all the time, so this rocks. And speaking of collaboration: TEAMVIEWER I’ve used this several more times since first touting it and just want to be sure you saw it. If you’re a typical computer user with modest skills . . . and so occasionally get stymied . . . but have a computer guru friend from work or daughter off at college, each of you should download this free software. Then start a session where you both see the same screen and can work on it together. Use skype – also free – to talk as you do. Or maybe you and a friend are charged with designing the Kiwanis Club holiday party evite. Rather than have to drive over to his place, just work on the file together from your respective dining room tables. This is great if you want to help your grandmother fix something on her computer or show her how to do something. And now . . . NO OFFENSE Rob: Imagine my surprise at learning this morning that I am gullible, ignorant and misguided as well as lacking in the areas of logical, critical thinking. If my IQ were not so low, I probably could have figured out just how stupid I am all for myself, huh?? It’s a wonder I can even brush my teeth without causing myself injury, let alone put three kids through college and run my own successful business. Kindly accept the fact that those who disagree with you – yet stop by to read most days – deserve a bit more than invective and insults. Reprinting ‘Ralph’s’ thoughts – such as they are – contributes to the problem and makes you look as foolish as he. For as long as we simply insult and degrade those whose opinions to not align with ours, no progress is possible. I’ll go back to drooling on myself now. How could I be so stupid?’ ☞ Thanks, Rob, and for stopping by this page most days – I appreciate that very much. I think you’re responding to something I didn’t say – and certainly something I did not intend to say. Ralph was referring to people specifically like those in Friday’s DC TEA PARTY video. There are tons of people like you who disagree in a thoughtful and constructive way. I surely have no monopoly on the best ideas, and – judging from the much touted ‘161 Republican amendments’ incorporated into one or another of the health care bills – Democratic legislators don’t believe they do either. What Ralph was bemoaning, and I admit to bemoaning, too, are those (however many they number), whose discourse is not thoughtful or fact-based. I think if you watch that video, you might agree that their approach to fixing the health care mess is not constructive or well-informed. Donald Szostak: ‘I was so outraged by the tenor of Ralph’s thesis and your apparent agreement that I felt I had to write. If those opponents, tens of millions of them, are gullible, ignorant and misguided then why haven’t they been easy prey for the left? Ralph’s and your lack of respect for the opposition is what will do you in. Have you ever considered the possibility that you might not be so 100% right? Maybe, just maybe, if you who consider yourselves elite took the time to understand what is driving those well meaning idiots and morons you might stand a chance of leading them, i.e., un-misguiding them, instead of just standing by lambasting. I think Obama called it finding common ground. Instead, all I read from you is how obviously right your solutions are and how wrong and dumb are those who disagree with you. How sad. Just a thought. As always, have a nice day.’ ☞ As above, I’d ask that you watch the video, if you haven’t already, because that was what Ralph was responding to. And, again with respect, I’d suggest that much of the health care stuff I’ve posted or linked to goes well beyond insult or naked assertion – as for example this lengthy column several weeks ago. Or the David Goldhill piece highlighted here. You and Rob (above) and others who wrote in are absolutely right – elitism is obnoxious. An aw shucks C-student regular guy approach is a lot more effective, and bested both Kerry and Gore. (John Kerry learned to drop all his gerundial g’s – tryin’ and thinkin’ and goin’ – but the day he answered a reporter’s query by asking ‘who among us is not a NASCAR enthusiast?’ I knew we had an uphill fight.) What was so effective about candidate and then President Clinton was his ability to have a stunningly A+ mind without rubbing voters’ noses in it. I think our current President has much the same talent. So I agree many of us need to do better at getting off our high horses. Still, the fact remains that 70% of the folks who voted to reelect President Bush believed Iraq played a role in attacking us on 9/11. Iraq did not. A great many people who voted for him the first time believed that ‘the vast majority’ of the benefits of his proposed tax cuts would indeed ‘go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder.’ The opposite was true. Many believe the Earth was formed just a few thousand years ago. It was not. The list goes on and on. So in that sense, tens of millions of decent, well-meaning people can be mislead – and routinely are. Like Ralph, I do believe it is something to bemoan. I miss the days when much of the nation watched one of three responsible nightly newscasts, along the lines Bryan Norcross described here a few days ago. Those newscasts were not perfect, but they aspired to a high journalistic standard – and were provided very significant resources to meet it. FIRST CLASS HEALTH CARE Lisa S.: ‘Financially, we agree about much. Politically, not so much. I think you are probably a person of good will, as the overwhelming majority of people are. I think your positions are probably heartfelt. As are mine. So I often just cannot understand your positions. You’ve consistently made similar comments before, and at least you aren’t hiding your position, but yesterday in writing about a single-payer plan you posted: ‘This being America, it needs a ‘first-class’ option for those wishing to pay a large premium to board the plane (or in this case, the non-emergency MRI) a little sooner, and in a nicer seat.’ I read this as, the wealthy will be able to skip to the front of the line, making the line even longer for the rest of us. As it is now, I wait my turn and I get my turn. Given that most of us are not wealthy, why would most of us want to set up a system where the privileged get to cut in line? I realize that you specified non-emergency. So this position would only delay treatment for those people who are merely suffering, not dying, but still. You are lobbying for a health care system that would be imposed upon me, but not upon you. I’d like to keep the one I’ve got thank you.’ ☞ But, gosh, Lisa – you don’t think the current system treats the rich better than it treats you? It totally does, whether it be with plush paneled private rooms and private nurses or with the availability of ‘premium care’ with guaranteed same day or next day appointments. Give $50,000 to your local hospital and you’re likely to have access to an office that tries to make sure you have a good experience whenever you need their help. And while this may be somewhat distasteful, it lowers the cost for everyone else. Anyway, all this is moot because a single-payer system was taken off the table even before the negotiations started. But as for keeping the coverage you’ve got – you currently can’t if it has a lifetime cap and you exceed it, or if the insurer decides not to renew your policy, or if you switch jobs and have a preexisting condition. Obama proposes to remove those worries, making your coverage more secure. Not the worst thing. Lisa continues: ‘Here’s my bottom line argument against government controlled health care system. Social Security is a wreck. It’s been mismanaged for decades. I do NOT want the same people who will NOT be bringing me my social security money also NOT delivering my health care. Until the U.S. government can get Social Security right, they have no business moving into my health care.’ ☞ Actually, Social Security is anything but a wreck. It’s been paying benefits efficiently and reliably for more than 70 years, taking up just 2% off the top for expenses and administration. True, it will run out of money if we don’t make some modest adjustments – people are living longer. But those adjustments really will be modest, especially if we start phasing them in soon. (Here‘s one way to do it.)
Pick Up The Pace September 28, 2009March 16, 2017 AN INFORMED CITIZENRY . . . Ralph: “That 9.12 DC TEA PARTY video Friday was great. It showed exactly what we’re up against: tens of millions of gullible, ignorant, misguided people. It’s important to remember that these people mean well, but they are lacking the the areas of logical, critical thinking – which makes them easy prey for right-wing manipulators like Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, and Fox.” ☞ Basically, Limbaugh and Beck make them feel smart and superior; we elitists who believe in evolution and know that Iraq did not attack us (and that you can’t be both a socialist and a fascist – they are pretty much polar opposites) are seen to be talking down to them. So if you were a ditto-head, whom would you likely side with? One does fear for democracy, when the things that “everyone knows” should be done – like single-payer health care today* or the phasing in of an annual gas tax hike 35 years ago** – can’t be done. *This being America, it needs a “first-class” option for those wishing to pay a large premium to board the plane (or in this case, the non-emergency MRI) a little sooner, and in a nicer seat. **I had a chance to interview the Secretary of the Treasury in 1974, after OPEC had quadrupled the price of oil (to twelve bucks a barrel). I asked: Shouldn’t we raise the puny gas tax by a dime a year for a couple of decades – using the revenue to lower the tax on things we wanted to encourage, like work and investment? He said: Yes, of course, he said, dismissively (how naïve could I be?); but it’s politically impossible. Yet if we had done that obvious thing, look where we’d be today: We would lead the world in fuel efficiency technology – Toyota would be licensing hybrid technology from us – largely independent of foreign oil, and trillions of dollars less deeply in debt. WE’RE IN HOT WATER Global warming is speeding up: “Earth’s temperature is likely to jump nearly 6 degrees between now and the end of the century even if every country cuts greenhouse gas emissions as proposed, according to a United Nations update,” reports the Associated Press. This doesn’t just mean it’ll be warmer in the winter and hotter in the summer, which might be kinda nice in some parts of the world. It means war, famine, disease, and perhaps the end of human civilization. We need to get on the stick. Pick up the pace. Focus. Which leads me to: BILL MAHER’S LATEST Here: New Rule: If America can’t get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can’t get up. As long as we’re pathetic, we might as well act like it’s cute. I don’t care about the president’s birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to “Yes we can.” Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they’ve gotten is a dog. Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can’t make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs – oh, and there’s still 60,000 troops in Germany – and can’t make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress’s climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions… by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where’s the fire? Oh yeah, it’s where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn’t start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! “What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!” When it’s something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called “On Demand.” You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it’s something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly. Folks, we don’t need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That’s what’s wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for “reform” these days. They’re not reform, they’re just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, “If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense.” So let’s start from scratch. Even if they pass the [bleep] Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn’t kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they’re not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don’t let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that’s the Democrats’ plan, too. We weren’t always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK’s ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon. . . . Bill Maher is host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” ☞ Obviously, it’s easier for Bill Maher to say these things than for even the most talented, well-motivated Administration to achieve them. But it’s good he’s saying them anyway. The challenge: to persuade sitting Democrats in tough districts to risk their careers for the greater good; and to risk losing control of Congress as in 1994. (It’s got to be Democrats, because the Republican game plan thus far is simply to say no to everything.) There is a strong case to be made if that if we actually do take bold action we will be rewarded, not punished (the inverse of 1994). Getting enough legislators to take that leap is not easy, but I think we’ll get there, with meaningful, albeit not perfect, results.
An Informed Citizenry September 25, 2009March 16, 2017 HALF A MILLION DOCTORS SUPPORT HEALTH CARE REFORM They’re not just in it for the money. Here. AN INFORMED CITIZENRY . . . . . . being essential to a successful democracy, click here to assess our chances. I think the Dow may have gotten a little ahead of itself.
Bob Dole Again September 24, 2009March 16, 2017 158 MPG IN 2013 So maybe you’d have your bigger, family car; but also this one when you didn’t need a third seat or trunk space. There aren’t enough airbags in the world for me to want to drive it in serious tractor-trailer traffic . . . my Foosball table weighs almost as much as this Volkswagen . . . but courage was never my middle name. One feature: a rearview camera, to replace those wind-drag side view mirrors. (Think how hard the wind pushes your hand when you put it out the window at cruising speed, and the energy required to overcome that drag.) MONEY MARKET FUNDS NO LONGER GUARANTEED From the Aristides August investor letter: . . . [P]erhaps the most serious moment of the current economic crisis was when hundreds of billions of dollars were withdrawn from money market funds in a matter of hours. The ‘money market,’ over $3 trillion in short maturity, high quality debt, represents a key short-term source of liquidity for most of corporate America; it is, in essence, a large virtual bank. The government halted the run on the bank by guaranteeing money market funds against loss. This is far from an optimal situation, as it harms the flow of deposits to actual banks, and on September 19, 2009, the government will allow the guarantee program to end. As the yield on the typical money market fund is something like 0.20%, this should logically precipitate flows out of money market funds; who in their right mind wants to earn 0.20%, with no guarantee from the federal government, when they could achieve a similar government guaranteed yield with T-bills or a CDARS CD product from a bank? Hopefully, this will all happen slowly and smoothly, but be aware that, after Saturday, nothing but faith in the financial system is preventing the largest bank run in the history of mankind. Of course, government will intervene again if needed, but if it has to, after recapitalizing the banks, taking over a large bank, implicitly guaranteeing the debt of the 20 largest banks and explicitly guaranteeing certain bank debt, taking over the world’s largest insurer, taking over the world’s largest mortgage company, subsidizing the securitization market, taking over the world’s largest auto manufacturer, and promising to help with the impending commercial real estate mess, it will not say anything good about the stability of the financial system. BOB DOLE – AGAIN I’m ‘reprinting’ this, because the more I think about it, the more I’d like to see everyone in America be familiar with it (so spread the word). Former Senate Minority leader and 1996 Presidential candidate Bob Dole helped kill the Clinton health care bill. As New York Times reported Saturday: When former Senator Bob Dole was the Republican minority leader, he helped deep-six President Bill Clinton’s health care plan. This year, Mr. Dole, 86, who left the Senate in 1996 to run for president, is working behind the scenes to help resurrect one. His motivation comes partly from experience. After his body was shattered during World War II, he underwent seven operations in veterans hospitals and three years of rehabilitation. ‘I had good treatment and it’s probably why I’m still around,’ he said in an interview. He has been working on the issue since the 1970s, and admits now that ‘we probably should have passed the Clinton bill, but it got so politicized.’ It seems he got a memo from Bill Kristol: allowing reform to pass would kill his chances to be President. It was just more important to defeat Clinton than to provide coverage to the millions of uninsured. For the sake of one man’s presidential aspirations, millions of uninsured or inadequately insured Americans have suffered or died or gone bankrupt. And now the Republicans hope to do it again.