Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, July 02, 2009

OK, So I'm Probably Missing Something Here... 

...but I really - no, seriously, REALLY - don't think that the idea of assessing fines of "more than $1,000" to people who don't choose to have medical insurance is a very good idea. Don't misunderstand; I think everybody should have medical insurance, but that thought leads me to the idea of 'single payer' rather than 'slap a fine on your shiney butt for not having insurance'...

Like I said, however, I may be missing something here...

I will confess that my Central Idaho upbringing has tinged my liberal viewpoint with a certain libertarian coloration, which isn't all that surprising given the cultural insistence where I grew up that you simply didn't mess in other people's lives. To me, the ideal of progressive beliefs is founded in the principle that people should be left alone to make their own decisions. That's the basis if my support for same-sex unions, a woman's right to control those most personal decisions about the fate of her body, and a whole host of other issues. That long-held philosophy is couched in personal choice and responsibility writ large, in a way that on reflection looks disturbingly a lot more like the old-school conservative/libertarian mindset that surrounded me in my formative years than the strange, controlling place that the modern brand of Republic/Fascist conservatism has tried to take us...

I'm still trying to work through all of this, but I realize that the idea of requiring individuals to have medical insurance was one of Obama's campaign planks. I didn't agree with that idea at the time (there's that Idaho thing cropping up). I don't agree now with the idea of penalties for those who don't have medical insurance; and I would really hope that somebody could come up with a better example of why this is "A Good Thing" than a comparison to state-mandated auto insurance....

That comparison simply doesn't work. State-mandated minimum auto insurance requirements are generally limited to liability coverage for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that somebody else will have recourse to monetary recovery if I screw up while behind the wheel and cause harm to them in the subsequent accident. Mandated auto insurance is all about protecting you from me, even though I am paying for it. Mandated medical insurance is all about...well, I suppose its about protecting me from me...or from the world...or from my decades-long failure to wash my hands before eating lunch, or from some other bad health thing that might be facing me...

Mandated auto insurance is all about fault and recovery; Obama's campaign thoughts and this particular bill appear to be about forcing people to sign up for a health care choice or pay a fine for the consequences of not having made that choice. At this first glance, that looks like the exact opposite of anything actually resembling either a 'single payer' system or a 'pubic option' insofar as those medical coverage choices are understood. More to the point, the whole idea that American citizens will be fined for failing to sign up for some specific medical insurance plan will provide fuel for just about any 'Socialist/Communist/Fascist "control your life"' commercial that Republicans could ever dream of running in next year's Congressional elections. Selecting health care options - or actually choosing not to have a health care option for reasons having nothing to do with affordability - is a supremely personal choice, and mandating punishment for not having made a selection is not going to sell well in a lot of places...

But I'm probably missing something here. It's happened before...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM |

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Happiest Man In The World 

...I have to confess that I'm not all that excited tonight about the final victory of Al Franken in the Minnesota US Senatorial race, mostly because I don't have any particular faith that a "filibuster-proof Democratic majority" will ever manifest itself in any meaningful legislation. There are too many United States Senators in the Democratic caucus who hold their seats only because they straddle the philosophical lines on all sorts of issues and will step away from any sense of Democratic unity if the outcome exposes them to reelection risk by a carefully constructed Republican challenge targeting the centrist or center right voters in their states. It's not about what polls suggest that voters believe in and support (those results usually come down on the Democratic side of the line); it's about framing and narrative and media coverage, which far too many Democrats continually demonstrate that they haven't figured out yet...

But never mind that. None of it is the Big News tonight. The Big News tonight is that we can, in this one brief glimmering moment, point directly to the Happiest Man In The World. It's not Al Franken, by the way; no, the Happiest Man In The World is Minnesota Governor Tim "Bridge Inspection? What Bridge Inspection?" Pawlenty. Think about it; not that long ago Governor Pawlenty was having to deal with the failure of the Republican National Convention as a democratic process and of his own callous misunderstanding of the importance of infrastructure inspection as something that state funding should support. Today, however, all of that stuff has been swept down the memory hole and he is rolling into the Independence Day weekend having spent the last fortnight watching one of his most viable challengers for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination plummet from the heights like a piece of space junk...

Beyond that, he has been able to sit in some quiet corner of his expansive executive office reading the new Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin. All by itself, this occasionally unflattering story is an Oppo Research goldmine for both Pawlenty's people and Democrats, if the need were to arise somewhere down the road. If you are the sort that naturally sees yourself looking just right standing up there on that hammered-together falsework in front of the White House on a frosty late January noontime next to Chief Justice John Roberts in 2013, anything that makes another of your most likely competitors look like a long night trapped in a closet with rabid wharf rats is - as Martha would say - "a good thing"...

Even beyond all of that, just this afternoon Pawlenty was able to sit quietly over in the Lurkers' Corner while Norm Coleman threw him a lifeline the size of a coastal old-growth Douglas fir by finally conceding to Al Franken. This saved Pawlenty from the personal pain of deciding whether to adhere to his mandated responsibility of issuing an election certificate on the heals of the Minnesota Supreme Court decision or to saddle up with the right-wing outriders that are the Republican base and wait for some alleged Federal Court intervention. He really was in a bind here: do the Right Thing subsequent to the Minnesota Supreme Court decision and be vilified by the True Believers who wanted to fight this battle to the death at the Federal level, or find some wiggle room and tack to a Middle Way that would clearly abandon the True Believers but earn the respect of enough voters in the amorphous "middle" to make up for that perceived 'abandonment' when it was time for the deal to go down the next time people stepped behind the curtain to vote for a presidential nominee...

It was a Good Day for Al Franken, but it has been a GREAT DAY - and a great couple of weeks - for Tim Pawlenty. He truly should be the Happiest Man In The World right now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:11 PM |

Monday, June 29, 2009

The Shamwow Guy Moves In 

...poor Billy Mays isn't even in the ground yet and here comes the Shamwow guy (apparently "Vince" is his name) pushing some chopping device on my late-night version of Hardball...

It's bad enough that Mays has been snatched away from us at the very moment that his ESPN 360 commercials suggested the degree to which he had broken through to the cultural mainstream. But now we have this strange creature who hunches around and leans into the camera like some 21st Century reimagining of Marty Feldman's "Eyegore" from Young Frankenstein and apparently threatens to be some sort of heir-apparent. This is a programming outrage of which MSNBC should be embarrassed (especially on a night when it has alleged White House Correspondent Chuck Todd hosting a talking head political opinion show)...

OK...so the Shamwow guy popping up on my screen tonight is not all that much an outrage, but the timing here on the Left Coast feels a bit tacky, and it seems to be a more interesting thing to talk about than how the utterly predictable judicial activism by the five conservative SCOTUS members in creating new affirmative action law out of whole cloth is some sort of repudiation of the 2nd Circuit Court decision to which Sonia Sotomayor was a party, even though she is nominated to replace David Souter, who supported her Appeals Court decision in Ricci v DeStefano...

It's been a long day and I just don't have the patience for that sort of idiocy tonight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:25 PM |

Friday, June 26, 2009

So Maybe This Is What Happens In The Winger BlogWorld 

...some stories simply do not have enough meat on their bones. This is one of them. I personally can't help but indulging in fanciful imagining of some tragic incident where the guy wants to write a blog post blaming Obama for Mark Sanford's Argentinian tryst and his wife tells him that's a stupid thing to do because Rush covered it already and that what he should post about is how Obama is going to put us all in internment camps once he gets the new Census data. He calls her an idiot because, he says, Michelle Bachmann is already all over that one...

One insulting accusation about a lack of creativity leads to another, and that bag of Cheetos is laying there on the desk next to the keyboard.

Mom finally gets tired of all the wild violent noises coming from the basement between her boy and that evil gold-digger witch he hooked up with and brought home when the bottom fell out of the fast food middle-shift manager job market. She calls 911...

OK, so the reality may well be far more prosaic than this, but given the stuff we see coming out of wingers these days, how can you ever be sure...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM |

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

ZOMG!! Can You Feel The OUTRAGE!?! (Dana Milbank Edition) 

...the basic story line as to what will now apparently go down in the annals of White House Correspondent Outrage as the "Blogger Stab In The Heart Of Journalistic Integrity" is pretty well understood, so there's no need to replow that ground. What is interesting, however, is the absolute outrage...OUTRAGE, I say, at this perfidious example of the White House stacking the deck when it comes to what questions might be asked at a presidential press conference...

The only problem is that the face of this outrage - perhaps even the only spokesperson for it from any reputable news outlet, in fact - seems to be Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. To be sure, he is more than doing his part to cover for apparent White House sycophants like Jake Tapper, who - unlike Milbank - is actually a current member of the White House press corp and yet somehow missed the opportunity to mention this outrage in his ABC News blog. Milbank, on the other hand, has turned his outrage as a former White House Correspondent into a cottage industry, expressing that outrage not only here, but also on this WaPo blogpost and - to make sure you get the message - in the above referenced NPR "All Things Considered" piece...

What seems to actually be powering this powerful outrage (which did get hashed over a bit at today's White House briefing - about 2/3rds of the way down in the transcript) is the specter of someone who is not a Villager in good standing being allowed to ask a question, rather than whether the person asking the question was planted. There is all sorts of high-minded talk about "perception" and 'scripting' and such, but the real burr under their saddles is the fact that the White House encouraged someone with actual subject-specific knowledge to come in and ask a question that may well matter to people outside the village...

These are the same people, mind you, who served as little more than handmaidens and stenographers to the recent and unlamented Bush administration until his approval ratings were so much lower than used car salesmen and personal injury lawyers that it was finally safe to chew on the press secretary's leg just a bit. The damage that Bushco wreaked on us and our country was already done by then, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter so much to the current and former White House Correspondents who failed both us and their own self-averred status as "The Fourth Estate" back in the day when they had the chance to actually matter. What matters anymore is that a stinking blogger showed up to ask a rather tough question from an Iranian citizen (which wasn't, by the by, all that much different than the question asked by FAUX News' Major Garrett) and that the White House encouraged that DFH blogger to be at the presser to ask that question that it neither vetted or knew beforehand and that Obama ACTUALLY CALLED ON HIM (insert your own version of 'ZOMG' here). And that, in the MSM world, is WRONG...apparently for some reason or other...

Milbank makes sure to take pains to invoke the name of Jeff Gannon for reasons that he would undoubtedly be able to provide a plausible-sounding explanation, regardless of the fact that there isn't any discernible connection or identifiable equal sign that could connect those two things out here in the real world. That, in itself, is probably instructive as to what the complaint of the White House correspondent Villagers, both past and present, are all about...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:05 PM |

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

On Congress Members Health Insurance...One More Time...From The Top 

...for the last several days, I've seen posters and commenters at various lefty blogs raging at the refusal of so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators threatening to bring down any efforts at health insurance reform by saying in one way or another "Let's take away their FREE health care and see how they like it then, the smarmy bastids!!?"

Stirring 'to the ramparts' rhetoric, that; wrong, but truly stirring. Let's revisit the health insurance program offered to Honorable Members of the Congress of the United States one last time, shall we?

Members of the Congress of the United States are eligible to enroll in the very same health benefits plan that is available to all those other two million federal employees; it is called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), and it is generally a program that offers health insurance provided by private companies - some of whom are strange creatures created by the program itself but private companies nonetheless - and that are paid for by both an employer and employee contribution. Many of these plans offer extremely limited dental and vision benefits, but those limitations can be overcome by the purchase of a 'rider' policy (all of which is paid for by the employee...or Senator) that will offer more generous coverage in those areas...

This is the 2009 premium/employer contribution structure for Senators, Representatives, and grumpy foresters for the more prominent plans. Based on over three decades of observation, my take is that this is not all that dissimilar to many private employers' insurance plans. Yes, the 'employer contribution' in this case is payed for by taxpayers. On the other hand, some portion of the price you pay for a variety of goods and services from the private sector represents the same sort of employer contribution. The main difference between that overhead cost and your tax payments covering your Senator's government contribution lies in your understanding of whether or not buying an American-made kitchen appliance (Frigidare or Maytag, for example) is actually different than buying new bridges or paving overlays or pothole patching or aircraft carriers or elements of relief and respite for the least amongst us offered by a host of social programs. We are the employers, and we contribute to the health care plans of those who work for us as they do things on our behalf...or not, as the case may be, but there are some straight-up differences between the products and services provided by industry and those provided by government...

The bottom line of this little screed is simple and - I must confess, because of the reality of life - self-serving. Members of Congress do not have FREE health care; they pay a premium and there is an employer contribution (albeit one that is made courtesy of taxpayer funding). Members of Congress contribute less of their gross pay to that health insurance program than most other federal employees, but that is a function of their pay grade and isn't really different from any number of private sector companies that offer health care plans for employees. The problems we are seeing with so-called "moderate" Democratic Senators fighting against some sort of public option is all about politics and not about any "free" health care that they supposedly enjoy. It's about insurance industry lobbyists and the MSM echo chamber that gives soapboxes to Republicans even though no credible polling data suggests that there is any public support for the Republican desire to torpedo anything that looks like health care reform. It's not about "free health care" for members of Congress...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:07 PM |

Monday, June 22, 2009

When To Spill The Beans 

...I gotta confess, when I first heard over the weekend that New York Times reporter David Rohde and Afghan reporter Tahir Ludin had managed to escape from their Taliban captors in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on Friday, my first thought was "Hot Damn!! Excellent!!" My second thought was "Wait! What?"...

An understandable reaction on my part, I suppose, because it turns out that I was only one of pretty much a whole planet full of people who didn't know that David Rohde was even missing, much less a captive of the Taliban. This episode does raise some intriguing questions about the role of the media, but - sadly - none of those questions appear to have any sort of coherent basis. On the one hand, there are questions about the fundamental trustworthiness of the MSM in the face of a breathtaking conspiracy on the part of no less than 40 major news organizations - along with our own government - to conceal the very fact of Rohde's capture. This particular viewpoint is offered and debated by Kelly McBride, an instructor of journalistic ethics (I promise, God as my witness, that this is not considered to be an oxymoron) at the Poynter Institute in this NPR interview. Listen to the audio, because there is a lot more meat on the bones than the print teaser suggests...

Another question, as raised by a pundit at the conservative National Post, goes to that whole "goose and gander" thing, asking why it was so important to conceal the identity, not to mention the simple fact, of a reporter hostage, not just this one time but as a reprise of an episode last year involving CBC reporter Mellissa Fung when the same sort of restraint and secrecy wasn't applied equally to other hostages who were either not "big time" mainstream journalists or part of that particular club at all...

There is clearly room to find a bit of concordance with both of these positions, if only because they bring up serious issues about the role of the media in this world in which we are sentenced to live. For anyone who hasn't decided to adopt the role of barnacle on the hull of American life, the twin ideas of media secrecy and media selectivity in reporting these stories can be powerful motivators for reinforcing the disturbing viewpoint that there simply isn't any agent out there looking out for any of us little guys who don't matter. Rather than engaging in a media blackout if any of us were to fall into the clutches of some evil terrorist cabal, we would be safe in laying a bet on the prospect of bulky trucks driving all over the flower beds and crushing the sprinkler system as the cable networks fought for space in our front yards to bring the latest "Breaking News" to their viewers...

Then, of course, there is as always that third question raised by those who simply can't look beyond their own personal agenda to be able to come to grips with what all of this is about anyway. This is a good example of that bizarre non sequitur argument that says, in effect, "Oh, sure, you can keep a secret now, but what about when torturing helpless detainees was necessary to defend the Homeland from Terra? Hunh, Bub? What about that?" Fortunately for the rest of us who long ago started looking for a quiet, peaceful, isolated South Pacific island that could serve as a Neocon repopulation center, Lewis Carroll covered this ground a century and a half ago with the Mad Hatter so we don't have to...

There is a point, even though certain neocon commentators can't seem to claw their way to it, to all of this, and that is 'when - and why - do you spill the beans on a situation like the one David Rohde was in. I haven't decided where exactly I find myself on this, although I do have to confess to leaning toward the "why not tell the story" crowd, if only because I have always hated the MSM's insistence on prying into the darkest, most desperate corners of everybody else's lives at the worst possible moment and wonder why they should be accorded some special privilege be spared those moments. This is clearly an "ethics panel" moment for the MSM to examine just exactly when or whether they spill the beans...

Wake me when the MSM gets beyond its own sense of exceptionalism and makes that moment happen, OK?
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:30 PM |

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