The Blood Center Needs Your Help

by capper (remember me?)

Summers are always rough on the Blood Center of Wisconsin. Regular donors are busy with vacations and other things, and lose track of when they can donate, so their supply levels drop.

To make things worse, because people are out doing things that are more physical, there is a higher percentage of injuries.

Higher demands and lower supplies puts them in a rough spot. Now, with last week’s flooding, things are even tighter for them.

They are asking for people to help by donating whole blood. They also especially need help with getting platelets, which help clot wounds. There need is so great that they have expanded their hours to Sundays for platelet donations. (My appointment to donate platelets is Saturday afternoon.)

So, if you can squeeze an hour or two from your busy schedules, please take the time to donate. You will be helping more people than you realize, you’ll feel good about yourself, and you get cookies and coffee afterwards. It’s a win-win-win for all involved.

You can schedule your appointment to donate by visiting their website or by calling 1-877-BE-A-HERO (1-877-232-4376).

(Cross-posted where I can.)

A Taxing Situation

by folkbum

Sorry for the slow blogging this week. This is the last week of the summer program I work with, and it is quite busy and hectic around these parts. (I'm still waiting for that whole "summers off" thing that I was promised when I signed up for my gummint job.)

Anyway, here's three things you need to read, with excerpts. Read them in this order:

• "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. [. . .] The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth."
• "Call me crazy, but after a decade of living large in ever more sumptuous beach houses and promoting policies that almost wrecked the economy, I think the folks earning a million bucks a year can probably afford to pay an extra 5% in taxes. Seemed to work OK in the 90s, anyway."
• "Letting Bush's tax cuts for the rich expire affects only a tiny number of small businesses; it doesn't affect them very much; and it generates revenues of $678 billion. If the only thing you care about is keeping taxes low for rich people, you won't be convinced. For the rest of us, it's a no-brainer."

Zombie Lies, MPS Edition

by folkbum

Among the left blogosphere, something is a "zombie lie" if it is held as true by significant numbers of politicians, media figures, or regular people, no matter how many times it's killed. The classic example is the lie that Social Security is going bankrupt and people my age won't see a dime. This is, sadly, both a total falsehood and believed by 6 in 10 Americans.

Today's zombie lie concerns the Milwaukee Public Schools and it comes to us by way of the Heartland Institute's Brien Farley (not to be confused with the MacIver Institute's Brian Fraley, who has repeated the lie himself--just not today). Here's the Heartland Farley:

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association dismisses as “simply false” reports that Milwaukee taxpayers could save $47 million a year by renegotiating the teachers’ health insurance plan. [. . .]

“The MacIver Institute published the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) Administration’s math on how nearly $48 million dollars in health insurance savings could be achieved,” notes MacIver President Brett Healy. [. . .] The school system’s own numbers, as reported by MacIver, reveal the cost difference between the teachers’ current Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) and the proposed Exclusive Provider Organization (EPO) is $4,512 for single plans and $7,380 for family plans.

MPS currently pays for 2,610 single PPOs and 4,810 family PPOs. Switching plans, therefore, would save MPS $11,776,320 on single plans and $35,497,800 on family plans, for a total savings of $47.3 million. With annual salary and compensation costs currently at about $100,000 per teacher, $47.3 million could pay for some 472 positions.

MTEA, however, insists that the switch in plans would save only $7 million, salvaging no more than 50 teacher jobs.

We have been through this. Not that long ago. It is very simple, even though this lie--thanks to people who should know better at MacIver--is almost everywhere. It started with Alan Borsuk and a politically motivated board that has more to win from bargaining in the media than bargaining with its employees. (The board provided last week material related to bargaining health care costs that the union requested nearly six months ago, for example.) The was recently in a Wall Street Journal editorial, for example, and repeated uncritically by this reporter who, as it's her job to cover MPS for the state's largest daily paper, should know better.

MacIver does simplistic math with complex numbers without bothering to try to understand where the numbers come from. The trick here is that MPS fully self-funds its health care, with Aetna (for the PPO) and United Health Care (for the EPO) acting simply as administrators. (That's why the cheaper plan is an EPO and not an HMO, technically, because UHC doesn't "manage" anything but shuffled paperwork.) So the cost of each MPS health plan is based on the total utilization of the members of that plan.

And here's the uncomfortable (for those who like the lie) truth: The people who choose the plan with the broader options for care--the PPO--are the people who either have more severe health care needs or think they might. Yes, the PPO has slightly higher reimbursement fees for doctors (why does MacIver hate Milwaukee's doctors?), and that's why MTEA agrees that there would be some savings. However, once all the people with higher utilization rates jump to the EPO, the average cost of the EPO plan will rise to nearly the level of what the PPO is now--patients are unlikely to change their health conditions when they change their health plans.

So while the math that Borsuk and the board and MacIver and Farley all do is arithmetically accurate, it is conceptually false. They all make the same fundamental error by not considering the way MPS's health care plans actually work.

Now can we please, please, please let this zombie die for real now?

Reminder: Chill on the Hill tomorrow!

by folkbum

Looks like the weather is going to hold for Chill on the Hill tomorrow night at the Humboldt Park bandshell, unlike last year when the audience and I got rained on.

This year at 5:30, the Park People are sponsoring a 5k run/2k walk to raise money for the parks. The run ends at the bandshell at 6 , which is when my set starts. Following me at 6:30 is a zydeco band from Oshkosh (really!) called Copper Box.

Not to mention food from Hector's and Streetza Pizza, as well as drinks. Bring a blanket or some lawn chairs, bring your kids or your dogs or both, bring $5 so you can buy a copy of my CD. But come on down tomorrow and enjoy some free, quality entertainment in your Milwaukee County Parks.

RIP, Daniel Schorr

by folkbum

I only knew him from NPR, but his was one of the last great news voices of his generation.

Republican Domestic Policy Plan Revealed

by folkbum

It seems that Rep. Michelle Bachmann, leader of the Tea Party Caucus, has revealed the Republicans' domestic policy agenda:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has a plan for what the Republicans should do if they win control of the House of Representatives: Spend all their time investigating the Obama administration.

"Oh, I think that's all we should do," Bachmann told the Three Fingers of Politics website. "I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another."

To review: On the economy, Republicans want to return to the go-go economic times of the 00s. And now Bachmann's pining for the good ol' days of the 90s when it was all Clenis all the time.

How can they believe any of this is a good idea?

FriTunes

by folkbum

A preview of tonight's entertainment.

Stimulus

by folkbum

Obviously, the city or the state can't print the money to do this, but we could kill a bunch of birds--metaphorical birds, I don't want to get in trouble with yet another interest group this week--with a single stone here.

There are still hundreds of thousands gutters in Milwaukee County that feed into the storm sewer system and, eventually, feed the great mass of water in the deep tunnel during the 100-years storms we seem to get a couple times a year now.

Let's hire a bunch of people--500? 1000?--and have them spend the rest of the summer and fall disconnecting them and installing rain barrels, leaving behind some basic instruction of how to use the rain barrels, of course. MMSD already has a program where homeowners can do this for themselves (at a cost of $45 a barrel), sure. But the vast majority of homeowners haven't done so, and probably won't.

So let's just do it, as stimulus. The barrels are made in Milwaukee. The people installing them will be from Milwaukee, and picking up employability skills and a work history that they can take with them to (hopefully soon) another job once the economy picks up. Plus, injections of cash into the community will stimulate demand more broadly.

Undoubtedly, there are also thousands of miles of water infrastructure that needs updating to the 21st century, too, though MMSD has been among the leaders nationally in that regard. But storm events like tonight's remind us that solutions to infrastructure problems not only are necessary, but can be done now as stimulus.

Republican Economic Plan Revealed

by folkbum

If you like what's happening now, you're going to love life under Republican control:

In a meeting with several reporters this afternoon, House Minority Leader John Boehner outlined the top three measures he'd pursue if he becomes Speaker of the House next Congress to create new jobs. But, those who thought he'd outline specific programs and how they would create jobs were disappointed with a familiar litany of wish-list items: repeal health care reform, eschew climate legislation, and renew the Bush tax cuts.

In other words, repeal a program that largely hasn't yet taken effect; prevent new legislation that is also not in effect; and keep a current tax structure in place.

Memo to Boehner: The status quo isn't working. You might want to try something different.

Related: Republicans explicitly eschew something different. And almost unanimously vote today against extending unemployment benefits which, as we all know, is a far better demand stimulus than, say, not.

If I tweeted

by folkbum


@JamesTHarris B sure 2 mention we at the blog also ? journalistic integrity of Kilmeade &Co., not just guests http://tinyurl.com/2d89fcn

Quote of the Day, American values edition

by folkbum

Louisiana Republicans are facing a choice between a family values incumbent who solicited prostitutes and a family values challenger who is currently sleeping with his stepson's estranged wife.

Shirley Sherrod saves a white family's farm from bankruptcy and gets fired; one of these two (white, male, upper-class) philandering pigs will be a US Senator next January.

You might be a racist if ...

by folkbum

... Charlie Sykes says you're a racist*.





* I guess he would know.

Speaking of Racism

by folkbum

So the right-wing hack machine known as "Big Government"--the studio responsible for last summer' blockbuster ACORN tapes--has pulled another fast one. Here, they've been caught editing an African-American woman's story of learning to trust and work side-by-side with whites for a common good into a clip that makes her sound racist and like she's abusing her federal position to keep the white man down. It's a lie!

Sherrod [the black woman in question made out to be racist here] noted that few news reports have mentioned that the story she told happened 24 years ago--before she got the USDA job--when she worked with the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund.

"And I went on to work with many more white farmers," she said. "The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it's about the people who have and the people who don't. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race." [. . .]

But Spooner [wife of the (now deceased) white man Sherrod allegedly screwed over], who considers Sherrod a "friend for life," said the federal official worked tirelessly to help the Iron City couple hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy back in 1986.

Indeed, the Big Government-released video actually claims that this happened "in her federally appointed position overseeing billions of dollars," not two decades ago. Shameless! (CNN has a report here, too.)

Certain segments of the right have been targeting successful activist African Americans (Van Jones, Desirée Rogers, even Regina Benjamin) and organizations whose mission is to help African Americans achieve political, economic, and social parity (ACORN) since November 2008. It seems to me that many of the protestations that it's we liberals who are really racist are classic cases of projection.

Clarence Thomas, Roger Maris

by folkbum

You'd think James T. Harris's fans would be happy to find him in such illustrious company.

James T. Harris is a Black* Conservative*

by bert

WMCS was right to spurn James T. Harris and his attempt to make a debate into a self-serving stunt.

As I learn from media columnist Tim Cuprisin, WMCS and its host Earl Ingram Jr. invited WTMJ's right-wing talk show host Harris to debate the NAACP's charge that the Tea Party movement should renounce the racists in its midst.

Things began to go wrong when Harris showed up with a videographer. The WMCS people told Harris he couldn't videotape the exchange (Harris had taped an earlier appearance on the station). Then, after a failed attempt to at least record audio with the video camera, Harris left without taking part in the debate.

According to Cuprisin:

"We had a go-around," Harris tells me. "I said, 'Earl, this is how I roll.' He said management said we can't let any cameras in. . . But when Harris left, Ingram let loose on him. On Twitter, Ingram called him a "drama queen," and on the radio, Ingram said Harris was "prostituting himself" as a conservative talker.

Ingram told me Friday that Harris and the cameraman said the video was to advance Harris' career.

"Well good riddance, take a walk, take a hike. We are not going to help you advance your career," says Ingram.

Harris denies his career was discussed, quoting Ingram as saying, "I'm not here to promote you."

Harris says he countered by saying to Ingram, "I'm here to promote you... I'm all about that. Why wouldn't you want to do that or me. We're two brothers in radio."

Harris is a black with an asterisk. Like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Harris reaps personal benefits from his black status for himself by perpetrating the structural disadvantages for fellow blacks. This gets James T. paid and publicized because it is soothing to many whites to hear blacks deny those structural problems are real, or to attack those black leaders who are trying to fix them.

Harris also sounds like a phony black, trying a little too hard to speak the way suburbanites think blacks should sound, as in the quotation above when he throws out "that's just the way I roll" or "my brother" to a fellow black.

Harris is a conservative with an asterisk. He takes the position all the way down the boilerplate of a conservative for fiduciary reasons. Harris wants pub. That's why he was doing the video thing at WMCS, and that's why he grandstanded for the news cameras in a phony rant during the campaign stop for McCain.

If Harris were a dog, he would walk around on two legs. If he were a woman with unusually large breasts, he would show them off in skimpy clothes. Harris sports phony conservative implants because they are unusual on a black man and thereby attract the leering attention of conservatives and their media outlet managers.

Your Monday morning puzzler

by folkbum

If there were no racist elements in the tea party movement to begin with--the teapartisans have been at great pains to say so all weekend after the NAACP said there were--then why did the tea party movement have to publicly kick the racist elements out yesterday?

McIlheran goes Galt

by folkbum

Journal Sentinel calumnist finally does something right.

Welcome to the world, Ellison Henry.

by folkbum



We'll try not to screw it up too much more for you.

McIlheran Watch: The McAdams pre-buttal

by folkbum

As I have noted previously, I am among an oh-so-super-lucky group of punditerati that gets an email preview a couple times a week of what Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calumnist Patrick McIlheran gets up to in print. So no surprise when my inbox dinged this morning with a McIlheran missive:

Don’t worry, says the state agency that’s running radio ads about how you can get a home with (almost) no cash. This time, they’ve got it all figured out.

Sure about that?

The money window’s back open, no place sooner than in Wisconsin. . . . The federal Treasury gave federal mortgage reseller Fannie Mae billions, so Fannie lent $325 million to WHEDA, which is passing it through banks to you if you haven’t owned a house in three years and have managed to save up pretty much nothing. All you need is $1,000 for closing costs and a middling credit score. No mortgage insurance needed, either.

McIlheran is referring to the WHEDA Fannie Mae Advantage program, run by the Wisconsin Housing and Economic and Development Authority, and apparently he doesn't like it.

I am certain a lot of that has to do with the continued insistence by those on the right that the present economic crisis is the result of abuses by Fannie Mae and ACORN intimidation of banks to lend to poor people and the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act. It grates on many conservatives (though not all) that the wealthy and successful could possibly be responsible for messing up anything. After all, their success is the market's success, and the market is infallible.

That is pretty clearly wrong, and WHEDA's own track record proves it. WHEDA ran for many years a similar Zero Down program, and--

You know what? I'm going to turn this over to Marquette Professor John McAdams--make note of this, as I will never say it again--who is right about WHEDA and actually took this on two weeks ago*:

[R]easonable concessions to allow people with modest assets to buy a home make good public policy sense.

But what concessions are reasonable?

Letting people with poor credit get a mortgage? Certainly not. But the WHEDA program requires a 680 credit score to qualify, and the average credit score of people who get mortgages is 732. That’s credit worthy.

How about employment and income? Under the WHEDA program, employment and income are checked. Too low an income or a spotty employment record can get you rejected. [. . .] WHEDA claims that historically its default rates have been low.

On that last point, WHEDA offers McAdams some specific stats in an email (pdf):

WHEDA and other Housing Finance Agencies around the country were never part of the sub prime mortgage problem thatplagued the housing industry in recent years. Quite the opposite--our 35-year track record of safe, responsible lending is what has resulted in a foreclosure rate of only 1.25%--far lower than the state's average of 1.82% for similar "prime" fixed-rate loans, according to the latest data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. During the height of the foreclosureepidemic, WHEDA's rate remained at less than one percent for several months. Moreover, the WHEDA foreclosure rate is miniscule when compared with the Wisconsin foreclosure rates for FHA and subprime loans, which are 4.30% and 11.31%respectively.

And note that none of the conditions for the WHEDA program under discussion here--or any WHEDA program, ever--come close to the greatest abuses of private mortgage brokers making subprime loans, like the infamous NINJA loan. And as we learned last week, wealthy homeowners (at least, those owning million-dollar homes) have defaulted at nearly twice the rate of middle-class and poor homeowners.

McAdams concludes, "[O]n a public policy landscape littered with outrages, this falls far short of being an outrage. In fact, it’s probably an outright good thing." And I agree. McIlheran, indefatigable defender of the upper classes, does not deem the working poor worthy of this assistance.

* Indeed, this WHEDA program was apparently a Charlie Sykes talking point and McAdams stood up for the program then. I'm surprised McIlheran didn't see the McAdams pre-buttal and leave this thing alone.

Weekend open thread, because I got nothin'

by folkbum

Hey, remember when Obama was going to shut down right-wing talk radio and enforce the fairness doctrine with his youth army? Ah, memories.