Michelle Malkin to Celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day in Milwaukee

by folkbum

Avast! I'm sure she'll see two million scurvy dogs along the lakefront.

Impatience

by folkbum

When I clicked the "unsubscribe" link in the emails I get from Cascio Interstate Music the second time, and even the third time, I was willing to be patient and give their automated system time to filter me out.

After many more weeks of emails and unsub requests, I followed the directions ("If you are having problems with the automatic unsubscribe function, please email a request to ...") and asked politely to be removed. This was followed by an apologetic email from someone who said their unsubscribe function was never working right and that I was now manually removed from the list.

You see where this is going, right? A couple of days later, ding! and another Cascio Interstate Music email appears in my box. This was, you know, months ago.

I've tried the unsubscribe link. I've tried emailing the address given. I've tried using my email client's "bounce" feature.

I am now reduced to public shaming. I hate doing this. But here it is:


You are a Bad Company, Cascio! Very, very Bad!

If You Can't Make It Just Fake It

By Keith R. Schmitz

God knows certain members of the right wing are honest as the day is lying. So it is hardly shocking that once again the right is resorting to faking by running a fraud foto of their rally on Saturday.


Politifact checked it out with the DC Fire and Emergency Department, confirmed the faking and now the pix has evaporated from right wing sites.

From many crowd counters 60,000 to 70,000 is about right. That's Camp Randal with a few no-shows. Despite all the non-stop right wing whining about the media, massive anti-war rallies barely made the press, and this side show is splashed all over.

Can these guys ever play straight?

Max Baucus is dumb

by folkbum

I don't feel like mincing words, so I'm just going to say it: Max Baucus is dumb. Just really, really dumb. Why?

Even if Baucus can't get Republican support, the plan already reflects some major GOP priorities. For example, Baucus opted not to include a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers. He's including nonprofit, member-owned cooperatives instead, something several liberals on his committee dislike. [. . .] The three Republicans involved in the talks - Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Olympia Snowe of Maine - are under intense pressure from leaders of their own party, some of whom have publicly dismissed Baucus' framework as a Democrat's plan. Baucus may not be able to get any of them to agree.

Baucus spends months writing a Bad Bill--including scrapping provisions he himself really wanted just a year ago--in order to win Republican support. This support will never happen.

Why? Waterloo. This is their 15-year strategy, based on Bill Kristol's insight in 1993 that is Democrats pass health care reform, people will like Democrats more, and reward them for having finally Done Something about the great domestic policy issue of our generation. Republicans, House and Senate, are not going to support a Democratic health care bill, period. Max Baucus could have printed up Paul Ryan's health care reform bill, whited out Ryan's name and replaced it with his own, and every Republican on his committee would vote against it anyway.

This is what they do. They are Lucy with the football.

Kevin Drum is on about a similar phenomenon here: Barack Obama's judicial appointments--appointments of Republicans with support from the Republican Senators in their home states!--are stalled in the Senate just because.

I heard a commentator on the radio last week--I think it was WPR--offer the notion that trying to pass a bill through the Senate with anything less than 60 votes, the magic number to cut off a filibuster, was just not How It's Done. It would be scandalous. But this, too is false: For two centuries, the Senate happily passed bills on a majority vote almost all of the time. It is only in the last two Congresses, with the current Republican minority, that the filibuster has become the default--so much so that, as Drum notes in the link above, a lot of Obama's nominees may never get a vote in the Senate at all.

And yet, Baucus is selling out solid health care reforms to please these people, in search of the 60th vote that never used to be necessary from a party whose leadership is going to do everything they can screw Obama and stop all reform efforts.

If this bill is going to go down because of Republicans, at least make it a bill Democrats can be proud to say they sponsored, not some watered-down giveaway to insurance companies designed to appease unappeasable people.

The cheat sheet for those who didn't read the bill

by folkbum

Just click the buttons. Learn something.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

By Keith R. Schmitz

A tale from the "spontaneous" We Hate Obama Rally in DC

Lois Calzone from Maryland carried a poster showing Obama painted as Batman character "the Joker" with the captions "Un-American" and "cap and traitor."

"He is a traitor. He's either a Marxist or a Communist and we're not. He's totally un-American," Calzone told AFP.

"I think Saudi Arabia is behind him. Where did he get all that money to fund his campaign?" she said.

Her daughter, who refused to give her name, said: "The reason he hasn't picked a church in DC is because he's not Christian. He's Muslim.

"We were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt but this is too much."

Some in the crowd were there to try and engage those skeptical of the Obama administration.

Georgetown University law student Lindsay Windsor asked demonstrators to explain their opinions of the president.

"A lot of the slogans are very inflammatory and I want to understand what they actually mean," said Windsor, 22, who was wearing an Obama-Biden T-shirt, as she walked over to Calzone and her friends.

"I don't want to try to convince you that I'm right. I want to try to understand you. If we are going to fix our country's problems, we need to have a conversation together," Windsor said to the group of women.

"Obama is a sleeper cell... Go have a conversation with someone else," Calzone's daughter told her.

So, you too can be a sleeper cell.

Cash for Clunkers a model of efficiency

by folkbum

As unlikely as it sounds, I'm linking to Hot Air (via, also unlikely, Dad29). In this post, Ed Morrissey first blows a gasket, but then reins most of it back in when his source turns out to have made a mistake. The blown gasket was over the idea that the much-maligned Cash For Clunkers program was spending twice as much on administrative costs than on the rebates to dealers--a fact which proves to be as untrue as it is absurd.

Here's Cap'n Ed's update noting the problem, and adding some commentary:

Rob Port has a corrected post, using data from Autoblog, which turns out to be more reliable than the AP:

Whoops, I read the article below a little too fast. The $1.22 billion number is the amount of rebates paid back so far. The remaining isn’t entirely administrative costs but also the amount of rebates yet unpaid. According to this article, though, the administrative costs to date have been $144 per rebate. That’s a lot of money for a simple car rebate, and with 690,000 rebates to process we’re talking over $100 million to process rebates for a program that lasted weeks. Still not every efficient.

Assuming that the average rebate comes out to $3500 (the program used a sliding scale), that comes to about a 4% overhead. That might not be bad for a health insurer, but for a rebate program? That seems like a lot of processing cost on the government end (for a worker earning $60K/year with benefits, about 5 hours for each claim), and it doesn’t count the cost of the dealer in filing and tracking the claims, either. Still, the AP article made it sound much, much worse.

That last paragraph is astounding to me. Why? Because conservatives have been using Cash for Clunkers as a truncheon with which to club the notion that a much grander-scale program, such as health care reform, could be done efficiently by the government, if they can't handle something as modest as this clunkers thing.

I've linked before to this story, in which Rick Newman writes that doctors and patients would almost certainly kill to have the kind of response from private-sector insurance companies that we saw with Cash for Clunkers. Now Morrissey adds that, by his math--and remember, he opposes the program!--the Cash for Clunkers program's bureaucracy cost was running at about 4%. And he has the gall to add, "That might not be bad for a health insurer."

Might not be bad! Are you kidding me? There is no insurance company in the country that has an overhead of 4%. Not one! The highest estimates are that Medicare, which is by far the most efficient payer in the industry, has an overhead of about 5%. You'll note reading there that the private insurance industry has much higher costs--even if you discount, as that economist suggests you should, profits and taxes.

In other words, if the federal government can run health care, and run it at the rate of just 4% of overhead, there would be billions and billions less in health care spending every year. Cash for Clunkers should be an inspiration to the private sector, not a cautionary tale about government programs.

By Comparison

by folkbum

Illy-T points out that the Badgers game yesterday drew a bigger crowd than the big 9/12 protest march on Washington, DC, yesterday. The march had maybe 75,000 people, which is a respectable number. However, it was also promoted for six months straight by FOX News and the various astroturf organizations (it was the guy from FreedomWorks, Dick Armey's outfit, who lied and said ABC news pegged attendance at over a million).

But, for comparison:

• Nightly viewers of Glenn Beck's TV program: 3.3 million. (Remember, the 9/12 project is Beck's baby!)
• International A.N.S.W.E.R.'s anti-war march on Washington, 2005: 150,000
• Rally for immigration reform in Los Angeles, 2006: 500,000
• The March for Women's Lives abortion rights rally, in Washington: 800,000
• Fighting Bob Fest this weekend--just a state-wide event, without any national news anchors shilling for it or corporate-sponsored PACs producing it: 8000

More on mayoral control of MPS

by folkbum

So I'm sitting in the mandatory professional-development-on-your-prep-hour session last week at school, where we're being presented with this year's iteration of the "school improvement plan."

"It's important that you know about this plan, that you know the data," our trainer said, "because big changes are happening. The mayor just took financial control of our district away from the superintendent!" Cue the facepalm.

Reality, of course, is that two weeks back the Milwaukee Board of School Directors created a new Office of Accountability, sort of shifting a layer of the bureaucracy up a little bit in the org chart so that many of the financial services, including the auditors, report directly to the Board, instead of through the superintendent. The mayor, you'll note, does not appear in the story; this change is a long-term goal of takeover opponent and Board President Michael Bonds, who would have done it mayoral threat or not.

Now, I don't want to generalize to the whole district or the whole city based on one moment of (albeit significant) misunderstanding that I encountered from a central office employee--who, I will say, seemed grateful to be corrected on the matter. But I do not doubt that the stepped-up talk of mayoral takeovers is leading to far too many conversations like that one. And it is not helpful.

It's also not helpful, as Lisa Kaiser points out, that the leading news organization--whose editorial board is firmly in the takeover camp--is not offering an accurate picture of the, you know, news. Kaiser notes that the Journal Sentinel's story on Rep. Gwenn Moore's rally against the takeover leaves out salient facts, like how mayoral control is not one of the criteria for federal "Race to the Top" funds that the idea was hatched to pursue.

(Kaiser also wonders why the JS gives more space in that story to suburban Republican Leah Vukmir, rather than to the Democrats representing Milwaukee--and holding the legislative majorities in Madison--who were at Moore's rally. Um, duh--Vukmir's running for State Senate! Watch the endorsement page next October.)

The notion that this controversy is all Dem-on-Dem action (it's not; conservative business forces in the city and state are driving a lot of it) is the theme of Alan Borsuk's story this week. Wresting control of MPS away from an elected board is not a new idea, of course, or an exclusively Democratic one; former Governor Tommy! Thompson was all about taking over MPS for a few years back in the last century. And Dem-on-Dem action regarding reform in Milwaukee is not new, either; it was State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, Democrat of Milwaukee, who made the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program happen, along with other Good Democrats like Howard Fuller--though the voucher program has since been perverted and owned (literally, bought and paid for) by conservative interests.

But intra-party fights are always good for ratings, or something, and Borsuk delivers. He also tracks down a group called Democrats for Education Reform that is generally promoting mayoral takeovers. He notes, for example, that DFER is trying to organize in Milwaukee, holding a luncheon last week. I hate this: When your goal is to talk education reform and you hold a lunch meeting, guess who's not going to be on board? Teachers. Principals. Most parents. Students. Seriously: If you want to make me automatically oppose what you're asking me to support about education reform, invite me to a lunch meeting I can't attend because I'm busy, you know, educating children at the time.

Moreover, looking at DFER's "What We Stand For" page, it seems that of all the bullet points listed, the only thing we're not already doing in Milwaukee is mayoral control. I have said this over and over--if there's something worth trying, MPS has already tried it. Go ahead, name something--we're doing it, or have done it. Do you really think this one more thing will be the magic bullet? (Hint: It won't.)

DFER seems to be very much in favor of the New York model, noting that since Mayor Bloomberg's takeover (Bloomberg, although not technically at the time, was a Democrat, too [CORRECTED]), New York City Schools have seen some improvement. But New Yorker and education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch offers a hint as to why: "Under N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg," she writes, "spending on education has increased from $12.5 billion annually to $21 billion, or nearly $20,000 per child." That's an increase of two-thirds; it would be the equivalent of taking MPS's budget and adding $800 million, or about $10,000 per student, annually. If the state or the city or feds were willing to offer us, long-term (not one-time stimulus or "Race-to-the-Top" infusions) an extra $10k per child, I guarantee you the district would improve no matter who was in charge--the Board, the mayor, an inanimate carbon rod--as long as we could put that money toward things we know work. Things like intensive home interventions, smaller class sizes, one-to-one tutoring, and so on.

To date, of course, Mayor Tom Barrett has offered no such carrot. Or any plan at all, for that matter. The lack of a plan is just one problem with the takeover described by Charlie Dee and Michael Rosen here--it's a long piece, but well worth the read.

Finally, Patrick McIlheran--yes, again--writes in today's opinion section that a mayoral takeover is no big deal, because even though the people who will be running the schools day-to-day will be appointees, rather than directly elected the way the Board is now, people still vote for the mayor. That's pretty pedestrian, but he does make enough other stunning statements to make it worth looking at.

For example, this: "The Milwaukee teachers union, which now overwhelms any other organized interest in School Board races with its money and manpower, will immediately become the giant in mayoral elections." There are nine members on the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. Care to guess how many of those nine were supported by the union in their last contested election, with our "overwhelming" money and manpower? Two--Peter Blewett and Terry Falk. All hail the overwhelming power of the union!

And note his use of the word "now": A few years ago, when national pro-privatization groups targeted Milwaukee, including endorsements on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and big dumps of cash from the Joyces and Waltons, he couldn't have said that. In recent years, those forces have moved on to other things, leaving only the locals--like us teachers--worried about the elections.

Also: "Concentrating power hardly seems a solution. A more promising idea, as long as we're speculating, is breaking up the district into manageable pieces, each large enough to feed one high school, like most Wisconsin school districts. Whether this will work is unclear, but it may bring the decision-making closer to families that schools serve."

I'm guessing that a lot of us--I mean, it's true for myself--grew up in places where there was one high school, one or two junior highs, and a smattering of elementary schools in one district. That's the non-urban model of education all across the country. But MPS currently has about 26,000 high school students, and the large high schools serve on average about 1500 students. (Hamilton, the district's largest, serves 2200.) That would be 15 or 17 "districts" in McIlheran's plan, at current capacities. If we wanted something closer to eight districts with one high school in each--blowhard Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan floated that one last year--it would take a massive (read, expensive) effort to get high schools up to where they could handle 3000 students again, though some did in their distant pasts.

In either case, what will happen is that Milwaukee would go from the one worst district in the state to the worst six or seven or 13 districts in the state: "Small" is no more a plan to change what happens inside the classroom (and outside it, to better prepare students for inside) than "mayoral control" is. Same students, same parents, same teachers, same principals, same pressures of poverty and unemployment and poor health and violent crime and addiction and unstable families and .... well, you get the idea.

The chorus, as everyone knows by now, is fix Milwaukee first.

Hey Big Spenders

Keith R. Schmitz

This week and since spring we have been entertained by the spectacular sight of angry white people taking the time to assemble in parks, capitol squares and town halls to rail, scream and threaten because of oh, a number of reasons. One of these that gets mentioned a lot is "all that government spending."

That spending, of course, by our current President.

We say, "ahem, where were you all when money, YOUR money, was being blown on Iraq, tax cuts for millionaires and drug 'reform' for seniors"...to the deaf.

Turns out that we were right. According to these calculations, 82% of our federal debt was racked up by GOP Presidents.

No one protests the right of people to protest, yell, scream, make derisive photo shops of their President, just so long as they know what the hell they are talking about.

What If?

By Keith R. Schmitz

Let's toss this cow into the piranha pool.

When we were attacked eight years ago, we all pulled behind the President. Practically all of us -- 90% of the country.

That certainly included Democrats who swallowed their anger over their suspicions that the election was stolen. They readily recognized the country was in assaulted and did what every good American should do -- pull behind the President out of respect for the office regardless of who is in it.

What do you think will happen if it happens again? What do you think Charlie Sykes, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Joe Wilson, Newt Gingrich and all the rest will tell their minions to do if we are visited by another black day?

Fan of Buying Local?

By Keith R. Schmitz

A bunch of us have been bringing on people for membership of the Open Book bookstore cooperative in Shorewood and yesterday we got a bit of good news.

Roundy's has provided us the opportunity to occupy the former Harry W. Schwartz location at 4093 N. Oakland Ave. We had some amazing cooperation from the real estate staff with Roundy's and this enables us to have time to find a permanent location in Shorewood.

Still living among us are people who like to go to a store to browse, buy books, hang out and chill. We are not yet taking our food in a pill.

But, we are halfway to the $100,000 we need to open the store in November, and by next week Tuesday we have to start buying books and building bookshelves. We need to go into next week with a substantial boost in membership totals. Join the 300 who have signed up already.

If the idea of a community owned bookstore, complete with a coffee shop featuring locally roasted coffee, sounds like a good idea to you, go to www.openbookcoop.com.

9/11 Music

by folkbum

On the Saturday after 9/11/01, the country was still in a little bit of, I don't know, a fog. Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer were in town that night, and, given Dave Carter's generally atavistic spirituality as a songwriter, that show was one of the singular most moving concerts I've been to. They opened with this track:



Dave Carter died of a heart attack less than a year later, robbing the world of, probably, decades of fantastic songwriting.

Here's one specifically about the events of that week, from a New Yorker and another of my favorite songwriters:



And a hopeful one, because we need it. I've linked this one before, by Mark Erelli, but it's totally worth the repeat:

The Heckle: Give me more, please

by folkbum

There are a number of things I like about the UK: Earl Grey tea, Shakespeare, the Beatles, Harry Potter, Oscar Wilde's one-liners, Waking Ned Devine, the word fardel, the original BBC "The Office," and so on (notably, not the National Health Service, thankyouverymuch).

And, in addition to those, there's Parliament. Not so much that I like the system, especially versus Congress, which as we all know is already the single worst governing body in history, save for all others ever conceived. Rather, I like the fact that on a regular basis, the Prime Minister stands up at the front of the Parliament there and has to defend himself and his government's policies.

Yes, the questioners are often boorish and offensive, and yes the whole thing is so base up against the "My Esteemed Colleaguing" and "I Cede The Balance Of My Timing" and such that makes "Booknotes" seem so very "Girls Gone Wild" compared to the rest of CSPAN's programming. But you know what? It works for me on a number of levels.

For one, an idiot like Joe Wilson (not to be confused with Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was much more circumspect in calling the president, then WBush, a liar, and did it in print, and turned out to be correct--all things you can't say about the volatile South Carolinian who shares the name) would have a time and place for his jackassery, and could let it out in a more cathartic and appropriate manner than in the middle of a joint session's rarified air. For two, since the filter would be gone, we'd get to see a lot more of the jackassery, revealing heretofore closeted jackasses whose exposure would surely be good for the nation.

For three, it would work to sharpen the arguments used by the president (or an appropriate representative; to capitalize on the current controversy, perhaps a new "czar" of some flavor) to defend his policies. When the jackassery happens--a "You lie!" shouted from the far reaches of the minority's back bench--the president or his czar can call that out: "Prove it, meathead" or some such gauntlet. "Pick up that bill and show me the death panels, and try not to look like too big an idiot."

I teach high school, you know, and some days my classes are like that. Not that I get accused of lying, often, but these kids come with their own agendas and they will press and press until I can convince them to listen quietly long enough that they finally get that, no, really, John Donne is totally talking about sex in that poem. (Note: Add John Donne to the list above.) It took me a couple of years to get the hang of managing that. Imagine Barack Obama, gloves off, in 2011 after two years of practice, going manno-ah-manno against some Republican goon on, say, student loan reform (not sexy, but really needed, look it up). Obama's already a pretty sharp debater (just ask Secretary Clinton), and if he got to do it every day up against the leading lights (sliding scale, please) of the Republican Party, he would almost certainly be able to wither nonsense objections faster than those flowers that only bloom for a few hours and then die, and that's pretty fast.

For four (fore!), stealing Parliament's thang would also, I think, do wonders to expose the minority leadership, i.e., his Orangeship, John Boehner (R-not very far from where I grew up), if they can't lead straight. Boehner in recent days has both shown a rightblogger-level of ignorance about the health care bills up in his chamber and "dodged" an offer for him to explain the Republican alternative to those bills. Parliament's where party leaders are made or broken, and bumbling incompetence at Boehner's current level would have long ago caused rebellion in the ranks, and maybe the good people of suburban Hamilton County, OH, would have had the sense to pasture him by now.

And for five, finally, this would certainly make the general public take up an interest in government again, at least until the novelty wore off. I'm too lazy to google now (and, frankly, still disturbed by the fact that the google box and buttons are somehow bigger today--egad) to check, but I'm sure that the number of people who can name the leaders of Congress is probably somewhere south of Congress's actual approval ratings, and that says a lot. Not even the leaders, but, you know, people's own representatives, I bet they don't know. Except, now, I bet everyone in South Carolina knows who Joe Wilson is--infamy, to paraphrase Lucky Day, being more than fame.

Is the dogfighting of Parliament perhaps diametrically opposed to the august nature the wig-wielding Founders envisioned for the Congreff of the United Statef? Almost certainly. But I'll be damned if Madison and Morris and Jefferson and the rest of the band wouldn't look at the dismal state of the GOP's behavior today and be able to tell the difference, anyway.

Covering Undocumented Workers -- How Does This Not Make Sense?

By Keith R. Schmitz

From Joe Klein at Time about The President's speech from last night:

On this whole question of whether illegal immigrants will be included in the plan, which caused the vile Congressman from South Carolina to shout "You lie" when the President said they wouldn't be covered. Why shouldn't they be? After all, when an illegal immigrant cuts his hand while chopping cabbage and goes to the emergency room, the rest of us pay for it. Isn't the point to expand the risk pool as much as possible, to lure the insurance companies into concessions and lower prices?

I kn0w it 's not going to happen. Congress will never vote to subsidize the health care of those who arrived here illegally. But, given the fact that we're already subsidizing them through the back door, it does make sense, doesn't it?

I've wondered about that myself.

In the other democracies such as the UK and France I've heard stories about American visitors needing medical care and getting it for practically next to nothing. Now if these countries who are delivering health care at around 2/3rds our cost and doing it better can provide that kind of coverage, how does this argument make us look?

This may be another case where we chop off our noses to spite our collective faces. I may be proven wrong very shortly, but none of us has the stomach or lack of character to not have an undocumented treated if they run into a medical problem.

But of course this so-called issue is being used by the opposition to distract people and get them all worked up so they don't think about the big picture.

As was pointed out last night, we all pay when someone has to check into an emergency room and does not have the means to pay for treatment. Worse, if the pending flu becomes an epidemic, not providing treatment to everyone will come at a hell of a cost.

Al Franken got fat

by folkbum



That was my second thought. My first thought was, how can someone who hates America so much draw such a pretty picture of it.

My third thought was, this is so much cooler than what Herb Kohl does at our fair.

Paul Ryan: Still peddling scare-tactic lies about health care

by folkbum

I go back, time and time again, to what I have said before: There is no downside for the Republican minority and the conservative press to lying to the American people. It doesn't really matter how many times you point out the lies, or how many times you patiently explain the specifics of their wrongedness, they just keep doing it. Betsy McCaughey keeps getting on TV to offer some new and bizarre misreading of legislation; the rightbloggers keep reposting the same mistaken lists that show up in their inboxes; and Paul Ryan keeps getting editorial space in local newspapers to offer the same tired lies about the health care bill he opposes. (Reminder: The last major Paul Ryan post was here.)

Now, I have no beef with someone who legitimately disagrees about whether the reforms offered in the ubiquitous HR3200 and other Democratic proposals are the way to go. A person can say, reasonably, that they oppose offering subsidies to people who can't afford insurance or allowing the government to compete with private insurance companies through a public insurance plan option. (Those two things, among the most key reforms in the bill, both poll very well, even among Republicans--which should make Ryan at least think about whether he's going to be on the right side of history here.) I can make, I believe, a persuasive case for those and for other parts of the bill without pulling stuff out of thin air; I'd like to think principled opponents could do the same.

But can Paul Ryan? No. Here he is:

Wisconsinites have expressed a number of serious concerns with H.R. 3200, the Majority’s health care overhaul: millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and be dumped on a new government-run plan; Washington bureaucrats would seize unprecedented decision-making power over their health; and a struggling economy would be hit with painful new taxes and a debt burden that we simply cannot afford.

Okay, maybe he's hedging a little bit by saying that these are things "Wisconsinites" fear--although as we saw previously, Ryan seems not to worry about correcting his audience's misperceptions about the bill when expressed at town halls, so it is disappointing either way that Ryan offers up such pap in print.

Let's take them in order, though any regular reader of mine should already know the true answers to these questions and can probably write the rest of the post without me here. But for the newbies, and those in Ryan's Congressional office stopping by (hi, guys!), let's spell it out.

Millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and be dumped on a new government-run plan: There are so many bad assumptions here, I hardly know where to start. I'll make a list:

1. Every year, without reform, millions of Americans already lose their current coverage; anyone losing a job (something that happens more and more lately) or changing jobs; anyone with employers priced out of the insurance market or forced to choose a new, cheaper plan instead of pay 10% or 20% rate increases; anyone buying insurance individually who faces recision or can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions. HR3200 actually helps all of those people find less expensive, more stable coverage.
2. Ryan assumes companies that now pay no penalty for dropping coverage but don't will suddenly rush to do it when there's a penalty applied.
3. Ryan discounts the additional incentives in the bill for small businesses, in particular, to offer coverage.
4. Those without employer-based coverage are not required to choose a "government-run plan," but can instead choose any plan from the Health Insurance Exchange, which comprises mostly private offerings.
5. The public option is not really so scary. The plan, though government-run, is no different from any other insurance plan, with legally enforceable contracts, minimum standards of coverage (for all levels of the plan, from basic to premium-plus), and, if Medicare is any guide, access to just about any doctor and coverage for nearly any procedure you could want (read the fine print, of course). But it will not, by law as spelled out in HR3200, offer something "less" than private plans.

Is that enough? Is it clear now how ridiculous it is to make the kind of assumptions he makes and demonize a plan that will be no different from a private plan--which is still available for purchase instead?

Washington bureaucrats would seize unprecedented decision-making power over their [I don't know whose--Wisconsinites? people on the public option insurance plan? the bureaucrats?] health: Again, most of us already have a bureaucrat making decisions about our health. For most of America, if HR3200 passes, that bureaucrat will still be the same private-sector pencil-pusher as always. However, again with Medicare being a guide, government bureaucrats are far less difficult to deal with than private ones: Medicare has fewer rejected claims, covers more claims more quickly, and requires far less paperwork and legwork than private plans. Seniors know this; that's why there are the not-at-all-apocryphal-but-quite-real protest signs out there, "Keep your government out of my Medicare." (Again, Paul Ryan needs to figure out if he's on the right side of history here.) Doctors know this, which is why nearly all accept Medicare patients. And the nice thing about HR3200 is its transparency: You know exactly who is setting the policy, exactly what the policy is, and whom to lobby to get that changed, if you want (Congress has confirmatory power over most of the people involved in developing and implementing coverage policy). When the private sector bureaucrats hike your rates and deny your claim, how transparent is the process?

A struggling economy would be hit with painful new taxes and a debt burden that we simply cannot afford: I will give Ryan the fact that HR3200 includes what are euphemistically called "funding mechanisms" but which are, in practice, taxes. HR3200's "funding mechanism" is a surtax on the top 1/2 of 1% of earners or so. This surtax is what funds a significant amount of the subsidy offered in the bill to those who cannot afford to buy insurance. (Some of that is also offset by eliminating waste and inefficiency in Medicare, and idea Democrats stole from the GOP platform; too bad they don't stand by it now.) But the bill actually scores almost completely deficit-neutral. It will add less than $7 billion in debt annually for the next ten years--and that only because scheduled increases in Medicare reimbursements are allowed to stand (in other words, no, there's no plan to cut doctors' pay under Medicare).

And the public option itself actually saves money. I found myself arguing this over the weekend at a couple of the righty blogs where people apparently have internalized a lot of the misinformation about the bill. The public option costs nothing to the taxpayer; the HR3200 is very clear in explaining (page 119, if you don't believe me) that this public insurance plan must be fully funded only by member premiums. To repeat: No Tax Dollars Pay For The Public Option.

The spending comes mostly, as noted above, in the form of help to those who cannot afford to buy their own insurance. This exists completely outside the public option insurance plan; people receiving the subsidy are free to choose any plan from the Exchange, just like us rich folk. And that's where the savings come in: The Congressional Budget Office, for example, suggests that the public option may be up to 10% cheaper to subscribe to than a private plan; the UnitedHealth-owned Lewin Group suggests it could be more than that. (This is the mechanism by which private plans will be forced to be more efficient, rather than continuing to pass paperwork costs on to their members.) The more robust the public option--i.e., the more people who choose it over a private plan--the more the likely savings among those receiving the subsidy and, thus, less cost to taxpayers.

There's one more thing Ryan does, later in his op-ed, that deserves notice. He writes, "Most of us simply can’t stomach handing over our [. . .] health care sector[] to the federal government." HR3200 does nothing of the sort. It does not nationalize, socialize, single-payerize, or annex in any way the health care sector. HR3200 does not put one single doctor or nurse or pharmacist in the employ of the federal government. It does not take over one single hospital, clinic, doctor's office, or Walgreens. It does not revoke the charters of any insurance companies, drug makers, or medical equipment manufacturers. On a scale of 1-10, with 1 where we are now and 10 someplace like the UK, where the government really does control the health care sector, passing HR3200 would not move us at all from 1. To suggest, as Ryan does here, that HR3200 gives the government control of health care is blatantly untrue. It's a lie. There's no other way to put it--and I'm sure Paul Ryan knows this and doesn't seem to care.

Look, HR3200 is not the bill I would have written were I in Congress. But it is, on the whole, not that bad. We could do worse. And yet Paul Ryan and his media enablers are making it out to be something it is not, a monster of a bill that will eat us whole or at least tell your grandma how and when to die. It isn't. Ryan knows, though, what I've said before: The only way to beat this bill is to lie about it. And he does.

On this Labor Day weekend, Mercury Marine situation shows import of unions

by folkbum

It's not that the IAMAW union was suckered into voting for a massive giveback to management, hurting themselves financially and, as the Brawler points out, demonstrating a clear need for broader reforms now.

It's something that shows up in the Stillwater, OK workers' complaints about not getting the jobs in their right-to-work state. "It's been a major part of my life," one worker said of MM. He went on, "I've got no voice. This was decided by someone else."

And there it is: That's what unions are for, people. Unions offer voice.

I know that virtually every conservative stopping by here on a regular basis--even those in unions--are certain that unions exists only to protect the lazy, to beat down hardworking industrialists, to Cadillac up pensions and health insurance. (See some of the anti-union bile spat here, in the comments of even a respectable conservative blog.)

But that's not what unions do. Unions let the workers have a say. After the first vote, when MM's union rejected management's attempt to re-write the contract they had agreed to less than a year ago, the workers seemed sanguine. They called the new offer a "slap in the face" and wanted to stand firm with those laid off by the company, who would be brought back at barely better than minimum wage if the pleasure boat market picks back up again. If they were going down, at least they would be going down on their own vote.

The MerCruiser plant in Stillwater? No vote. No voice. No union. "This was decided by someone else."

Is that how you want to live?

The big news today

by folkbum

Is that some guy you've never heard of resigned from a position you didn't know existed and for the right wing, this is the beginning of the end of the Obama administration.

Presidents, School Kids, and Wispy Spines

by bert

It is getting scary out there. Real scary.

Here is the futile letter I sent to the Waukesha Schools Superintendent Todd Gray, who also bravely chose Friday to prohibit his students from hearing a message from a U.S. president.

Dear Superintendent Gray:
I have two daughters attending Waukesha schools, one at ***** and the other at *****. I spoke in person with the ****** principal Mrs.****** as I picked up my girl on Friday. But I also wanted you to know how I feel, because it is obvious that radical, unhinged people in this district have your ear. Hopefully you're willing to hear another perspective as well.

By choosing to allow the president's enemies (because their views are beyond reasonable) to dictate how you run this district, you are harming the education of my children and all future citizens of the United States. Please be aware that other parents in your district have no problem with school children hearing from the president of the United States. I swear on a stack of Bibles (which I think you can also have in school if you want) that I would say the same about George W. Bush or whatever other president, even though I have strong political views.

Now let's be honest. By your saying President Obama's comments can be shown to students later after review by certain teachers who notify parents in advance, you are not taking a middle position that is satisfactory to both sides. You are agreeing with those who believe this speech would indoctrinate students, or want another way to damage the president. You have participated in a tactic that intentionally scores partisan points for one party. This is not an apolitical or neutral decision. I guess we now know whose side you prefer.

We also both know that Obama's speech (which is not a life-or-death message, I grant you) will not be shown much. He has been successfully shut up.

If a teacher distributes literature that documents they want to show this video, won't they expose themselves, if not to you as a supervisor who seems to look with disfavor on whiffs of Democrat-leanings, then to a militant, organized faction of the community? Won't most smart teachers choose not to bring down this storm upon themselves even if they find educational value in Obama's message? (Here I am about to engage in some hyperbole, I admit) Can you make it a policy to now have all of my daughters' teachers warn me in advance when they are planning to expose my girls to U.S. presidents and what they had to say? Seriously, the people with whom you have agreed would also regard FDR's inauguration speech as a source of indoctrination.

To argue that schools cannot afford to lose the time needed for this presentation is also not credible. My older daughter, while attending *****, experienced a visit from the ex-Brewer Ben Sheets as part of a program called "Score". Mr. Sheets, who seems like a great guy, was there for more than 10 minutes, and (I guess I might sound like a Marxist for saying this) what Ben had to say came from a person with less intelligence than the man you have prevented from speaking. I think it’s fine for either to deliver a message for some part of one day of the school year.

Finally, I wanted to bring up the case of another Waukesha school administrator you might have heard of, the former principal at Catholic Memorial High School. As everyone knows, this man was drummed out of his job for daring to have an Obama sign on his lawn during last year's campaign.

So obviously there is an anti-Obama faction around here that is so unhinged but also so militant that they pose risks to the jobs of school administrators. (According to their ideology, there should not be any public schools in the U.S., so you cannot win in trying to placate them.) I am asking you to, rather than embolden them and the risks they pose to our children and society, show enough courage to do the right thing in spite of the discomfort it causes you.

Thanks for hearing me out.

Bert

There is a scene at the opening of the old movie "Down By Law" when Ellen
Barkin's character, with tears and sweat marring her mascara, says on her knees to Tom Waits' character: "Look what you're doing to yourself, Zach. You're digging your own grave." Today I am Ellen Barkin, black slip and all, saying to the country I love the same exact thing.